MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Marx and Contemporary

Critical Theory
The Philosophy of Real Abstraction

Edited by
Antonio Oliva
Ángel Oliva
Iván Novara
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors
Marcello Musto
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada

Terrell Carver
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for
new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx,
Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with
Babak Amini and Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs,
edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as transla-
tions of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come
from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic dis-
ciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative col-
lection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main
areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors
and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social move-
ments, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism
in the world.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14812
Antonio Oliva • Ángel Oliva • Iván Novara
Editors

Marx and
Contemporary Critical
Theory
The Philosophy of Real Abstraction
Editors
Antonio Oliva Ángel Oliva
National University of Rosario National University of Rosario
Rosario, Argentina Rosario, Argentina

Iván Novara
National University of Rosario
Rosario, Argentina

ISSN 2524-7123     ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-030-39953-5    ISBN 978-3-030-39954-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © fhm / Moment / Getty Image

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Titles Published

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of
Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts,
2014.
2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology”
Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chap-
ter,” 2014.
3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015.
4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A
Critique of Marxism, 2016.
5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical
History, 2016.
6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to
Read Marx, 2017.
7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017.
8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl
Marx, 2018.
9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the
Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st
Century, 2018.
10. Robert Ware, Marx on Emancipation and the Socialist Transition:
Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018.
11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of
Capitalism, 2018.
12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair
MacIntyre, 2018.

v
vi  TITLES PUBLISHED

13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in
the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral
Capitalism, 2019.
14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and
Political Theory, 2019.
15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and
Metaphysics of Domination, 2019.
16. August H.  Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative Real-­
Time Political Analysis, 2019.
17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini
(Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist
Analysis, 2019.
18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds), Karl Marx’s
Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the
Bicentenary, 2019.
19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism:
Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019
20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The
Possibility of Social Critique, 2019
 Titles Forthcoming

Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories

Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature
Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian
Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith
Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and
Marxism in France
Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx
Kevin B.  Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya
Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics
of Liberation
Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Dimension
Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s
Twentieth Century
Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century
Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space
Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a De-­
alienated World
Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism
Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Borderline Socialism: Self-­
organisation and Anti-capitalism
Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique
of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism
Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective
from Labriola to Gramsci
Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction

vii
viii  TITLES FORTHCOMING

Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean

Jaures: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism
Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis
and Alternatives
Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in
France and Italy
George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe
James Steinhoff, Critiquing the New Autonomy of Immaterial Labour: A
Marxist Study of Work in the Artificial Intelligence Industry
Spencer A.  Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of
Cosmopolitanism
Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st Century
Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of
“Labour Note”
Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal
Freedom in Marx
Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist
Analysis of Values
Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A
Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy
Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship,
State, and Revolution
V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India
Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’
Insubordination of 1968
Atila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A
Marxist Analysis
 Acknowledgments

This volume has been something of a miracle for us. Twenty years ago, the
logistics of publishing such a global contributor list and of bringing
together scholars from the many countries represented in this table of
contents would have made this book impossible. And although this vol-
ume is a result of our respect for and conviction in a work that we feel
continues to offer the deepest and most complete explanation of how our
old and battered world works, this miraculous project could not have been
realized without the invaluable help of many people. As the nobility
obliges, here go our thanks.
In the first place, we thank each and every one of the authors whose
contributions really make the Marxist theory come alive again. To Palgrave
Macmillan, represented by North American Politics & Political Theory
Editor Michelle Chen, for trusting that this project had a future, and for
its tireless management. We thank comrades Terrell Carver and Marcello
Musto who, with their reading and unconditional support, monitored the
entire process to its completion. To the editorial review staff whose sug-
gestions made the project executable and possible. To Anahí Prucca (who
has translated the articles of Pablo Nocera, Sergio Tischler and Mario
Duayer), Sol Golzman (who has translated the articles of Cristián Sucksdorf
and Mauricio Vieira Martins), Santiago Soulignac (who has translated the
articles of Alberto Bonnet), Alex Locascio (who has translated the articles
of Ingo Enlbe and Wolfgang Fritz Haug) and Renata Farías (who has
translated the introduction) for their hard work translating many of the
articles in this volume, and especially to Andrés Pacheco (who has trans-
lated the introduction), who involved himself lovingly in the project and

ix
x  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

whose selfless and professional work was more than just a translation. To
our fellow countrymen and collaborators of this volume—Cristián
Sucksdorf, Pablo Nocera, and Alberto Bonnet—as well as our fellow col-
laborators in Brazil—Mauricio Vieira Martins, Mario Duayer and Ricardo
Gaspar Muller—who, because of their proximity, supported the project
directly and enthusiastically. To our partner and friend Juan Pablo Lewis
who monitored as native speaker more than one translation that appears
here. Our huge thanks to Yael Geisner who read these texts critically even
before they were a book. A special acknowledgment also to each and every
one of the people who worked on the MEGA2 volume which made the
immeasurable work of Marx and Engels available, now, to the world. A
special mention to our families who make our intellectual work have a
concrete and affective sense. Finally, and although it seems obvious, we are
indebted to the works of Marx and that of Engels, without which the
specificity and importance of the issues that are put into play here would
not make sense.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Antonio Oliva, Ángel Oliva, and Iván Novara

Part I Reconstructing the Problem of Real Abstraction  23

2 Value Form and Abstract Labor in Marx: A Critical

Review of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Notion of ‘Real
Abstraction’ 25
John Milios

3 Money as a Practical Abstraction: From Feuerbach to

Marx Through Hess (1841–1844) 41
Pablo Nocera

4 Real Abstraction: Philological Issues 61

Roberto Fineschi

5 Marx’s Method and the Use of Abstraction 79

Alfonso Maurizio Iacono

xi
xii  CONTENTS

6 Method and Value: Engels Through Sohn-Rethel 97

Paul Blackledge

7 Marx: The Method of Political Economy as an

Ontological Critique113
Mario Duayer

8 Marx, Berkeley and Bad Abstractions129

Patrick Murray

Part II Repercussions in the Method and in the Critique

of the Social System 151

9 On Capital as Real Abstraction153

Werner Bonefeld

10 The Lost Roads and the Steep Paths of ‘Real Abstraction’171

Jacques Bidet

11 On Real Objects That Are Not Sensuous: Marx and

Abstraction in actu191
Maurício Vieira Martins

12 The Concept of Form in the Critique of Political

Economy203
Alberto Bonnet

13 The Real Contradictions (Commodities as Coherence of

Contradiction)227
Cristián Sucksdorf
  CONTENTS  xiii

14 Reification and Real Abstraction in Marx’s Critique of

Political Economy249
Ingo Elbe

15 The Critique of Real Abstraction: From the Critical

Theory of Society to the Critique of Political Economy
and Back Again265
Chris O’Kane

16 Real Abstraction in Light of the ‘Practical Revolution

in Epistemology’ (Labriola): Considerations on the Uses
and Limits of a Concept289
Wolfgang Fritz Haug

17 Real Abstraction in the History of the Natural Sciences307

Peter McLaughlin and Oliver Schlaudt

18 Zapatista Autonomy: The Invention of Time as a

Discontinuity and Untotaling Category319
Sergio Tischler
 Notes on Contributors

Jacques  Bidet  professor emeritus at the University of Paris-Nanterre,

founder of the journal Actuel Marx. Among his books: Explication et
reconstruction du Capital, (PUF, 2004); Foucault with Marx (ZED Books,
2015); Marx et la Loi-travail. Le Corps Biopolitique du Capital, (Les
Editions sociales 2016); Nous et Eux?, Une alternative au populisme de
gauche, (Editions Kimé 2018). More on his home page http://perso.
orange.fr/jacques.bidet/
Paul Blackledge  teaches Politics and Ethics at Leeds University, UK. His
works include Marxism and Ethics (2012) and Reflections on the Marxist
Theory of History (2006).
Werner  Bonefeld is Professor of Politics at the University of York,
UK. His work contributed to the development of the internationally rec-
ognized Open Marxism school. He is the author of Critical Theory and the
Critique of Political Economy (2016) and The Strong State and the Free
Economy (2017).
Alberto  Bonnet is Doctor of Social Science at the Autonomous
University of Puebla, Mexico. He is a professor at Buenos Aires National
University, Argentina, and Quilmes National University, Argentina. He is
the author of La insurrección como restauración: El kirchnerismo 2002–2015
(2016). He edited El país invisible. Debates sobre la Argentina reciente
(Peña Lillo-Ediciones Continente 2011).
Mario Duayer  is a professor at Fluminense Federal University, Brazil. He
was the technical supervisor and translator for the first Portuguese edition

xv
xvi  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

of the Grundrisse (2011) by Editora Boitempo (Brazil), as well as the

­correspondent for the translation of the first volume of Ontology by György
Lukács (2012).
Ingo  Elbe is a lecturer and research fellow in the Department of
Philosophy, Carl von Ossitzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. He is
the author of Oldenburger Jahrbuch für Philosophie (2012) and Zeitschrift
für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie (2014).
Roberto  Fineschi  studied Philosophy and Economic Theory in Siena,
Berlin, and Palermo. He has published several books and essays in numer-
ous languages. His studies are focused on the new historical-critical edi-
tion of the Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Mega II. He is a
member of the International Symposium on Marxian Theory.
Wolfgang  Fritz  Haug  is Professor of Philosophy at Freie Universität
Berlin, Germany, and Director of Das Argument Review and Historisch-­
kritische Worterbuch des Marxismus. He is the author of High-Tech-­
Kapitalismus (2003); Kritik der Warenästhetik (2011); and
Jahrhundertwende Werkstatt-Journal 1990–2000 (2016).
Alfonso Maurizio Iacono  is Professor of History of Philosophy at the
University of Pisa, Italy. He is the author of numerous books including Le
Fétichisme: Histoire d’un Concept (1992), Autonomia, Potere, Minorità
(2000), Caminhos de Saida do Estado de Menoridade (2001), The History
and Theory of Fetishism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and Studi su Karl
Marx (2018).
Maurício Vieira Martins  is a professor at Fluminense Federal University,
Brazil. He is the author of Marx, Espinosa y Darwin: pensadores de la
inmanencia (2017), and is a member of NIEP-Marx at Fluminense Federal
University, an Interdisciplinary Research Center.
Peter  McLaughlin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Heidelberg, Germany. He has worked extensively on the interrelations of
science and philosophy. His works include Kant’s Critique of Teleology in
Biological Explanation (1990), What Functions Explain (2000), Exploring
the Limits of Preclassical Mechanics (1992), and The Social and Economic
Roots of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk
Grossmann (2009) (Springer).
   NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS  xvii

John  Milios is Professor of Political Economy and the History of

Economic Thought at the National Technical University of Athens,
Greece. He is co-author of Rethinking Imperialism. A Study of Capitalist
Rule (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and A Political Economy of Contemporary
Capitalism and its Crisis: Demystifying Finance (2013).
Patrick  Murray  is Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University in
Omaha, Nebraska. He is the author of The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on
Marx and Social Form (2016) and Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge
(1988). He is working on the book Capital’s Reach: How Capital
Shapes and Subsumes.
Pablo  Nocera  studied Sociology and Politics, and is a professor at the
Buenos Aires National University, Argentina. He has edited and translated
Gabriel Tarde and Émile Durkheim’s work, and is director of the El siglo
largo collection for the journal Imago Mundi published in Buenos Aires.
Iván  Novara  is studied Physics and is a professor at Rosario National
University, Argentina. He is a researcher at the National Scientific and
Research Council (CONICET).
Chris  O’Kane  is a Visiting Professor of Economics and Finance at St
John’s University. With Bev Best and Werner Bonefeld he is co-editor of
the three-volume SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical
Theory (2018).
Ángel Oliva  is a professor in both the School of Arts and Humanities and
the Psychology School at Rosario National University, Argentina.
Antonio  Oliva  is Professor of History at Rosario National University,
Argentina. He is a researcher at the Institute of Regional Socio-historical
Research from the National Scientific and Research Council and a mem-
ber of the Editorial Committee of ARCHIVOS.
Oliver Schlaudt  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Heidelberg, Germany. His main research interest centers on the philoso-
phy of the natural and social sciences, with a special focus on measurement
and quantification. He is co-editor of the collected works of Alfred Sohn-­
Rethel (German edition, Ca Ira Verlag) and of the journal Zeitschrift für
kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie.
Cristián Sucksdorf  studied Communication Science and is a professor at
the Buenos Aires National University, Argentina. He is the co-editor of 18
xviii  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

volumes of Leon Rozitchner’s complete works (Argentine National

Library). He is the author of Del temor a ser tocado (2011) and Espejos
Rotos (2016).
Sergio Tischler  is a professor at the Autonomous University of Puebla,
Mexico, and research member at the National System of Researchers of
Mexico. He is the author of Revolución y destotalización (2013) and Mario
Payeras y los interiores de una constelación revolucionaria (2009).
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Antonio Oliva, Ángel Oliva, and Iván Novara

As a social critique of contemporary reality, another non-dogmatic reading

of Marx’s oeuvre may seem a barren and unsatisfactory endeavor. Even
when Marxian thought—as well as Marxism, as a whole and through its
different currents 150  years on—still provides the most robust analysis
and the most radical critique of mercantile society and of the political
forms of exploitation and domination that capital has deployed, the end of
this second decade of the current century will see capitalism reign unchal-
lenged across the world, fully globalized in its homogenizing ways of pro-
ducing and reproducing social relations, and most important, with a huge
capacity, in both qualitative and quantitative terms, for the creation of
material wealth which, nonetheless, remains beyond the reach of three
quarters of the world’s population.
The reasons why a political alternative to capitalism, with agency and
visibility, was not deployed after the fall of the so-called actually existing
socialism are beyond the scope of this introduction and of this volume.
Nonetheless, we cannot dodge the very significant paradox that can be
perceived since the beginning of this century. On the one hand, there is a
capitalism increasingly ruthless in its irrational ways of assigning value to

A. Oliva • Á. Oliva • I. Novara (*)

National University of Rosario, Rosario, Argentina

© The Author(s) 2020 1

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_1
2  A. OLIVA ET AL.

capital, which destroys life. On the other, we see the loss of theoretical and
political references at an international scale required to restrain it in order
to establish a society founded on bases other than wealth as value. This
capitalism does not allow us to envision a hopeful future for the large
majorities and pauperized peoples. Despite this, and in significant con-
trast, during these last three decades, the most fruitful and non-dogmatic
rereadings of Marx’s oeuvre and, to a lesser extent, of Marxism as a whole
have proliferated at a global scale, conforming for the first time since the
late nineteenth century a true corpus of interpretations that begin to be
connected to current non-conformist movements.
Regarding the analysis and interpretation of Marxian works, the differ-
ent current rereadings, reinterpretations, and theoretical and political
reconsiderations are, without a doubt, heterogeneous, but they all com-
prise three aspects which, in our consideration, unify them.
To begin with, new approaches, both collective and individual, to Marx’s
oeuvre, have been forged from outside—and often stemmed from a devas-
tating critique of—the main two Marxist currents of the twentieth century,
that is, social democracy and Soviet-style Marxism–Leninism, which, even
when they represented an alternative to capitalism, not only failed, but to a
certain extent fostered the theoretical and practical sustainment of capitalist
regimes. Notwithstanding the undeniable contribution of both currents to
the reconstruction and dissemination of Marx’s ideas and, more preva-
lently, to the elaboration of political programs and interpretations within
clearly revolutionary contexts, some of them successful, it is also undeni-
able that their partial and dogmatic approach to as well as religious canon-
ization of Marxian works precluded the development of a true political
alternative capable of overcoming capitalism. As a result, they have both
stalled and fossilized since at least the 1970s.
In this sense, the aforementioned new contributions, freed from such
dogmatism, have carried out novel rereadings of Marx’s oeuvre by address-
ing some of its most overlooked aspects and through the critical analysis of
its better-known theoretical premises. At the same time, they have
attempted to reconstruct Marx’s oeuvre, something significantly difficult,
due not only to the vicissitudes of Marx’s writings after his death, but also
to their constant mutilation and distortion by the aforementioned social–
democratic and Marxist–Leninist currents of Marxian thought.
The most ambitious contemporary project to reconstruct Marx and
Engel’s oeuvre is the Marx–Engels–Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), which aims
at producing a new comprehensive edition of Marx’s and Engels’s com-
 1 INTRODUCTION  3

plete works. It started in the 1970s and is still ongoing. Initially published
by the Marxism–Leninism Institutes of the Socialist Unity Party of
Germany (SED) in Berlin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(CPSU) in Moscow, under the direction of Dietz Verlag (Berlin), MEGA
includes all works published during the life of Marx and Engels and many
previously unpublished manuscripts and letters. All texts in MEGA are in
their original language: the majority in German, but with many in English
and French. Being an academic, historical and critical edition, most of the
volumes in MEGA include appendices that provide additional information
about each text. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the publication of the
MEGA project was transferred to the Internationale Marx–Engels–
Stiftung (IMES) in Amsterdam, which is still working on it. So far, 65
MEGA volumes have been published, and the whole project is expected to
comprise 114 volumes (Musto 2011; Fineschi 2013).
Secondly, the emphasis in the critique of Marx’s oeuvre, in our opinion,
has conveniently moved from highlighting the most traditional aspects of
the theory, such as exploitation in capitalist systems (the theory of surplus
value and its developments) and the subjects who bear emancipating
essences within a class structure (the working class, the proletariat), toward
the production of several readings which focus on the critique of political
economy and review the critique to the ideology of mercantile society.
More specifically, these readings emphasize the validity of the theory of
value-labor, the objective character of capital’s social domination through
the abstract forms of value and the articulation between such abstract
forms and Marx’s specific method of analyzing capitalism.
Precisely, beyond their heterogeneity, the emphasis of contemporary
approaches has been on the specific character of each historical era and on
readings that understand the forms assumed by social wealth through
value in capitalism as non-transhistorical,1 as well as on the structural char-
acter of abstract and social labor as first-order determinations in the theory
of value, and even the analytical method adopted by Marx when rereading
Hegel. Furthermore, there has been a painstaking effort to delimit, mainly
through the idea of crisis sketched by the different contributions to the
critique of political economy, the possible ‘passages’ to societies not gov-
erned by class divisions and not determined by the forms of wealth based
on value-labor (Kurz 2000; Jappe 2003).2
Thirdly, with different degrees of accuracy and adherence to Marx’s
oeuvre, Marxist scholarship of the last 30 years has become increasingly
more transnational, something which so far has not received enough
4  A. OLIVA ET AL.

c­ onsideration. The possibilities of global access to Marx’s oeuvre and the

emergence of technologies that enable work beyond strict national bound-
aries have allowed production and knowledge which are not rooted, as
during most of the twentieth century, at a national (or international) scale.
On the contrary, breaking political and linguistic barriers, they produce
collaborative projects with contributions from the six continents. We can
now state that there is a ‘Marxology’ with different study centers devoted
to the transversal socialization of knowledge and to the connection of
those theoretical achievements to possible social practices for anti-­capitalist
transformation (Elbe 2013; Musto 2015: 7–40).
Out of the debates emerged from the review of Marxian thought and
the contemporary reconstruction of Marx’s oeuvre, Marxian scholars have
highlighted the doubts generated by the interpretations of the Marx’s
analysis of the capitalist system which make use of categories which were
not explicitly stated by Marx. For instance, it is worth mentioning that the
concept of ‘capitalism’ is not in itself present in Marx’s oeuvre and that he
used the historical ideas of ‘commodity-producing society’ or ‘mercantile
society’ to name the historical period he was analyzing. Nonetheless, the
word ‘capitalism’ applied to the time period in which capital is still domi-
nant as a social form, which governs all relations, is used frequently enough
and with such theoretical rigor to occupy a clearly interpretative place
within Marxian analytical categories. When examining the controversy
between ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ analysis, in our opinion, a specific distinc-
tion is pertinent. We believe that one thing is the critique to the imposi-
tion of concepts and categories from outside of Marxian theory which
attributes to it theoretical developments that Marx would not have formu-
lated and are sometimes directly opposed to his thought as a whole, for
example the metaphysical ontology of the proletariat. A very different
thing is that the social critique based on Marx’s thought (as a starting
point for a critique of capitalism) has not been able and may not be able in
the future to develop new categories for new realities. Therefore, an
orthodox following avant la lettre of his writings, namely a merely philo-
logical study of the oeuvre, will tend to preclude any fruitful initiative or
even updates and new readings not only of Marx’s oeuvre itself (and of its
most faithful reconstruction possible), but also of the social reality to
which a social critique must necessarily refer.
The theoretical problem of real abstraction belongs within this area of
constructive inference from an analysis of Marxian thought, although it
was never explicitly formulated by Marx as a concept. The concept of real
 1 INTRODUCTION  5

abstraction was coined by Alfred Sohn-Rethel in the 1950s, but he only

developed it fully in his Geistige und Körperliche Arbeit (Intellectual and
Manual Labor), published in 1970, at the same time as new readings of
Marx focused mainly on the importance of the theory of value. Sohn-­
Rethel’s field of analysis, his concern with understanding the genesis of
social forms of thought, and his knowledge of the main problems in politi-
cal economy led him to think, through a critique of Kantian apriorism,
that in societies where commodities are exchanged there are operations of
objective abstraction which, unconscious to the subjects who perform
them, determine, as general forms of social praxis, the forms of abstract
thought that allow us to know such societies. In summary, the abstractions
for knowing are preceded and determined by the practices of real abstrac-
tion at the core of economic operations in mercantile societies.
Sohn-Rethel analyzes the fact that, in exchanges, people do not con-
sciously abstract the use values of the commodities they exchange.
Commodities are abstracted as a pure quantity and as a universally imper-
vious substance. Even when the people participating in the exchange are
not conscious of the abstraction of the commodity’s use value, the abstrac-
tion is still an objective characteristic of their actions. In this sense, the
abstraction is real by opposition, because it is only performed as a thought
process. According to Sohn-Rethel, this phenomenon has fundamental
philosophical relevance, to the extent to which mercantile exchanges
become a generalized practice in a society and impose a specific world view
upon the members of such society. If we observe where the author locates
the practical operations of abstraction, we must agree that they belong in
the plane of social relations, the same practical field and the same path of
determinations where Marx places determinations of value. The insistence
in locating practical operations of human abstractions/commodities at the
moment of exchange led Sohn-Rethel to explore the origins of money. He
suspected that such abstractions were present as phenomena of social
praxis in ancient societies, like ancient Greece, which had developed a
tight relation between the social deployment of commodity exchanges and
their philosophical capacity of generating abstract thought.
Thus, Sohn-Rethel’s intuitions were articulated in the 1970s as a two-­
way path, which enriched analysis. On the one hand, they supported, in
general terms, the theoretical problems postulated in the 1940s by mem-
bers of the Frankfurt School like Adorno and Horkheimer, who, from
different perspectives, presented a negative critique of the irrationality of
capitalist objectivity beyond the capacity of reason to apprehend the real.
6  A. OLIVA ET AL.

On the other hand, there were new readings of Marxism that, as we have
seen, reread the Marx of the critique of political economy and, more spe-
cifically, the qualitative analysis of value which, through the simple form of
the commodity and its unfolding into use value and value, are presented
as objective forms of exchange products.3
Since then, many theoretical problems have derived from Sohn-Rethel’s
thesis. This volume attempts to trace them throughout the debates of the
last few decades which are regarded as central to Marxian thought.
First, Sohn-Rethel’s theoretical position regarding the transhistorical
character of real abstraction differ from the way it was conceived by the
mature Marx. When Sohn-Rethel restricts the synthetic operations of
abstraction to the transactional moment of exchange, making even the
conversion of human labor into abstract labor, he removes the conver-
gence of practical determinations that Marx establishes to explain the set
of abstract forms—from the simplest ones, led by the genesis of value in
commodities, to the more concrete ones, like the production of the form
of capital—which make up mercantile production in contemporary societ-
ies. In this sense, the transhistorical character of the concept restricts
abstract social relations to the synthetic field of the market, excluding the
phenomenic character where exchanges appear in capitalist societies. In
this manner, the determinant character of abstract human labor as labor
time, considered as the substance of the value of commodities, is blurred
as the determination of the abstract character of commodities. Thus, in
Sohn-Rethel we see a true inversion of the determinations presented by
Marx already in the Grundrisse of 1857. The best recent productions
about real abstraction, some of them included in this volume, resume a
critique of Sohn-Rethel, recovering perspectives such as those found in
Isaak Rubin’s groundbreaking Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (1973) by
or in Hans Georg Backhaus’s classic Dialektik der Wertform (1997). They
adopt the Marxian analysis of abstract labor and socially mediated labor in
capitalism as key and historically determined concepts, fundamental to
understanding social forms abstracted at the moment of exchange.
Second, Sohn-Rethel establishes an identity and an unmistakable kin-
ship between abstract processes occurring in the conformation of practical
relations between people in exchanges and cognitive faculties resulting
from said practical relations, something fundamental to delimit the prob-
lem. Attempting to enlighten the epistemic differences between the con-
ceptual elements in Kantian philosophy and in a Marxian materialistic
approach, Sohn-Rethel sets out to demonstrate that the relation between
 1 INTRODUCTION  7

formal elements in social synthesis and formal components of knowledge

is not a simple analogy, but a true identity, and that the verification of this
identity would result in a demonstration that the conceptual basis of
knowledge is conditioned by ‘the basic structure of the social synthesis in
each era’ (Sohn-Rethel 2001: 16). From this aporia in Sohn-Rethel derive
a wide range of problems about the ways in which social relations as phe-
nomenically present in society, the corresponding conceptual tools for
their cognitive apprehension, and the method that would order such tools
are related. These results make necessary a more intense analysis on the
epistemological plane of Marx’s theory. One of the most important ele-
ments is the open debate on whether the concept of real abstraction in
Marx can be stated only in the plane of the Darstellung (the form of
expression of knowledge of the real) or it is part of the same analyzed
object as manifested in social relations. To any extent, the identity of the
Darstellung and reality itself places us fully within the debate—already
established by a contemporary critique of the theory of value—about the
depth of the relation between Marx and Hegel or, in other words, about
the degree to which Marx’s expository method follows Hegel on the
emergence of the real from its abstracted forms presented by the pheno-
menic. The problem of real abstraction, and thus the significance of Sohn-­
Rethel’s intuition, assumes the existence of abstractive operations, very
close to the forms of the human unconscious that objectivize the social
relations which determine and dominate the women and men who per-
form them, irrespective of the cognitive method that they use to compre-
hend them, but also conditioning it. Therefore, conceptualization would
seem to be a phenomenon independent from the epistemological strength
of the Marxian method, as it occurs in social praxis, that is in the real.
The problem expands, because it is not possible to verify the phenom-
enon in reality by means of empirical methods. The conscious abandon-
ment of any empiric verification of phenomena as they were present in the
apparent social reality led Marx back to Hegel and to establish his Logic as
a pillar of the expository presentation of A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy of 1859 and, of course, Capital.4 Regardless of the
weight we attribute to the adoption of a Hegelian method in the critique
of political economy, the reach of the practices of abstraction in the social
reality of capitalism and especially the form adopted by these practices of
abstraction in the human mind for the comprehension of such reality were
not sufficiently explained by Sohn-Rethel, even though this problem con-
stituted the center of his approach.
8  A. OLIVA ET AL.

If real abstraction, as a theoretical problem in contemporary societies,

transcends the methodological aspects adopted by Marx, and if real
abstraction is constituted by operations that determine the forms of know-
ing but are objectivized in reality, what kind of relational operations are
they? Are they contradictions, inversions, abstractions, separations, that
operate in social formations to reproduce mercantile society? In which
sequence and under which historical and material conditions? How does
this problem appear specifically in Marxian works? These questions circu-
late in the volume that we now present, and are articulated with other
questions of the same significance: What connections can we establish, for
instance, when we think about the problem of real abstraction in Marx
and when his thought goes from a critique of ideology to a critique of
political economy as an ‘anatomy of society’? Moreover, what is the practi-
cal relation between the consciousness of the unconsciously abstractive
process, the current forms of domination based on it, and the path to a
society without these forms of domination? This volume attempts to think
these questions in their strategic sense.
The purpose of the first section of this volume is to trace the theoretical
background of abstraction phenomena in Marx’s oeuvre which, in most
cases, is equal to concepts that Marx himself adopted in order to explain
the nature of these phenomena in commodity-producing societies.
Nonetheless, since this set of problems took shape under the concept of
real abstraction—a term coined by Alfred Sohn-Rethel which highlights
the practical and not merely the mental principle of abstraction in the
shaping of the social behavior of individuals, the construction of forms of
comprehension, and the conformation of social relations—the presence of
this epistemological, gnoseological and political trope in Marx’s oeuvre
requires the inclusion, in this reconstruction, of contemporary and subse-
quent contributions from early readings of Marxian works that help delim-
iting it. Thus, this reconstruction of the problem, centered on Marx’s
oeuvre, requires a critical reconsideration of Sohn-Rethel as the thinker
who has brought to a contemporary realm the question of real abstraction.
Perhaps nobody deals most directly with the critical aspects of the con-
cept of real abstraction in Sohn-Rethel than John Milios. He starts with
Marx’s method and its misunderstandings, which leads him to a prompt
consideration of the commodity in its dynamics. In these dynamics, he
finds a social homogenization of the individual labor processes and pro-
ductive processes through abstract labor. For Milios, value and abstract
labor are constitutive categories of the capitalist mode of production, as he
 1 INTRODUCTION  9

believes that the relation established by Sohn-Rethel between the econ-

omy of Ancient Greece and capitalism breaks the link between capitalism
and wage labor. Therefore, it is only possible to talk about real abstraction
after wage labor has established itself as a generalized commodity in a capi-
talist mode of production.
On the other hand, by tracing the intellectual construction of the ori-
gins of the concept of real abstraction, Jan Hoff addresses the ways in
which William Petty and Benjamin Franklin influenced Marx on his theory
of value. In his notebook about Franklin in 1858, Marx considers him as
the father of the labor theory of value. For Hoff, there is a turning point
in Marx’s consideration about Franklin in May 1863, when he system-
atizes Petty’s oeuvre, placing the latter as the first predecessor in the analy-
sis of the determination of the magnitude of the value of commodities.
Pablo Nocera’s purpose is to approach the uses, appropriations and
shifts in the notion of abstraction initially developed by Ludwig Feuerbach
in his critique of the forms of alienation. He also goes through the contri-
bution of Moses Hess, Marx and Engels’s companion during the months
in which they wrote The German Ideology in Brussels. Through this path,
Nocera follows the uses that Marx makes of the notion of abstraction in
order to explore the form of social abstraction which deploys the logic of
exchange and is projected to the whole of capitalist society.
As Marx’s oeuvre has been attributed a good amount of concepts which
he did not actually use—‘real abstraction’ being one of them—, in this
section, which aims at the reconstruction of this notion within the oeuvre,
it has been necessary to include a series of contributions that set forth to
deconstruct the wide span of the Marxian conceptual apparatus by resort-
ing to the study of Marx’s terminology. Roberto Fineschi carries out a
philological reconstruction in later Marxian works of the complex con-
cepts of ‘real’ and ‘abstraction’ in order to demonstrate the controversial
interpretations derived from a bad reading of said concepts and the varia-
tions suffered by both terms in different parts of the oeuvre. This work of
terminological precision entails working with differential intensities on the
terms used by Marx himself in his oeuvre and those that can be inferred
from its thematic tropes, allowing Fineschi to answer the question about
‘the limits within which we can use this category’. Fineschi’s philological
work also sets forth to differentiate in Marx’s oeuvre those abstractions
which are part of Marx’s methodological procedures and those which may
be present in practical life. For him, the restriction of real abstraction only
to capitalism is another controversial point, and for this reason he distin-
10  A. OLIVA ET AL.

guishes between real abstractions and historically specific real abstractions

in capitalism, as they relate to the concept of fetishism: ‘What is specific of
the capitalist mode of production is that these abstractions are not simply
“real”, but appear as things’.
On his part, Alfonso Iacono locates the problem of abstraction in
Marx’s critique and method. He focuses on the theoretical problem
addressed by both historians of culture (Kulturhistoriker) such as Adam
Ferguson, and classical economists. The former by reducing society to a
model ‘based on the isolated natural man’ and the latter by building a
simplified and ahistorical model underpinned by a poor abstraction, that
of the individual and isolated hunter-fisherman. According to Iacono, this
is a clearly reductionist construction, which identifies the product of an
extremely simple model (i.e. the abstraction of the isolated or individual
man), an extremely complex system. (namely the capitalist means of pro-
duction). For Iacono, then, this is an idealized transposition of the rela-
tions in the sphere of circulation onto the relations of production. Marx
perceived this transposition, and that is why he took the genetic path of
simple categories and not the strictly historical one, thus achieving a dou-
ble critical path: ‘[…] his problem is not only to put historical analysis
back on a firm footing, but to understand the process of simplification/
generalization in the models of political economics and therefore the
method of abstraction’.
Paul Blackledge researches Friedrich Engels’s contribution to the polit-
ical economy of the twentieth century through Sohn-Rethel’s work on
real abstractions. For Blackledge, Engels’s historical method is problem-
atic, because Engels conflates the genetic procedure of Marx’s commodity
saga with a specific pre-capitalist historical stage. Here, Sohn-Rethel fol-
lows Engels when he focuses not on this system where the purchase and
sale of labor power prevails, but instead on the simple exchange of com-
modities developed in Classical Greece. Regarding the theory of value,
Blackledge suggests that the uses of ‘simple mercantile production’ by
Engels are not related to his comprehension of a dialectic, but to his poor
understanding of the theory of value. This poor understanding was pro-
jected not only onto twentieth century Marxism, but also, in particular,
onto Sohn-Rethel’s transposition of capitalist social relations to mercantile
forms in Antiquity. For Blackledge, Sohn-Rethel is correct in that abstrac-
tion in exchanges is not mental but material. On the other hand, he seems
to make explicit what would otherwise be implicit in twentieth-century
 1 INTRODUCTION  11

Marxism: the difference between Marx and by Engels in their understand-

ing of the theory of value.
Mario Duayer delves into Marx’s methodology; in particular, the pas-
sages where Marx talks about ‘the scientifically correct method’ in his
famous section ‘The Method of Political Economy’ of the Grundrisse.
Duayer sets forth a critique of what he considers a standard interpretation
of Marx’s method and argues that those passages describe the workings of
science in general and not of his method. Following Lukacs, Duayer con-
cludes that the solution for the question is not exclusively methodological
or epistemological, but ontological. Lukacs’s ontology is based on the
parts of Marx’s oeuvre where the critique refers to the modes of totaliza-
tion and to the set of categories with which both political economy and
materialist philosophy result in a hypostasis of the existing representational
forms of life and are therefore presented as ahistorical. The ontological
critique developed by Lukacs is directed to the ontologies which dismiss
the historical character of the construction and reproduction of that total-
ity. For Lukacs, what Marx states in his text is not that economists did not
realize that they took ‘the way back’, this is, from abstract to concrete, but
that they abandoned any representation of totality and did not question
the given notions of reality.
Closing the first part of this volume, Patrick Murray presents a histori-
cal timeline of phenomenological critique, from Berkeley and going
through Hegel to Marx. He is interested in what he calls ‘bad abstrac-
tions’ and the manners in which they relate to the notion of abstraction in
Marx. He finds a second dividing line from Berkeley to Marx, but through
Samuel Bailey. Neither Berkeley nor Bailey, even when they criticized
political economists for dealing with abstract ideas, saw value as an expres-
sion of the social character of wealth. Both got entangled in the bad
abstractions generated by the capitalist mode of production. Finally,
Murray traces the way in which Marx deals with bad abstractions in phi-
losophy and political economy, concluding with the problem of what
would be “abstract” in abstract labor.
The second section presents the problematic methodological and con-
ceptual consequences that this trope produces within and from Marx’s
oeuvre. The aforementioned new readings allow us to underscore that the
specific social form of a generalized commodity-producing society objecti-
fies a kind of abstraction that cannot be limited any longer, in its critical
exposition, to a mental process or a merely categorical one, nor should it
be confused with the methodological needs of the critique of political
12  A. OLIVA ET AL.

economy. They are, instead, abstract processes that social individuals

themselves perform and reproduce under the parameters of specific his-
torical relations and that, in Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s words, ‘have the shape
of thought’. The form commodity, the form value, the form capital, the
form money are all abstractions that operate in the objectivity of the social
system and tend to naturalize economic phenomena under the continuous
and central process of the historical social relations that reproduce them.
Warner Bonefeld’s chapter in this volume addresses the basic features of
these economic forms as objective phenomena of capitalist society and the
specific role of criticism regarding the treatment of these forms: ‘Rather,
what appears in society as economic objectivity is Men in their social rela-
tions. That is, the so-called economic laws of development express the
social nature of a definite form of social relations. The question of ‘capital’
thus becomes a question about the social relationship between persons
expressed as a relationship between economic things, that is, real eco-
nomic abstractions.’
It is an abstraction that, given the centrality of its objective condition in
the social form, tends to compel the behavior of social individuals beyond
their immediate conscious processes, and that orientates, in systemic
terms, the sense of the social praxis of said individuals toward the repro-
duction of such concealed social form. The condition for the naturaliza-
tion of the economic phenomena presented in this social form resides in
forgetting social relations, which are abstracted by the abstraction implied
in the commodity in value, capital and money. Bonefeld’s contribution
underscores that the so-called New Reading of Marx anticipated by Sohn-­
Rethel’s and Adorno’s attempt to expand the critique of political economy
into a social critical theory had the virtue of ‘revealing social relations in
the shape of things as inverted forms of defined social relations’. Therefore,
these problems require a reflection about the theoretical and method-
ological procedures specific to the critique of these forms. If the categories
of political economy, to the extent to which they are presented as true
hypostasis of the forms of the social system, provide a gate toward an
explanation of how such social system was genetically produced and is
reproduced. The devising of a coherent series of categories by Marx in his
critique of political economy, followed, in a certain manner, by Sohn-
Rethel and Adorno’s projects, are equal, in Alfred Schmidt’s words, to a
true ‘conceptualized praxis (begriffene Praxis) of the capitalist social rela-
tions in the form of real economic abstractions’. The methodological
aspect of the theory must therefore take into consideration the nature of
 1 INTRODUCTION  13

the thing to be addressed and consequently the theoretical abstractions

that correspond to that critique pursue the abstracting logical course of
the real contained in the categories of political economy to later surpass it.
Nonetheless, if we can recognize in Marx’s oeuvre the presence of a
radical change in relation to the philosophical tradition, the inherited
ontology, and especially the hardened common sense which locates in the
genetic and reproductive praxic process of the social system abstractions
that do not correspond solely to thought, our discussion would now be
centered in the intratheoretical web of the critical apparatus, that is which
are the moments in Marx’s oeuvre where this change redirects the critique
and how the questions of method are articulated in the oeuvre regarding
the variations implied in dealing with abstractions whose substance is
located in social praxis. Strongly rooted in the tradition of Althusserian
readings of Capital, Jacques Bidet’s contribution puts forth a critique of
the positions which tend to connect the centrality of the concept of
abstract work with the objectivity of the real abstraction, to the extent to
which the mercantile character of capitalist social relations would be the
source of the abstract character of labor. In this regard, Bidet’s contribu-
tion questions both Moishe Poston’s seminal Time, Labor and Social
Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory as well as the
readings of the so-called ‘esoteric school’ started by Georg Backhaus and
continued in the current of the Neue Kritik, whose main exponent is
Christopher Arthur. Bidet argues that these theses ‘confuse the notions of
abstraction, abstract labor and real abstraction’, and that such confusion
also extends to ‘the set of the structural, historical, and political analyses it
inspires’. The distinction by Althusser, in his reading of Marx, between the
thought-concrete and the real-concrete, offers, according to Bidet, the
possibility of seeking a distinction between the separation of two analytic
registers: ‘theoretical abstraction’ and ‘real abstraction’. In the Marxian
method, the former helps understand the latter. The metastructural
dimension of the mercantile society analyzed by Marx in a logical register,
thus, can only be perceived once the structure of exploitation has become
consistent. The apparent paradox faced here by theory leads to a confu-
sion between an abstraction which remains, in principle, at a theoretical
level, and another one which signals the historical and real centrality of the
forms of abstract labor in its objectivity.
Therefore, our aim is to elucidate on the one hand the theoretical prin-
ciples under which Marx’s critique has explored how real abstractions
frame the permanent reproduction of the social system and on the other,
14  A. OLIVA ET AL.

when and to what extent these specific abstractions of capitalist mercantile

production, in its process of praxic generalization, allowed their theoreti-
cal elucidation. Mauricio Vieira Martins’s contribution in this volume
addresses this. By considering the general inclusion of labor power within
the circuit of exchanges and the generalization of the form of money as
both conditions required for ‘subsuming the meaning of production as a
whole’, he provides the theoretical keys of Marx’s reasoning to establish
an explanation which bridges the gap between the objective genetic pro-
cess of consolidation of certain historical production relations and the
conditions, both objective and subjective, for their elucidation. Since this
process consolidated concurrently to Marx’s life and oeuvre, it is also key
to elucidate the differences within the oeuvre itself with regard to the
conditions which allowed Marx to arrive at a critical reflection under-
pinned by a praxistic conception of abstraction. Accordingly, these trans-
formations within theory are not exempt of a ‘tense articulation’ between
the so-called ‘systematic plan of analysis (at the highest level of abstrac-
tion) and the historical approach (that points to the unavoidable presence
of the social classes and their conflict)’. The verification, in Marx’s later
works, of the notion of abstraction in actu derived from the general entrap-
ment by the form of value of the diversity of concrete labor and its subse-
quent influence on phenomena of social consciousness allow Vieira
Martins to state that, at that moment, Marx would have been able to
demonstrate that ‘abstract processes (which, in the specific sense we here
give evidence of) also generate uninterrupted effects on reality’.
If we can therefore say that the verification of abstractive forms operates
in the sphere of the real before operating in the forms of consciousness
and historically conditions their heuristic scope of the latter, and if this
verification reaches the tensions in Marx’s own oeuvre, the study of the
problem of real abstraction should avoid the temptation to conceive it
merely as a question circumscribed to the epistemological dimension, but
also extend it to the nature of social theory as necessary for the theoretical
treatment of capitalist modernity and the necessary conceptual tools to
overcome it. Here as well, in the conceptual sphere, we encounter intrathe-
oretical and extratheoretical consequences due to the verification of the
real character of systemic abstractive phenomena. The contributions of
Alberto Bonnet, Cristián Sucksdorf and Ingo Elbe carry out this search for
conceptual accuracy within and out with Marx’s oeuvre.
Bonnet unwinds the dense variability of the concept of ‘form’ in Marx.
Freed from the idealist reduction of the form, both in the Aristotelian
 1 INTRODUCTION  15

tradition, where the concept of form as related to matter is kept at a level

which is too broad to characterize specific historical forms, and in its
Hegelian counterpart, which substantializes the reductive action of con-
sciousness and limits matter to a concept of fixed and ensemblistic-­
identitary (i.e. ensidic) nature, Marx’s notion of form, centered in the
concept of historical relations of production, dynamically outlines a
divided materiality, articulated among social relations, and a socially medi-
ated conception of nature. In consequence, if matter in its double rela-
tional condition always exceeds a certain historical form, it is convenient
to set forth a concept of form that is deployed, in relation to that contra-
dictory materiality, as a form of process. Capitalist forms do not imply a
dynamics of process in their origin and in their point of structuring, but
do imply a dynamics of process in their ongoing reproduction. Stripped of
its speculative surface, in Marx’s notion of form there are modes of exis-
tence whose contradiction with the metabolisms of matter they grasp jus-
tify their dialectic treatment. From here, Bonnet attempts to think about
abstraction in Marx’s oeuvre as an attribute of capitalist forms in social
relations, connection that links this attribute to the concepts of fetishism
and abstract work. This reasoning results in the following statement: ‘This
relation between concept and object must now be specified in the light of
distinction between mental abstraction and real abstraction. All concept
remains, naturally, the result of a process of mental abstraction. But there
is a specificity when this subjective process of abstraction has as its coun-
terpart a process of objective abstraction given that, in such case, the for-
mer may aspire to reproduce the latter in thought’. The specificity of the
concept of form in Marx, explicit in its dialectic treatment, states the scope
and the objectives of the critique: ‘[T]he concept of form explains the way
in which social relations in capitalist society exist. And, in this way, from
the point of view of the anti-capitalist critique, it allows us to precise the
objectives of such critique. This, in itself, is already decisive. Marx himself
dedicated innumerable pages to argue against other socialists of his time
this matter of the objectives an anti-capitalist critique should have’.
Social theory had to pay a hefty price for the Hegelian concept of con-
tradiction to earn the right to be a source of truth in process and to cease
to be equated with falsehood and rejection. All dynamics of internal con-
tradictions in social life were subsumed to a resolution whose command,
eventually, corresponds to thought. In his contribution, Cristián Sucksdorf
attempts to demonstrate the manner in which Marx’s thought distances
itself from these two versions of contradiction typical of the ontology
16  A. OLIVA ET AL.

inherited from our philosophical traditions. This maneuver is, in turn, elu-
sive with regard to the idealist matrix with which said ontology constructed
the duality of idealism and materialism. With a specific utilization of
Foucaultian epistemology, centered in the notion of discourse, Sukdorf
attempts to prove that Marx expanded the field of the real, regarding
philosophical tradition, to ‘include in it the meaning as articulation of the
bodies’. If Marx deals mainly with an investigation related to the specific
articulation between bodies and representations in capitalist society, the
question is, then, ‘to account for the differential ways in which representa-
tions—the meaning—constitute real practices and thus modify the bodies
and their interrelations, but also, how that meaning forms in the active
life—in actual, concrete practices—of the many interrelated bodies’. The
real contradiction—bound to practices whose meaning for mercantile
society is, in principle, potency—is not a contradiction residing within the
concept or a contradiction in general. It is instead the specific support,
namely the source, of the abstractions of a historical intertwining between
bodies and representations. In this sense, contradiction is also an attribute
of the universalization of dynamics in a social system based on abstract
forms of sociability. The cellular form of this contradiction, which inocu-
lates into real life its abstracting poison, is on the one hand the double
contradictory condition within its body of the commodity as use value,
that is as the product of concrete labor, and as value, that is as the product
of abstract labor; and, on the other, that in the horizon of representation,
we deal with physical and metaphysical, sensible and suprasensible, indi-
vidual and universal, private and social elements as we appreciate its repro-
ductive generalization. The isomorphism in the experience of subjects,
with its unsolvable duality in the field of capitalist relations present in the
body of the commodity, locates the subjective aspect of abstract thought
in consistency with the hidden hardness of the contradiction that subtends
it. This isomorphism of the forms of consciousness with the contradictory
and hidden nature of the commodity locates Marx’s analysis of the com-
modity in a place that overcomes inherited philosophical dualities.
Ingo Elbe’s text addresses the risk of Lukacs’s drift toward idealism due
to the lack of systematization of the Marxian concept of reification in his
oeuvre. The fact that Lukacs treated several topics present in Marx over-
looking the importance of this key concept ‘had fatal consequences for the
entire history of the reception of the term, since this conceptual diffuse-
ness, paired with a Hegelian metaphysics of spirit, led to an idealist (all
social interrelations are mental things) and irrational social ontology
 1 INTRODUCTION  17

(social interrelations under capitalism are mental things)’. The rescue of

the concept of reification in Marx’s oeuvre thus requires a new intratheo-
retical order of the concepts which may be articulated with reification as a
consequence of the real character of abstraction. Within this conceptual
field, which is also a problematic trope, Elbe addresses first ‘the real reifica-
tion and autonomous status of social relations in capitalism’, which is
related to the semantic variations of the concept of alienation in Marx, and
second the need to distinguish that real reification from ‘the ideological
reification (fetishization, mystification) of these relations as natural charac-
teristics of things or universal-historical social patterns’. Here the concept
of fetishism becomes significant. In Marx’s later works, the sense of the
concept of alienation, explained in earlier works by the domination of the
thing or of wealth as a completely extraneous power, gets more elaborate
and is deciphered from the starting point of abstract work, whose condi-
tion of possibility is given by the process of autonomization of the social
form of labor. In this manner, ‘reification proves to be a form of alienation
specific to capitalism’, given that ‘the form of wealth, value, is constituted
as a specific social relationship of validity through initial conditions struc-
tured by a private division of labor, and the social recognition of products
of labor through the mediation of exchange’. Nonetheless, in his later
works, the concept of reification also encompasses the cognitive phenom-
ena of the fetishization process, which connects the two phenomenic
instances, organically connected, at which Marx aims his critique: the nat-
uralization of social relations caused by the ‘objectification and autono-
mization of the social nexus’ and crystallized in the categories of political
economy, and, through this, ‘the critique of this objectification and auton-
omization of relations itself’.
Another problem is the risk of dispersion in the critique, both concep-
tually and thematically, produced by, on the one hand, the so-called New
Reading of Marx with regard to the reconstruction of the critique of polit-
ical economy and their particular interest in the phenomena of real abstrac-
tion in their systematization and reconstruction of the Marxian theory of
value and, on the other hand, other readings of real abstraction as a field
of application for the interpretation of phenomena linked to social domi-
nation and the reproduction and accumulation of capital in race, gender
and nature. Chris O’Kane’s contribution attempts to encompass the con-
ceptual field from these two areas of theoretical renewal and the concep-
tual scales devoted to the problem of real abstraction in the work of
Sohn-Rethel, Theodore Adorno and Henrí Lefebvre. This contribution
18  A. OLIVA ET AL.

also focuses on two topics which are key to our purpose: first, the episte-
mological consequences for the type of critical social theory which includes
in its several fields of application the fact of conceiving phenomena as
objective when they are of an abstract nature, and second the considerable
differentiation between an abstraction which corresponds to the objective
occurrence of social phenomena and another one which corresponds to
the critical exercise which chases such social phenomena.
The tight relation between the categories of political economy revealed
by Marx and the reconstruction of the contextual field category by cate-
gory which he undertakes pose the question of the effectiveness of the
‘method’ in A Critique of Political Economy. This relation is surrounded
by an objectivity whose specific historical condition is to conceal its sub-
stance. The Marxian method, therefore, operates as a path of genetic
reconstruction of said concealments, which requires the exercise of
abstraction itself to fulfill the passage from the abstract to the concrete. As
it proceeds, it accounts for the systemic causes by means of which political
economy produced a process of resubjectivation of the general historical
categories in the mode of production. Wolfang Fitz Haug’s contribution
reconstructs the saga of the reconstruction the workings of political econ-
omy from outside until the question which political economy itself had
not put forth is revealed: Why does material content historically adopt the
form of value? At the same time, this reconstruction of the categorical
array of political economy poses the question of why the latter has stopped
reasoning before stating this issue. A central aspect of Fitz Haug’s contri-
bution consists of signaling that this process of pursuing the nature of
things themselves through hardened categories is present in Marx since
the critique to Feuerbach. Another central aspect of his analysis consists of
highlighting that the genetics intrinsic to the form of value requires an
abstraction, in principle, of the effective exchange, in order to demon-
strate that this is its condition of possibility. The connection between both
aspects takes place in the fundamental conclusion for social theory that
genetic and historical explanations are not the same, because in the
­categorical subjectification typical of the unveiling of political economy
there is a kind of abstraction equivalent to the way in which value works in
the concrete sphere of the social system. Therefore, ‘the abstraction of the
category “labor” [is] not to be confused with the concept of “abstract
labor”’, since here ‘[t]he truth of the abstraction here stands for the fact
that—as Adorno says in the appropriate context—it clings to (schmigtsich
an) a practical reality’. Yet, if the simple form of value proceeds toward the
 1 INTRODUCTION  19

more complex forms in the abstract sphere, always in relation to but sepa-
rated from the continuous phenomenon of exchange, the ‘interest in
exchanges’ always presents a mercantile aesthetics (presented here as the
conceptual innovation of the Haug’s contribution) which can only stand
on the other leg of the contradiction intrinsic to the commodity: the use
value of things. A mercantile aesthetics which creates images of use value
becomes the condition that underpins exchange, as a consequence of
goods being compelled to be valued as commodities. If this is the case,
then, ‘[t]he abstraction from use value manifests itself as the aesthetic
promise of use value and leads to the formation of aesthetic monopolies of
use value. In short: real abstraction appears here as illusory concreteness
for the purchasing masses’.
Oliver Schlaudt and Peter McLaughlin’s chapter deals with the episte-
mological implications of real abstraction. Thinking of the problem as a
conceptual field for application, the authors attempt to derive the notion
to the field of the natural sciences, in particular, to an epistemology of
physics rooted in the history of technology, a sphere where there are
extensive experiences of the operation of practical abstraction. Taking into
consideration that the kind of abstraction analyzed by Sohn-Rethel in
exchange sphere points out to a ‘special’ kind of real abstraction from a
‘more general’ set of practical abstractions, the authors highlight a general
morphology of abstraction in technological experience that proceeds by
‘analogous types of abstractions’. At stake here is Sohn-Rethel’s assump-
tion that the experience of exchange defines the general form of science,
as it provides, by means of mimetic procedures which remain hidden, a
base of experience for the emergence of the categorical base of Kantian
subjectivism. According to Schlaudt and McLaughlin, by resorting to the
history of technology, it is possible to grasp a more significant experience
in these procedures, based on the diversification of “technical devices”
which put to different uses resulted in applied abstractive practices. It is
stated that when Marx undertakes the genetic explanation of value, he also
proceeds with diverse elements that can be made analogous for different
ends. The aim of Schlaudt and McLaughlin is ‘to discuss the extent to
which abstraction, understood in this way, can be regarded as a common
phenomenon in the history of science, and thus as a useful key to concept
formation in the science’.
Finally, the implications in the substratum of social domination that these
forms of abstraction imply regarding the systemic dynamics of the commod-
ity-producing society in relation to the homogenization of socialized life and
20  A. OLIVA ET AL.

its behavioral regularities, urge the organizational forms of anti-capitalist

resistance to consider new forms of revolutionary sociability that contem-
plates the cracks in the coercive features spread by such socialization. The
problem of time connected to the process of valorization of capital and to
abstract labor becomes a key issue in the diagnostics of advanced capitalism
regarding the correlation between practical phenomena and the concepts of
temporality by which social individuals act. Sergio Tischler’s stimulating
work, which closes our volume, rises to the twofold theoretical challenge of,
on the one hand, problematizing the implications of this ‘abstract time’ of
capital and its consequences for the dynamics of socialization, both in mod-
ern capitalist societies and in the experiences of domination of time in the
so-called ‘really existing socialisms’ and, on the other, presenting the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the conformation of Councils of
Good Government as experiences whose organizational logic in establishing
authorities and conforming primary relations in social life breaks away from
the abstracting principles of mercantile temporality. In this practical and
rebellious experience, there is an applied reading of the wider problem of real
abstraction as a conceptual field in Marx’s oeuvre, which launches a revision,
as a theoretical update to Marxism, of the revolutionary experiences of previ-
ous decades in Latin America.
In conclusion, in an extensive set of problems that encompasses from
research into the theoretical and practical backgrounds of the theory of
real abstraction to the unveiling of its potential effectiveness within the
theory of social criticism and the past and present controversies regarding
this problem in the reading of Marx’s oeuvre and Marxism, this volume
proposes a wide and open outline for the problem of our contemporary
dominating forms of socialization, with abstraction as a main force. They
were envisioned in a work that today, after relatively few years and for the
first time, has been systematized and made accessible.
This Introduction was translated by Andrés Pacheco and Renata Farías.

Notes
1. Perhaps it is Michael Postone’s (1993) already classic work that has most
emphasized his criticism of transhistoric planks in Marx’s work.
2. This group is part of the ‘wertkritik’ (value criticism) movement, and pub-
lishes a magazine of the same name, Krisis, in the German language. Its
main references are known: Robert Kurz, Roswitha Scholz, Ernst Lohoff,
Franz Schandl, Norbert Trenkle y Claus-Peter Ortlieb.
 1 INTRODUCTION  21

3. The critical–theoretical lineage refers to thinkers who develop their New

reading of Marx within the tradition of critical theory and includes not only
students of Adorno but thinkers in other critical Marxist traditions, such as
Open Marxism. This distinguishes them from others who work within this
theoretical discourse, such as Michael Heinrich (2004) and Chris Arthur
(2004), who are influenced by the work of Backhaus (1997), Reichelt
(2007), etc. but do not see their attempts to reconstruct the critique of
political economy as part of the critical theoretical tradition.
4. The influence of the Logic of Hegel in relation to Capital, has been accentu-
ated mainly by the proposals of the New Dialectic, especially by Chris Arthur
(2004), for a review Moseley and Smith (2014).

References
Arthur, C. (2004). The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. Leiden: Brill.
Backhaus, H. G. (1997). Dialektik der Wertform. Freiburg: ç ́a ira.
Elbe, I. (2013). Between Marx, Marxism, and Marxisms–Ways of Reading Marx’s
Theory. Retrieved August 10, 2019, from https://www.viewpointmag.com/.
Fineschi, R. (2013). Karl Marx después de la edición histórico-crítica (MEGA2):
Un nuevo objeto de investigación. Laberinto, no. 38.
Heinrich, M. (2004). An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital.
New York: Monthly Review Press.
Jappe, A. (2003). Les Aventures de la marchandise, pour une nouvelle critique de la
valeur. Paris: Ed. Denoël.
Kurz, R. (2000). Marx Lesen. Die wichtigsten Texte von Karl Marx für das 21.
Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn.
Moseley, F., & Smith, T. (2014). Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic. A
Reexamination. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Musto, M. (Coord.). (2011). Tras las huellas de un fantasma. México: Siglo XXI.
Musto, M. (2015). De regreso a Marx. Nuevas lecturas y vigencia en el mundo
actual. Buenos Aires: Octubre Ed.
Postone, M. (1993). Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of
Marx’s Critical Theory. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reichelt, H. (2007). Marx’s Critique of Economic Categories: Reflections on the
Problem of Validity in the Dialectical Method of Presentation in Capital.
Historical Materialism, 15(4), 3–52.
Rubin, I. I. (1973). Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Montreal: Black Rose.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (2001). Trabajo intelectual y trabajo manual. Critica de la episte-
mología. Barcelona: Ed. Viejo Topo.
 PART I

Reconstructing the Problem of Real

Abstraction
 CHAPTER 2

Value Form and Abstract Labor in Marx:

A Critical Review of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s
Notion of ‘Real Abstraction’

John Milios

Marx’s Concepts of Value, Value Form

and Abstract Labor

The Marxist concept of value is radically different from the Ricardian con-
cept of value as ‘labor expended’. Unlike the Ricardian theory of value, the
Marxist theory of value is a monetary theory. In the Marxist system, the value
of a commodity cannot be defined in isolation, but exclusively in relation to
all other commodities, in the process of exchange. In this relation of exchange,
value is materialized in money. The essential feature of the ‘market econ-
omy’ (of capitalism) is thus not simply commodity exchange but monetary
circulation and money. Barter is for Marx non-existing, as all exchange
transactions are made up of separate acts of exchange of commodities
with money.

J. Milios (*)
Department of Humanities Social Sciences and Law, National Technical
University of Athens, Athens, Greece

© The Author(s) 2020 25

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_2
26  J. MILIOS

In capitalism, each commodity is produced not as a mere useful thing,

that is a use value, but as a bearer of value, a thing carrying a price. Even
before entering the market, each ‘product’ potentially carries a price, which
though will be realized (validated) in the exchange process. Prices are thus
determined in the process of capitalist production, that is in a historically
unique process of (capitalist) production-for-the-exchange-and-for-profit,
a process which unites immediate production with circulation.
Money is thus conceived as the adequate form of appearance of both
value and capital. According to Marx’s analysis, it is the material embodi-
ment of abstract and therefore equal human labor, which the capitalist
appropriates, and which in the framework of capitalist relations of exploi-
tation is accumulated and functions as a ‘self-valorising value’. This point
requires, though, further elaboration.
That ‘wealth’, that is to say everything that is useful, is mostly a product
of labor applies not only to capitalism, but also to every mode of produc-
tion. Every mode of production presupposes the worker–producer and his
(her) particular relationship with the means of production, from which can
be deciphered the particular structural characteristics of the community in
which that mode of production is predominant. However, as stressed by
Marx on the very first page of Capital, it is only in ‘those societies in
which the capitalist mode of production prevails’, that wealth ‘presents
itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities”’ (Marx 1990: 125).1
It is thus obvious that it is not because it is a product of labor that wealth
is a commodity, but because this labor is carried out within the framework
of certain social relations of production and so is subjected to the stan-
dardization and uniformity that is inherent in these relations of produc-
tion. Value is a manifestation of the structural characteristics of the
capitalist mode of production and not a manifestation of labor in general.
It is therefore clear that Marx conceived of value as a historically specific
social relation: Value is the ‘property’ that products of labor acquire in
capitalism, a property which is actualized in the market, through the
exchangeability of any product of labor with any other, that is through
their character as commodities bearing a specific (monetary) price on the
market. From the Grundrisse (1857–1858),2 to Capital (1867),3 Marx
insisted that value is an expression of relations exclusively characteristic of
the capitalist mode of production. Thus, wherever in his work he intro-
duces the concept of ‘generalised commodity production’ (such as in the
first section of the first volume of Capital) so as to comprehend value, in
reality he is shaping a preliminary intellectual construct (which to some
 2  VALUE FORM AND ABSTRACT LABOR IN MARX: A CRITICAL REVIEW…  27

extent corresponds to the superficial ‘visible reality’ of the capitalist

­economy), which will help him to come to grips with capitalist produc-
tion, and subsequently construct his concept of it. In 1858–1859 he
wrote: ‘The simple circulation is mainly an abstract sphere of the bour-
geois overall production process, which manifests itself through its own
determinations as a trend, a mere form of appearance of a deeper process
which lies behind it, and equally results from it but also produces it—the
industrial capital’ (MEGA II.2 1980: 68–69).
Marx approaches the problem of value creating labor by way of the
question of commensurability. Put in another way, where Classical Political
Economy believed that it was giving a conclusive answer (qualitatively dif-
ferent objects—use values—are rendered economically commensurate—
exchangeable—because they are all products of labor), Marx simply sees a
question which has to be answered: How and why can qualitatively differ-
ent kinds of labor be made equivalents? Marx clearly questions the classical
notion of ‘equal’ labor: ‘Let us suppose that one ounce of gold, one ton
of iron, one quarter of wheat and twenty yards of silk are exchange-values
of equal magnitude […] But digging gold, mining iron, cultivating wheat
and weaving silk are qualitatively different kinds of labour. In fact, what
appears objectively as diversity of the use-values, appears, when looked at
dynamically, as diversity of the activities which produce those use-values’
(Marx 1981: 29).
For the riddle of the equivalence of different kinds of labor to be solved,
what must be comprehended is the social character of labour under capital-
ism: The capitalist organization of production and the resultant social divi-
sion of labor is underpinned by the direct (institutional) independence of
each individual producer (capitalist) from all the others. Nevertheless, all
these individual productive procedures are linked indirectly between
themselves through the mechanism of the market, since each of them pro-
duces not for himself or for the ‘community’ but for exchange on the
market, with the purpose of acquiring a profit not lower than the average
profit of the economy. This procedure imposes an increasing social (capi-
talistic) uniformity on all individual productive activities precisely through
generalized commodity exchange and competition between individual
capitalist production processes (commodity producers).
Marx defines this procedure of social homogenization of individual
labor procedures and productive processes through introduction of the
term abstract labor. Labor has a dual nature in the capitalist mode of pro-
duction—on the one hand, it is concrete labor (labor which produces a
28  J. MILIOS

concrete use value, as in any mode of production) and on the other, it is

at the same time abstract labor (labor in general), labor which is from the
social viewpoint qualitatively identical. From this stem the overall com-
mensurability and exchangeability of the products of labor, that is that
they are constituted (produced) as commodities: ‘The labour contained in
exchange-value is abstract universal social labour, which is brought about
by the universal alienation of individual labour’ (Marx 1981: 56–57).
This means that ‘every commodity is the commodity which, as a result
of the alienation of its particular use-value, must appear as the direct mate-
rialisation of universal labour-time’ (Marx 1981: 45).
Put in another way, every commodity attains the social form of general
exchangeability, in abstraction from its specific utility or any other charac-
teristic, expressing its value in monetary units. Marx formulates at this
point what Alfred Sohn-Rethel defined as the ‘real abstraction’ of the
value form. Commenting on the fact that as values commodities carry a
monetary name (express themselves in a—potential—quantity of money),
Sohn-Rethel correctly stresses: ‘In this capacity money must be vested
with an abstractness of the highest level to enable it to serve as the equiva-
lent to every kind of commodity that may appear on the market’ (Sohn-
Rethel 1978: 6).4
In Vol. 1 of Capital (Penguin Classics edition) the analysis of abstract
labor takes up no more than seven pages (131–137). Nevertheless, he
hastens to declare that he is proud of the formulation of this concept, a
declaration the like of which we would probably find no more than once
or twice in all the rest of his writings.5
Abstract labor does not ‘emerge’ from the concrete, it is not an identity
of it: it is the historically specific property of all labor under capitalism.
Concrete-natural labor as a distinct concept can in no way be reduced to
abstract labor or constitute the content of exchange value: Abstract labor
is a distinct ‘property’ of every (concrete) act of labor under the capitalist
mode of production, that is an expression of the particular form of social
arrangement that characterizes that (and only that) specific mode of pro-
duction, irrespective of whether the work in question is simple or more
complex and requiring a high degree of specialization.6
The problem of social homogenization of labor to which one is referred
by the concept of abstract labor is thus different from the problem of
‘quantitative correspondence’ of work of differing degrees of intensity,
specialization, and productivity. For one hour of the work of an engineer
to be able to correspond (quantitatively) to n hours of the work of an
 2  VALUE FORM AND ABSTRACT LABOR IN MARX: A CRITICAL REVIEW…  29

unskilled laborer, the two types of work must already constitute ‘qualita-
tively similar’ (i.e. abstract) labor.
In conclusion: The products of labor are commodities, values and
exchange values, not simply because they are products of labor but because
they are products of abstract labor, that is ‘capitalist labor’ (labor which is
performed under capitalist conditions, within the framework of the capitalist
mode of production), labor creating products-for-exchange-and-for-profit:
commodities. Abstract labor produces value-carrying commodities. Value
constitutes the relation of general exchangeability of commodities, and is
expressed through money—their common measure, which lacks every pred-
icate beyond that of size.
Here it is worth noting two points:
(a) Abstract labor (and consequently ‘abstract labor time’) is not a
straightforward (empirically verifiable) property of labor but an ‘abstrac-
tion’, that is a social form which expresses the social homogenization of
labor in the capitalist mode of production. Marx’s notion of abstract labor
renders thus comprehensible this very process of social homogenization of
labor under the capitalist mode of production: ‘Universal labor-time itself is
an abstraction which, as such, does not exist for commodities’ (Marx
1981: 45).
That which empirically exists is merely the specific commodities which
are bought and sold on the market (and so exchanged with money).
(b) Abstract labor, as the concept which conveys the specifically social
(capitalist) character of the labor process, does not have to do with each
separate productive procedure but with the social interrelation of all the
separate, institutionally unrelated, capitalist productive processes, as this
interrelation reveals itself in the market-place: ‘Social labour-time exists in
these commodities in a latent state, so to speak, and becomes evident only
in the course of their exchange […]. Universal social labour is conse-
quently not a ready-made prerequisite but an emerging result’ (Idem: 45).
These two issues suggest why the whole weight of the analysis must be
placed on the manifestation of value as exchange value (the ‘form of
appearance’ of value) and this is where Marx places it: he does not close
his analysis of value with the concept of abstract labor but on the contrary
devotes by far the greatest part of his analysis (107 of the 120 pages of Part
I of Vol. 1 of Capital) to the value form, or value as an exchange relation
between commodities, and to money.
The price expressing the general exchangeability for any commodity
with all others is the sole objective materialization (form of appearance) of
30  J. MILIOS

value. In Capital Marx introduces his readers to these questions through

the following phrase:

The reality of the value of commodities differs in this respect from Dame
Quickly, that we don’t know “where to have it”. The value of commodities
is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom
of matter enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single commod-
ity, by itself, as we will, yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems
impossible to grasp it. […]. Value can only manifest itself in the social relation
of commodity to commodity. In fact, we started from exchange-value, or the
exchange relation of commodities, in order to get at the value that lies hid-
den behind it. We must now return to this form under which value first
appeared to us. (Marx 1990: 138–139, emphasis added)

Marx’s whole analysis makes clear that the notion of abstract labor does
not mainly refer to a process of subjective or intellectual appropriation of
reality (by Marx or any other intellectual), but to an objective process: the
formation of an aspect of the structure of capitalist reality, the typical con-
figuration of certain elements of this reality. Deciphering this reality is
then characteristic of Marx’s analysis, which conveys the causal relation-
ships that regulate reality without ever themselves appearing as such in the
realm of empirical reality and of appearance, since they do not belong to
the tangible entities and phenomena (Marx 1990: 433, 680).
The conclusion that may be inferred from the above theses is that the
value of commodities never appears as such, as an immediately perceivable
(empirically observable) and thus measurable entity. It finds expression
only through the form of its appearance, that is commodity prices. This
form of appearance of value does not, as we have argued, relate to each
commodity separately, that is to say, it is not a matter of isolated, of ini-
tially mutually independent expressions of the value of each commodity.
The form registers the relationship of exchange between each commodity
and all other commodities.

Marx’s Methodology and Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s

Notion of ‘Real Abstraction’. A Critical Discussion
As can be inferred from Section 1 of this chapter, a methodological issue
in Vol. 1 of Capital, which must always be taken into account, is that Marx
examines the question what is value and subsequently what is money in the
 2  VALUE FORM AND ABSTRACT LABOR IN MARX: A CRITICAL REVIEW…  31

first three chapters of the first volume of Capital before offering a defini-
tion of capitalism (the capitalist mode of production—CMP). This method
of exposition, aiming at the gradual maturation of concepts, has led cer-
tain Marxists to the view that value is not a constituent category of the
concept of the CMP but that it gives a preliminary description of a (sup-
posed) historical epoch of commodity production, which preceded
capitalism.
As argued above, Marx introduces this concept of generalized com-
modity production only as an intellectual construct that will help him to
approach and then to establish the concept of capitalist production.
In one of his latest texts, Marx himself describes his method as follows:

De prime abord, I do not proceed from ‘concepts,’ hence neither from the
‘concept of value,’ and am therefore in no way concerned to ‘divide’ it.
What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the product of
labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the ‘commodity.’
This I analyse, initially in the form in which it appears. […] The mere form
of appearance is not its own content. […] For this reason when analysing the
commodity, I do not immediately drag in definitions of ‘capital,’ not even
when dealing with the ‘use-value’ of the commodity. Such definitions are
bound to be sheer nonsense as long as we have advanced no further than the
analysis of the elements of the commodity. (Marx 1881)

To be consistent with Marx’s methodology, one must take into consid-

eration his whole analysis from the commodity to money as the general
equivalent, and from there to the notion of capital as a social relation, the
circuit of capital, money as the general form of appearance of capital, credit
money etc. Otherwise, apart from the detachment of the concept of value
from the CMP and its projection to a plethora of ‘commodity’—forms
and—modes of production, the introductory reference to value and
money ‘in itself’ creates again the illusion that in the first three chapters of
the first volume of Capital there is (or may be) a conclusive theoretical
investigation of the Marxian concepts under question.
It is true that the commodity is the simplest economic form ‘in contem-
porary society’ (Marx, op.cit.). However, if we restrict our analysis to the
first section of Volume 1 of Capital, we will miss reference to the most
characteristic commodity of the CMP, the existence of which is also the
most significant presupposition for the generalization of commodity produc-
tion: labor-power. Labor power subsumed under capital, that is the capi-
tal–wage–labour relation, constitutes the basis of the CMP as such.
32  J. MILIOS

The distinguishing feature of the capitalist economy is that all active

agents of production are commodity owners, because even if they are not
commodity producers (capitalists), they possess the commodity of labor
power. Only under this precondition all products of labor, including, first
of all, those that constitute the laborer’s remuneration, become commodi-
ties, that is goods produced for-exchange-and-for-profit bearing a value
which is expressed in monetary units; only under this precondition useful-­
concrete labor exists also as abstract labor; we may therefore speak about
a real abstraction.
It is exactly this point that Alfred Sohn-Rethel misses when he puts
forward a notion of real abstraction supposedly extending through all the
‘ages of commodity production from their beginnings in ancient Greece
to the present day’ (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 5). He further explains:

This kind of exchange—commodity exchange properly speaking—is the one

which is characteristic of Greek antiquity. It leads to a monetary economy
and to a system of social synthesis centred on private appropriation.
‘Commodities’ then answered the Marxian definition as ‘products of the
labour of private individuals who work independently of each other’. (Sohn-­
Rethel 1978: 98)

Such analyses, portraying the character of ancient Greek economy and

society as a ‘market economy’, are most often put forward by non-Marxist
historians, sociologists or economists. Characteristic is the case of certain
economic historians (portrayed as ‘modernists’, like Edward E.  Cohen,
Alain Bresson), who challenge the theorizations of Moses I. Finley, Karl
Polanyi and others (the so-called ‘archaists’) on the archaic and ‘embed-
ded’-in-polity, pre-capitalist, character of the ancient Greek economy
(Milios 2018, Ch. 7). But even John Maynard Keynes argues that capital-
ism was born in the antiquity! Commenting on ‘Ancient Currencies’,
he writes:

Individualistic capitalism and the practices pertaining to that system were

undoubtedly invented in Babylonia […]. Perhaps the clue to the economic
history of Greece from the Homeric period to the fifth century B.C. may be
partly found in the gradual adaptation of the primitive economy of the tribes
to the individualistic capitalism which they found in Asia Minor in a deca-
dent and confused form but reaching back in its origins and in the experi-
ence behind it to a highly developed and complex system of great antiquity.
(Keynes 2013: 253–254)
 2  VALUE FORM AND ABSTRACT LABOR IN MARX: A CRITICAL REVIEW…  33

However, each and every version of this problematique stressing a sup-

posed affinity between the economy of ancient Greece and capitalism (as
‘commodity producing economies’) either implicitly or explicitly fully dis-
entangles the notion of capitalism from any connotation or hint of con-
nection with wage-labor. Marx has repeatedly referred to pre-capitalist
‘mobile wealth piled up through usury—especially that practised against
landed property—and through mercantile profits’ (Marx 1993: 504), but
always in an effort to distinguish it from the capitalist form of
‘mobile wealth’.
But the mere presence of monetary wealth, and even the achievement of
a kind of supremacy on its part, is in no way sufficient for this dissolution
into capital to happen. Or else ancient Rome, Byzantium etc. would have
ended their history with free labor and capital, or rather begun a new his-
tory. There, too, the dissolution of the old property relations was bound up
with development of monetary wealth—of trade etc. But […] this dissolu-
tion led in fact to the supremacy of the countryside over the city. […]
Capital does not create the objective conditions of labour (Idem: 506–507,
emphasis added).
Value and abstract labor are notions pertaining to the capital relation,
not to ‘exchange’, the market, or ancient currencies. I will further elabo-
rate on this issue, bringing into the discussion the conclusions of Marxist
historical research.
The dominant mode of production in the societies of antiquity was the
classic (or patriarchal, as Marx names it) mode of production. In this form
of (‘classic’) slavery, the slave-owners were landowners who, however,
were absent from the production process and conceded the management-­
supervision of this process to a special category of slaves, ensuring for
themselves the surplus appropriation through the extra-economic coer-
cion inherent in the master–slave relationship. Marx cites Aristotle, who
writes: ‘Whenever the masters are not compelled to plague themselves
with supervision, the overseer assumes this honour, while the masters pur-
sue public affairs or philosophy’ (Aristotle, cited by Idem: 509).
This form of exploitation fully separates (manual) work from the ruling
class of citizens, who by definition abstain from any form of production,
practicing only politics and philosophy in the cities. The prominent
Marxist historian of antiquity, G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, emphasizes the fact
that ‘the function of slave (and freedman) overseers was essential […]
playing a very important role in the economy, perhaps far more so than has
34  J. MILIOS

been generally realized’ (de Ste. Croix 1981: 258). Perry Anderson also
writes along these lines:

Graeco-Roman Antiquity had always constituted a universe centred on cit-

ies. […] The Graeco-Roman towns were […], in origin and principle, urban
congeries of land-owners. […] The condition of possibility of this metro-
politan grandeur in the absence of municipal industry was the existence of
slave-labour in the countryside […]; the surplus product that provided the
fortunes of the possessing class could be extracted without its presence on
the land. (Anderson 1974: 19–20, 23, 24)

In ancient societies, apart from the dominant classic slave mode of pro-
duction, there also existed the following forms and modes of production:

(a) Simple commodity production of freedmen artisans or farmers

(Ste. Ctoix. 1981: 33).
(b) Wage-labor, though to a rather limited extent, especially among
the poor and in public construction plants.7 However, this form of
labor was regarded as a form of (temporary) voluntary enslave-
ment, and was generally disdained (Kyrtatas 2002).
(c) A self-contained exploitative mode of production based on slave
labor also existed, which was characterized by the concentration of
both the ownership and the management-supervision of the means
of production in the hands of the slave-owner. Characteristic of this
mode of production is that the slave-owner, in nearly all cases a
metic, that is a non-citizen, was present in the production process,
which was production for the market aiming at the appropriation
of surplus in monetary form. I have named this non-dominant pre-­
capitalist mode of production the money-begetting slave mode of
production (Milios 2018).

In the words of Aristotle, the process has ‘no limit to the end it seeks;
and the end it seeks is wealth of the sort we have mentioned […] the mere
acquisition of currency […] all who are engaged in acquisition increase
their fund of money without any limit or pause’ (cited by Meikle 1995: 59).
Marx clearly differentiates the money-begetting slave mode of produc-
tion from the classic (or ‘patriarchal’) slave mode of production (of the
absentee slave-owner, who is dissociated from the management of the
means of production): on different occasions he repeatedly stresses the
 2  VALUE FORM AND ABSTRACT LABOR IN MARX: A CRITICAL REVIEW…  35

‘transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system

of commercial exploitation’ (Marx 1990: 925, emphasis added). As he
explains: ‘In the ancient world, the influence of trade and the development
of commercial capital always produced the result of a slave economy; or,
given a different point of departure, it also meant the transformation of a
patriarchal slave system oriented towards the production of the direct
means of subsistence into one oriented towards the production of surplus-
value’ (Marx 1991: 449–450, emphasis added).
In the above citation, Marx uses the terms ‘capital’ and ‘surplus-value’
in a rather loose manner in order to denote the specific difference of
surplus appropriation in the framework of the money-begetting slave
­
mode of production.8
Dominant mode of production, determining the society’s principal
structures, remained the classic slave mode of production: ‘The nature of
a given mode of production is decided not according to who does most of
the work of production but according to the specific method of surplus appro-
priation, the way in which the dominant classes extract their surplus from
the producers’ (de Ste. Croix 1984: 107).
The dominant classic slave mode of production assigned both the
money-begetting slave mode of production and the simple commodity
production to the ‘intermundia’ of society, that is, interstitially, in spaces
between the basic social structures: The trading peoples of old existed like
the gods of Epicurus in the intermundia, or like the Jews in the pores of
Polish society (Marx 1991: 447).9
Both in ancient Greece and Rome, the non-monetary character of the
dominant classic slave mode of production had, as a consequence, as de
Ste. Croix explains, that ‘money income cannot be directly equated with
income in kind from land for assessment purposes’ (de Ste. Croix 2004: 41).

A manufacturer or trader, even when the use of money became general,

would simply not know what his ‘income’ or his ‘profits’ expressed in terms
of drachmae were. This is one of the basic facts about the economy of the
Greek world (and the Roman world) which many modern historians have
entirely overlooked, because they persist, quite unconsciously, in conceiving
the ancient economic systems in terms taken over directly from the modern
or the medieval world. (Idem: 42–43)

It is clear from the above-presented analysis that the money-begetting

slave mode of production is different from the capitalist one, as in the
36  J. MILIOS

former the laborer is still bound to the taskmaster by a relation of direct

personal dependence, and his individual consumption does not depend
directly on monetary market relations. As a consequence, exchange value
and money cannot become universal, that is, it cannot become the moti-
vating force in the economy, the capital relation cannot take shape.
Pre-­
­ capitalist societies ‘follow a different economic logic’, as Ernest
Mandel aptly stresses.

It is true that the capitalist mode of production is the only social organiza-
tion of the economy which implies generalized commodity production. It
would thus be completely mistaken to consider for example Hellenistic slave
society or the classical Islamic Empire—two forms of society with strongly
developed petty commodity production, money economy and international
trade—as being ruled by the ‘law of value’. Commodity production in these
pre-capitalist modes of production is intertwined with, and in the last analy-
sis subordinated to, organizations of production (in the first place agricul-
tural production) of a clearly non-capitalist nature, which follow a different
economic logic from that which governs exchanges between commodities
or the accumulation of capital. (Mandel 1991: 14–15)

I would like to elaborate a bit further on the difference between the

two modes of production, since the ‘ancient capitalism’ or ‘ancient market
economy’ thesis remains powerful among certain parts of academia.
Scott Meikle reviewed a vast array of literature on the ancient Greek
economy and concluded that the low development of productive credit in
the ancient world constrained the role of money to a medium of circula-
tion and a treasure to be hoarded (Meikle 1995: 147–179). The absence
of inclusive capital and labor markets ruled out the possibility of exchange
value becoming the regulating principle of the economy.
There were no credit instruments of any kind, and each individual
transaction was settled almost always by physical transfers in person, either
by the principal himself or by an accredited agent. […] There was no
double-entry bookkeeping; notions of debit and credit were unknown;
there was no accounting of debits and credits through strings of transac-
tions to be settled at the end of a period, and there were no settlement
days, quarterly or otherwise (Meikle 1995: 160).
The subordination of monetary relations to pre-capitalist structures,
and the prevalent position of politics maintained in ancient societies,
resulted in economic relations and processes being perceived as issues of
politics or ethics. As Dimitris Kyrtatas aptly stresses: ‘The idea of exploita-
 2  VALUE FORM AND ABSTRACT LABOR IN MARX: A CRITICAL REVIEW…  37

tion as a general economic category in human relations was absent in

ancient Greek thought. What Aristotle and other authors stressed was
domination. […] [T]opics that we would examine as aspects of the econ-
omy, the Greeks examined as aspects of politics and ethics. And instead of
seeking profit-maximization, the Greeks were mostly after honour-­
maximization’ (Kyrtatas 2002: 153–154).10
Concluding my analysis, I may formulate my final result as follows:
Sohn-Rethel’s notion of real abstraction constitutes an important contri-
bution to Marxist theory of value and the value form. However, its gener-
alization to cover ‘ages of commodity production from their beginnings in
ancient Greece …’ deprives it of its hermeneutic accuracy.

Notes
1. ‘The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out
of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and ser-
vitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it
in turn as a determinant’ (Marx 1991: 927).
2. ‘The concept of value is entirely peculiar to the most modern economy,
since it is the most abstract expression of capital itself and of the production
resting on it. In the concept of value, its secret is betrayed […]. The eco-
nomic concept of value does not occur in antiquity’ (Marx 1993: 776 ff.).
3. ‘The value form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most
general form of the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of
social production of a historical and transitory character’ (Marx 1990: 174).
4. As Christopher Arthur writes: ‘What is extraordinary about Sohn-Rethel is
that he shows that social abstraction occurs as a result of the practical
action of exchangers and obtains with objective validity regardless of
whether they are aware of it’ (Arthur 2010: 1).
5. ‘I was the first to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the
labour contained in commodities’ (Marx 1990: 132).
6. A characteristic instance is that of Rosdolsky. In his book The Making of
Marx’s Capital, which had a significant influence on post-World War II
Marxist theoretical analysis, he maintains that decline from the ‘craftsman-
ship’ of the pre-capitalist artisan led to concrete labor becoming ‘abstract
labor’. He writes: ‘Marx accepted the thesis of Ricardo, which is confirmed
by the workings of the market, that what is involved is a reduction of spe-
cialised labour to unspecialised’ (Rosdolsky 1969: 609. Also see Rosdolsky
1977: 510 ff.).
7. ‘By the end of the fifth century, as we know from the Erechtheum accounts,
wage rates of one drachma per day were common. The daily pay of sailors
38  J. MILIOS

in the fleet was also between one drachma per day […] and half a drachma
[…] and the daily pay of dicasts was half a drachma from 425 onwards’ (de
Ste. Croix 2004: 43). ‘The poorer women of Athens and, presumably, of
other cities also worked for wages’ (Kyrtatas 2011: 105).
8. In the Grundrisse Marx makes clear that he refers to economic forms which
function ‘not as themselves forms of capital, but as earlier forms of wealth,
as presuppositions for capital’ (Marx 1993: 504).
9. In the antiquity, ‘no single statesman is known to have been a practising
merchant, and no merchant is known to have played a prominent part in
politics, even at Athens. The merchants were not all […] both non-citizens
and men of little or no property; but […] their influence on politics, as
merchants, was certainly infinitesimal’ (de Ste. Croix 2004: 356).
10. Karl Marx has also stressed this view: ‘Do we never find in antiquity an
inquiry into which form of landed property etc. is the most productive,
creates the greatest wealth? Wealth does not appear as the aim of produc-
tion, although Cato may well investigate which manner of cultivating a
field brings the greatest rewards, and Brutus may even lend out his money
at the best rates of interest. The question is always which mode of property
creates the best citizens’ (Marx 1993: 487).

References
Anderson, P. (1974). Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: New
Left Books.
Arthur, Ch. (2010). Abstraction, Universality and Money. 7th Annual Conference,
Marx and Philosophy Society, Institute of Education, University of
London, June 5.
Keynes, J. M. (2013). The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (Vol. XXVIII,
Social, Political and Literary Writings) (pp. 253–254). Cambridge University Press.
Kyrtatas, D. (2002). Domination and Exploitation. In P. Cartledge, E. E. Cohen,
& L. Foxhall (Eds.), Money, Labour and Land: Approaches to the Economies of
Ancient Greece (pp. 140–155). London and New York: Routledge.
Kyrtatas, D. (2011). Slavery and Economy in the Greek World. In B.  Keith &
P.  Cartledge (Eds.), The Cambridge World History of Slavery (pp.  91–111).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mandel, E. (1991). Introduction. In K. Marx (Ed.), Capital (Vol. 3). London:
Penguin Classics.
Marx, K. (1881). Notes on Adolph Wagner’s ‘Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie’
(2nd ed., Vol. I), 1879. Retrieved December 2, 2017, from https://www.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01/wagner.htm.
Marx, K. (1981). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. London:
Lawrenceand Wishart.
 2  VALUE FORM AND ABSTRACT LABOR IN MARX: A CRITICAL REVIEW…  39

Marx, K. (1990). Capital (Vol. 1). London: Penguin Classics.

Marx, K. (1991). Capital (Vol. 3). London: Penguin Classics.
Marx, K. (1993). Grundrisse. London: Penguin Classics.
MEGA II.2. (1980). Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe. ‘Das Kapital’ und Vorarbeiten,
Manuskripte und Schriften 1858/1861. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Meikle, S. (1995). Aristotle’s Economic Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Milios, J. (2018). The Origins of Capitalism as a Social System. The Prevalence of an
Aleatory Encounter. London and New York: Routledge.
Rosdolsky, R. (1969). Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen ‘Kapital’. EVA:
Frankfurt am Main.
Rosdolsky, R. (1977). The Making of Marx’s Capital. London: Pluto Press.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Intellectual and Manual Labour. London and Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
de Ste. Croix, G.  E. M. (1981). The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.
New York: Cornell University Press.
de Ste. Croix, G. E. M. (1984). Class in Marx’s Conception of History, Ancient
and Modern. New Left Review, 146, 92–111.
de Ste. Croix, G. E. M. (2004). Athenian Democratic Origins and Other Essays.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 CHAPTER 3

Money as a Practical Abstraction:

From Feuerbach to Marx Through Hess
(1841–1844)

Pablo Nocera

Introduction
By the end of 1841, a young Engels irascibly contested, under a pseud-
onym and from the pages of the Telegraph für Deutschland, the attempt by
an old Schelling—with the royal support of Frederick William IV of
Prussia—to give an end to the menace that Hegelian philosophy repre-
sented to the state and to the manner in which it was growing at the time
within a group of radical epigones. The so-called positive philosophy that
Schelling presented in his first Berlin lecture seemed to offer, from the
point of view of Marx’s future companion, only an update to the previous
works that, beyond their clear intention to be old-fashioned, were not able
affect the power of Hegelianism and its philosophy of negativity. Such
contestation was replicated diversely in an auditorium full of Hegelians,
including the young Søren Kierkegaard, Mijail Bakunin and Arnold Ruge.
Even though it was questioned because of the political context in which it
emerged, Schelling’s position made visible a distrust that a young

P. Nocera (*)
Buenos Aires National University (UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina

© The Author(s) 2020 41

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_3
42  P. NOCERA

Hegelianism would start to elaborate within the following five years. The
practical results emerging from the theoretical power of Hegel’s dialectics
were being made evident in a conservative political horizon. The return to
Fichte by referents such as von Cieszkowski and Moses Hess served as
warning that praxis had been gradually devaluated, and that thought was
being favored as a superior activity, making it impossible for German phi-
losophy to acquire a practical concretion that, in France and Great Britain,
had been embodied in respective revolutionary processes.
This chapter explores the notion of abstraction in the brief, prolific
course in which the young Hegelian heritage deploys it, to a great extent,
as a true detachment from the legacy of its master. The purpose of this
chapter is, in particular, to address the initial uses by Feuerbach as an ana-
lytical support of his critique of the forms of alienation, to explore later the
statements by a young Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844, but noting between both positions a specificity not always prop-
erly appreciated. It is well known that, for Feuerbach, alienation is a
denunciation nurtured by a critique of religion and (Hegelian) philoso-
phy, thus providing an analytical matrix that can very well be projected to
the state and to private property, with an emphasis on labor. This was the
exercise consummated by Marx during those years. Nonetheless, a more
careful reading makes evident the importance of the reflection by Moses
Hess as an impulse for this displacement, a sample of which can be traced
to the pages of a brief text entitled Über das Geldwesen (The Essence of
Money). Specifically, we attempt to look at the reasons for Feuerbach to
invoke the notion of abstraction and the manners in which he mentions it
to account for alienation, in order to later expose the appropriations and
displacements offered by Hess’ exploration. This journey gives way to a
reflection about the senses in which Marx uses the term in an early analysis
of money, as they not only directly set forth his position but also help us
to explore an early reflection about a form of social abstraction that deploys
a logic of exchange and whose realization only materializes in the dyna-
mism of a central aspect of the organizations of capitalist forms of
production.
 3  MONEY AS A PRACTICAL ABSTRACTION: FROM FEUERBACH TO MARX…  43

Feuerbach and Abstraction as Alienation

in Theology and Philosophy

The original relation of Feuerbach as Hegel’s disciple got colder through-

out the 1830s. By 1839, his differences with Hegel got increasingly tan-
gible, gradually encompassing not only his conception of philosophy but
also Christianity. With the publication, in the same year, of Towards a
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy, the differences would become explicit in an
essential aspect: the manner in which Feuerbach analyzes the division
between philosophical speculation and the sensible world. The first differ-
ences are suspicious of the Hegel of the initial statements of The
Phenomenology of Spirit.1 Philosophy’s end is displaced toward the knowl-
edge of nature as a fundamental point in reality. This makes necessary a
strengthening of a science of the real, not as the activity of thought, but as
something concrete and sensible. Feuerbach’s program of a critique is
reinforced by an appeal to an inversion of Hegel’s assumptions. Nature
becomes the center of reflection, and it is accessed with a clear intention
to avoid a Hegelian ‘fall’ in its consideration as a mere degraded counter-
part of an absolute idea. Nature considered in its immediacy as indepen-
dent of consciousness, as an empirical reality that does not go against the
sovereignty of the subject, requires a revision of the anthropological foun-
dations of German idealism, at least in the version deployed by Hegel. On
the other hand, Feuerbach stands for ways of thinking, which would set
humanity free from all forms in which the products of reason and of prac-
tice place it in contradiction with sensible reality. This critical program
would take a more significant power since 1841, with the publication of
The Essence of Christianity.
The book published by Wigand placed him as a leader within the young
Hegelianism. The power of the critique included in this text provided a
true matrix that served as a platform for others to state a denunciation of
existing social conditions, beyond the boundaries of a circumscribed
German world, and looking at Europe as a whole. The core of this text
may be summarized as the need of an anthropological reduction of
Christian theology. It is related, precisely, to providing a human justifica-
tion to that which has lost it in an inversion of reality; in other words, to
invert an inversion by Christian religion when it placed God as subject and
man as a predicate of divinity. Although ‘alienation’, as a term, does not
appear frequently in this text—as it would in two brief texts commented
below—it summarizes precisely the sense of the denunciation in the
44  P. NOCERA

critique: man has been estranged in the Christian god, and it only subjects
itself to its own estrangement: ‘Religion is the division [Entzweiung] of
man from himself; he considers God as a being opposed to him. God is
not man, man is not God […] In religion, man objectivizes his secret
essence. It is therefore necessary to demonstrate that this opposition, this
division between God and man with which religion begins is a division
between man and his own essence’ (Feuerbach 1960: 41/tr. 1995: 85). At
a distance from Hegelian statements, religion is far from being a media-
tion that serves to reach infinity. Rather, as an expression of human inver-
sion, of an essence which is not recognized, man as a generic essence
[Gattungswesen] is estranged from his condition, placing in the figure of a
deity the whole potential to which he is subsumed and does not recognize
as his own: ‘The absolute being, the God of man, is his own essence. The
power that the object [Gegenstandes] has over him is, therefore, the power
of his own essence’ (Feuerbach 1960: 6/tr. 1995: 57).
Man’s alienation implies that this reality in which he is trapped is
unknown. Feuerbach’s arguments are focused on the relation between
man and God as a relation between subject and predicate: the subject is
the condensation of all its predicates. If the predicate is true of the subject,
it is possible to understand why the figure of God can only be a human
creation. The predicates attributed to the deity are only human character-
istics brought to their ultimate expression, therefore, ‘[…] if the divine
predicates are determinations of the human essence, their subject would
also be a human being’ (Feuerbach 1960: 30/tr. 1995: 76). The manner
in which Feuerbach conceives the division (i.e. alienation) does not
imply—as opposed to a Hegelian perspective—a provisional moment that
projects, inevitably, a reconciliation in experience. Opposed to Hegel, for
whom experience as a departure from the self (a loss of the self) consti-
tutes a precondition for a richer formative process in the subject’s consti-
tution, for Feuerbach alienation implies a negative process, a loss,
something close to straying, which departs from the potency of negativity
circumscribed by the master’s statement. This estrangement is embodied
in the generic condition. The mantle of religion ends up hiding, under the
divinity, the original human condition: ‘Man—this is the mystery of reli-
gion—objectivizes his essence and becomes in turn an object of this objec-
tive being, transformed into a subject, into a person; he is thought as an
object of an object, as an object of another being’ (Feuerbach 1960: 37/
tr. 1995: 80). Once the estrangement is consummated, religion cannot be
the space of containment of collective life. The generic essence may
 3  MONEY AS A PRACTICAL ABSTRACTION: FROM FEUERBACH TO MARX…  45

overcome this condition in the relation with another human being

expressed in an effective, real form. For this, it is necessary to understand
that ‘God is man’s own and subjective essence, separated and unstated;
therefore, he cannot act by himself, all goodness comes from God. The
more subjective and human God is, the more man estranges his own sub-
jectivity, his own humanity, because God is, in and by himself, his alienated
self that is simultaneously recovered’ (Feuerbach 1960: 38/tr. 1995: 81).
Resuming on the idea of reason (understanding) and love, addressed in
previous works as a characteristic double in the human, Feuerbach thinks
about human life as the expression of love. As a material sample of the
relation between men, love appears as the earthly/individual link in which
the bodily nature of the human is expressed. Together with understand-
ing, love allows that the relation between the individual and their peers be
expressed as any human relation in the connection between the self and an
other. In both dimensions, there is an effective possibility of relations rel-
evant to the Gattungswesen. The self is the repository of understanding
and the other claims love. In both cases, in each of them and in their rela-
tion, Feuerbach makes a conciliation between the two to provide a foun-
dation for the idea of community.2
The reach and the projection of these diatribes are increased during
subsequent years, when in Provisional Theses for the Reformation of
Philosophy (1842) and in Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843),
Feuerbach points out that the critique to Christianity is extensible, by
analogy, to Hegelian philosophy as a whole. Following on the same argu-
ments, the author begins with the assumption that Hegelian philosophy
behaves, ultimately, as a ‘rationalized theology’.3 Unlike the critique of
Christianity, here, the author would frequently underscore how estrange-
ment can also be expressed—in the scope of thought where philosophy
thrives—as an abstraction. This displacement is very suggestive, because,
although Feuerbach does not let go of the idea of a division, in these brief
works, the concept is expanded to make it evident that the natural (sensi-
ble) dimension of humanity is consummated by estrangement through
these acts of abstraction.4 The critique to Hegel points out again toward
phenomenology. Sensible certainty is an experience only reflected from a
theoretical standpoint. The question about the being, states Feuerbach, is
a practical one, in which our being is involved in terms of life or death.
The practical standpoint reclaimed by the author as an alternative to
Hegelian abstraction is ‘the standpoint of eating and drinking’ (Feuerbach
1959: 288/tr. 1976: 92).
46  P. NOCERA

The author is aware that negativity, in Hegelian speculation, saves an

activity which makes the subject stand sovereign against the object. For
Hegel, abstraction was reprehensible if it did not go beyond a mere provi-
sional limit of understanding. Nonetheless, the warning in the Theses is
that the negative (active) move in though is reproduced only in specula-
tion, consummating another form of abstraction. It is not by chance that,
in these same pages, Feuerbach ends up asking, with all the connotations
implied in Hegel: ‘What is real? How is thought realized?’ To this, he
tersely replies: ‘The realization of thought means that thought is denied,
it stops being mere thought. But, what is then this non-thought, this
something different than thought? The sensible. That thought is realized
means, according to this, that it becomes an object to the senses. The reality
of the idea is, thus, sensibility […]’ (Feuerbach 1959: 295/tr. 1976: 99).
In general terms, abstraction as a specificity of estrangement, implies not
acknowledging the natural dimension, which operates as a material basis in
any speculative position. For Feuerbach in particular, this reference is
given by nature. If philosophy loses touch with ‘everything which is not
philosophy’ before philosophizing, it is bound to translate its undertak-
ings into pure estrangement.5 Feuerbach’s naturalism, as an original
expression of a materialism with evident issues—as pointed out by Marx a
few years later—is conclusively defined when he recognizes that ‘[t]he
true relation between thought and being is only the following: a being is a
subject, and a thought is a predicate’ (Feuerbach 1959: 239/tr. 1976: 37).
Feuerbach’s critique speaks for itself. A questioning of Christian theol-
ogy linked to a questioning of Hegelian philosophy is due not only to a
device by means of which the logic of alienation is undermined but also to
a need of criticism to invoke a new anthropology, a kind of knowledge
that, without disregarding the specificity of the human against the animal,
may acknowledge the sensible dimension without falling into an atomistic
empiricism. Feuerbach’s claim to provide humanity and society with a
naturalistic frame would offer a wide range of possible uses and appropria-
tions, many of which would display a critical effort against him (first by
Max Stirner, and later by Marx and Engels themselves). Before and con-
current to the impact of such positions on Marx, Moses Hess would cre-
atively appropriate this matrix of estrangement, turning its focus into the
sphere of social relations; in particular, an aspect which seems to govern
our times: the logic of exchange.
 3  MONEY AS A PRACTICAL ABSTRACTION: FROM FEUERBACH TO MARX…  47

Hess: The Philosophy of Action and the Essence

of Money

Self-taught and detached from academic circles, Moses Hess started devel-
oping, by the end of 1830, an early concern about the transformations in
Europe under the Restoration. Against the main role assigned by many of
his Hegelian contemporaries to the German spirit as a future interpreter of
human revolution, Hess defended a wider perspective (introduced in
1841 in European Triarchy), supported by the conviction that Europe had
a culture and a past, which provided it with a unity that would not be
necessary to impose. The historical conditions to overcome national
boundaries were there. From a philosophical standpoint, Europe’s union
was sealed in Saint-Simon and Hegel: ‘One of them [Saint-Simon] per-
ceived the future, was full of the action and of the enthusiasm of a passion-
ate heart; the other one [Hegel] perceived the past, inclined toward
contemplation and possessed by a logical and cold spirit’ (Hess 1961:
148). To this he adds, in a third place, the English contribution, the core
of the most significant social transformations brought by industrial society.
In a stylized history of national protagonisms, Hess places England as the
latest and most evident display of a future already perceivable in its reach
and sufferings: ‘In the same manner in which the German Reformation—
the origin of our new age—reached its full potential in France, now the
fruit of the French Revolution (unless we make a wrong conclusion based
on all hints) is about to ripen in England. The English nation is the most
practical in the world. England is to our century what France was to the
previous one’ (Hess 1961: 117).
In the series of articles he would write in the years after the publication
of his last book, Hess’ socialism matures together with the theoretical
exchanges in French thought, particularly in the line of Saint-Simonian
traditions. Socialismus und Communismus takes depth on a line started in
the previous book and which relates the comparison of French and German
thoughts: ‘[T]he absolute unity in life appeared for the first time as abstract
idealism in Germany and as abstract communism in France […] German
philosophy was, until Hegel, an esoteric science; nowadays, as a specula-
tive atheism, it begins to have an influence in life. The same happens with
French social philosophy, which, in a similar manner, begins to emanci-
pate, after Saint-Simon and Fourier, from scholasticism, and begins to get
involved with the people as scientific communism [wissenschaftlicher
Kommunismus]’ (Hess 1961: 200). Thus, where is the potency that Hess
48  P. NOCERA

perceives in both national traditions? Which institutions do they face, in

parallel and with similar consequences?
The parallel advantages drawn by French and German traditions are
expressed in these terms: Feuerbach is about overcoming Christianity;
French social positions are about abolishing the state. Based on this per-
spective, Hess makes it evident that such an overcoming is consummated
with communism. As a social instance in which the boundaries of both
realities (religion and politics) get diluted, Hess attempts to go beyond
communism only as the abolition of private property. The conception of
communism suggested by Hess signals a new anthropological perspective
where all forms of human domination would disappear and the antagonis-
tic relation between labor and leisure would be restated to a point of
dilution.
Philosophie der That constitutes an important point in Hess’ production
because it attempts a philosophy of action, with a clear Fitchean imprint,
which could prevail against the abstraction of the French Revolution and
against the merely subjective and internalized dimension of German phi-
losophy. Even when these two perspectives constituted the most advanced
expression of historical conditions, Hess’ times allowed him to think about
a superior instance: ‘Now, the task of the philosophy of the spirit is to
become a philosophy of action. Not only thought, but human activity as a
whole as well, must reach a point where all oppositions disappear’ (Hess
1961: 264). It is not a coincidence, in this specific aspect, that Hess would
turn toward the manners in which private property operates. From an
individual perspective, private property constitutes an externalized expres-
sion that gives testimony of human activity. On the other hand, this same
activity which got embodied in an external object, separated from the
individual, is established as a past action, independent of its protagonist.
Property is an element of self-expression, as well as of alienation: ‘[…]
man does not conceive an activity as an end by itself, but constantly con-
ceives his gratification as something separate […]’ (Hess 1961: 265). In
this problem, Hess points out the alienating inversion eventually produced
by an action conceived as an appropriation: the potentiality of human cre-
ativity expressed as an external object becomes, in this externality, a factor
for its own submission. In addition to this specificity, money is the most
relevant example of wealth as an accumulated form of objects separated
from production; this is, as an estranging activity where freedom turns
into a dependency on a past activity.
 3  MONEY AS A PRACTICAL ABSTRACTION: FROM FEUERBACH TO MARX…  49

The perspective deployed by Hess in Über das Geldwesen (The Essence of

Money) recovers the synthetic trace, in a sense epigrammatic, of Feuerbach’s
formulations. Published in 1845 (and written one year and a half before,
with circulation before its publishing), it vividly includes questions that a
young Marx would retake very productively in the Manuscripts of 1844.
Hess, in a few words, traces a suggestive path that allows material depth to
categories that Feuerbach—in spite of his materialist pretenses—still kept
enclosed into merely naturalistic formulations. In agreement with the cen-
trality of the aforementioned praxis, Hess focuses on an attempt to char-
acterize the social relations, which structure collective life in capitalist
times, acknowledging that ‘reciprocity in the exchange of an individual
vital activity, commerce, the mutual stimulation of individual forces, that
common realization is the true essence of individuals, their true power’
(Hess 1961: 330). This materialist dimension notably augmented
Feuerbach’s perspectives and his notion of generic essence. Men do not
belong to a genre only because of their specifically human condition (con-
sciousness, reason and love) but are characterized in their collective life
because they perform productive activities. Without these productive
forces, they cannot develop as people: ‘When more intense is the com-
merce among them [men], more intense is their productive force, and if
commerce is restricted, their productive force is restricted as well. Without
their vital medium, outside the exchange of their individual forces, indi-
viduals do not survive. Human commerce does not originate in its essence,
it is its effective essence: it is both their theoretical, true vital essence and
their vital, practical, and true activity’ (Hess 1961: 331).
Its culminating point in the history of humanity, understood as the
development of material forces—as the French used to say—is the indus-
trial age. Nonetheless, this brought a deep transformation that ended up
in commercial societies. Exchange inverses human relations, to the point
that it defines the individual as the end and the genre as a means (Hess
1961: 333–334). In this general model of inversion, money condensates
the material expression of alienation: ‘Money is the product of men turned
into strangers to one another; this is, an alienated man […] Money is the
value of human productive force for the true vital activity of human
essence’ (Hess 1961: 335). Inverting and overcoming the conditions of
this alienated action causes Hess to think that communism can restate the
conditions of social relations, allowing man to become not the owner of
objects, but the creator of those circumstances that may allow him to per-
form his own activity.
50  P. NOCERA

In this context, Hess exposes certain parallels between Christianity and

the world ruled by money, thus giving shape to a series of similarities
which imply that even if the religious problem is solved, it is possible to
find a continuation in earthly forms. In other words, Hess makes possible
in his prose the transition from a philo-religious critical scenario into a
material one, very close to Marx’s concurrent developments about the
limits of Hegel’s conception of the state. In the correspondence between
the real and spiritual worlds, between religious and profane forms of
human existence, Hess invokes the notion of alienation: ‘God is to theo-
retical life what money is to practical life, in this inverted world: the alien-
ated capacities (entäußerte Vermögen) of men, their auctioned vital activity’
(Hess 1961: 334). The constant analogy between these two dimensions
points out that theory is lacking emancipation, and that it is necessary to
project the conditions for liberation into a practical sphere, a substantial
form which conforms the basis, in a sense, of all other forms of estrange-
ment. Thus: ‘We can always get emancipated, in theory, from the inverted
consciousness of the world; yet, as long as we do not practically exit the
inverted world, we must, as the proverb states, “howl with the wolves”.
Thus, we must alienate (veräußern) our essence, our life, our own free,
vital activity constantly, in order to be able to maintain our miserable exis-
tence’ (Hess 1961: 335).
The capitalist world consummates practically what Christianity set forth
in spiritual terms. In part, the parallels stated by the author do not neces-
sarily reject Feuerbach’s positions. Hess acknowledges the need to observe
its current aspect in a material sphere, particularly regarding the logic of
exchange: ‘Money is the product of mutually estranged men (gegenseitig
entfremdeten Menschen), this is, of alienated man (entäußerte Mensch)’
(Hess 1961: 335). It is not by chance that he expresses this continuity in
religion, politics and economics. These three spheres are where human
alienation is developed, both theoretically and practically. It is the material
projection of that which Feuerbach encapsulates only within an intellec-
tual sphere. This evidences that it is not enough with denouncing, in
materialistic terms, the estranging forms of religion and philosophy, if they
do not have a material match in which to serve as a practical equivalent.
Human life is far from being summarized by the spontaneity of nature.
 3  MONEY AS A PRACTICAL ABSTRACTION: FROM FEUERBACH TO MARX…  51

The connection goes much further than a relation based on reason and
love. The terms of these relations, as long as they are established only as a
necessary passage through the collective to reach an individual end (i.e.
the market), will never be able to conform what Hess calls an organic com-
munity (organische Gemeinschaft).
It is quite suggestive that Hess criticizes all expressions (both material
and spiritual) in which the inverted form of the communal is expressly
invoked: ‘In other terms, politics and economics had the task of perform-
ing, at the level of a practical life, that which religion and theology had
carried out at the level of a theoretical life: the practical alienation (prak-
tische Entäußerung) of man had to be elevated to the dignity of a princi-
ple, as with his theoretical alienation’ (Hess 1961: 339). This practical
alienation consummates the mercantile world, whose reality affects the
human dimension of relations, inverting, under the blanket of individual
freedom and independence, the set of relations that conform humanity as
a collective. Money is the ultimate expression of this estrangement, with
the appearance of isolated individuals whose respective acknowledgment
only happens in the provisional sphere of a commercial relation. Hess pos-
tulates a parallel between money and the divinity, and allows us to con-
ceive a form of alienation which is practically deployed in exchange, in
addition to enabling an abstraction, as it does not appear as a consequence
of the subject’s positioning regarding an act of knowledge, or in the sphere
of consciousness, but requires a material connection as a support. Money
consummates an abstraction, with exchange as its social context, and
whose deployment makes invisible (abstract) the material character, not
just bodily, as Feuerbach stated, but as a producing subject: ‘The object
that for man is God in heaven, the superhuman good, in earth is the inhu-
man good, the material good, tangible, the thing, property; this is, the
product appropriated from its producer, its creator; the abstract essence of
commerce, money’ (Hess 1961: 339). Although Hess does not provide at
this moment an alternative which would serve as an answer to this diagno-
sis (something he would later do), the foundation for the displacement of
German philosophical discourse is set forth, integrated to political projec-
tions, with scenarios that would question the forms of statism, the market
and the order of private property. Marx’s critique goes into this direction.
52  P. NOCERA

Marx and the Practical (Profane) Forms

of (Abstraction) Estrangement

The first and only volume of the German-French Annals (Paris, 1844)
allowed Marx to develop an initial synthesis of the path from previous
years, after the frustration of his career as a university professor (under the
probable sponsorship of Bruno Bauer) shortly after he submitted his doc-
toral dissertation. Noticing, after his writings in the Rheinische Zeitung
(1842), that the problem of German censorship emerged from more than
the country’s backwardness regarding political freedoms, and that it was
also necessary to (re)think the theoretical question on itself (i.e. the
Hegelian concept of the state), he devoted part of the summer of 1843 in
Kreuznach to meditate about Hegel’s positions published in 1821
(Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts). Although these detailed manu-
scripts were published well into the twentieth century, the writing origi-
nally conceived as his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right was part, eventually, of the Annals. They are quite significant in our
journey. In his pages, Marx acknowledges the critique of religion as a man-
datory starting point, and he points out that such a task has already con-
cluded in Germany (although he does not expressly mention it) with
Feuerbach’s works about Christianity. This allows him to acknowledge
that the deployment of estrangement, once its development is revealed in
the religious/philosophical sphere, can also be recreated under its ‘profane
forms’ (Marx & Engels 1981: 379/tr. 1982: 492).
If alienation can be perpetrated in earthly forms—as perceived early by
Hess—Marx would set forth his first reflections about it taking into con-
sideration the functioning of the state. Beyond any potential debate about
conservatism or backwardness in a Hegelian perspective, let us keep the
central aspect objected by Marx. The state, under a superior universal
class, bureaucracy, is not able to place itself above the contradictions of
civic society in the sphere of the market (Hegel calls it system of needs). The
opposed interests of agricultural production and industry were thought as
solved by an illustrated class that would control, from a universal/univer-
salist perspective, the restrictions of a social standpoint, which may not be
perceived by the logic that rules its own operation: a partial perspective
infinitely replicated in the market’s atomic multiplicity. Marx acknowl-
edges, when he puts into perspective Hegel’s statement, not only that the
state is not able to recreate a true universality when it leaves untouched the
foundation of civic society but also that the political emancipation which
 3  MONEY AS A PRACTICAL ABSTRACTION: FROM FEUERBACH TO MARX…  53

France has been trying for almost half a century is useless. Here, Hess’
perspective supplements Feuerbach’s in an essential sense. The state as
conceived by Hegel recreates an earthly form of political alienation in
which individuals are subject to a power that they respect and fear, without
realizing that its operation is intertwined with the roots of the civic society
that they compose and support.
Without Marx expressly defining yet the class character of the state, his
observations are recognized in Hess, in the depth in which he read the
European map. In a few words, Germany must not aspire to realize itself
in the political universe with which the Revolution had provided France
(singularity in the diagnostics of his—now former—comrade, Bauer) with
political and civic freedoms. Germany can think an even more substantial
horizon, with a revolutionary program beyond the boundaries of a partial
revolution (i.e. political) to establish a radical program implying human
emancipation.
If it is about a practical revolution/liberation, which would avoid the
typically German speculative exit to the poignant problems of the times, a
part of society, a class within society, should provide thrust to the whole
process. For the first time, in this brief text, Marx attributes to the prole-
tariat the conditions of possibility of a positive overcoming of the status
quo (as opposed to a negative one, understood as a merely speculative
overcoming). Its peculiarity resides, in that it is the only one focused on its
condition, the strictly human dimension expressed by labor. In other
words, Marx starts to reflect upon the possibility of finding a different
perspective in order to rescue a universal dimension that would effectively
replace a state that only reproduces some profane forms of alienation.
It is not by chance that the stay in Paris had a significant theoretical
influence on those perspectives. The sensitivity about the so-called social
question is nurtured by the impact of the exchange with referents of French
socialism. Cabet, Proudhon, Leroux, the Saint-Simonians, the romantics
and the philo-Catholics provided the thinker from Trier with a suggestive
breeding ground to reflect that society is supported, as a whole, by a major
actor which, in spite of holding it materially, is marginalized not only by
republican power but from any minimum spillage of wealth. The novelty,
in comparison with his French comrades, is the peculiar manner in which
he perceives the relation between philosophy and revolution. A philoso-
phy without the proletariat is mere speculation without a body; the prole-
tariat without a philosophy is just action without a direction.
54  P. NOCERA

The incipient reflection about the working class—possibly a new reser-

voir of universality in order to think of an effective overcoming against the
limits of the state—makes it evident that civic society is addressed with a
priority on an essential practical dimension—according to Marx, labor.
From this perspective, in the same issue of the Annals, he frankly argues
with Bauer in an article which constitutes a reply, On the Jewish Question.
Refuting the positions of his comrade and former mentor, Marx considers
that the emancipating horizon which he proposes is restricted. It is not
about liberating the state of religious forms, or about aspiring to an eman-
cipation from religion in a backward Germany. The conditions are given,
actually, to perform a human, integral emancipation like the one that
aspires to liberate itself from the state.
The parallels between both texts are significant, and this second one,
somehow longer than the other, provides a rich approach not only toward
the specific key in which Marx appropriates Feuerbach’s matrix but also in
the manner in which Hess6 resonates, as can be observed here: ‘Only when
the true individual recovers within himself the abstract citizen and becomes,
as an individual man, a generic essence [Gattungswesen], in his individual
labor and in his individual relations; only when man has been able to rec-
ognize and to organize his “forces propres” as social forces and when he,
therefore, does not remove from himself the social force in the form of a
political force, we can say that human emancipation is achieved’ (Marx &
Engels 1981: 370/tr. 1982: 484). In the same manner, it is tangible that
the same analogies between money and divinity stated by Hess are included
in Marx’s prose by the end of the text: ‘Money is the essence of labor and
of the existence of man, estranged from him, strange essence that domi-
nates him and is adored by him’ (Marx & Engels 1981: 375/tr. 1982: 487).7
Shortly afterwards, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
focused on economic and political discourses. A paradigmatic expression
about commercial society, it is for Marx a somehow complex categorical
web, essentially summarized in the category of labor. Labor in capitalist
societies hides, behind private property, estrangement. The economy of
Great Britain has made a discovery, which is presented as contradictory. Its
referents (paradigmatically, Adam Smith) state that human labor, human
industry, is the sole generator of wealth, even though this same industry
hires and terminates human laborers. This is for Marx the great contradic-
tion in the discourse of political economy: there is nothing sacred in prop-
erty, as property is merely accumulated labor. Now, if labor is the source
of property, it suffers the consequences of the power that property imposes
 3  MONEY AS A PRACTICAL ABSTRACTION: FROM FEUERBACH TO MARX…  55

through money. In Marx’s words: ‘The product of labor is labor which has
been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objecti-
fication of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. This realization
of labor, as presented in political economy, appears as a loss of realization
for the worker; objectification as loss and subjection of the object; appro-
priation as estrangement, as alienation’ (Marx & Engels 1968: 511–512/
tr. 1982: 596). The fact on which Marx’s reflection begins is the impover-
ishment of workers, which increases to the same extent to which the pro-
duction of wealth increases. An analysis shows that this fact expresses an
essence. The progressive impoverishment of workers is the process whose
general and human form is alienation. In this manner, the economic fact
manifests a certain elaboration, which allows it to reveal its hidden mean-
ing. Under the statement of economic facts, there is an anthropological
critique, which expresses the process of alienation.
According to Feuerbach, man produces God: he objectivizes in God
the predicates that constitute his essence. Now, when it is stated that a
worker produces an object, the starting point is the concept of produc-
tion. Marx’s critique thinks about the relation between the worker and his
product, in the same manner in which the relation between God and man
was given in a religious context. Nonetheless, unlike Feuerbach, Marx
demonstrates that productive activity is identified with generic activity
(activity by man in that with it he is making an affirmation of his own
essence) and the object produced with the objectivization of man’s generic
essence. The fact that this product increases the possibility of more wealth
for the capitalist appears as a manifest consequence of alienation, in which
man becomes an object of its object. The first manuscripts conclude cate-
gorically in two spheres. The alienation of workers through labor is what
remains hidden in private property When this estrangement happens as a
practical process, it can only be overcome practically as well. It is not
enough with denouncing the phenomenon. It is not enough with a com-
prehension and a subsequent critique. It can only be modified as a result
of a practice which, as we have seen, includes within itself a revolutionary
program.
In the Manuscripts, Marx develops a brief history of the circumstances
which ended up in estranged labor and have as their context civil society
and, particularly, the organization of industry. The basis for a possible
overcoming of the status quo are formulated there, including a materialist
aspect of communism, making historical to a certain extent what
Feuerbach’s Gattungswesen stated somehow abstractly. It is clear that
56  P. NOCERA

Marx avoids specificities about the future, but he still acknowledges: ‘But
to overcome real private property, it is necessary the real action of com-
munism. It will be carried out by history, and this movement that we ide-
ally represent as our own overcoming will be a very long and very hard
process’ (Marx & Engels 1968: 553/tr. 1982: 632). The emphasis in this
real dimension recovers overtones from Hess and increases the distance
with Feuerbach. It is not by chance that in the pages of this third manu-
script, Marx specifically addresses money.
Without disregarding the references to Shakespeare (Timon of Athens)
and Goethe (Faust) in the lament of their characters for the evils and pow-
ers of money, Marx reflects about them in a manner related to Hess’, link-
ing the problem of estranged labor to its essential note: ‘The inversion and
confusion of all natural and human qualities, the conjunction of two
impossible aspects, the divine strength of money resides in its own essence,
as it is the alienating, estranging, and estranged generic essence of men’
(Marx & Engels 1968: 565/tr. 1982: 643). As a ‘power of inversion’,
money has the virtue of conjugating the general confusion in a social
world, with an inversion that makes it become an end, which subjugates
its holders, instead of being under their control.
Nonetheless, the aspect in which Marx deepens and extends Hess’ for-
mulations with greater power is exposed in the allusions of mutation that
money introduces in the sphere of representation and the sphere of reality.
Money ‘allows to convert representation into reality and reality into a mere
representation, it converts the essential real forces of man and nature in
purely abstract representations […]’ (Marx & Engels 1968: 566/tr. 1982:
644). The term chosen by Marx as a counterpart to ‘reality’ is ‘representa-
tion’. In German, the term Vorstellung has a long and weighing history in
idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel himself), whose allusion sup-
poses an acknowledgment of a cognitive aspect, which is, in general,
opposed to presentation/exposition [Darstellung] or event of reality itself,
and that in consequence appears, in general, as a kind of partial, provisional
or incomplete knowledge. Money is able to achieve in these dynamics not
only an inversion but also a certain flow between the sphere of thought and
the sphere of the real, overlapping the forms in which alienation is expressed.
Briefly stated, when divinity was the alienating release that sublimated real
poverty, whose perpetuity was politically assured by the state, money pro-
vides the necessary abstraction that expresses a counterpart to estranged
labor and private property. Even in the practical dimension of exchange,
money is able to reproduce an abstraction removed from its holders and is
 3  MONEY AS A PRACTICAL ABSTRACTION: FROM FEUERBACH TO MARX…  57

imposed into them with the same force as the divinity falls over the believ-
ers. Marx’s critical journey will bring him, shortly afterwards, to think that
this specific phenomenon connecting both specificities may begin to be
reflected upon if ideology is taken into consideration. By then, the journey
of exploration and critique of political economy will project him to a much
broader and complex approach than these initial formulations.

Coda
In Karl Marx’s bicentennial, even this early aspect of his oeuvre, as ana-
lyzed here, proves to be very current. By exploring the contributions of a
young Hegelianism that affected his first reflections about how commer-
cial society works and how capitalist production is organized, we were able
to reconstruct a connection not always properly appreciated in the recur-
ring exegesis of different parts of his vast reflections. Within the scope of
a denunciation emerging in the specific situation of the German political
context, Marx’s perspective though about a phenomenon, which, beyond
national boundaries, cultural expressions and religious specificities, was
able to warn about the emancipatory outlook in the social and economic
transformations of the nineteenth century.
The development of a critique of alienation, reconstructed in this text,
to eventually reach his perspectives about the logic of money, warn the
modern reader about the contemporary processes of abstraction that
monetary dynamics weave increasingly faster, deploying a potential for the
visualization of social relations, and whose implications seem difficult to
analyze and, even more so, to anticipate. Money is a general equivalent, a
driving force by definition, the ethereal expression of an age in which
images seem to wrap around the flows (of information, capital, popula-
tions, etc.), that condense with a particular plasticity the manner in which
social relations are set forth beyond the control of their protagonists.
Marx’s early diagnosis warns about the secular forms that recreate the
religious, where there are equivalents to deity which, surreptitiously, give
shape to social relations in order to deploy in its spectral objectivity—as he
would state in Capital—a materiality that, not for being intangible, is less
present or less determinant. Money and its theological connotations,
aspects to which Marx would return, in his maturity, with a tangential
recurrence, set forth in these early texts a suggestive intersection between
discursive traditions that his own thought was able to encompass in a tran-
scendent manner. At the crossroads of German idealism, French socialism
58  P. NOCERA

and British political economy—combination through which Lenin would

define Marxism—money was to Marx a preferred object to access the
social fabric, which is the backbone of capitalist society. It being called
geld, go(l)d or argent, a secular divinity, a universal logical and practical
means, or a practical abstraction, its functioning strongly preludes the
question formulated by Marx in 1844: ‘ist das Geld nicht das Band
aller Bande?’
This article was translated by Anahí Prucca.

Notes
1. ‘The idea is produced and testified not by means of a really different other—
which may not be other than an empiric-concrete intellectual intuition;—it
is produced based on a formal and apparent opposite […] Beyond this, the
other of pure thought is, in general, sensible understanding. An attempt in
the domain of philosophy is, therefore, to overcome the contradiction
between sensible understanding and pure thought […]’ (Feuerbach 1959:
183/tr. 1974: 41–42) [Emphasis in the original. Unless specifically stated,
the translations are our own.]
2. It is in a community that the conditions of the specifically human are real-
ized: ‘Only life in a community is true divine life that satisfies itself; this
simple thought, this truth, natural and innate to man, is the secret of the
supernatural mystery of the trinity. But religion also expresses this truth, as
any other, in an indirect and inverted manner, as it also turns a general truth
into a particular one, and the true subject into a predicate […]’ (Feuerbach
1960: 38/tr. 1995: 118).
3. Thus, it can be stated that: ‘In the same manner in which theology divides
and alienates man, in order to subsequently identify with him the alienated
essence, also Hegel multiplies and disperses the simple essence of nature and
man, self-identical, to mediate later through violence that which was sepa-
rated by means of violence’ (Feuerbach 1959: 226/tr. 1976: 24).
4. ‘Just as the abstraction of everything sensible and material had been a neces-
sary condition for theology, it was the same for speculative philosophy, with
the only difference that abstraction is, in turn, a sensible abstraction, as its
object, even when reached through abstraction, is again represented as a
sensible being, while abstraction in speculative philosophy is a spiritual
abstraction: when thought, it only has a scientific or theoretical significance,
but not a practical one’ (Feuerbach 1959: 254/tr. 1976: 58).
5. ‘To abstract means to place the essence of nature outside nature, the essence
of thought outside the act of thinking. Hegelian philosophy has estranged
 3  MONEY AS A PRACTICAL ABSTRACTION: FROM FEUERBACH TO MARX…  59

man, as its whole system rests in these acts of abstraction’ (Feuerbach 1959:
227/tr. 1976: 25).
6. Although Hess published The Essence of Money in 1845, Marx had a previous
version, which he intended to include in the Annals. The same year in which
the only number of the Annals was published, Hess included in the Vorwärts
(December of 1844) the Red Catechism, where there were some preliminary
reflections about money. In the third section (questions and answers from
14 to 19), his statements were still very much in consonance with the
Weitling’s positions in Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit (1842).
7. Marx uses the practical connotation of the term ‘alienation’ (as a sale)
[Veräußerung] to deploy with an eloquent play on words the peculiar trans-
mutation performed by money: ‘The sale is the practice of estrangement
[Die Veräußerung ist die Praxis der Entäußerun]. Just as man, when he
remains subject to religious constraints, is only able to objectivize his
essence, turning it into a fantastic being alien to him, and can only practi-
cally behave under the rule of selfish need; only in this manner can he practi-
cally produce objects to be sold, placing his products and activity under an
alien power and giving them the significance of an alien essence, which is
money’ (Marx & Engels 1981: 376–377/tr. 1982: 489).

References
Feuerbach, L. (1959). Sämtliche Werke  – Band 2. Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt:
Fromman Verlag.
Feuerbach, L. (1960). Sämtliche Werke  – Band 6. Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt:
Fromman Verlag.
Feuerbach, L. (1974). Aportes para la crítica de Hegel. La Pléyade: Buenos Aires.
Feuerbach, L. (1976). Tesis provisionales para la reforma de la filosofía.
Barcelona: Labor.
Feuerbach, L. (1995). La esencia del cristianismo. Madrid: Trotta.
Hess, M. (1961). Philosophische und sozialistische Schriften 1837–1850: eine
Auswahl. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
Marx, K. (1982). Obras Fundamentales-Tomo I. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Económica.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1968). Werke – Band 40. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1981). Werke – Band 1. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
 CHAPTER 4

Real Abstraction: Philological Issues

Roberto Fineschi

There is a relatively long list of ‘Marxian’ categories that Marx has never
used: labor theory of value, historical materialism, philosophy of praxis
and so on. ‘Realabstraktion’ is no exception. The question is then whether
this category might be useful for a better understanding (or transforma-
tion) of society, or shed more light on Marx’s theory. Further difficulties
arise from the delicate status of complex philosophical concepts such as
‘real’ or ‘abstraction’, which themselves are not easy to define and
extremely controversial. In order to avoid a generic use of those catego-
ries, I shall try to reconstruct and contextualize the specific meaning these
words have in Marx’s mature theory of Capital, and how they change in
progress. The theory of commodity circulation and the definition of
abstract labor will be the main focus of this research, and eventually the
theory of fethishism and reification. In light of this philological recon-
struction, it will be possible to answer the question about the limits within
which we can use this category.

R. Fineschi (*)
Siena School for Liberal Arts, Siena, Italy

© The Author(s) 2020 61

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_4
62  R. FINESCHI

‘Abstract’ and ‘Real’ from the Grundrisse

to A Contribution. Controversies with a Definition

In his fundamental essay, Sohn-Rethel (1978: 21 and ff.) first introduced

the famous opposition between thought and real abstractions: here, ‘real’
seems to be the opposite of ‘thought’, in the sense of an abstraction that
is not posited by thought, but result of a practical process. Thought
abstraction is therefore nothing but a translation in thoughts of something
that actually happens in those societies that are based on commodity
exchange, where abstractions are practically posited by a social dynamic. If
this is the key point, passages in Marx’s works that can lead to this inter-
pretation are mostly to be found in A Contribution. Here he says:

To measure the exchange values of commodities by the labour time they

contain, the different kinds of labour have to be reduced to uniform, homo-
geneous, simple labour, in short to labour of uniform quality, whose only
difference, therefore, is quantity. This reduction appears to be an abstrac-
tion, but it is an abstraction which is made every day in the social process of
production. The conversion of all commodities into labour time is no
greater an abstraction, and is no less real, than the resolution of all organic
bodies into air. (Marx 1988: 272; German: Marx 1980: 110)

If we further follow this argument in A Contribution, we see that Marx

clearly refers to the development of a general equivalent: exchange-value1
is only unilateral and mental, mere abstraction, until it gets posited as
practical social result by the exchange process. It becomes from ‘theoreti-
cal’, ‘mere abstraction’, to a social result; the general equivalent is the
instantiation of a particular commodity as universal equivalent. Before a
general equivalent is posited, value exists only as mere abstraction for the
commodity owners in their minds. Instead, it needs to be there, to be
instantiated for and by commodities themselves in their exchange process:

Every commodity however is the commodity which, as a result of the alien-

ation of its particular use value, must appear as the direct materialisation of
universal labour time. But on the other hand, only particular commodities,
particular use values embodying the labour of private individuals, confront
one another in the exchange process. Universal labour time itself is an
abstraction which, as such, does not exist for commodities. (Marx 1988:
286; German: Marx 1980: 123)
 4  REAL ABSTRACTION: PHILOLOGICAL ISSUES  63

The wording is precise and can be found again at the end of the pro-
cess, once the general equivalent is posited, with the opposition ‘thought’
versus ‘social result’: ‘This is a theoretical statement as long as the com-
modity is merely thought as a definite quantity of objectified universal
labour time. The existence [Dasein] of a particular commodity as a univer-
sal equivalent is transformed from a pure abstraction into a social result of
the exchange process, if one simply reverses the above series of equations’
(Marx 1988: 287; German: Marx 1980: 124).
The exchange process was supposed to be the ‘real’ side of the argu-
ment, in opposition to the just thought abstraction made by the actors
before they actually exchange. The exposition in A Contribution follows
and develops the same path Marx formulated for the first time in the
Grundrisse.2
This strong contrast of ‘thought’/‘abstract’ versus ‘instantiated’/‘actual’
value is, however, not so relevant in the later, more mature formulation of
Capital, vol. 1. What was supposed to be the ‘thought’ part of the analysis
becomes now the value-form section. It would be too long to deal exten-
sively with that, but it has been philologically shown how in Capital, and
in particular in the second German edition, Marx considered the entire
development of the money deduction, within the value-form, as a theo-
retical whole, where the exchange-individuals are already present in the
argument since the very beginning (Lietz 1987, 1989). In fact, also in A
Contribution, the ‘real’ interaction was nothing but what would later
become the passage to a general equivalent. In A Contribution, however,
this passage was not possible in the thought analysis, but only in the ‘real’
dynamic of the exchange process. In Capital, the value-form is already a
whole theory of money deduction that implies exchanging individuals; for
this reason, a general equivalent can be deduced within the value-form.
A consequence of this change is that also the concept of ‘real’ is to be
conceived in a theoretical sense; the ‘real’ instantiation of the ‘thought’
value abstraction happens in thought as well, within a theory. Marx is not
talking about ‘historical’ developments as in a history book. Also the ‘his-
torical excursus’ that we can find in the chapter on the Exchange process
is a sort of phenomenology of the generalization of the value-form to a
money-form, but neither a chapter of history nor a theory of a pre-­
capitalist society.3
Epistemologically, the distinction is not between a non-better defined
reality and thought. Here, Marx makes a theory of individuals that think
and act: this is not about them acting in history outside of the theory, but
64  R. FINESCHI

a theory of their historical action. This doesn’t certainly mean that outside
thought no ‘reality’ exists, but that Marx’s is a theory of that reality, and
what reality means is defined within this theoretical system. Exchange pro-
cess, commodity, money of course exists before the theory that explains
them, and such a theory is possible only because they have already devel-
oped to a certain extent. However, the theory that explains them does not
simply correspond to, or mechanically reflect, their historical genesis or
form of appearance.
I believe that this is why Marx re-worded these sections and did not use
anymore the concept of thought in opposition to actual or instantiated
(not ‘real’, strictly speaking). It seems to me that a controversial point in a
few interpretations is the non-very clear status of the category ‘real’4:
sometimes it seems that they mean the non-theorized world outside the
mind; in some other cases, they mean the dynamic of the social process
that produces those abstractions, which is however already framed within
a theory. In some others, it seems that the two levels uncritically go into
each other, so that it remains unclear what the ‘reality’ of the process is.5
The meaning that the concept ‘abstract’ in Capital is therefore differ-
ent: it doesn’t follow anymore the same development as in the Grundrisse
and A Contribution; in Capital, it is not the other side of ‘real’, but ‘con-
crete’. Moreover, the adjective is used to define ‘labor’ and ‘wealth’, which
is a very limited and precise utilization.

Abstract Labor in Capital. Abstraction,

Parcelization, Alienation: Controversial Syntheses
A key point is the definition of ‘abstract labor’. As it is known, Marx intro-
duced this category in the analysis of commodity and money as one of the
two sides of the commodity producing labor. The same labor can be
addressed as abstract or concrete if considered productive, respectively, of
value or use value. Thought and abstraction are not used anymore in the
sense we could find in A Contribution. The theoretical context is now dif-
ferent and ‘abstract’ is the opposite of ‘concrete’. This abstract labor is
always a concrete labor, but considered in its pure formalism. It does not
exist as abstract as such, but is always both concrete and abstract.6
Some have tried to make a connection between this concept and the labor
that results from the parcelization of the individual activity within the pro-
duction process—by some also labeled as ‘alienated’—that we have through
 4  REAL ABSTRACTION: PHILOLOGICAL ISSUES  65

the ‘real’ subsumption of the labor process under capital. These concepts are
connected, but in a specific sense. In general terms, labor is abstract inas-
much as it produces value, not because of its parcelization. It subsists even if
every single producer is in charge of the entire production of their good,
even if there is no internal division of labor within the production process.
The second kind of abstraction is instead explicitly connected with the partial
character of the activity that aims at the production of an object, not the
division of labor in society in its complex. In this case, production of abstract
labor refers to the further division inside the process, and the growing par-
tiality of the individual activity in the production of the product itself, until
it becomes so formalistic that can be replaced by a machine. It is loss of
complexity, concreteness that characterizes this second abstraction.
If, on the one hand, the growing partiality of the individual activity is the
most adequate form of labor in the capitalist mode of production, on the
other this is not why labor is abstract. Internal division of labor has always
existed and will exist after capitalism, but not abstract labor, which is value
producing labor; and, in fact, Marx never used ‘abstract labor’ for the par-
celed labor. The fact that he does not is significative, because several cir-
cumstances could have brought him to do it, first of all the probable source
of the phrase ‘abstract labor’. Both in the Jena’s system drafts7 and Philosophy
of right8, Hegel, the philosopher that probably invented the expression
‘abstract labor’, talks about this kind of abstraction: labor is abstract because
of its parcelization; the more parcelized, the more abstract. Making this
point, Hegel put together a theory of value and property, and the division
of labor within production and mechanization. This means that Hegel,
misled by the classics and Smith in particular, mixed together the division
of labor in commodity circulation and manufacture production.9 As regards
the individual actors determined in this theoretical framework, in Hegel we
have the same short circuit we can find later in those interpreters of Marx
that put on the same plan the phenomenal level (abstract labor as defined
in the commodity circulation, what Marx actually called abstract labor,
where subjects appears as ‘persons’, the fundament of bourgeois ideology),
and the production process (abstract labor as parcelization, what Marx
actually did not define abstract labor, where subjects are, instead, ‘classes’).
This consistently affects also the foundations of a Marxian political theory.
If we move back to Marx, he did not use the ‘parcelization’ concept to
talk about abstract labor in Capital, and he actually only randomly did
before. He did it just occasionally in few passages in the notes of ‘44.10 In
those notes, he still had an anthropological perspective, a Gattungswesen
model, according to which the capitalist mode of production alienated the
66  R. FINESCHI

fullness of the human essence expressed in and through labor. In my opin-

ion, some interpreters misunderstood Marx’s argument following this line:
labor as essence, abstract/parcelizated labor as alienated form of the activity
because of capitalism, abstraction as reality of this alienated world, fight
against abstractions = capitalism as historical, philosophical, anthropologi-
cal revolutionary perspective. The mature theory of Capital would analyti-
cally show this logic of alienation/abstraction intuited in the notes of ‘44.
In my opinion, this misinterpretation can be explained as follows: the con-
cept of ‘person’, posited by commodity circulation as human essence, is
taken not as the phenomenal and non-substantial form of subjectivity, but
as human essence itself. Since its apparent fullness (freedom and equality)—
another phenomenal appearance of commodity circulation—is negated by
the productive praxis of the capitalist mode of production, the reappropria-
tion of the fullness of personality (full humanity, where personality = human-
ity) seems to be the goal of emancipation/revolution. This perspective
seems, however, to be set within the bourgeois theoretical framework:
commodity circulation and, in particular, it’s phenomenal instantiation
(person) is misconceived as subject in the form of human essence. I believe
that most of the anthropological interpretations of Marx’s theory rely on
this misunderstanding. Merging abstract labor in the two different levels of
abstraction (commodity circulation and production process) is the key
point here, as the misconception of the historical subjects (individuals vs.
classes). I don’t think this nexus is philologically tenable, since that
‘extended’ concept of abstract labor is not supported by textual evidence.
In Capital, Marx moved beyond any essentialistic model and based the
same concept of human nature on the dialectic of the historical process,
where the same concepts of ‘man’ or ‘abstract labor’ become, emerge, get
defined and transformed in and through the process itself. In regard to
this, it is worth noticing another important change in Capital: there labor
is just one element of the labor process11: labor process, and not labor, is
now the most abstract, ‘essential’ level. Labor process does not exist as
such, but its elements will be in every mode of production; it consists of
humans (they themselves part of nature) and things (means and object of
labor); it is an interaction with a specifically determined natural subject/
subjects on natural object within nature. This interaction never happened,
happens or will happen in a vacuum: the way these elements combine is
historically determined, and determines the different modes of produc-
tion; and this specific determination allows to correctly collocate subjects
and objects in their proper functional positions within the system of
 4  REAL ABSTRACTION: PHILOLOGICAL ISSUES  67

production and reproduction. No given essence, but a process where

everything is functionally defined through the process dynamic. Here
classes are the historical subjects, and we have a theory of historical pro-
cess: this is Marx’s mature solution.12
To avoid misunderstandings, it is useful to precise that the labor process
is no new abstract fixed essence. In fact, since the capitalist mode of pro-
duction determines the inversion of subject and object in the labor process
with the subsumption of it under capital, if the labor process represented
such an essence, the way out of the capitalist alienation would be re-­
establishing the ‘original’ order. But this is not what Marx theorizes. The
actual inversion of subject and object in the production process is exactly
what we need to keep as core point to move to a new, higher level of sub-
jectivity: The Gesamtarbeiter. Marx does not claim a return to the full
personal individuality based on singles; instead he introduced the concept
of Gesamtarbeiter at the end of the analysis of the absolute and relative
surplus-value, as integrated social producer, where the parcelization and
inversion are not just kept, but the basis of the fullness of a bigger subjec-
tivity.13 This is the actual historical production of a new universal human
concept as a fact, as a compound subject, not just as a thought abstraction
as it had been as cultural theme starting with the Renaissance. Universals
are also result of a historical process.
The ‘alienated’ character of labor here (although, in Capital, Marx did
not use this expression, as did not connect abstract labor to the alienation
concept) is not its parcelization but the lack of social control on the social-
ized labor. This socialization happens thanks to the capitalist mode of pro-
duction. This is the dialectic of form and content, the only one that allows
to scientifically think a process that, at the same time, is positive and
negative.14

Abstract, Concrete and Method: Further

Controversies and Colletti’s Aporias
In my opinion, Colletti’s interpretation is a good synthesis of all these
misunderstandings, also because he made another passage; he connected
such an essentialist approach with an epistemological point related to
Marx’s method: the famous descend from concrete to abstract and from
abstract to concrete.
In his opinion, a passage from the first German edition of Marx’s
Capital, vol. 1,15 modified and ‘reduced’ in the second one, shows how
Marx claimed that the inversion of the value-form is nothing but the
68  R. FINESCHI

philosophical reflex of the real inversion that takes place in the commodity
society; Hegel’s philosophy and the dialectical method, as top theoretical
expression of this inversion, is therefore the perfect way to give theoretical
form to this world: the inverted philosophy that comes out and gives
proper explanation of an actual inverted reality. At the same time, this
method and philosophy seems implicitly to be valid as long as this inverted
reality exists. In Colletti’s own words:

Die Wertform was added by Marx to the first edition of Capital while the
work was already in press. It is a fact that the page which we have taken from
it reproduces to the letter the arguments with which Marx first criticized
Hegel’s dialectic in his early writing, the Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts.
The abstract-universal, which ought to be the predicate—i.e. a ‘property of
the concrete or the sensate’—becomes the subject, a self-subsisting entity;
‘contrariwise the concrete-sensate counts merely as the phenomenal form of
the abstract-universal’—i.e. as the predicate of its own substantified predi-
cate. This overturning, this quid pro quo, this Umkehrung, which, accord-
ing to Marx, rules Hegel’s Logic, rules also, long before the Logic, the
objective mechanisms of this society—beginning right from the relation of
‘equivalence’ and the exchange of commodities. (Colletti 1973: 282)

Here Colletti seems to mix two different themes in an uncritical way:

the inversion in the value-form and the inversion of subject and object in
the labor process subsumed under capital.
What, in my opinion, Marx does in the mentioned passage is to talk
about the inversion of concrete and abstract in the value-form develop-
ment; this inversion takes place in the scientific reconstruction of reality,
not in reality itself, because there is no possible inversion in reality of con-
crete and abstract under this regard, otherwise the thesis would be that
abstract creates concrete, thought creates sensibility, that is the fundamen-
tal thesis of subjective idealism, something against which Marx consis-
tently insists all over his life. The passage mentioned by Colletti in
particular is written to avoid such misinterpretation. The materialistic pri-
macy of objectivity over thought is, in Marx’s own opinion, what distin-
guishes his philosophy from the bad Hegelian idealism. Here no real
inversion is possible; otherwise, subjective idealism would be correct and
there’s no doubt that Marx thinks it is not.
This is not the same argument that Marx makes when he mentions the
‘inverted’ comprehension of the world by bourgeois economists and phi-
losophers; he claims that they are wrong in the understanding of reality,
 4  REAL ABSTRACTION: PHILOLOGICAL ISSUES  69

because they take the inverted phenomenal manifestation of essence as

essence itself: persons as actual historical subjects, money as thing with
social power and so on. In this case, Marx is not talking about science, but
bad representations, ideology.
The scientific exposition moves from abstract to concrete to reproduce
reality in thoughts, it is not the production of reality and it is not a mere
transposition of reality in thoughts: essence and phenomenon do not
match immediately. The movement from abstract to concrete is how
thought explains reality. There is no possible ‘real’ inversion under this
regard: scientific understanding shows how money comes out from com-
modity and is a social product; inverted (mis)understanding conceives the
social power of money as its material quality. In spite of the ‘inversion’ of
concrete and abstract in the explanation, and the fact that phenomenally
money continues to manifest itself and work as a thing, money is not a
thing. Marx does not think that an inverted theory, as a sort of photo-
graphic mirror of inverted reality, is science. On the contrary, a scientific
reconstruction that starts from abstract shows why the world appears
upside-down, but is not. Here Colletti misunderstands and puts together
science and ideology as regards the meaning of ‘inversion’ and the dialec-
tic of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’.
Colletti thinks he can do this, inasmuch as, in his interpretation, this
methodological point is paralleled by the inversion of subject and object in
the production process; this takes place because of the real subsumption of
the labor process under capital. The actual inversion in the production
process pushed Colletti to make the salto mortale and think that the two
inversions (in the circulation and in the production process) are two sides
of the same coins.
I have tried to show how, on the one hand, we don’t have any real
inversion on the side of the scientific explanation; on the other, even if we
have an actual inversion of subject and object in the labor process, it is not
philologically correct to claim that Marx conceives the capitalist produc-
tion process as an inversion of something naturally given or essential; on
the contrary, Marx wants to keep this alleged inversion as basis of a new
form of subjectivity that is historically produced by the capitalist mode of
production itself: the Gesamtarbeiter. According to Marx, a future society
will be based on the historical progress allowed by this inversion. Therefore,
also under this regard, Colletti’s thesis doesn’t get Marx’s point and
reduces his theory of historical process to a mere conflict of essence and
(inverted) appearance.16
70  R. FINESCHI

The inversion of abstract and concrete in the scientific method does not
match a ‘real’ inversion. This is what ideology does. The inversion of sub-
ject and object in the production process is to be conceived in regard to
previous modes of production, not essence.17

Real Abstraction, or Historical Forms

of Singularity

The final part of this essay regards the concept of ‘real abstraction’ as a
whole, after I have tried to show controversial interpretations that can
separately derive from a misunderstanding of the concepts of ‘real’ and
‘abstract’. In general terms, one of the most important focuses is that, in
capitalism, abstractions become real and work in the system as acting sub-
jects. It is not always very clear what these abstractions should be, since
Marx does not explicitly use the phrase ‘real abstraction’. Probably, most
of the interpreters would accept in the list money as ‘naked’ universal form
of wealth, and capital as this abstraction transformed into a subject.18
In general terms, one could wonder whether real abstractions exist only
in the capitalist mode of production, inasmuch as, as Hegel already
showed, abstractions always need to exist in particular ‘bodies’. They don’t
exist as such in their universality, but are particular universals: ‘singulars’
(Hegel 2010: 546 and ff.). An alleged separate ‘universal’ turns to be just
a particular. An actual universality can be only the one that is able to show
how universals act through particulars until a particular, in its particularity,
plays the role of a universal. Therefore, existing universals are always ‘real’,
in the sense that they are instantiated. In more specific terms, we have
already seen how abstract is a quality of concrete, and their separation is an
‘intellectual’ result, as Hegel would say. In a dialectical theory, the fact that
abstractions are real, universals are particulars and so on is no surprise.
If we come back to Marx’s theory, money is a particular commodity
that works as universal commodity. The labor that produces the money-­
commodity works in its particularity as universal representative of labor
(Marx 1996: 69, 77; German: Marx 1991: 59, 68). And also the abstract
activity of the workers is a concrete activity. Abstract labor is possible only
as pure formal treatment of concrete labor, because concrete labor and
abstract labor are just two sides of the same activity. Then, the abstraction
of labor in general or value objectivity as such are real abstractions in the
sense that a specific labor and a specific commodity work as universal labor
 4  REAL ABSTRACTION: PHILOLOGICAL ISSUES  71

and universal commodity. They are not purely abstract, but particular ones
that work as universal, they are singular.
Does this structure belong just the capitalist mode of production or
not? In general terms, since the instantiation of universality as such is part
of the concept of Singularity itself, this seems to be an ontologically tran-
shistorical notion. Singularities don’t belong just to the capitalist mode of
production: an emperor, the three medieval classes, State and so on are
not less existing universalities, ‘real abstractions’, than money or capital. A
king, for instance, is a really existing universal that thinks that he is the
king because of himself and not because there are people that relate as
subjects to him. Besides, these are social actors, subjects as capital or
money are. If this is also a crucial aspect in the meaning of ‘real abstrac-
tion’, it doesn’t seem then that existing universals acting as subjects are
only in the capitalist mode of production. We can talk maybe of histori-
cally specific real abstractions, if we want to keep this concept.
The fact that the capitalist mode of production produces fetish charac-
ters, such as Money or Capital itself, means that abstractions are produced
in a very specific and limited way. Actually, Marx shows that Money or
Capital are abstracts only inasmuch as they seem to own their social quali-
ties as physical properties, while this happens only because there is a social
relationship and process that posits that. They are as they appear only
inasmuch as they are a ring in a big chain, which includes the material
process of production. But the same happens in regard to ‘person’ or
‘man’: they are those universalities only abstracting from the real process.
But capitalism is a process, and produces and re-produces those universals
as things: this is its specific historical determination. To reconstruct this
process and understand how it actually works does not cancel that appear-
ance as long as the material structures that produce it are solid. Cutting
the veil, showing the essence, does not stop the objective process.
Given that, it seems that real abstractions are not just in the capitalist
mode of production; a domination of abstractions assumes different, spe-
cific forms in different times. What is specific of the capitalist mode of
production is that these abstractions are not simply ‘real’ but appear as
things. If we make the mistake to reduce the concept of reality to being a
thing, we fall in a very simple and unsophisticated form of realism and
cancel the subtitle Marxian distinction between content and form.
72  R. FINESCHI

Conclusions
Since the concept of ‘real abstraction’ is not explicitly present in Marx’s
works, I have tried to show how its use is connected with complexes issues.
The first is the definition itself of ‘real’ and ‘abstraction’: these concepts
can be easily misunderstood outside a precise philological reconstruction
of Marx’s thought. This kind of miscomprehension has bought to contro-
versial parallels with essentialist theories that are very far, in my opinion,
from Marx’s theory of the historical process. The restriction of real abstrac-
tion just to capitalism is another controversial point that can be ques-
tioned by a more general analysis of the concept of Singularity as both
historical and transhistorical categories.
These difficulties impose, in my opinion, a cautious use of this category
that is very suggestive and evocative on the one hand and potentially mis-
leading on the other.

Notes
1. Actually ‘value’. In this moment (1859), Marx still did not have a clear
distinction between value and exchange-value. Philological results have
shown that he will precisely and consistently define these categories only in
the second German edition of book 1 (1872/3). See Hecker (1987).
2. In that text as well, he distinguished between a thought and real deduction
of general equivalent/money (at the time they were defined in the same
way): ‘This third thing, distinct from the other two since it expresses a ratio,
exists initially in the head, in the imagination, just as in general ratios can
only be thought if they are to be fixed, as distinct from the subjects which are
in that ratio to each other’ (Marx 1986: 81; German: Marx 1976: 77–78).
Then, he adds: ‘For mere comparison, for the valuation of products, for the
notional determination of their value, it is enough to make this transforma-
tion in the head (a transformation in which the product exists simply as the
expression of quantitative relationships of production). For the comparison
of commodities, this abstraction is sufficient; for actual exchange, this
abstraction must again be objectified, symbolized, realized through a token’
(Marx 1986: 91; German: Marx 1976: 78). Finally, ‘Through the product
becoming a commodity and the commodity becoming exchange value, it
acquires, first in our mind, a dual existence. This mental duplication pro-
ceeds (and must proceed) to the point where the commodity appears dual
in actual exchange: as natural product on the one hand, as exchange value
on the other. I.e. its exchange value acquires an existence materially sepa-
rated from it’ (Marx 1986: 81; German: Marx 1976: 79).
 4  REAL ABSTRACTION: PHILOLOGICAL ISSUES  73

3. For a precise philological reconstruction of all this development through

the different versions of the theory since the Grundrisse to the second
German edition of Capital, vol. 1, see Fineschi (2006), On the changes
and development in the different edition of Book 1, see Hecker (1987),
Jungnickel (1988, 1989). About this, see all the quarrel on the so-called
simple commodity production (see Hecker 1997; Rakowitz 2000).
4. Another relevant issue is that the German language has two different words
for ‘real’, which are ‘reel’ (with the variant ‘real’), and ‘wirklich’. To give
an example, not every ‘real’ is ‘wirklich’. Not everything that exists (real)
is actual (wirklich). The misunderstanding of this is at the basis of most
misinterpretations of Hegel’s Philosophy of right and his thesis of the ratio-
nality of reality: Wirklichkeit is rational, not Realität. This problematic
ambiguity of the English (and Italian, Spanish, etc.) generic ‘real’ posits
further problems. I think this is the reason why Adorno prefers ‘objective’
(Adorno 1990).
5. In my opinion, these issues implicitly emerge reading the overviews by
Toscano (2008), Redolfi Riva (2013), Engster (2016). This also seems to
be the background of the debate on Marx’s method: if Marx had a logic-­
historic or just logical method. The question is if ‘real’ (in the sense of
extra-­theoretical) elements constitute or not, each time, a necessary pas-
sage to move forward in the logic development, or if the intrinsic logical
necessity moves forward by itself, once the ‘economic cell’ is set, the
Ausgangskategorie. This is one of most relevant focuses in the so-called
Neue Marx-Lektüre, but also in the debate among philologists in the for-
mer Democratic German Republic. On this see Fineschi (2009). On the
Neue Marx-Lektüre, see Elbe (2008), Bonefeld and Heinrich (2011),
Reichelt (1973, 2008), Backhaus (1997).
6. ‘On the one hand, all labour is, speaking physiologically, an expenditure of
human labour power, and in its character of identical abstract human
labour, it creates and forms the value of commodities. On the other hand,
all labour is the expenditure of human labour power in a special form and
with a definite aim, and in this, its character of concrete useful labour, it
produces use values’ (Marx 1996: 57; German: Marx 1991: 48).
7. See, among others, this passage: ‘Each satisfies the needs of many, and the
satisfaction of one’s own many particular needs is the labor of many others.
Since his labor is abstract in this way, he behaves as an abstract I—accord-
ing to the mode of thinghood—not as an all-encompassing Spirit, rich in
content, ruling a broad range arid being master of it; but rather, having no
concrete labor, his power consists in analyzing, in abstracting, dissecting
the concrete world into Its’ many abstract aspects. Man’s labor itself
becomes entirely mechanical, belonging to a many-sided determinacy. But
the more abstract [his labor] becomes, the more he himself is mere abstract
74  R. FINESCHI

activity. And consequently he is in a position to withdraw himself from

labor and to substitute for his own activity that of external nature. He
needs mere motion, and this he finds in external nature. In other words,
pure motion is precisely the relation of the abstract forms of space and
time—the abstract external activity, the machine’ (Hegel 1983: 121).
8. Cfr. Hegel (1991), §§ 191–192, and in particular §198: ‘The universal and
objective aspect of work consists, however, in that [process of] abstraction
which confers a specific character on means and needs and hence also on
production, so giving rise to the division of labour. Through this division,
the work of the individual [des Einzelnen] becomes simpler, so that his skill
at his abstract work [abstrakten Arbeit] becomes greater, as does the vol-
ume of his output. At the same time, this abstraction of skill and means
makes the dependence and reciprocity of human beings in the satisfaction of
their other needs complete and entirely necessary. Furthermore, the
abstraction of production makes work increasingly mechallical, so that the
human being is eventually able to step aside and let a machine take his
place’. See also §204. A similar argument in the Encyclopédia, Hegel
(2007), §§ 525–526.
9. See Section 4 of Part 4 of Capital, Book 1: ‘Division of labour in manufac-
ture, and division of labour in society’ (Marx 1996: 356; German: Marx
1991: 316).
10. Cfr. Marx (1975): 237 and ff; German: Marx (1982): 197 and ff. I don’t
write Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of ‘44, because, according to the
philological results, those texts don’t actually exist as a book. The notes
were extrapolated from their context, put together thematically and pub-
lished as a book. For a general introducti0on to the new critical edition,
the second Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), see Bellofiore and
Fineschi (2009).
11. See the famous passages of Chapter 7 of Capital Book 1 (Marx 1996: 187
and ff.; Chapter 5 in the German edition: Marx 1991: 161 and ff.). See
Jungnickel (1988, 1989) on Marx’s modifications in the second German
edition, which explicitly aims at distinguishing labor and labor process.
12. I think that this is the most relevant contribution of the most significative
Italian interpreters of Marx, starting with Luporini (1966, 1972, 1975),
and then with Cazzaniga (1981), and Mazzone (1976, 1981, 1987).
13. Cfr. Marx (1996): 509–510; German: Marx (1991): 456–457: ‘In consid-
ering the labour process, we began (see Chapter V) by treating it in the
abstract, apart from its historical forms, as a process between man and
Nature […] So far as the labour process is purely individual, one and the
same labourer unites in himself all the functions, that later on become
separated. When an individual appropriates natural objects for his liveli-
hood, no one controls him but himself. Afterwards he is controlled by
 4  REAL ABSTRACTION: PHILOLOGICAL ISSUES  75

others. A single man cannot operate upon Nature without calling his own
muscles into play under the control of his own brain. As in the natural
body head and hand wait upon each other, so the labour process unites the
labour of the hand with that of the head. Later on they part company and
even become deadly foes. The product ceases to be the direct product of
the individual, and becomes a social product, produced in common by a
collective labourer [Gesamtarbeiter], i.e., by a combination of workmen,
each of whom takes only a part, greater or less, in the manipulation of the
subject of their labour. As the co-operative character of the labour process
becomes more and more marked, so, as a necessary consequence, does our
notion of productive labour, and of its agent the productive labourer,
become extended. In order to labour productively, it is no longer necessary
for you to do manual work yourself; enough, if you are an organ of the
collective labourer, and perform one of its subordinate functions. The first
definition given above of productive labour, a definition deduced from the
very nature of the production of material objects, still remains correct for
the collective labourer, considered as a whole. But it no longer holds good
for each member taken individually’.
14. How a socialized production process can be controlled and rationally man-
aged by a socialized worker is, of course, a big open question; it is not even
guaranteed that it might be possible to find an answer. However, it seems
solid that this was the perspective Marx was moving to.
15. ‘Within the relationship between value and the expression of value con-
tained therein, the abstract universal does not count as a property of the
concrete in its sense-reality, but on the contrary the concrete-sensate
counts merely as the phenomenal or determinate form of the abstract uni-
versal’s realization. The labour of the tailor which one finds, e.g., in the
equivalent coat, does not incidentally have the general property of being
human labour within its value-relation as cloth. On the contrary: To be
human labour is its very essence; to be the labour of the tailor is only the
phenomenal or ­determinate form taken by this its essence in its realization.
This quid pro quo is inevitable, since the labour represented in the labour-
product creates value only in that it is undifferentiated human labour; such
that the labour objectified in the value of a product is not at all distinguish-
able from the labour objectified in the value of another product’. And
Marx concludes thus: ‘This total reversal and overturning, which means
that the concrete-sensate counts only as the phenomenal form of the
abstract-universal, and not contrariwise the abstract-universal as a property
of the concrete, characterizes the expression of value. This is what makes
its understanding difficult. If I say that Roman law and German law are
both forms of law, this is obvious. If, however, I say that the law, this
abstraction, translates itself into reality in Roman law and German law—
76  R. FINESCHI

these concrete forms of laws—then what emerges is a mystical connexion’.

The English translation is quoted from Colletti (1973): 281–282. For the
original, see Marx (1983): 634.
16. I don’t think that this alleged conflict of essence and appearance is what
Marx means with ‘contradiction’. On Marx’s theory of contradiction see
Fineschi (2001), Cazzaniga (1981).
17. In light of this complex methodological argument, it seems to me that it is
not correct to claim that Marx’s method is revocable (see Reichelt 1973).
What is historically determined is the specific logic of the specific object; at
the same time, it is implicit that every mode of production has its own
logic, therefore the idea of a specific logic of a specific object is generally
valid. The methodological principle of the descent from concrete to
abstract and back from abstract to concrete can be used in order to find
new Ausgangskategorien, whose specific dialectical development is based
on their intrinsic contradiction. Marx did not say that his dialectical method
is valid only for the capitalist mode of production.
18. Some add that the system would produce alienated ‘abstract labor’, and it
is mostly meant, as we have seen, the progressive parcelization of the total
human subject because of the capitalistic production system. I have tried to
show how the textual evidence doesn’t support the use of abstract labor for
this case.

References
Adorno, T.  W. (1990). Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. In Gesammelte
Schriften. Band 5. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Backhaus, H. G. (1997). Dialektik der Wertform. Untersuchungen zur marxschen
Ökonomiekritik. Freiburg: Ḉa ira.
Bellofiore, R., & Fineschi, R. (2009). Re-reading Marx. New Perspectives after the
Critical Edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Bonefeld, W., & Heinrich, M. (Eds.). (2011). Kapital & Kritik. Nach der “neuen”
Marx’-Lektüre. Hamburg.
Cazzaniga, G. M. (1981). Funzione e conflitto. Forme e classi nella teoria marxiana
dello sviluppo. Liguori: Napoli.
Colletti, L. (1973). Marxism and Hegel. London: NLB.
Elbe, I. (2008). Marx im Westen. Die Neue Marx-Lektüre in der Bundesrepublik
seit 1965. Berlin: Akademie.
Engster, F. (2016). Subjectivity and Its Crisis: Commodity Mediation and the
Economic Constitution of Objectivity and Subjectivity. History of the Human
Sciences, 29(2), 77–95.
Fineschi, R. (2001). Ripartire da Marx. Processo storico ed economia politica nella
teoria del “capitale”. Napoli: La città del sole.
 4  REAL ABSTRACTION: PHILOLOGICAL ISSUES  77

Fineschi, R. (2006). Nochmals zum Verhältnis Wertform  - Geldform  -

Austauschprozess. In Neue Aspekte von Marx’ Kapitalismus-Kritik
(pp. 115–133). Berlin: Argument.
Fineschi, R. (2009). Dialectic of the Commodity and Its Expoistion: The German
Debate in the 1970s – A Personal Survey. In R. Bellofiore & R. Fineschi (Eds.),
Re-reading Marx: New Perspectives after the Critical Edition (pp.  50–70).
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hecker, R. (1987). Zur Entwicklung der Werttheorie von der 1. zur 3. Auflage des
ersten Bandes des “Kapitals” von Karl Marx (1867–1883). In Marx-Engels-­
Jahrbuch (Vol. 10, pp. 147–198). Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Hecker, R. (1997). Einfache Warenproduktion. In Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Hg.),
Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (Bd. 3). Hamburg:
Argument Verlag.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1983). Hegel and the Human Spirit. A Translation of the Jena
Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–6). Detroit: Wayne State
University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). Elements of Philosophy of Right. Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, G.  W. F. (2007). Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Translated from the 1830
Edition, Together with the Zusätze by W.  Wallace and A.  V. Miller Revised
with an Introduction by M. J. Inwood. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (2010). Science of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jungnickel, J. (1988). Zur Entstehung und zur Edition der 2. Auflage des ersten
Bandes des “Kapitals” in der MEGA.  In Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch (Vol. 11,
pp. 175–211). Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Jungnickel, J. (1989). Die Stellung der 2. Auflage des ersten Bandes des “Kapitals”
in der Entwicklungsgeschichte der ökonomischen Theorie von Marx. In Marx-­
Engels-­Jahrbuch (Vol. 12, pp. 92–125). Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Lietz, B. (1987). Zur Entwicklung der Werttheorie in den ‘Ergänzungen und
Veränderungen zum ersten Band des ‘Kapitals’ (Dezember 1871–Januar
1872). In Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung (Vol. 23, pp. 26–33). Berlin.
Lietz, B. (1989). Besser verständlich und stärker dialektisch. Zur Entwicklung des
Wertbegriffs in der 1. und 2. deutschen Auflage des “Kapitals”. In Beiträge zur
Marx-Engels-Forschung (Vol. 27, pp. 166–172). Berlin.
Luporini, C. (1966). Realtà e storicità: economia e dialettica nel materialismo, in
Dialettica e materialismo (pp. 153–211). Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Luporini, C. (1972). Marx secondo Marx, in Dialettica e materialismo
(pp. 213–294). Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Luporini, C. (1975). La logica specifica dell’oggetto specifico. In N.  Badaloni
et al. (Eds.), Problemi teorici del capitalismo. Rome.
Marx, K. (1975). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In Marx-
Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3 - Marx and Engels: 1843–1844, Progress
Publishers (Moscow) in Collaboration with Lawrence and Wishart (London)
and International Publishers (New York City).
78  R. FINESCHI

Marx, K. (1976). Ökonomische Manuskripte 1857/58. In Marx-Engels-­

Gesamtausgabe, 2. Abteilung, Band 1.1. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Marx, K. (1980). Ökonomische Manuskripte und Schriften 1858–1861. In Marx-­
Engels-­Gesamtausgabe, 2. Abteilung, Band 2. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Marx, K. (1982). Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte. In Marx-Engels-­
Gesamtausgabe, 1. Abteilung, Band 2. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Marx, K. (1983). Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band.
Hamburg 1867. In Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, 2. Abteilung, Band 5. Berlin:
Dietz Verlag.
Marx, K. (1986). Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58. In Marx-Engels Collected
Works, Vol. 28  - Marx: 1857–1861, Progress Publishers (Moscow) in
Collaboration with Lawrence and Wishart (London) and International
Publishers (New York City).
Marx, K. (1988). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Part One.
In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 29  - Marx: 1857–1861, Progress
Publishers (Moscow) in Collaboration with Lawrence and Wishart (London)
and International Publishers (New York City).
Marx, K. (1991). Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ókonomie. Erster Band.
Hamburg 1890. In Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, 2. Abteilung, Band 10.
Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Marx, K. (1996). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I. In Marx-­
Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35 - Marx: Capital I, Progress Publishers (Moscow)
in Collaboration with Lawrence and Wishart (London) and International
Publishers (New York City).
Mazzone, A. (1976). Il feticismo del capitale. Una struttura storico-formale.
Quaderni di critica marxista, Rome.
Mazzone, A. (1981). Questioni di teoria dell’ideologia. Messina: La Libra.
Mazzone, A. (1987). La temporalità specifica del modo di produzione capitalis-
tico. (Ovvero: “la missione storica del capitale”). In A. A. VV. (Ed.), Marx e i
suoi critici (pp. 224–260). Urbino: QuattroVenti.
Rakowitz, N. (2000). Einfache Warenproduktion. Ideal und Ideologie. Freiburg: Ḉa
ira-Verlag.
Redolfi Riva, T. (2013). Teoria critica della società? Critica dell’economia politica.
Adorno, Backhaus, Marx. Consecutio temporum, pp. 213–226.
Reichelt, H. (1973). Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx. 4.,
durchges. Auflage, mit einem Vorwort von Iring Fetscher, Frankfurt am Main:
Europäische Verlagsanstalt.
Reichelt, H. (2008). Neue Marx-Lektüre. Zur Kritik sozialwissenschaftlicher Logik.
Hamburg: VSA-Verlag.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Intellectual and Manual Labour. London and
Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press.
Toscano, A. (2008). The Open Secret of Real Abstraction. Rethinking Marxism:
A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 20(2), 273–287.
 CHAPTER 5

Marx’s Method and the Use of Abstraction

Alfonso Maurizio Iacono

1. On several occasions, Marx emphasized the absurdity of placing the

isolated individual at the origin of social development and the historical
process. In Forms which precede capitalist production, he observes how
simple it is to imagine that a powerful man can exploit another man ‘as
another naturally occurring condition for his reproduction’ (Marx 1973:
430), and direct his efforts specifically to make other men work for him,
that is assuming a division of labor between master and servant even before
establishing the fundamental requirements for the reproduction of human
life, ‘But such a notion is stupid—correct as it may be from the standpoint
of some particular given clan or commune—because it proceeds from the
development of isolated individuals. But human beings become individu-
als only through the process of history’ (Marx 1973: 430).
The question posed by Marx is obviously not new. Ferguson, for exam-
ple, had already supported the need to consider the human species as
groups and to conduct a socio-historical investigation which chooses as its
object the whole of society and not men considered individually (Ferguson
1995: 10 ff.). In general, all of the ‘Scottish School of Historiography’

A. M. Iacono (*)
Department of Civilizations and Forms of Knowledge,
University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 79

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_5
80  A. M. IACONO

had posed the problem of studying human history, starting from men
gathered in a society, and had stressed that the key factor for understand-
ing the development of different societies was the ‘means of subsistence’
(Robertson 1818: 111; Millar 1960: 175), from which customs, laws, and
forms of government could be derived. In this regard, it has been argued
that Marx was a successor of the so-called ‘Scottish School’ (Pascal 1938:
178), and that his materialistic conception of history had been anticipated
by Ferguson, Millar, and Robertson. It has been noted that in France too,
in the eighteenth century, Quesnay, Mirabeau, and Turgot had advanced
a materialistic theory of history (Meek 1973), which can be regarded as
the foundation of political economics as a standalone science. The idea
that understanding the institutions and customs of different societies
requires an investigation into the material conditions resulting in these
differences paved the way for political economics to become a separate
discipline, as it analyzed the structure of civil society. Political economics
becomes the key to understanding the whole of society. But there’s a
problem here. Having established a connection between the materialistic
conception of history and political economics in the eighteenth century,
there is however an open question with respect to Marx: do his thoughts
extend the concepts developed in the eighteenth century to definitively
reduce the explanation of capitalist society to its economic basis, or is his
way of combining the materialistic theory of history and his critique of
political economics aimed at preventing this reduction—a reduction only
present in the attempts of classical economists to construct a standalone
economic science? There is at least one aspect of Marx’s analysis that
allows us, if not exhaustively, at least to highlight from a different perspec-
tive the meaning of this very widely debated question. It is the connection
that Marx makes between his critique of the isolated man, placed at the
origin of history, and the critique of the use by classical economists of this
concept in their attempt to construct a simplified economic model capable
of explaining the complex economic mechanism of the capitalist means of
production.
The role of abstraction in Marx’s critique and method comes into play
here. Alfred Sohn-Rethel observed that Marx derives from Hegel the idea
of form as shaped by time, but he distances himself from it because, unlike
Hegel, he ‘understands the time governing the genesis and the mutation
of forms as being, from the very first, historical time—the time of natural
and human history. That is why the form processes cannot be made out in
anticipation. No prima philosophia under any guise has a place in Marxism.
 5  MARX’S METHOD AND THE USE OF ABSTRACTION  81

What is to be asserted must first be established by investigation; historical

materialism is merely the name for a methodological postulate and even
this only became clear to Marx “as a result of my studies”’ (Sohn-Rethel
1978: 18).
The problem that we want to discuss here is whether Marx’s critique is
the result of an interaction between the materialistic conception of history
and political economics—that is, an internal critique of a previously initi-
ated theoretical process which nevertheless contains a defect or a contra-
diction in this attempt to resort to the isolated man for the construction
of a simple model—or if it opens the field to a different way of interpreting
this theoretical entity, proposing a connection between the theory of his-
tory and economic theory, so as to offer us some food for thought on the
role that the field of economics plays, in Marx, within various areas of
society. In short, we aim to ascertain if reductionism of society to its eco-
nomic key points plays a part, or not, in Marx’s work. In order to do that,
it is essential to understand the role of abstraction in Marx’s theoretical
way of proceeding.
2. It is well-known that Marx begins the 1857 Introduction with criti-
cism of Smith and Ricardo’s starting point for political economics. He
states that ‘Individuals producing in Society—hence socially determined
individual production—is, of course, the point of departure’ (Marx 1973:
25). The starting point for Smith and Ricardo is instead made up of ‘The
individual and isolated hunter and fisherman’ which, says Marx, ‘belongs
among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades,
which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and
a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine’
(Marx 1973: 25); they represent instead an anticipation of the ‘civil soci-
ety’ (bürgerlicheGesellschaft), where free competition gives rise to the indi-
vidual freed from those natural limitations, ‘which in earlier historical
periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglom-
erate’ (Marx 1973: 25).
Here Marx offers a double criticism: one concerns the starting point of
classical economists, and the other, the kind of explanation that ‘historians
of civilization’ (Kulturhistoriker) have tried to give for a model of society
based on isolated man in a natural state. At stake is the kind of abstraction
used by economists. Let us dwell for the moment on this second criticism.
We can reasonably suppose that Marx, when referring to ‘historians of
civilization’, had Ferguson in mind, amongst others. In his Essay on History
of Civil Society, where he claims that it is wrong to write the history of
82  A. M. IACONO

individuals on their own, Ferguson is adversarial to the idea of an imagi-

nary natural state, ‘Among the various qualities which mankind possess,
we select one or a few particulars on which to establish a theory, and in
framing our account of what man was in some imaginary state of nature,
we overlook what he has always appeared within the reach of our own
observation, and in the records of history’ (Ferguson 1995: 8).
Ferguson uses the comparative analysis between the customs of
Americans and the customs of the ancients that Lafitau had carried out in
an attempt to demonstrate, through comparison and analogy, the unique
origin of the human race (Lafitau 1724).1 Finding empirical evidence that
under similar material conditions, people develop similar customs and
laws, Ferguson criticizes the theoretical notion that attributes certain qual-
ities to man in his original natural state, since he sees in it the idea of per-
fecting the human race, and in general of the development of civilization
as a progressive departure from primordial human nature. By contrast,
human nature is evident both in wild and in civilized man, since man, in
whatever social state he is found, ‘only follows the disposition, and employs
the powers that nature has given’ (Ferguson 1995: 14).
On the other hand, if it is true that a palace is not natural, it is just as
unnatural as a hut, and it does not represent a stepwise departure from a
hypothetical original state. From the point of view of historical analysis, it
is not possible to trace the origins of social conditions, since there are no
appropriate documents or witnesses (Ferguson 1995: 7), and the danger
of speculating on these origins is that we end up thinking that everything
known historically about the human species is extraneous to the nature of
man. What Ferguson essentially criticizes Rousseau for is that his natural
man, hypothesized for the purpose of denouncing the evils of civilization
and society (founded on inequality among men), is not only historically
unascertainable, but presupposes a theory of the individual—based on the
nature–society dichotomy—which cannot become the object of histori-
cal analysis.

If we are asked therefore, Where the state of nature is to be found? We may

answer, it is here; and it matters not whether we are understood to speak in
the island of Great Britain, at the Capo of Good Hope, or the Straits of
Magellan. While this active being is in the train of employing his talents, and
of operating on the subjects around him, all situations are equally natural. If
we are told, that vice, at least, is contrary to nature; we may answer, It is
worse; it is folly and wretchedness. But if nature is only opposed to art, in
 5  MARX’S METHOD AND THE USE OF ABSTRACTION  83

what situation of the human race are footsteps of art unknown? In the con-
dition of the savage, as well as in that of the citizen, are many proofs of
human invention; and in either is not any permanent station, but a mere
stage through which this travelling being is destined to pass.
(Ferguson 1995: 14)

Ferguson’s critique of Rousseau stops at this point: denouncing vice to

be contrary to nature does not necessarily imply denouncing what
Ferguson ascribes to human nature, that is the capacity to progress as a
species. Precisely because the conception of the original state of man can-
not be anything but conjecture, Rousseau’s denunciation has no sound
theoretical basis, and should be explained as merely a reaction to the vices
which arise in developed societies. Ferguson’s polemic has both a theoreti-
cal and political character: in fact it is well-known that, using his chosen
method, he was able to highlight the evils derived from the capitalist divi-
sion of labor; only that for Ferguson it makes no sense to point out these
evils using the image of a man in his original natural state as opposed to
historical, civilized man: this contrast makes us forget that the evils of civi-
lized society are intrinsic to that peculiar characteristic of human nature, of
developing and progressing as a species. It is within this development and
progress that the historical contradictions of society must be sought and
not through comparison with an imaginary state of man. We know that
Marx was very attentive to the issue of the human species, since it allowed,
at a theoretical level, the understanding of the historical possibility of a
communist social organization starting from the contradictions inherent
in the development of cooperation among men.
We also know that in The Poverty of Philosophy, he contrasts Ferguson’s
analysis of the capitalist division of labor with that of Proudhon, who in his
attempt to criticize capitalist society and the forms of the division of labor
that characterize it, adopts an image of the original natural state as one in
which independent men enter into contracts with one another. In the
1857 Introduction, moreover, Marx’s criticism looks back to the starting
point of Smith and Ricardo, having in mind Bastiat, Carey, and Proudhon,
who perpetuate the error in the image of ‘the individual and isolated
hunter and fisherman’. But compared to Ferguson, in the critique of the
imaginary natural man, Marx shifts the axis of the problem: not only is
there the question of the historical existence, or not, of this imaginary
man, but there is also the other question about the historical–theoretical
meaning of such a concept; he is not merely criticizing the use of conjec-
84  A. M. IACONO

tures in historical analysis, but also the epistemological sense of these con-
jectures and of those concepts. While Ferguson’s criticism simply identifies
an erroneous historical method which establishes comparisons between
reality and an artificially constructed concept, Marx starts from the prob-
lem of the genesis of such a concept from social reality. That’s why he says
that ‘the individual and isolated hunter and fisherman’ does not represent
a reaction to excessive refinements and a return to a misunderstood natu-
ral life, but constitutes the anticipation of ‘civil society’.
Here we are faced with a new aspect of the relationship that Marx
establishes between the materialistic conception of history and the critique
of political economics: his theory of history allows him to address an epis-
temological problem that economists had to face in their investigation of
the capitalist economic system: of constructing, through an abstraction, a
simplified economic model for comparison against the real one. Marx
emphasizes the fact that man in a natural state, rather than being an
inverted mirror to negative criticism of civilization’s effects, comes across
as the image of a bourgeois economic individual transcending his society.
This image, which anticipates the ‘civil society’ (bürgerliche Gesellschaft),
does nothing more than reduce capitalist social relations to simple and
abstract economic terms. An abstraction, therefore, of social relationships
reduced to economic relationships: Marx’s critique of the isolated man as
the starting point of history and as a starting point for political economics
stands as a critique of this reductive abstraction, in an attempt to restore
the connection between economic and socio-historical relationships. Let
us now examine Marx’s second criticism, the one at the starting point of
classical economists.
For Marx, the image of the ‘the individual and isolated hunter and
fisherman’ is simultaneously a simplified abstraction and an expression of
common bourgeois thinking, or rather a simplified abstraction deriving
from common bourgeois thinking. This apparently concrete image, which
is in reality abstract, is in fact opposed to ‘civil society’ precisely because it
is constructed upon the structure of the latter. In fact, precisely because an
individual within ‘civil society’ appears to be free of natural limitations, he
is nevertheless part of nature, imbued with his own historical characteris-
tics. The individual of the eighteenth century, says Marx, ‘appears as an
idea, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but
as history’s point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to
their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by
nature’ (Marx 1973: 25).
 5  MARX’S METHOD AND THE USE OF ABSTRACTION  85

What interests Marx is precisely the idea that economists make human
nature into the linchpin of simple abstraction with which to compare the
means of capitalist production. The problem of classical economists was to
construct a synchronic model capable of representing the economic cate-
gories of capitalist society and of explaining the value of commodities. It
was necessary to find a simple abstraction that would allow categories to
be generalized; and just as Rousseau conceived of the natural state not as
a real state, but as an abstraction with which to compare civilized society,
economists had to resort to an abstract model, but with the seemingly
concrete appearance of ‘the individual and isolated hunter and fisherman’,
able to represent all the different facets of value. And while Ferguson was
arguing that conjectures on man’s supposed original state made no sense
from a historical point of view, Adam Smith had to resort to this same
original state to explain the economic point of view.
Similarly, while Turgot, in his writings on progress, also placed the
emphasis on the development of the human species in its different stages,
rather than on the contractarian idea of originally independent and iso-
lated men, when he found himself having to formalize the theory of value,
he had to resort to the isolated man or to men who enter into relation-
ships with each other as independent (Turgot, about 1769). In the eigh-
teenth century, a conflict arose between the features of historical analysis
and the features of economic analysis. Thanks to the first attempts of com-
parative anthropology, it started to be possible in socio-historical research
to apply a procedure to understand differences between different histori-
cally known social stages as variations in the faculties of the human species,
that is as variations found in the characteristics of human nature, expressed
and developed in societies. In economic research, on the other hand, the
procedure presupposed a conception of human nature whose peculiarity,
valid for all epochs, is ideally and abstractly expressed in a hypothetical
pre-social stage.
Marx deals with this second procedure; his problem is not only to put
historical analysis back on a firm footing, but to understand the process of
simplification/generalization in the models of political economics and
therefore the method of abstraction. It is from this point of view that one
must interpret his critique of the starting point of political economics as a
function of the question of the origins of human societies; that is, from the
point of view of the construction of a theoretical model capable of offering
a general representation of the capitalist means of production.
86  A. M. IACONO

Marx criticizes the abstraction used by Smith and Ricardo because it

assumes the isolated individual as a starting point for political economics.
And he argues that the further back we look in history, the more the indi-
vidual can be seen as part of a community; ‘Only in the eighteenth cen-
tury, in “civil society”, do the various forms of social connectedness
confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as
external necessity’ (Marx 1973: 26). Only in the era when social relation-
ships are most developed, in the capitalist era, do the forms of relation-
ships, based on individuals detached from the community and independent
of each other, ultimately appear to dominate the material production
of wealth.
Classical economists, according to Marx, construct their abstraction
based on this appearance: considering as natural the bourgeois individual,
who considers himself as free from natural limitations, means projecting
the way we see the current reality into the past. But how does such a pro-
jection take place? How is it possible to abolish historical differences to
construct a simple model that replicates capitalist activity and shows its
internal dynamics? Or, put another way, why does it not make sense for
Marx to construct an abstraction that has no connection with history? If
we start from the observation that on the level of historical analysis the
myth of the original state of man was fading away, we must note that this
myth reappears when it becomes necessary to build an ahistorical model,
where it is necessary to reduce the social characteristics of an individual to
his economic contents. It is exactly such a reduction that homogenizes the
abstraction of ‘the individual and isolated hunter and fisherman’ with the
means of capitalist production, and it is this homogeneity that erroneously
leads economists to create the differences between a simple abstraction
and a complex model. Marx’s criticism is aimed exactly at this theoretical
process of homogenization of the two models, since it is based precisely
on the reduction of the social individual to the economic individual, a
reduction made possible historically only through the means of capitalist
production. Consequently, it can be extended to other means of produc-
tion or to the origins of human society only as a bad abstraction, that is, as
an inappropriate projection of historical reality onto an ahistorical, natural,
and universalizing scenario. The individual feels free from the natural limi-
tations that bind him to society as soon as he can consider the latter as a
means for his private ends, and this means that society appears as a pure
economic means to be used for one’s own needs. This concept conceals
 5  MARX’S METHOD AND THE USE OF ABSTRACTION  87

the fact that satisfying private needs takes place under the pretext of
exploitative relationships that underlie the social character of commodities.
On the contrary, the transfer of this social character from men to com-
modities ultimately implies that the domain of private life is also invested
with purely utilitarian economic relationships. Therefore, the reduction of
society to economic society is presented as the deceptive and erroneous
epistemological premise of the birth of political economics as a science:
the individual, in nature, is the economic individual of the capitalist sys-
tem. From this point of view, it is possible to explain all the determinations
of value. Marx admits this when he mentions Robinson Crusoe. In the
chapter on The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof in Book 1
of Das Kapital, Marx describes Crusoe, who, in his isolation, clarifies the
relations between himself and his things. It is an abstraction deriving from
his isolation: in this representation, in fact, both the cooperative nature of
labor and the relationships between men, mediated by goods, are taken
away at the very start. Crusoe presents himself as one ‘having rescued a
watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreckage’ (Marx 1887: 50), that
is, objects needed for his survival, and which were produced by the labor
of society.
The transparency provided by the figure of Crusoe derives from the
total abstraction of the social character of private labor and therefore of
the social relationships of private labor, summarized perfectly in one per-
son. But clock, ledger, pen and inkwell ultimately point out how the ori-
gin of Crusoe’s behavior in isolation is at odds with his possibility of a
private relationship with things. However, ‘All the relations between
Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation, are
here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion, even to Mr.
Sedley Taylor. And yet those relations contain all that is essential to the
determination of value’ (Marx 1887: 50).
The point that Marx criticizes about Smith and Ricardo’s ‘Crusoean’
things is not that they give no account of value determination, but that in
the idealized reintroduction of the figure of ‘the individual and isolated
hunter and fisherman’, the social aspect of economic relationship is lost.
The savage of Adam Smith, who rationally discovers the advantage of spe-
cializing in the production of objects and then bartering with others who
need them, ideally also owns a watch, ledger, pen and inkwell, but these
objects do not appear only because of the absence, in an abstract sense, of
the social aspect on which the rational utility of bartering is based. The
reduction of reason to pure economic rationality becomes the abstraction
88  A. M. IACONO

that characterizes human civilization, willing to sacrifice the immediate

satisfaction of needs for a calculated larger final utility derived from labor
and abstinence. Modern anthropology has shown that exchange relation-
ships among primitive peoples are not necessarily connected to economic
calculations based on satisfying material and primary needs. Malinowski
questioned the idea of ‘Primitive Economic Man’, acting according to a
calculation of their interests and to achieve their goals according to the
criterion of minimum effort. The Trobriand islander ‘works prompted by
motives of a highly complex, social and traditional nature, and towards aims
which are certainly not directed towards the satisfaction of present wants, or
to the direct achievement of utilitarian purposes. Thus … work is not carried
out on the principle of the least effort. On the contrary, much time and energy
is spent on wholly unnecessary effort, that is, from a utilitarian point of view’
(Malinowski 1932: 40).
Mauss claims: ‘apparently there has never existed, either in an era fairly
close in time to our own, or in societies that we lump together somewhat
awkwardly as primitive or inferior, anything that might resemble what is
called a “natural economy”’ (Mauss 2002: 6). Polanyi, in turn, maintains
that in a primitive community there is no standalone existence of econom-
ics, and he asks ‘whether awareness of an economic sphere would not tend
to reduce his capacity of spontaneous response to the needs of livelihood,
organized as they are mainly through other than economic channels’
(Polanyi 1957: 70). All this obviously leads to the conclusion that the idea
of capitalist economic rationality cannot be applied to primitive peoples.
But the question posed by Marx goes beyond such an affirmation. His
critique of the epistemological homogenization of a simple abstraction
and a complex model against which it is to be compared seems to imply
something else. The image of ‘the individual and isolated hunter and fish-
erman’ is nothing more than an abstraction, that of the natural state of
bourgeois economic man in his intentional and conscious relationships,
while the aim of political economics is to lay out the logic of the uninten-
tional relationships through which moments of awareness arise.
In the Preface to the first edition of Book 1 of Das Kapital, Marx
writes: ‘I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose.
But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifica-
tions of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations
and class-interests’ (Marx 1887: 7). Even the image of ‘the individual and
isolated hunter and fisherman’ is nothing more than the personification of
 5  MARX’S METHOD AND THE USE OF ABSTRACTION  89

certain economic relationships, but a personification which, located at the

origins of society, is presented as an intentional cause of those very rela-
tionships that it should represent and explain. Precisely this way of pro-
ceeding puts the lie to the homogenization between simple abstraction
and complex model: there cannot be homogeneity between a simple
abstraction in which individuals decide to establish economic relationships
and a complex model in which they are an expression of unintentional
economic relationships. Therefore, even in the case of a theoretical com-
parison which does not take into account the real historical process, the
question of homogeneity between the two models remains unresolved.
Not only that, but the image of economic man at the origins of society, as
the abstract personification of missing social relationships, leads to society
being reduced to economic society. The ideology of the economic man
and of his self-serving rationality abstractly reduces all social relationships
to economic means, and it is precisely this abstraction that Marx attempts
to debunk in order to understand social relationships in the context of
economic relationships.
3. Marx’s preoccupation with the starting point of political economics
is linked to the fact that Smith and Ricardo’s error in placing the individ-
ual as the original state of production reappears in those he calls ‘apologist
economists’. In their work, unlike in classical works, the use of the image
of the individual, isolated and independent at the origins of society,
extends to the point of shaping all of their economic analysis: ideology
ends up having the upper hand over economic analysis. ‘The point could
go entirely unmentioned if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for
the eighteenth-century characters, had not been earnestly pulled back into
the centre of the most modern economics by Bastiat, Carey, Proudhon,
et al’ (Marx 1973: 26).
In Carey, Bastiat and Proudhon, the image of the isolated man presents
itself as an abstract and incongruous generalization to the whole field of
economic analysis, since it is no longer identified only with the problem of
epistemological simplification, but becomes a total reversal of the analysis.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, criticizing the way in which Proudhon defines
the relationship between exchange value and utility value, Marx shows
how his method is like a ‘Robinsonade’, as it invariably presupposes what
cannot be presupposed and should be explained historically: from the
need that overcomes spontaneous production, to the division of labor,
to exchange.
90  A. M. IACONO

How does M. Proudhon, who assumes the division of labour as the known,
manage to explain exchange value, which for him is always the unknown? ‘A
man’ sets out to ‘propose to other men, his collaborators in various func-
tions,’ that they establish exchange, and make a distinction between ordi-
nary value and exchange value … to tell us finally how this single individual,
this Robinson, suddenly had the idea of making ‘to his collaborators’ a pro-
posal of the type known and how these collaborators accepted it without the
slightest protest. (Marx 1955: 12)

According to Marx, Proudhon is still wedded to the idea of the social

pact that independent men have made amongst themselves. Men make
proposals to other men and determine the nature of the exchanges: those
proposals and decisions conceal the historical origin that must explain the
voluntary actions of men. ‘What is society, irrespective of its form? The
product of man’s interaction upon man. Is man free to choose this or that
form of society? By no means’ (Marx 1975: 95). In this letter, Marx speaks
of society as a product of mutual actions between men—actions deter-
mined by objective conditions found in the different spheres in which
these actions occur, not only in the economic sphere; however, economics
remains key to a fundamental explanation, precisely because it is in capital-
ist economic relations that the fetishism of commodities represents the
world for what it actually is, that is reversed. Commodities exist in and of
themselves and embody the social manifestation of private labor: they are
therefore the basis of the division, in the capitalist system, between social
relationships (embedded and represented therein) and individual
­relationships. Commodities incorporate the social nature of private labor
and thus hide their origins while simultaneously being present to the
world, which leads to their fetishist nature. The crystallization of social
relationships within the realm of commodities (i.e. rejecting their nature
of relationships and processes) becomes the structure through which such
relationships are perceived as things, and as ways to satisfy private eco-
nomic needs. Society is thus reduced to economic society, and the sphere
of circulation conceals the social relationships that preside over the sphere
of production.

This sphere that we deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and pur-
chase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of
man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom,
because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are
constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the
 5  MARX’S METHOD AND THE USE OF ABSTRACTION  91

agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression
to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the
other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equiva-
lent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham,
because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together
and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the
private interests of each. (Marx 1887: 7)

The fact that commodities are repositories of social labor leads to two
consequences: (a) the reduction of the process of social labor, and there-
fore of production relationships, to something simple; (b) the demarca-
tion of subjectivity, of its intentional space of action, to the sphere of
circulation, where social labor, crystallized in commodities, circulates
within the orbit of economic interests. Once the workforce is treated as a
commodity, as dead labor, its subjectivity is recognized only in its circula-
tion. It is exactly the undervaluation of these two consequences that leads
Marx to criticize Bastiat and Carey. With regard to the latter, Marx
observes that he belongs to a country, the USA, in which bourgeois soci-
ety has not developed from feudal society and therefore is seen as a start-
ing point for a new movement. ‘That the relations of production within
which this enormous new world has developed so quickly, so surprisingly
and so happily should be regarded by Carey as the eternal, normal rela-
tions of social production and intercourse (…)?’ (Marx 1973: 806).
And here too, the activity of informed individuals determines social
relationships and the development of productive forces within a
­harmonious vision of the economic system. Here we see clearly how Marx
considers history to be the key distinguishing factor: ‘but the unhistoric
moment in Carey is the contemporary historic principle of North America,
while the unhistoric element in Bastiat is a mere reminiscence of the
French eighteenth-century manner generalizing’ (Marx 1973: 810).
Criticizing the way Bastiat explains wages in the Harmonies Economiques,
Marx nevertheless stresses the method of explaining the relationship
between capital and wage labor as stemming from an agreement between
the capitalist and the wage earner: ‘We will not call attention here to the
genius of a procedure which begins by presupposing a capitalist on one
side and a worker on the other, so as then, afterwards, to let the relation
of capital and wage labour arise between them by their mutual agreement’
(Marx 1973: 812).
92  A. M. IACONO

Bastiat presents the production relationships between capitalist and

worker as intentional and voluntary relationships in the form in which
they appear in circulation. Circulation is then proposed as the exclusive
field of intentionality: but moving intentional action into the sphere of
relationships means both denying the possibility of grasping the objectiv-
ity of the production relationships, and preventing to bring to light the
antagonistic nature of the actions of individuals from the context of such
relationships.2 Bastiat’s is a bad abstraction.
In Marx, economics remains the preferred field of his investigation, but
he does not reduce all social relationships to the domain of economic rela-
tionships. If we consider carefully Marx’s criticism of apologist econo-
mists, we realize that, according to Marx, key to explaining them is the
sphere of circulation, one in which there is the appearance of free and
intentional relationships. And we see too that this sphere is one in which
economic relationships based on independent individuals who exchange
commodities, to the extent that they hide the social nature of the labor
embodied in the commodities, are seen as the only or the main social rela-
tionships. In this sense there is a reduction of the social to the economic,
and paradoxically, this happens precisely at the moment when the social
nature of economic relationships, in the sphere of circulation, is most
strongly asserted as the sphere of free relationships. But since the social
nature of economic relationships is a given prerequisite for the free and
intentional actions of men, it comes naturally. In this way we come to real-
ize the observation that Galiani had made on value, the origin of which,
according to Galiani, must in the first instance be sought in man himself
(Galiani 1963: 97). This observation was revived by Turgot in a failed
attempt to prove the theory of value (Turgot 1769: 85 ff) and in the idéo-
logues (Destutt de Tracy) finally assumed a process of abstraction of this
kind: natural rules as the cause of the social rules and, in the case in point,
of economic rules. Marx’s point of view is instead that of considering the
specificity of the economy as an object of investigation, from which the
social aspect of mutual actions between men emerges. In this sense, politi-
cal economics represents precisely the structure of civil society.
4. We started from Marx’s critique of Smith and Ricardo’s attempt to
use ‘the individual and isolated hunter and fisherman’ to build a simplified
model capable of measuring the complex economic model of the capitalist
system. Marx criticizes this attempt, considering it a bad abstraction based
on the fact that the difference between the simple and complex models is
not supported by an underlying homogeneity, but only by an idealized
 5  MARX’S METHOD AND THE USE OF ABSTRACTION  93

transposition of the social relationships of production (as they appear in

the sphere of circulation), on to the sphere of social relationships of pro-
duction. The assessment then takes place between an abstraction coming
from the sphere of circulation and a complex model coming from the
sphere of production. Thus the assessment of the capitalist machinery is
nothing more than what remains to be explained by the sphere yet to be
assessed, that of production. This is exactly what Marx ascribes to Bastiat,
Carey and Proudhon. A symptom of the theoretical paradox deriving from
this type of abstraction is the naturalization of the economic man endowed
with rationality and utilitarian will. From this comes Marx’s criticism of
the idea that, at the origin of the conditions of production, the economic
relationship between private, isolated individuals within the sphere of cir-
culation are presented as natural social relationships. In this way the social
character of private labor that allow men to have mutual relationships as
isolated individuals, can be dismissed and with it the whole social sphere
of economic relationships deriving from production. The myth of primi-
tive economic man, subject to criticism by anthropologists (Malinowski
1932; Mauss 2002; Polanyi 1957),3 is in reality the theoretical myth of the
idealized transposition of the relationships of the sphere of circulation to
the relationships of the sphere of production, a transposition that denies
the possibility of including the historical differential method within the
abstraction of an economic model, for the simple reason that this method
presupposes an internal analysis of the sphere of human action in question
and not a transposition between different spheres.
Marx finds himself at odds with those apologist economists who use the
Wealth of Nations as a ‘paradigm’ to transform an abstract representation
of the capitalist system into a sort of incongruous generalization. But
Marx’s criticism goes beyond this aspect, since the insertion of historical
analysis into the idealized model as a genetically different stage (Luporini
1974) comes across as a break with the classical approach. Rather than
complete the approach initiated by Smith and Ricardo, Marx embarks on
a new approach, one that advocates the need to rethink society as a whole
starting by investigating the capitalist means of production. But to do this
he had to demolish the naturalistic aspects present in the determination of
the economy, which made the intentions present in the sphere of circula-
tion appear as natural qualities.
While for the apologist economists the naturalization of individual eco-
nomic intentions resulted in the reduction of society to the elements
determined by economic circulation, in Marx the reversal of this relation-
94  A. M. IACONO

ship toward a search, inspired by the classics, for the unintentional rela-
tions inherent in production relationships, allows a new discourse on the
topic of subjectivity to be opened up. The naturalization of social relation-
ships as they arise in the sphere of the commodity circulation, the Eden of
man’s innate rights (i.e. as relationships between isolated and independent
individuals), implies that social action derives only from that of abstract
homogenization among individuals who have the same interest in defend-
ing themselves against others with opposed interests. Hence the idea of
the social pact as the ‘anticipation of civil society’ and as a great metaphor
for the class behavior of the bourgeoisie, which abstractly conceives of the
intentional relationships of the sphere of circulation as the relationships of
all the spheres of mutual actions between men, ‘where every man is in it
for himself’. Thus the myth of the isolated man is nothing more than the
abstraction within this single figure of all those aspects of human action
that are seen separately in capitalist society. As a result of the socio-­
historical process, it reveals its origins from the capitalist conditions of
production, the division of labor and the private appropriation of social
work. This unveiling, by destroying that myth, represents the isolation of
the individual for what it actually is when the capitalist process of expro-
priation of labor rules: the reality is having to deal only with oneself in
relationships with others, with loneliness as the only moment to search for
one’s fragmented individuality.
For this reason, Marx’s critique of ‘the individual and isolated hunter
and fisherman’ overcomes the epistemological discussion of abstraction.
The reference to production and its capitalist nature, on which the circula-
tion of commodities and the social behavior of isolated individuals is
based, also indicates the need to find a commonality between the working
class and the proletariat different from that of the bourgeoisie, the con-
quest of an organized and mass conscience that, starting from the fight
against the private appropriation of social labor, reverses the visibility
offered by the relationships between men in the sphere of commodity
circulation, and funds its unity not only in the opportunity to defend itself
against a common enemy, but also in the permanent ability to translate
that struggle into the open visibility of the social appropriation of social
labor. From this point of view, the search for sociality through commodi-
ties and for dismembered individuality among the separate spheres of
 5  MARX’S METHOD AND THE USE OF ABSTRACTION  95

human action will perhaps prevent solitude from destroying the possibility
of reconstituting the social individual. Despite globalization, the great
changes in the organization and division of labor, and in the ways people
and environment are exploited, this research still deserves to be pursued.

Notes
1. I have explored the subject at length in Iacono (1994, 2016).
2. On the relation between capital and capitalist, Marx observes: ‘(…) capital
in its being-for-itself is the capitalist. Of course, socialists sometimes say, we
need capital, but not the capitalist. Then capital appears as a pure thing, not
as a relation of production which, reflected in itself, is precisely the capitalist’
(Marx 1973: 242).
3. Malinowski grossly misunderstands historical materialism as he equates it to
utilitarian economics, which he criticizes because accepts the myth of the
primitive economic man (Malinowski 1932: 276).

References
Ferguson, A. (1995). An Essay on Civil Society (1767). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Galiani, F. (1963). Della moneta (1750). Milano: Feltrinelli.
Iacono, A. (1994). The American Indians and the Ancients of 18th Century. In
W.  Haase & M.  Reinhold (Eds.), The Classical Tradition and the Americas
(Vol. I). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Iacono, A. (2016). The History and Theory of Fetishism. New  York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Lafitau, J. (1724). Moeurs des sauvages amaricains, comparées aux moeurs des pre-
miers temps. Paris. English Edition: W. N. Fenton & E. L. Morre (Eds.),
Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times.
Toronto: The Champlain Society. [I Vol. : 1974; II Vol.:1977].
Luporini, C. (1974). Realtà e storicità: economia e dialettica nel marxismo. In
Dialettica e materialismo (pp. 153–211). Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Malinowski, B. (1932). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge.
Marx, K. (1887). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. I). Moscow:
Progress Publishers.
Marx, K. (1955). The Poverty of Philosophy. Moscow: Institute of Marxism-Leninism.
Marx, K. (1973). Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (M.  Nicolaus,
Trans.). London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1975). Letter to Annenkov (December 28.1846). In Marx-Engels,
Collected Works (Vol. 38). Moscow: International Publishers.
96  A. M. IACONO

Mauss, M. (2002). The Gift (1924). London and New York: Routledge.

Meek, R. L. (1973). Introduction to Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Millar, J. (1960). The Origin of the Ranks (1771). Reprinted in W. C. Lehmann,
John Millar of Glasgow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pascal, R. (1938). Property and Society. The Modern Quarterly, no. 2.
Polanyi, K. (1957). Aristotle Discovers the Economy. In K.  Polanyi (Ed.),
Arensberg, Pearson, Trade and Market in the Early Empires. Glencoe, IL: The
Free Press.
Robertson, W. (1818). History of America (1777). In W. Robertson (Ed.), Works
(Vol. V). Edinburgh: Hill.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Intellectual and Manual Labour. A Critique of
Epistemology. London: Macmillan Press.
Turgot, A. R. J. (about 1769). Valeurs et monnaies. In Turgot, A. R. J. (1919).
Valeurs et monnaies; Le commerce des grains; Cinquième lettre (Reprod.)
(pp.  79–98, Dubois de l’Estang, Ed.). Resource Document. Bibliotèque
Nationale de France. Retrieved June 25, 2017, from https://gallica.bnf.fr/
ark:/12148/bpt6k43249d?rk=665239;2.
 CHAPTER 6

Method and Value: Engels Through

Sohn-Rethel

Paul Blackledge

In this chapter I explore Friedrich Engels’s contribution to twentieth-­

century Marxist political economy through the lens of Alfred Sohn-­
Rethel’s work on real abstractions. Whereas Engels’s reputation amongst
theorists is at its nadir, and though his misunderstanding of value theory
is not the least of the reasons for this situation, I want to argue that Engels
remains relevant to contemporary thought (Blackledge 2019b, c, d).
Specifically, I argue that the strengths and weaknesses of Sohn-Rethel’s
contribution to Marxism when understood in the context of his debt to
Engels suggest that it would be a mistake to throw the baby of Engels’s
historical method out with the bathwater of his misunderstanding of value
theory. For if it is unfortunate that Engels’s comments on the historical
method have been overwhelmed by criticisms of his concept of ‘simple
commodity production’, the fact that his historical work informed work
as important as Sohn-Rethel’s suggests that it should not be easily
dismissed.

P. Blackledge (*)
Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 97

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_6
98  P. BLACKLEDGE

Sohn-Rethel aimed in his Intellectual and Manual Labour to fill a gap

left by Marx and Engels in their account of the relationship between basis
and superstructure in their theory of history. Whereas Engels argued that
the basic question of philosophy ‘is that concerning the relation of think-
ing to being’ (Engels 1990b: 366; Thomson 1955: 321), Sohn-Rethel
added that though Marx and Engels had outlined the general relationship
between production and consciousness, they had not explained how this
relationship worked. He thus set himself the task of articulating ‘a blue-
print for the staircase that should lead from the base to the superstructure’
(Sohn-Rethel 1978: XI). To this end, he sought to historicize the emer-
gence of abstract thinking, and he did so in part through an engagement
with what he called Engels’s ‘powerful’ historical writings, especially as
mediated through the work of George Thomson (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 96).
Sohn-Rethel argued that abstract thought emerged and developed as
an expression of a developing monetary and commodity economy.

The essence of commodity abstraction … is that it is not thought induced;

it does not originate in men’s minds but in their actions. And yet this does
not give “abstraction” a merely metaphorical meaning. The economic con-
cept of value resulting from it is characterized by a complete absence of
quality, a differentiation purely by quantity and by applicability to every kind
of commodity and service which can occur on the market… It exists nowhere
other than in the human mind but it does not spring from it. Rather it is
purely social in character arising in the spatio-temporal sphere of human
interrelations. It is not people who originate these abstractions but their
actions. ‘They do this without being aware of it’. (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 21)

This is a profound argument in which, as Robert Albritton puts it,

Sohn-Rethel shows that ‘abstraction is not only a mental exercise of sub-
jects but also something that takes place through economic exchange rela-
tions’. It is ‘induced by exchange relations … Every time an exchange
takes place, qualitative differences are suppressed in order to arrive at a
quantitative identity’ (Albritton 1999: 30; Žižek 1989: 16–21). The
strength of this general approach has recently been reaffirmed by Richard
Seaford who, building upon Sohn-Rethel’s insights, has made a strong
case for that claim that ‘it is possible to relate the genesis of the ancient
Greek idea of a unitary and transcendent self-consciousness to the histori-
cal process of monetisation’ (Seaford 2004, 2012: 81).
Seaford acknowledges that a similar thesis was developed by Sohn-­
Rethel’s friend and collaborator George Thomson in the 1950s (Seaford
 6  METHOD AND VALUE: ENGELS THROUGH SOHN-RETHEL  99

2004: 188, 2012: 79). However, he does not explore the debt to Engels
registered by both of these writers. This omission is unfortunate because
their common debt to Engels’s Anti-Duhring and The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State is a useful lens through which to
illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments.
According to Thomson, Engels’s definition of civilization is superior to
that deployed by bourgeois archaeologists, because whereas the latter
merely held to a descriptive model of civilization as ‘the culture of cities’,
the former articulated a much more analytical account that treated civiliza-
tion as the ‘culmination of an organic process of economic and social
change’ (Thomson 1955: 175). Engels argued that civilization is the
‘stage of development of society at which division of labour, the resulting
exchange between individuals, and commodity production, which com-
bines the two, reach their full development and revolutionize the whole of
hitherto existing society’ (Engels 1990a: 272; Thomson 1955: 175). This
process, according to Thomson’s gloss, emerged in the Bronze Age but
did not come into its ‘full growth’ until the Iron Age, particularly in
Greece (Thomson 1955: 178).
Engels claimed that ‘[t]he stages of commodity production, with which
civilization began, is marked economically by the introduction of (1)
metal money and, thus, of money capital, interest and usury; (2) the mer-
chants acting as mediating class between producers; (3) private ownership
of land and mortgage; (4) slave labour as the prevailing form of produc-
tion’ (Engels 1990a: 274). Interestingly, these lines are quoted with
approval both by Thomson and by Sohn-Rethel, and in both cases they
underpin their accounts of the moment when a full monetary economy
first came into being (Thomson 1955: 177; Sohn-Rethel 1978: 95–96).
More specifically, Sohn-Rethel argues that ‘Thomson confirmed and
supported’ Engels’s conclusions that ‘Greek society was the first to be
based on a monetary economy’ and that this process was significant
because of the links between ‘the rise of commodity production in Greece
with the rise of Greek philosophy’. Sohn-Rethel went on to argue that he
had distinguished between ‘primitive exchange on the one hand and pri-
vate commodity exchange on the other’. He insisted that ‘[t]he former
was contemporary with the various forms of “communal modes of pro-
duction” and evolved chiefly in the external relations between different
tribal communities’ whereas the latter emerged
100  P. BLACKLEDGE

[w]hen the productive forces developed further by the transition from

Bronze to Iron Age communal food production was superseded by indi-
vidual production combined with an exchange of a new kind, the private
exchange of ‘commodities’. ‘Commodities’ then answered the Marxian
definition as ‘products of the labour of private individuals who work inde-
pendently of each other’. This kind of exchange  - commodity exchange
properly speaking  - is the one which is characteristic of Greek antiquity.
(Sohn-Rethel 1978: 98)

Whatever the undoubted strengths of this argument it is not without

its problems. Terry Eagleton argues that there is what might be termed a
‘reductionist flavour’ to both Thomson’s and Sohn-Rethel’s work
(Eagleton 1986: 124). Interestingly, Seaford recognized this problem,
and in his attempt to extend Sohn-Rethel’s thesis on the link between the
emergence of money and Greek philosophy he sought to differentiate his
arguments from the more reductionist aspects of Thomson’s earlier ver-
sion of this thesis (Seaford 2004: 188). This understandable attempt to
improve on Thomson’s thesis is somewhat weakened, however, by
Seaford’s failure to explore the Engelsian roots of Thomson’s work for
these arguments also inform Sohn-Rethel’s work and through his ideas
Seaford’s own account of the ‘genesis of the idea of the individual mind or
soul as a unitary site of consciousness’. Engels’s historical analysis is prob-
lematic because of his tendency to conflate what Sohn-Rethel labels com-
modity exchange proper with a system that was, according to Marx, at best
only a stage toward a system of complete commodity exchange. Indeed,
whereas Marx’s analysis of the commodity form is the lens through which
he explored capitalism as a distinct mode of production, Sohn-­Rethel fol-
lows Engels in focusing not on a system of generalized commodity pro-
duction in which labor power is itself a commodity, but rather on the
monetary and commodity economy that developed in classical Greece.
The problem with this approach is perhaps best understood through
the lens of Marx’s comments on Aristotle. Though Marx registered his
intellectual debt to this great thinker, he did so while pointing to the
material roots of Aristotle’s failure to grasp the labor theory of value.
Aristotle, according to Marx, recognized that exchange assumes commen-
surability of seemingly incommensurable objects, but came to the conclu-
sion that it is in practice impossible to compare such incommensurable
objects. Marx comments that this argument reveals both the power of
Aristotle’s arguments—he recognized the limits of his own thought in his
 6  METHOD AND VALUE: ENGELS THROUGH SOHN-RETHEL  101

lack of a concept of value—and the material roots of the limits of his

thought: ‘Aristotle’s genius is displayed precisely by his discovery of a
­relation of equality in the value-expression of commodities. Only the his-
torical limitation inherent in the society in which he lived prevented him
from finding out what “in reality” this relation of equality consisted of’
(Marx 1976: 151–152).
In following Engels’s history, Sohn-Rethel effectively downplay the
distinction Marx stressed between capitalist and pre-capitalist economies.
Moishe Postone has argued that because Sohn-Rethel fails to ‘distinguish
between a situation such as that in fifth-century Attica, where commodity
production was widespread but by no means the dominant form of pro-
duction, and capitalism, a situation in which the commodity form is total-
izing. He is … unable to ground socially the distinction, emphasized by
Georg Lukács, between Greek philosophy and modern rationalism’
(Postone 1993: 156, 177–179). For his part, Lukács claimed that though
Greek thought ‘had one foot in the world of reification … the other
remained in a “natural” society’ (Lukács 1971: 111). Lukács claim is, as
Postone points out, of the first importance to modern theory because it
illuminates both the sui generis nature of modern thought as a reflection
of the sui generis nature of modern social relations and practice, and the
continuity between this kind of thought and earlier approach classically
realized in Greek philosophy.
Anselm Jappe has similarly argued that despite the undoubted strengths
of Sohn-Rethel’s approach to the relationship between being and con-
sciousness, his analysis of commodity production is limited by his failure
to pierce beneath the level of circulation to explore the links between
consciousness and production proper. According to Jappe, the key weak-
ness with Sohn-Rethel’s argument stems from his rejection of Marx’s con-
cept of abstract labor and his distinction between this and concrete labor.
One consequence of this difference with Marx is that whereas Marx con-
ceptualized capitalism as an alienated system of abstract labor, Sohn-Rethel
effectively transposed capitalist social relations back into antiquity.

Sohn-Rethel is right in saying that abstraction is a social phenomenon and

does not originate in man’s relation to nature as such. But nothing justifies
his conclusion that social abstraction exists only, or even mainly, as the result
of exchange. Such a statement presupposes that production is a non-social
sphere. In this respect, Sohn-Rethel remains firmly within the framework of
traditional Marxist approaches. (Jappe 2013: 8)
102  P. BLACKLEDGE

The traditional Marxism to which Jappe refers is, of course, the inter-
pretation of Marx’s theory of value that has roots in Engels’s work on
Vols. II and III of Capital.
Amongst those who have criticized Engels for his misunderstanding of
value theory, Chris Arthur has also praised Sohn-Rethel for his work on
abstraction. According to Arthur, Sohn-Rethel explained how abstraction
in exchange ‘is not a mental operation; it is a material abstraction’. And
this process of material abstraction underpinned the subsequent emer-
gence of abstract labor: ‘Before the positing of labour as “abstract” there
is the positing of commodities themselves as bearers of their abstract iden-
tity as values’ (Arthur 2004: 80). This is an interesting argument because
though it follows Sohn-Rethel’s general approach to conceptualizing the
relationship between practice and consciousness, it departs from his rejec-
tion of the concept of abstract labor. This is an important point because it
was through his rejection of this concept as ‘a fetish concept bequeathed
by the Hegelian heritage’ (Sohn-Rethel quoted in Jappe 2013: 7) that
Sohn-Rethel effectively made explicit what was implicit for much of the
twentieth century: the fundamental difference between Marx’s and
Engels’s understanding of the labor theory of value.
Elsewhere Arthur has argued that Engels’s misunderstanding of Marx’s
theory of value illuminates deeper methodological concerns with his
thought (Arthur 1996). In 1859 Marx and Engels published outlines of
their basic methodology. According to Arthur, discrepancies between the
two essays illuminate deep divergences between two of them. The first of
these essays was Marx’s preface to A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, followed by Engels’s two-part review of this book. Both
works are, for different reasons, somewhat opaque and difficult to inter-
pret. In the first instance, as Arthur Prinz points out that Marx’s preface
was written with an eye to the censor and thus underplayed the active,
interventionist aspect of Marxism (Prinz 1968; Blackledge 2006: 27).
Secondly, Engels’ review is incomplete. It was supposed to run to three
parts but only the first two installments were written because the journal
in which it was being serialized, Das Volk (effectively edited by Marx),
went bankrupt before Engels had time to complete the final part of
the review.
The central paragraph of Marx’s preface is an infamously dense rehash
of themes from The German Ideology (Marx 1987a: 263; Carver 1983:
72–77). This condensed summary of Marx’s theory of history has been a
source of debate since its first publication. If the 1859 preface has been
 6  METHOD AND VALUE: ENGELS THROUGH SOHN-RETHEL  103

misinterpreted as advocating a fatalist theory of history, Marx might have

mitigated this misunderstanding had he chosen to publish the much more
substantial draft introduction he had written two years earlier. He elected
not to do so because he believed the 1857 Introduction anticipated results
that had yet to be published (Marx 1987a: 261). This somewhat unfortu-
nate decision meant that one of Marx’s more substantial mature method-
ological reflections was kept from Engels. First published in 1902–1903,
Marx’s 1857 Introduction is important to anyone hoping to understand
his method. In it, Marx famously argued that

The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the liv-
ing whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always
conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant,
abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As
soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established
and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the
simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to
the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The
latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete
because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the
diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of con-
centration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point
of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation
and conception. … the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is
only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as
the concrete in the mind. (Marx 1973: 101)

The clearly dialectical but not Hegelian method suggested in this para-
graph has been subject to much interrogation (Ilyenkov 2013). As it hap-
pens Engels’s review of Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy was written without sight of the 1857 Introduction, and Arthur
argues that it suffers by comparison (Arthur 1996: 180; Carver 1983:
96–97). In his review, Engels wrote that whereas the Germans had previ-
ously lacked a first-rate political economist, Marx had now filled this gap.
What is more, his contribution to political economy superseded those of
his predecessors because his approach was rooted in a new, scientific
approach to the study of history: ‘The materialist conception of history’
(Engels 1980: 469).
Whereas Smith and Ricardo had proved themselves incapable of grasping
the essence of capitalism because they could not see beyond its horizons,
104  P. BLACKLEDGE

Marx’s historical materialism allowed him to view capitalism in its essence as

a transitory rather than a natural form. This was the first time that the phrase
‘the materialist conception of history’ was used, and Carver makes much of
it. He claims that this ‘brief notice represents a turning point in his thought,
his career and in the Marx-Engels intellectual relationship’. At this moment,
according to Carver, Engels began to reduce Marx’s thought to a crudely
materialist caricature of the same that was subsequently picked up to become
the methodological cornerstone of Soviet Marxism: ‘Marx’s work was trans-
mogrified in Engels’s 1859 review into the academic philosophy that the
self-clarification of The German Ideology had triumphantly superseded’
(Carver 1983: 116).
Carver’s evidence for this claim is flimsy indeed. To begin with, Marx
was editing the journal in which Engels’s essay was published, had asked
Engels for the review, and Engels had offered it with a cover note suggest-
ing that ‘if you don’t like it in toto, tear it up and let me have your opin-
ion’ (Engels 1983: 478). More specifically, the phrase ‘materialist
conception of history’ may have been new, but it certainly is not an eccen-
tric description of either Marx’s 1859 preface or the approach outlined in
The German Ideology. Indeed, in the first version of The German Ideology
Marx and Engels had written that ‘we know only a single science, the sci-
ence of history’ (Marx and Engels 1976: 28; Blackledge 2019a).
Engels’s aim in his review was to explicate the method underlying
‘Marx’s critique of political economy’ (Engels 1980: 475). This was a
doubly difficult task as Marx’s recent re-engagement with Hegel had led
him to clarify his ideas on this matter. As he famously wrote to Engels in
January 1858: ‘What was of great use to me as regards method of treat-
ment was Hegel’s Logic at which I had taken another look BY MERE
ACCIDENT’ (Marx 1983: 249). Marx’s debt to Hegel was registered by
Engels in his review of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
However, upon first reading a draft of this work he complained to Marx
that Marx’s abstract was ‘A VERY ABSTRACT INDEED … and I often
had to search hard for the dialectical transitions, particularly since ALL
ABSTRACT REASONING is now completely foreign to me’ (Engels
1983: 304). Clearly Engels’s task would have been easier had he had sight
of the 1857 introduction, but he had not.
Arthur argues that Engels’s essay points to a very different conception
of dialectic to that outlined in Marx’s 1857 Introduction. In his
Introduction, Marx argued that ‘It would … be unfeasible and wrong to
let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as
 6  METHOD AND VALUE: ENGELS THROUGH SOHN-RETHEL  105

that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined,

rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which
is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or
which corresponds to historical development’ (Marx 1973, 107).
Conversely, Engels suggested that ‘the critique of political economy
could still be arranged in two ways—historically or logically … [But] the
logical method … is indeed nothing but the historical method, only
stripped of the historical form and of interfering contingencies’ (Engels
1980: 475).
Arthur comments that whereas Marx had learnt from Hegel the neces-
sity of distinguishing ‘systematic dialectic (a method of exhibiting the
inner articulation of a given whole) and historical dialectic (a method of
exhibiting the inner connection between stages of development of a tem-
poral process)’, Engels ‘conflated the two’ (Arthur 1996: 182–183). As to
why Marx, as Engels’s editor, had let this comment pass in 1859, Arthur
suggests that it may well have been because ‘he was still undecided about
the relevance of his logical arrangement of the categories for historical
research’ (Arthur 1996: 186).
Arthur claims that Engels’s conflation of the logical and historical
methods opened the door to his profound misunderstanding of Marx’s
Capital. In his preface to Vol. III, Engels famously wrote that ‘at the
beginning of Volume I, where Marx takes simple commodity production
as his historical presupposition, only later, proceeding from this basis, to
come to capital … he proceeds precisely there from the simple commodity
and not from a conceptually and historically secondary form, the com-
modity as already modified by capitalism’ (Marx 1981: 103).
Elsewhere, in his supplement to the second edition of Capital Vol. III,
he expanded on the implications of this argument: ‘the law of value applies
universally … for the entire period of simple commodity production’
which dates back to at least 3500 BC (Marx 1981: 1037). This statement,
as John Weeks points out, ‘leaps off the page at the reader’. Weeks rightly
argues that, if true, the implications of Engels’s claim are profoundly
destructive to Marx’s critique of political economy: ‘To argue that the law
of value ruled for five to seven thousand years … is to argue that exchange
can occur amongst independent, self-employed producers without gener-
ating capitalism’ (Weeks 1981: 45).
Engels’s claim amounts to a variant of Proudhon’s ideas that Marx had
so devastatingly criticized in The Poverty of Philosophy, and that he had
himself criticized so ably in his essay The Housing Question. To assume the
106  P. BLACKLEDGE

truth of Engels’s argument consequently strikes at the core of both his and
much more substantially Marx’s critique of Proudhon’s reformist ‘critique
of political economy from the standpoint of political economy’. The law
of value is not 3500 years old but operates in a system of generalized com-
modity production where labor has been separated from the means of
production such that the ability to work becomes commodified as labor
power. Marx detailed the emergence of this system in his famous discus-
sion of the primitive accumulation of capital (Marx 1976: 873–876). The
fact that this argument and Marx’s earlier critique of Proudhon built on
insights from Engels’s Umrisse makes Engels’s misunderstanding of value
theory all the more unfortunate. In fact, his error implicitly opened the
door to the sort of utopian and reformist politics he had explicitly fought
against since the 1840s.
Simply put, in his preface and supplement to Vol. III of Capital, Engels
evidenced that he had ‘completely misconstrued Marx’s value theory’; and
he did so because he confused ‘concrete and abstract labour’ (Weeks 1981:
8, 55). In fact, in his introduction to Marx’s original draft of Vol. III, Fred
Moseley has lamented that the questions Engels asked of Marx about this
volume evidence that ‘when Engels started this very difficult project, he
appears to have had very little knowledge and overall understanding of
Marx’s Book III’ (Moseley 2016: 3). It is difficult to overstate the impor-
tance of Engels’s misunderstanding of the theoretical architecture of
Capital. The distinction between the concepts of abstract and concrete
labor sits at the core of Marx’s mature critique of political economy—
indeed, he wrote to Engels that it was one of the ‘the best points in my
book’ (Marx 1987b: 407). This distinction is important because it is
through the concept of abstract labor that Marx overcomes fundamental
problems with the variants of the labor theory of value as conceived by
Adam Smith and David Ricardo (Rubin 1979: 248–255). Whereas neither
Smith nor Ricardo fully grasped how distinct types of concrete labor could
be compared, Marx solved this problem through the argument that labor
has a dual character. It is both ‘concrete labour’—the specific act of work-
ing to produce useful things—and ‘abstract labour’—the process of value
creation through the equalization of concrete acts of labor under the dis-
cipline of competition (Saad-Filho 2002: 26–29; Rubin 1973: 131–158;
Colletti 1972: 82–92). Whereas Smith’s and Ricardo’s studies in political
economy ultimately failed in their attempts to conceptualize capitalism
because they were unable to extricate their accounts of the labor theory of
value from the superficial materiality of labor as a multiplicity of distinct
 6  METHOD AND VALUE: ENGELS THROUGH SOHN-RETHEL  107

concrete acts, Marx’s concept of abstract labor allowed him to abstract

from these concrete forms to grasp the more general value form. It was
through the concept of abstract labor that Marx realized the scientific task
of illuminating the essence of capitalism as a uniquely dynamic mode of
production with its own characteristic forms of social conflict (Meikle
1985: 63–70; Blackledge 2012: 33–36).
Unfortunately, Engels’s misunderstanding of value theory framed the
bulk of twentieth-century studies of the subject. One consequence of this
theoretical failure was that the conception of the labor theory of value held
by Marx’s epigones became susceptible to the criticisms that had proved
to be so devastating to Ricardo’s and Smith’s variants of the theory. This
challenge to Marx is exactly what happened in the 1970s and 1980s when
the neo-Ricardians mounted an overwhelming critique of the labor theory
of value; or at least a critique that overwhelmed the variant of value theory
that had roots in Engels’s misunderstanding of Marx (Steedman 1977).
Amongst the many malign consequences of this critique, capitalism disap-
peared as a specific object of enquiry—the neo-Ricardians proved them-
selves unable to distinguish between the exploitation of modern
proletarians and the exploitation of other producers in pre-capitalist soci-
eties (Rowthorn 1980: 14–47). Furthermore, the neo-Ricardians reduced
exploitation to a moral concept—not getting the rate for the job—with a
simple reformist solution: a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. Consequently,
by rejecting value theory a generation of left-wing intellectuals rejected
Marxist revolutionary politics for a moralistic and reformist alternative
(Fine and Harris 1979: 30; Blackledge 2004: 67, 2010).
But if the defense of a scientific analysis of capitalism required that
Marxists drop Engels’s version of value theory, it is not at all clear that
Arthur is right to suggest that Engels’s errors on this score were caused by
his conflation of the logical and historical methods in his conception of the
dialectic. Bertell Ollman has suggested that there is no clear-cut division
between historical and logical methods: ‘by uncovering the connections
between … value, labour, capital and interest … and other social factors
Marx is also displaying a moment in their unfolding historical relations’
(Ollman 2003: 131). Similarly, Ben Fine, Costas Lapavitsas, and Dimitris
Milonakis insist that the link between systematic and historical dialectic
should be maintained because other wise systematic dialectic risks becom-
ing unhinged from the material world in a way that ‘grants unlimited
degrees of freedom to the theorist when it comes to explaining particular
historical phenomena’ (Fine et al. 2000: 136). Meanwhile Alfredo Saad-
108  P. BLACKLEDGE

Filho agrees that ‘purely conceptual reasoning is limited because it is

impossible to explain why relations that hold in the analyst’s head must
also hold in the real world … The concrete can be analyzed theoretically
only if historical analysis belongs within the method of exposition’ (Saad-
Filho 2002: 19–20; Ilyenkov 2013: 202–208).
These arguments suggest that the fundamental problem with Engels’s
comments on simple commodity production relate not to his understand-
ing of dialectics generally but to the narrower matter of his misunder-
standing of value theory. This weakness is important because it implies
that Marx was wrong to believe, first, that value theory was the key to
understanding modern capitalism as a historically specific mode of produc-
tion and, second, that there was an intrinsic link between his critique of
political economy and revolutionary politics (Colletti 1972: 91; Weeks
1981: 45). Nonetheless, because the error in respect of value theory con-
tradicted the general trajectory of his politics, to correct it is a relatively
simple matter within the theoretical framework he outlined most compre-
hensively in Anti-Dühring (Blackledge 2017, 2018). It is thus a much less
destructive weakness than the claim that Engels’s understanding of dialec-
tics and method was fundamentally flawed.
Engels’s interlocutors have tended to agree with Arthur that the nega-
tive aspects of his contribution to value theory reflect broader weaknesses
with his version of the dialectical method. But whereas Arthur is careful to
distance himself from the more extreme claims of what he calls the ‘anti-­
Engels faction’—for instance, he does not allow his awareness of the errors
marring Engels’s presentation of Capital to detract from an appreciation
of the fundamental importance of his role in the monumental task of pre-
paring Vols. II and III published in the decade after Marx’s death (Arthur
1996: 175–179; Moseley 2016: 4)—commentary on Engels does tend to
suffer from what he calls ‘Engels phobia’ (Arthur 1996: 175–176).
This is an unfortunate situation because, though Engels may have mis-
understood the value form, his understanding of the dialectical method is
much less problematic. In his preface to the third volume of Capital, he
wrote that where ‘things and their mutual relations are conceived not as
fixed but rather as changing, their mental images too, i.e. concepts, are
also subject to change and reformulation’ (Marx 1981: 103; Saad-Filho
2002: 14). Dill Hunley notes that while ‘Engels did not speak of ‘rising
from the abstract to the concrete’ … a careful reading of his comments
shows [he] expressed views very close to those of Marx without using his
precise wording’ (Hunley 1991: 92). In fact, as Bertell Ollman insists,
 6  METHOD AND VALUE: ENGELS THROUGH SOHN-RETHEL  109

Marx and Engels were in broad agreement on methodological issues

(Ollman 1976: 52, 2003: 147).
Amongst the methodological insights of Marx and Engels’s work was a
stress on the dialectical interrelationship between change and continuity in
history. Despite the weaknesses of his arguments, Sohn-Rethel’s work
points to the power of this insight. He may have misconstrued the nature
of the shift to a monetary economy in Iron Age Greece, but he was not
wrong that this was an important turning point in history. For it was the
moment that opened the door to abstract thought while setting in train a
process that culminated in the emergence of capitalism. Capitalism may
have a unique dynamic that emerged as a qualitative break with pre-­
capitalist social formations, but this qualitative break was premised upon
prior quantitative changes in the social formations that preceded it. And
just as the shift to abstract thinking in the Iron Age marked, as Thomson
suggests, a qualitative change that was nevertheless built upon earlier
quantitative developments in the Bronze Age, so what Lukács calls fully
reified forms of modern thought have their roots in, despite involving a
break with, the partial forms of reification and abstraction known to the
Greeks. Engels, Thomson, and Sohn-Rethel may have ultimately misun-
derstood value theory and the nature of capitalism, but without them our
historical self-awareness would be greatly diminished.

References
Albritton, R. (1999). Dialectics and the Deconstruction of Political Economy.
London: Palgrave.
Arthur, C. (1996). Engels as an Interpreter of Marx’s Economics. In C. Arthur
(Ed.), Engels Today. London: Macmillan.
Arthur, C. (2004). The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. Leiden: Brill.
Blackledge, P. (2004). Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left. London:
Merlin Press
Blackledge, P. (2006). Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Blackledge, P. (2010). Marxism, Nihilism and the Problem of Ethical Politics
Today. Socialism and Democracy, 24(2), 101–123.
Blackledge, P. (2012). Marxism and Ethics: Freedom, Desire and Revolution. New
York: SUNY Press.
Blackledge, P. (2017). Practical Materialism: Engels’s Anti-Dühring as Marxist
Philosophy. Critique, 45(4), 483–499.
110  P. BLACKLEDGE

Blackledge, P. (2018). Engels, Social Reproduction and the Problem of a Unitary

Theory of Women’s Oppression. Social Theory and Practice, 44(3), 297–321.
Blackledge, P. (2019a). Historical Materialism. In Matt Vidal et al. (Eds.), Oxford
Handbook on Karl Marx. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 37–56.
Blackledge, P. (2019b). Engels’s Politics: Strategy and Tactics after 1848. Socialism
and Democracy, 33(2), 23–45
Blackledge, P. (2019c). War and Revolution: Friedrich Engels as a Military and
Political Thinker. War & Society, 38(2), 81–97
Blackledge, P. (2019d). Friedrich Engels’s Contribution to Modern Social and
Political Thought. New York: SUNY Press.
Carver, T. (1983). Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Colletti, L. (1972). From Rousseau to Lenin. New York: Monthly Review.
Eagleton, T. (1986). Against the Grain. London: Verso.
Engels, F. (1980). Karl Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
In Marx and Engels Collected Works (Vol. 16). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Engels, F. (1983). Letter to Marx 9 April 1858. In Marx and Engels Collected
Works (Vol. 40). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Engels, F. (1990a). The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State. In
Marx and Engels Collected Works (Vol. 26). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Engels, F. (1990b). Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy. In Marx and Engels Collected Works (Vol. 26). London: Lawrence
and Wishart.
Fine, B., & Harris, L. (1979). Rereading Capital. London: Macmillan.
Fine, B., Lapavitsas, C., & Milonakis, D. (2000). Dialectics and Crisis Theory.
Historical Materialism, 6, 133–137.
Hunley, D. (1991). The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels. Yale University Press.
Ilyenkov, E. (2013). The Dialectics of Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital.
Delhi: Aakar Books.
Jappe, A. (2013). Sohn-Rethel and the Origin of ‘Real Abstraction’: A Critique of
Production or a Critique of Circulation? Historical Materialism, 21(1), 3–14.
Lukács, G. (1971). History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin Press.
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital (Vol. I). London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1981). Capital (Vol. 3). London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1983). Letter to Engels 16 January 1858. In Marx and Engels Collected
Works (Vol. 40). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, K. (1987a). Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In Marx
and Engels Collected Works (Vol. 42). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, K. (1987b). Letter to Engels 24 August 1867. In Marx and Engels Collected
Works (Vol. 42). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
 6  METHOD AND VALUE: ENGELS THROUGH SOHN-RETHEL  111

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1976). The German Ideology. In Marx and Engels
Collected Works (Vol. 5). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Meikle, S. (1985). Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx. La Salle: Open Court.
Moseley, F. (2016). Introduction. In F.  Moseley (Ed.), Marx’s Economic
Manuscripts 1864–1865. Leiden: Brill.
Ollman, B. (1976). Alienation. Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Ollman, B. (2003). Dance of the Dialectic. Illinois University Press.
Postone, M. (1993). Time, Labour and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Prinz, A. (1968). The Background and Ulterior Motive of Marx’s ‘Preface’ of
1859. Journal of the History of Ideas, 30, 437–450.
Rowthorn, B. (1980). Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation. London: Lawrence
and Wishart.
Rubin, I. I. (1973). Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Montreal: Black Rose.
Rubin, I. I. (1979). A History of Economic Thought. London: Ink Links.
Saad-Filho, A. (2002). The Value of Marx. London: Routledge.
Seaford, R. (2004). Money and the Early Greek Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Seaford, R. (2012). Monetization and the Genesis of the Western Subject.
Historical Materialism, 20(1), 78–102.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of
Epistemology. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.
Steedman, I. (1977). Marx after Sraffa. London: Verso.
Thomson, G. (1955). The First Philosophers. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Weeks, J. (1981). Capital and Exploitation. Princeton University Press.
Žižek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
 CHAPTER 7

Marx: The Method of Political Economy

as an Ontological Critique

Mario Duayer

Introduction
This chapter deals with the so-called question of the method in Marx. The
debate around the methodological issues in the Marxist tradition are
mainly based on the famous text entitled ‘The Method in Political
Economy’, which appears in the introduction of the Grundrisse (Marx
2011a). Though unfinished and not published by the author, it consti-
tutes the only work in which Marx deals explicitly with the issues relative
to the method. It is then natural that it is the obligatory reference for the
theoretical arguments on the Marxist method.
As the chapter consists in a critical contribution inside the Marxist tra-
dition, it is worth warning, and not just for convention, that other dimen-
sions of the work of the authors here mentioned are not being questioned:
the critical commentaries concentrate only in their interpretations of the
‘Method…’, It is even important to recognize the value of these works in
the divulgation of the Marxist text, as well as being of importance to
enlarge and enrich important aspects which surge from it.

M. Duayer (*)
Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

© The Author(s) 2020 113

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_7
114  M. DUAYER

The critique realized in the chapter seeks to show, in the first place, that
it is a serious misunderstanding to suggest that Marx settles the general
lines of his method in this writing; second, and even more relevant, that,
with Lukács1 as an exception, the most influential interpretations cannot
account for the ontological orientation of the Marxist text, precisely the
fundamental dimension of his critique. With this purpose, the chapter
starts transcribing the passages of the work of Marx of interest for our
discussion. Then, it examines what some authors have elaborated to illus-
trate the most characteristic elements of what could be considered the
standard interpretation. Finally, it suggests that Marx describes the proce-
dures of science in general and not of his method, reason why it can be
inferred that the resolution of the matter is not properly of a method,
either gnoseological or epistemological, but ontological.

Marx’s Method?
The critique cannot be elaborated without quoting the large initial pas-
sage of ‘The Method of Political Economy’, which synthesizes the ideas of
Marx (2011a). To facilitate the exposition, it was decided to use italics for
the most commented passages by the literature on the matter:

When we consider a given country politico-economically, we begin with its

population, its distribution among classes, town, country, the coast, the dif-
ferent branches of production, export and import, annual production and
consumption, commodity prices etc. It seems to be correct to begin with the
real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics,
with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire
social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves 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 phrase if I am not
familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc.
These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For
example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price
etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic con-
ception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further
determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff],
from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had
arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to
be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time
not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many
 7  MARX: THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AS AN ONTOLOGICAL…  115

­ eterminations and relations. The former is the path historically followed by

d
economics at the time of its origins. The economists of the seventeenth century,
e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several
states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small
number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour,
money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less
firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which
ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need,
exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the
world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The con-
crete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence
unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process
of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the
point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observa-
tion [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full conception
was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the
abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of
thought. (Marx 2011a: 54. Italics added)

As we shall see now, in general, those two paragraphs have been used to
affirm or suggest that Marx considers his own the second  method—the
retracing phase—the scientifically correct method. Callinicos, for example,
after quoting the passage, concludes that ‘This, then, is Marx’s method of
analysis. (…) So we move first from concrete to abstract, breaking down
the concrete into its “simplest determinations”, and then from abstract to
concrete, using these to reconstruct the whole. We shall see this method at
work when Marx analyses capitalist society in Capital’ (Callinicos 2004: 74).
Carchedi seems to support an identical interpretation. Quoting Marx’s
passage in which he suggests that it is necessary that ‘From there the jour-
ney would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population
again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich
totality of many determinations and relations’, he highlights that ‘This is
what Marx calls the “concrete in thought”. The “retracing” phase is the
dialectical deduction, the unfolding (reconstruction in thought) of more-
and-more concrete, detailed, and articulated notions of reality derived
from their potential state. Each step in the unfolding is a (temporary)
conclusion, but also the premise for the following step in the chain of
deductions’ (Carchedi 2011: 46).
The author describes the process of knowledge explained by Marx in
terms of dialectical induction and deduction, different from their equiva-
116  M. DUAYER

lents in formal logics. We are not trying to discuss, here, Carchedi’s prop-
ositions, but if it is said that ‘Marx’s starting point of induction is indeed
empirical reality’; it is clear that for him, Marx, in fact, is talking about his
own method.
Foley certainly shares a similar interpretation when he affirms that ‘This
double motion is pervasive in Marx’s writing’. He thinks that Capital can
be seen as ‘a movement to reconstruct in thought the whole complex of
capitalist social relations beginning from the simplest abstractions - com-
modity, value, and money - and eventually arriving at the most complex and
distorted forms, for example, the stock market and crisis’ (Foley 1986: 4).
Basu, in a working paper for the Economics Department of the
University of Massachusetts (Amherst), famous for its Marxist tradition, is
convinced that, from the Grundrisse till the redaction of Capital, Marx
puts into practice his understanding of ‘the correct method of political
economy’, which had been detailed in the ‘Introduction’. According to
the author, Marx explains that ‘“ascending from the abstract to the con-
crete” is the only scientific way to understand a concrete reality like a capi-
talist society’ (Basu 2017: 6). Such a movement ends ‘With a structured
synthesis of determinations, which is how Marx visualized the reproduc-
tion in thought of the concrete reality he was studying’ (Basu 2017: 6).
In his analysis of ‘The Method of Political Economy’, Netto observes
that ‘the method in Marx’ is not the product of a sudden and fantastic
insight, but of a long process of investigation. In his opinion, in the
‘Introduction’, after 15 years of studies, ‘the central elements’ of Marx’s
method are ‘precisely’ formulated. According to the author, the few pages
of the work present synthetically ‘the bases of the method which made
viable the analysis in Das Kapital and the foundation of Marx’s social
theory’ (Netto 2011: 19).
The author remembers that, in the process of knowledge, of theoretical
production and of theoretical appropriation of the object suggested by
Marx ‘it starts “with the real and with the concrete”, which appear as
given; through the analysis, elements are abstracted and, progressively,
with its advance, some concepts and abstractions are reached which refer
to the simplest determinations’ (Originally highlighted, Netto 2011: 42).
And he adds, based on the Marxist text, that this was the method
adopted by economics in its origins. However, in the sequence of his anal-
ysis, Netto dismisses a crucial element of Marx’s argument. In fact, accord-
ing to him, Marx claims that ‘the analytical procedure was a necessary
element for the emergence of the political economy’, and, nonetheless, it
 7  MARX: THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AS AN ONTOLOGICAL…  117

is not sufficient to ‘ideally reproduce (theoretically) the “real” and the

“concrete”’. Supplied with the simplest determinations, as Marx recom-
mends, it would be necessary to make a retracted journey and reach the
population not as a chaotic representation of the totality, but as ‘rich total-
ity of determinations and diverse relations’. This is the ‘retracted journey’,
he concludes, the one that Marx characterizes as ‘the adequate method for
a theoretical production’. And he closes with Marx’s statement: ‘The last
method is clearly the scientifically exact method’ (Netto 2011: 43).
It is not possible to affirm that, according to Netto, Marx refers to his
method when he mentions the retracted journey as the scientifically cor-
rect method. Nevertheless, the way in which he presents and comments
on the passages of the Marxist text undoubtedly lead the reader to that
conclusion. In fact, even though he warns the reader that ‘we do not offer,
in the name of Marx, a set of rules to orient the investigation’ (Netto
2011: 52–52), his analysis finishes as follows:

The theoretical knowledge is, (…) according to Marx, the knowledge of the
concrete, which constitutes reality, but it is not directly offered to thought:
it must be reproduced by it and only ‘the retraced journey’ allows this repro-
duction. We already pointed out that, (…) the concrete to which thought is
capable to arrive through the method that Marx considers as ‘scientifically
correct’ (the ‘concrete in thought’) is a product of thought which realizes a
‘retraced journey’. Marx does not hesitate in qualifying this method as the
one which consists in ‘rising from the abstract to the concrete’, it is ‘the only
way’ by which ‘thought appropriates the concrete’. (Netto 2011: 44–45)

The erroneous conclusion that is possible to infer from his analysis

comes, according to us, of the omission of the passage, essential in the
commented text, in which Marx affirms that ‘the economic systems ascended
from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange
value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world
market’. (Marx 2011a: 54. Emphasis added.) Of course, by economic sys-
tems, Marx means economic theories, which, therefore, made the
‘retracted journey’. Now, if according to him the economic science made
the ‘retracted journey’, Marx could not consider exclusively his this ‘scien-
tifically correct method’.
Quartim de Moraes2 also analyzes in detail ‘The Method of Political
Economy’ and, contrary to the authors previously studied, he does not
seem to consider that Marx explains there what would be his method.
118  M. DUAYER

However, in spite of the interesting contributions he offers to clarify

Marx’s positions, I consider that his analysis is inconclusive.
His explanation starts highlighting the apparently paradoxical character
of Marx’s initial statement that the correct starting point is the real and the
concrete, the effective presupposition, to immediately suggest that, in a
more rigorous way, this proves to be false. Instead of paradoxical, I would
say that such an ambiguity can be seen as a rhetorical device to call the
reader’s attention, taking advantage of the perplexity aroused by the ambi-
guity. Quartim understands it in a different way, noticing, of course, that
that is not what Marx wishes to suggest. He reasserts, with Marx, that in
spite of the fact that the population is ‘the the foundation and the subject
of the entire social act of production’, it is an abstraction if its determina-
tions are ignored and, thence, if we only reach a ‘chaotic conception of the
whole’. In relation with the fact that, in Marx’s text, ‘representation comes
associated to chaos … and is assimilated in an abstraction’, Quartim
emphasizes something important in understanding Marx’s argument, and
which is not generally highlighted:

Every common noun is a universal, the necessarily abstract result of a gener-

alization operated in the collective practice. Transposed from colloquial lan-
guage into theoretical discourse, the noun usually keeps its basic meaning.
Thus, both in political economy as in biology, by population we understand
a collectivity composed of individuals living in a specific area. It is evident
that in this general level, the notion does not indicate some knowledge, but
an object to be known, which is, however, susceptible of being progressively
determined with more precision. (Quartim de Moraes 2017: 44)

In truth, when he talks about ‘chaotic conception of the whole’, Marx

refers to the most immediate form of considering a country from the
political-economic point of view, or rather, the country with ‘its popula-
tion, its distribution among classes, town, country, the coast, the different
branches of production, export and import, annual production and con-
sumption, commodity prices etc.’. Consequently, contrary from what is
deduced from Quartim’s text, in this case the population is not merely an
abstract universal as any other common noun, once it is specified by those
determinations. Besides, it is important to stress that, in spite of being
abstract, it is still a type of knowledge, a type of representation, however
chaotic it may be, which consists of some—pre-scientific, pre-­theoretical—
intelligibility of the world, presupposition of the social practice of the sub-
 7  MARX: THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AS AN ONTOLOGICAL…  119

jects. Quartim seems to paradoxically agree with this because when he

does a critique of Althusser’s interpretation of the Marxian text—which is
not necessary to reproduce here entirely—he claims:

(Althusser) should also explain that before being the raw material of theo-
retical production, the intuitions and representations constitute the lexical
heritage of each language, and it results from the social practice. (…) They
crystallize the social thought built up in each historical moment and they
provide knowledge with the heritage of ideas which constitute the materials
on which the theoretical work operates. (Quartim de Moraes 2015: 79/80)

In spite of being clarifying, I believe this passage deserves rectification,

since, such as Marx suggests on the passage in question, as well as in other
moments,3 it appears more adequate to invert Quartim’s proposition and
affirm that the intuitions and representations constitute the heritage of
figurations of the world, the necessary requirement for social practice,
and, on that condition, they are actually the material of which theories are
made. Such an inversion is not only conceptually and chronologically
more adequate, since the lexical heritage does not exist separately and
‘before’ the conceptual apprehension of reality,4 but it also explicitly states
something obvious, namely that social reality, being the product of the
intentional practice of the subjects, has to be always imagined, conceived
by the subjects in some way.
In an alternative formulation of the same idea, from the truism that any
human activity has as necessary presupposition the existence of social
structures, Bhaskar concludes that society provides means, rules and
resources for everything we do. He means that, society with its structures
is a necessary condition for any teleological activity. From this, it can be
inferred that we do not create society, but it always preexists our actions.
What we do with our practice is to reproduce and/or transform the—
material and spiritual—social structures, which are the condition for our
daily practice. In the words of the author: ‘(the) social world is reproduced
and transformed in daily life’. And if the intentional practice acts on the
preexisting structures, reproducing or transforming them, it follows that
some kind of knowledge of the structures is a condition for the practice
(Bhaskar 1989: 3–4). Said another way, it can be concluded that our
apprehensions of reality are not a result of what we ‘capture with sensorial
perception, but the result of the theories [and/or representations—MD]
in terms of which our apprehension of things is organized’ (Bhaskar
1989: 60–61).
120  M. DUAYER

In that sense, it can be asserted that Marx refers, when saying that it
always starts in population, not to a mere noun, but to a representation of
the population which, lacking an economic science, was the necessary con-
dition for the agents in the real economic life. There is no doubt that is
what Marx has in mind when he notices that

… if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception

[Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determi-
nation, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from
the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived
at the simplest determinations…
The former is the path historically followed by economics at the time of
its origins. The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin
with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc., but
they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of
determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money,
value, etc. (Marx 2011a: 54)

The economic science, therefore, at its beginning stage, starts with the
representation of population of the real agents of social production.
Quartim is more emphatic when he highlights that for the economists of
the seventeenth century ‘there was no other way of moving on in the eco-
nomic analysis’, so that Marx was wrong to qualify that way as false.
(Quartim de Moraes 2017: 45). Fact that Marx, according to him, admits
tacitly in the sequence of his arguments:

As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly estab-
lished and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended
from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange
value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world
market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The con-
crete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations,
hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore,
as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even
though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of
departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first
path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination;
along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction
of the concrete by way of thought. (Marx 2011a: 54)
 7  MARX: THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AS AN ONTOLOGICAL…  121

Interpreted in a correct manner, Marx’s argument can be described as

follows: the authors involved in the genesis of the economic science did
not have where to commence but in the common representation(s) of the
real agents of the social production. Since the social reality is always repre-
sented,5 they started from those representations so as to discover, by
means of analysis, ‘a small number of determinant, abstract, general rela-
tions such as division of labour, money, value, etc.’. Knowledge acquired
in such way, as we may infer from Marx’s text, returns to practice and
makes it more efficient because, now, the subjects act knowing some struc-
tures and the way they function.
In connection with the double journey—the round trip—of the
Marxian text, Quartim contributes to dissolve the pseudo-problem with a
simple and direct formulation, when he highlights the difficulties of under-
standing Marx’s proposal. He says that ‘It seems obvious that far from
opposing to the first path, the second one presupposes it. The first departs
from the representations of the common language to dissolve the repre-
sentations in abstract determinations. The latter works with them to forge
the analytical tools which permit to reproduce the “concrete in thought”’
(Quartim de Moraes 2017: 45).
That is precisely one of the central points of the position defended in
this chapter. But not for the same reasons presented by Quartim, who
attributes to Marx the mistake of presenting as two paths what actually
were three different moments of a sole process—of the beginning of the
economic theory—an error, which may have caused the paradoxical
­character of the introduction. According to the author, Marx does not
ease the understanding of his argument since he qualifies as false the first
path. In his opinion: ‘Marx artificially segments the history of the forma-
tion of the economic theory, presenting as two paths (one which ends, the
other which starts in the ‘abstract determinations’) the three moments of
a sole process’ (Quartim de Moraes 2017: 45).
By virtue of this interpretation, Quartim risks a hypothesis to explain
what he considers ‘the paradox of the two paths’. According to him, Marx
does not attribute to the first economists the mistake of starting at the first
path, but to the analyses which start
122  M. DUAYER

… from the obscure representation of a living totality in the nineteenth cen-

tury, when the simple elements, identified by analysis, had already allowed
the economic systems to ascend to the level of the state… The great theo-
retical mission which should have been carried out, in the second half of the
nineteenth century, was the critique of the political economy as it had been
elaborated by Adam Smith in the last third of the eighteenth century and by
David Ricardo and others in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
(Quartim de Moraes 2017: 45)

In truth, if there is something that can be qualified as artificial, it is,

doubtlessly, the hypothesis offered by Quartim, which cannot find any
kind of direct or indirect support in the original. Contrary to what he
proposes, the problem, according to Marx, does not consist in the fact
that the first economists made a mistake for not making the ‘retracted
journey’, for not totalizing by means of discovered relations and determi-
nations. In truth, the problem is that they did not abandon the representa-
tion of totality from which they departed and, therefore, they maintained
the notions on the immediately given reality, now enriched by the discov-
ered determinations, and this is the reason for which they were dispensed
of totalizing.
In short, we sought to illustrate in this section a very widespread inter-
pretation according to which the ‘retracted journey’ is the hallmark of the
method of Marx. The only exception is Quartim’s contribution, though it
is incomplete. In the next section, we show that the misunderstanding of
those analyses has its origin in the fact that they are confined to the so-­
called problem of the ‘method’, while Marx’s analysis evidently shows that
the problem is of an ontological character, as we try to demonstrate in the
following section.

Ontological Critique
The first matter to be observed for an adequate interpretation of Marx’s
thought is his categorical declaration on the instauration of the economic
systems. As we saw above he stated that: ‘As soon as these individual
moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there
began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations,
such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the
state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obvi-
ously the scientifically correct method’ (Marx 2011a: 54. Emphasis added).
 7  MARX: THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AS AN ONTOLOGICAL…  123

Now, if Marx considered that the economic science proceeded in such

a way, there is no doubt that for him, the economic science employs the
scientifically correct method. Therefore, there is no basis for declaring that
the second method, the retracted journey, is his method.
In fact, Marx could not even have the ambition of being the holder of
the copyright of the scientifically correct method, since the retracted jour-
ney is nothing more than the synthesis process, that is, the process of total-
izing, the ultimate objective of the analysis process of any science. ‘The
descending path, according to Marx, is the indispensable premise of the
ascending path. I think that what is meant by the latter being the scientifi-
cally (Wissenschaftlich) correct method is that political economy as a sci-
ence (Wissenschaft) is first established by the various pieces of economic
knowledge (Wissen) forming a system’ (Kuruma 1969).
What use would science find in interrupting the process in its analytical
moment and, thus, remaining with a group of inarticulate abstract con-
cepts? And, consequently, being unable to produce any kind of knowledge
about the studied reality, apart from the phenomenic results. In sum, the
fundamental meaning of Marx’s explanation can be expressed as follows:
every science totalizes, it forms a figure of the reality in question, a repro-
duction of the concrete, as a result of the synthesis process. It does the
retracted journey with the elements obtained in the analysis process.
Hence every science sets up a new ontology or offers scientific arguments
for the ordinary ontology(ies). As a consequence, it is possible to assure
that for him, the problem of science is not totalizing but the way in which
it does it, and the categories from which it departs:6

Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his sci-
entific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their
actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of
the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that
stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary pre-
liminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stabil-
ity of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to
decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable,
but their meaning. Consequently, it was the analysis of the prices of com-
modities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and
it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to
the establishment of their characters as values. It is, however, just this ulti-
mate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals,
124  M. DUAYER

instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social
relations between the individual producers.
The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are
forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations
of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the produc-
tion of commodities. (Marx 2011b: 210–211)

The bourgeois political economy, argues Marx, is the socially valid form
of the thought, objective for those productive relations, whose content he
tries to investigate. What he means is that it consists in a totalization, in a
figuration, in a scientific ontology of the capitalist society. It departs from
the representation, as all of them, takes distance and differentiates from it,
but, in the process, it hypostatizes that form of life, and, in consequence,
it is a-historical. But certainly, it investigates its structure and its dynam-
ics—in a logical time, without history, that is, without substantial changes.7
It departs from the finished totality, fully developed, ignores its historical
character; it proceeds analytically and produces a richly articulated synthe-
sis, without history.
Marx makes a completely different analysis with what he calls the vulgar
economy, precursor of the neoclassicism. In chapter 48 from the 3rd vol-
ume of Capital, entitled ‘The Trinity Formula’, he analyzes the term
as follows:

Vulgar economy actually does no more than interpret, systematize and

defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois
production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations. It should
not astonish us, then, that vulgar economy feels particularly at home in the
estranged outward appearances of economic relations in which these prima
facie absurd and perfect contradictions appear and that these relations seem
the more self-evident the more their internal relationships are concealed
from it, although they are understandable to the popular mind. But all sci-
ence would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of
things directly coincided. Thus, vulgar economy has not the slightest suspi-
cion that the trinity which it takes as its point of departure, namely, land—
rent, capital—interest, labour—wages or the price of labour, are prima facie
three impossible combinations. (Marx 2017: 1041)

It is therefore just as natural that vulgar economy, which is no more than a

didactic, more or less dogmatic, translation of everyday conceptions of the
actual agents of production, and which arranges them in a certain rational
 7  MARX: THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AS AN ONTOLOGICAL…  125

order, should see precisely in this trinity, which is devoid of all inner connec-
tion, the natural and indubitable lofty basis for its shallow pompousness.
(Marx 2017: 1056–1057)

Here, Marx emphasises that the vulgar economy departs from the rep-
resentation of the captive agents of the capitalist economy relations, and,
instead of turning progressively different from it, it does completely the
opposite: it keeps the ontology (figuration/totalization) immediately gen-
erated and needed for those relations, and it systematizes them by means
of a scientific apparatus and, this done, it goes back to the agents as a form
of more efficient thought in the immediate practice.8 This is done with the
seal of science.
As it was indicated in this chapter, I tried to demonstrate, first, that the
usual interpretations of ‘The Method of Political Economy’ are directly
contrary to Marx’s text. On the other hand, as the title of the section
points out, it concerns The Method of Political Economy and not The Method
of the Critique of the Political Economy. Secondly, it was argued every sci-
ence totalizes. The vulgar economy totalizes (synthesizes); the political
economy totalizes; and the critique of the political economy, that is, Marx,
also totalizes. Those totalizations constitute ontologies with a social force.9
They offer the image to the subjects, backed by the prestige of science, by
means of which they position themselves in their reciprocal relations and
in their relation with the natural world.
If every science totalizes, signifies the world for the subjects, and,
besides, provides a scientific apparatus to administer it, manage it, it fol-
lows that it is efficient in practice. Thus, the decisive theoretical battle
between the theoretical systems can only take place at an ontological
level—that is to say,  ontologies in dispute, radically different ways of
understanding the world. In other words, an effective critique is an onto-
logical critique. If, as we saw in Marx, the political economy is a form of
thought valid and objective for the social life under capital; if it is eco-
nomic science at the service of the management of that society; if it
expresses and reinforces the ontological notions spontaneously generated;
if, with its prestige, it not only elevates the common ideas to the exclusive
figuration of society, but it also provides the techniques to reproduce it,
then the critique of the political economy, as a substantial critique, creates
a radically different intelligibility of the structure and the dynamics of the
society ruled by capital, in the first place by restoring its historicity and, in
consequence, by opening to the human practice the possibility of its trans-
126  M. DUAYER

formation. It contributes, in fact, to create a new ontology in which

humanity if not condemned to the infinite reproduction of the same or to
being a mere spectator of history as an absolute contingency. In this sense,
it overcomes the positivist,  postmodern,  poststructuralist and neoprag-
matic conceptions of history.
This article was translated by Anahí Prucca.

Notes
1. See Lukács (2012), chapter IV, section 2, for a detailed analysis of the matter
elaborated by the author.
2. Without the proper permission of the author, from now on we will only use
‘Quartim’ in the references, since the Marxist theorist is widely known in
that way.
3. See below Marx’s passage on the vulgar economy from the chapter about
the Trinity formula.
4. As Lukács defends (2013): ‘We have already seen how the teleological posi-
tion consciously realized produces some distance in the reflection of reality
and how, with this distance, the subject-object relation arises in the proper
sense of the term. These two moments imply simultaneously the emergence
of conceptual comprehension of the phenomena of reality and their ade-
quate expression in language… In fact, word and concept, language and
conceptual thought are linked elements of the complex called the social
being, which means that they can only be understood in their true essence
when related to the ontological analysis of the social being and recognizing
the real functions which they exert within the complex’. (Lukács 2013:
84–85. Personal translation).
5. As Lukács observes: ‘the totality of nature can be inferred in many ways,
however strict the analysis be; in the social field on the contrary, the totality
is always given in an immediate way’ (Lukács 2012: 304. Personal transla-
tion). It is on this totality always immediately given where the subjects act
and, consequently, they always refigure it in some way. On this matter, cf.
also Duayer (2006, 2015).
6. Lukács remembers that what Marx follows from the abstract to the concrete
‘cannot start at an ordinary abstraction. […] because, considered in isola-
tion, any phenomenon could be taken, once it is transformed in an ‘ele-
ment’ by means of the abstraction, as a starting point; only such a path
would never lead to the comprehension of totality’ (Lukács 2012: 312.
Personal translation).
7. On the characteristic temporalities of capitalism—abstract time and histori-
cal time—see Postone, in particular, chapter 8. According to the author, ‘the
 7  MARX: THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AS AN ONTOLOGICAL…  127

dialectics of the two dimensions of labour in capitalism can be understood

temporarily, as dialectics of two forms of time. […] the dialectics of concrete
and abstract labour results in an intrinsic dynamic characterized by a peculiar
treadmill effect’ (Postone 2003: 330. Personal translation.)
8. See Duayer (2006).
9. On the social force of ontology, Lukács says: ‘[…] independently from the
degree of consciousness, all the ontological representations of men are
widely influenced by society, no matter whether the dominant component is
daily life, religious faith, etc. These representations fulfill an influential role
in the social praxis of men and they are frequently condensed in a social
power…’ (Lukács 2013: 95. Personal translation).

References
Basu, D. (2017). The Structure and Content of Das Kapital. Working Paper, −12,
Dept. of Economics of Massachusetts (Amherst).
Bhaskar, R. (1989). Reclaiming Reality. London: Verso.
Callinicos, A. (2004). The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx. London: Bookmarks.
Carchedi, G. (2011). Behind the Crisis: Marx’s Dialectics of Value and Knowledge.
Leiden: Brill.
Duayer, M. (2006). Anti-Realismo e Absolutas Crenças Relativas. Margem
Esquerda, 8, 109–130.
Duayer, M. (2015). Jorge Luis Borges, filosofia da ciência e crítica ontológica:
verdade e emancipação. Margem Esquerda, 24, 87–110.
Foley, D. (1986). Understanding Capital: Marx’s Economic Theory. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Kuruma, S. (1969). Discussion of Marx’s Method. Part 1. Resource Document.
Retrieved November 15, 2017, from https://www.marxists.org/archive/
kuruma/method-discussion1.htm.
Lukács, G. (2012). Para uma Ontologia do Ser Social I. São Paulo: Boitempo.
Lukács, G. (2013). Para uma Ontologia do Ser Social II. São Paulo: Boitempo.
Marx, K. (2011a). Grundrisse. Boitempo, São Paulo (in English). Retrieved from
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/
ch01.htm.
Marx, K. (2011b). O Capital, LI. Boitempo, São Paulo (in English). Retrieved
from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/
Capital-Volume-I.pdf.
Marx, K. (2017). O Capital, LIII. Boitempo, São Paulo (in English). Retrieved
from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm.
Netto, J.  P. (2011). Introdução ao Estudo do Método de Marx. São Paulo:
Expressão Popular.
128  M. DUAYER

Postone, M. (2003). Time, Labor, and Social Domination. New York: Cambridge

University Press.
Quartim de Moraes, J. (2015). Las Abstracciones, entre la Ideología y la Ciencia.
Representaciones, XI, 67–83.
Quartim de Moraes, J. (2017). As abstrações, entre a ideologia e a ciência. Crítica
Marxista, 44, 43–56.
 CHAPTER 8

Marx, Berkeley and Bad Abstractions

Patrick Murray

Karl Marx and Bishop George Berkeley may seem like strange bedfellows,
given Marx’s reference to Berkeley as ‘the advocate of mystical idealism in
English philosophy’ (Marx 1970a: 78).1 However, both Marx and Berkeley
were educated in philosophy; both took an interest in the new science of
political economy and each brought his philosophy to bear on political
economy.2 Each combines phenomenological inquiry with identifying how
abstraction can go wrong, creating bad abstractions. Marx goes beyond
Berkeley, with the phenomenological breakthrough of historical material-
ism and by introducing, with his theory of value, the idea of social practices
of real abstraction—practices integral to the circulation of capital—that
result in capitalist society being ruled by bad abstractions of its own making.
A second historical through line runs from Berkeley through Samuel
Bailey (1791–1870) to Marx.3 Berkeley, like Bailey, whose thinking he
influenced, offers a critique of intrinsic value as a bad abstraction. Unlike
Marx, who sees intrinsic value—which makes fetishes of commodities,
money and capital—to be an unavoidable consequence of the social prac-
tices of real abstraction involved in capital’s circuits, Berkeley and Bailey
see intrinsic value as a theoretical gaffe. Marx quotes Bailey as saying that

P. Murray (*)
Philosophy Department, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 129

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_8
130  P. MURRAY

Ricardians speak of ‘value as a sort of general and independent property’

(Marx 1988: 101). Intrinsic value is an abstract idea to be seen through
and set aside. Marx recognizes that value is the product of social practices
of abstraction, but this theoretical insight will not do away with value.
Berkeley and Marx take the offensive against bad abstractions: matter for
Berkeley and value for Marx. Berkeley battles materialism, which he sees
leading to atheism and a ‘forlorn skepticism’ of our own making: ‘we have
first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see’ (Berkeley 1957: 6).
Berkeley attacks abstract ideas (which I will count as bad abstractions) and
argues that matter, as conceived by early modern philosophers such as
Descartes and Locke, is an abstract idea. Neither an idealist in Berkeley’s
sense nor a materialist of the sort that Berkeley criticized, Marx criticizes bad
abstractions as he encounters them in philosophy and political economy.
With his historical materialist investigation of capitalist society, however,
Marx opens new territory. He extends the critique of bad abstractions to the
practical abstractions through which value becomes the peculiar social form
of wealth in capitalist society. Value is not an abstract idea in Berkeley’s sense,
for it attains a supersensible social objectivity in capitalist society; it cannot
simply be debunked. Value is a bad abstraction because it is indifferent to the
features that make goods useful. Marx describes the movement of industrial
capital as ‘abstraction in action’, continuing, ‘here value passes through dif-
ferent forms, different movements in which it is both preserved and increases,
is valorized’ (Marx 1978: 185). As capital, the bad abstraction value, that
‘phantom-like objectivity’, becomes ‘an automatic subject’ (Marx 1976:
128, 255). The circuit of industrial capital produces new useful things in the
form of commodities which are sold at a profit, valorizing the original value
and providing the money capital with which the means to a new and expanded
production cycle can be purchased. When Marx writes of the capitalist mode
of production that ‘individuals are ruled by abstractions’, he means bad
abstractions (Marx 1973: 164). The consequences of capital’s rule by abstrac-
tions include alienation, fetishism, domination and exploitation.4

Berkeley’s Phenomenological Critique of Matter

as an Abstract Idea

Berkeley Affirms General Words and Ideas But Not Abstract Ideas

In the Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley iden-
tifies what he believes is the most persistent problem plaguing philosophy,
namely, ‘the opinion that the mind has a power of framing abstract ideas
 8  MARX, BERKELEY AND BAD ABSTRACTIONS  131

or notions of things’ (Berkeley 1957: 7). He distinguishes among (1)

abstract ideas of a quality or mode, for example the yellow of a lemon; (2)
abstract ideas of kinds of qualities or modes, for example, color and (3)
abstract ideas of kinds of ‘compounded beings’, such as triangle, pear,
animal or human being. Thinking, according to Berkeley’s empiricism, is
perceiving, imagining or remembering. Thinking always involves sensibil-
ity; there is no pure thinking of the sort that rationalists like Descartes
prize. Since abstract ideas are neither perceivable nor imaginable, Berkeley
concludes that they cannot be thought. What cannot be separated in expe-
rience cannot be separated in thought.
What is distinguishable may be separable; for example, I can separate a
doorknob from the rest of the door, but I cannot do likewise for the color
or shape of the door. Berkeley notes that I can separate in my imagination
some things that I have not perceived as separated: ‘I can consider the
hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest
of the body. But then whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some
particular shape and color’ (Berkeley 1957: 9). How do we tell when what
is distinguishable is separable and when not? Phenomenological judg-
ments, that is experience-based judgments of necessity such as ‘it must
have some particular shape and color’, are required. The deep lesson from
Berkeley, one that Marx took up, is that thinking requires both analysis
and phenomenology. In Berkeley and Marx, criticism of abstract ideas
relies on phenomenology: we need to draw distinctions (analysis), and we
need to know when the distinguishable is separable and when not. We will
turn later to the phenomenological judgments involved in Marx’s histori-
cal materialism, which set up many criticisms of abstract ideas in politi-
cal economy.
Berkeley rejects abstract ideas, but he allows for general ideas and the
legitimate use of general words: ‘I do not deny absolutely there are general
ideas, but only that there are any abstract general ideas’ (Berkeley 1957:
12). General words are not general by referring to abstract ideas (since
there are none): ‘[But it seems that a word becomes general] by being
made the sign, not of an abstract general idea, but of several particular
ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind’ (Berkeley
1957: 11–12). A general idea is an idea that functions as an example: ‘An
idea which, considered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being
made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort’
(Berkeley 1957: 12). Berkeley brings in an example from geometry. He
takes the case of cutting a line in two equal parts. The geometrician ‘draws,
132  P. MURRAY

for instance, a black line of an inch in length; this, which in itself is a par-
ticular line, is nevertheless with regard to its signification general, since as
it is there used, it represents all particular lines whatsoever; for that which
is demonstrated of all lines or, in other words, of a line in general’ (Berkeley
1957: 12). Generality is all about how particulars are handled; a line
becomes general when it serves as an example of something general.
General ideas, for Berkeley, are ideas that are attended to in the right way;
there are no abstract ideas.

Berkeley’s Critique of Matter: It Is an Abstract Idea

To catch the modern thinking about matter to which Berkeley reacts, we
can turn to the end of Meditation Two of René Descartes’ Meditations on
First Philosophy. There he investigates the true nature of material objects
and how we come to know them. Using a bit of wax as an example,
Descartes draws the distinction between the secondary qualities of the
wax, its color, taste, smell and sound, which are ‘for us’, and its primary
qualities, extension, flexibility and ability to move, which belong to the
wax ‘in itself’. Descartes concludes with this image of the relationship
between the wax’s primary and secondary qualities: ‘But when I distin-
guish the wax from its external forms, and when, just as if I had taken from
it its vestments, I consider it quite naked, it is certain that although some
error may still be found in my judgement, I can nevertheless not perceive
it thus without a human mind’ (Descartes 1970: 156).
Drawing this contrast between primary qualities as the body and the
secondary qualities as its clothing shows that Descartes believes that the
primary and secondary properties are separable. So, Berkeley’s phenome-
nological claim that primary and secondary properties, for example, exten-
sion and color, are inseparable contradicts Descartes’ conception of matter:
‘Now, if it be certain that those original qualities are inseparably united
with the other sensible qualities, and not, even in thought, capable of
being abstracted from them, it plainly follows that they exist only in the
mind’ (Berkeley 1957: 28). If the secondary qualities exist only in the
mind and the primary qualities are inseparable from them, then they too
must exist only in the mind, Berkeley reasons. Matter cannot subsist out-
side the mind.
The target of Berkeley’s immaterialism is matter understood as a super-
sensible thing, extended, flexible and moveable, known only to the under-
standing. As an empiricist, Berkeley rejects any claim to know that is
 8  MARX, BERKELEY AND BAD ABSTRACTIONS  133

independent of sense and imagination. So, Berkeley rejects the pure

understanding, which Descartes turns to as the only faculty capable of
knowing ordinary physical objects as they are in themselves, and he rejects
its putative object: ‘But what is this piece of wax which cannot be under-
stood excepting by the [understanding] or mind?’ (Berkeley 1957: 155).
It is nothing but the phantom of bad abstraction.
Once he dispatches matter understood as a supersensible thing know-
able only to the pure intellect or understanding, what remains for Berkeley
to say about ordinary physical objects? Material things can only be com-
pounds of sensible (ideas): ‘Thus, for example, a certain color, taste, smell,
figure, and consistence having been observed to go together, are accounted
one distinct thing signified by the name “apple”: other collections of ideas
constitute a stone, a tree, a book, and the like sensible things’ (Berkeley
1957: 23).5 Berkeley goes on to argue that ‘collections of ideas’ are held
together as objects only by the will of God, who causes the sequence of
sensible ideas that make up our world.

The Phenomenological Breakthrough of Marx’s

Historical Materialism
Marx’s historical materialism, which he developed as a young man in col-
laboration with Friedrich Engels, represents an underappreciated water-
shed in human self-understanding. It opens a new discursive horizon for
social theory. Historical materialism brings the topic of the social form and
purpose of the provisioning process (mode of production) within the hori-
zon of social theory. Historical materialism demands that ‘the determinate
character of this social man is to be brought forward as the starting point,
i.e. the determinate character of the existing community in which he lives,
since production here, hence his process of securing life, already has some
kind of social character’ (Marx 1975: 189). Humans are needy creatures
and cannot survive without some sustainable and reproducible social pro-
visioning process: ‘Whatever the social form of the production process, it
has to be continuous; it must periodically repeat the same phases. A soci-
ety can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When
viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its
incessant renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a
process of reproduction’ (Marx 1976: 711).
134  P. MURRAY

The opening of this passage—‘Whatever the social form’—posits that a

production process always has some reproduceable social form.
Marx’s historical materialism does not insist simply on the uncontrover-
sial point that wealth and its continuous production are necessary to meet
human needs; it calls out the social forms and purposes constitutive of
specific provisioning processes. Marx and Engels write in the German
Ideology: ‘This mode of production [Produktionsweise] must not be con-
sidered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the
individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a
definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life [Lebensweise] on
their part’ (Marx and Engels 1976: 31).
Provisioning for human needs is a social process, and there are no social
processes in general. Marx and Engels oppose those approaches that over-
look or ignore the social form of production and wealth—treating pro-
duction as if it were production-in-general. Conventional analyses
overlook the historically changing ‘modes of life’ that belong with wealth
and the processes by which it is produced. They treat production as bear-
ing solely on the ‘reproduction of the physical existence of human beings’.
This view finds in the provisioning for human life little food for thought.
Marx’s complaint against such idealist ways of thinking is that they skip
over the provisioning process because they fail to see that wealth and its
production always have historically specific social forms, and that these
forms are of great consequence (Marx 1973: 107). Materialists and econ-
omists, on the other hand, highlight material production, but likewise
they miss the fact that a mode of production is ‘a mode of life’. As Martha
Campbell characterizes Marx’s two-pronged criticism: ‘Marx’s case against
idealist philosophy of law is that the goal of each particular way of life is
realized through the process of satisfying needs; against economics, it is
that satisfying needs is the means for realizing the goal of a particular way
of life’ (Campbell 1993: 146). Where Berkeley argued that primary and
secondary qualities are inseparable, Marx argues that a way of satisfying
needs and a way of life are inseparable. Historical materialism’s phenom-
enological breakthrough is to recognize that social form and purpose
reach all the way down and therefore must be ingredients in understand-
ing any mode of production.
 8  MARX, BERKELEY AND BAD ABSTRACTIONS  135

From Berkeley, Through Samuel Bailey, to Marx

A second line from Berkeley to Marx runs through Samuel Bailey. Berkeley
and Bailey opposed intrinsic value, which they saw as a bad abstraction,
but they were trapped in their own fetishism for lack of the historical
materialist insight that wealth, labor and production always have a social
form and purpose: ‘Bailey is a fetishist in that he conceives value, though
not as a property of the individual object (considered in isolation), but as
a relation of objects to one another, while it is only a representation in
objects, and objective expression, of a relation between men, a social rela-
tion’ (Marx 1971: 147). Bailey’s thinking stops at appearances. Bailey’s
fetishism, which reduces commodities to useful things and fails to recog-
nize value as the social form of wealth in commercial societies, is common
in economics and social theory generally.
Neither Berkeley nor Bailey recognized value as the expression of the
social character of wealth produced on a capitalist basis; instead, they criti-
cized political economists for trading in abstract ideas (intrinsic value).
They did not recognize, as Marx does, that the peculiarly abstract social
form and purpose of the labor that produces commodities is the source of
value and of money as its necessary form of appearance. Their animus
against bad abstractions was directed against the notion that value is
intrinsic to commodities and money. And we can see why. The value that
classical political economy claims is common and intrinsic to the products
of labor must be, like Locke’s abstract idea of a triangle, which is not sca-
lene, isosceles or equilateral but ‘all and none of these at once’, something
impossibly abstract or contradictory. Value’s strange social objectivity,
writes Marx, is supersensible, ‘phantom-like’: ‘The objectivity of com-
modities as values differs from Dame Quickly in the sense that ‘a man
knows not where to have it’. Not an atom of matter enters into the objec-
tivity of commodities as values; in this it is the direct opposite of the
coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects’ (Marx
1976: 138).
Berkeley and Bailey regard talk of value as a supersensible ‘objectivity’
to be the sort of nonsense generated by bad abstraction. For Marx, the
ghostly objectivity of value is purely social and real; it is generated by the
real abstraction that takes place in the market, where commodities are
constantly being reduced to money. Marx transposes Berkeley’s worries
about the bad abstraction in thought that results in supersensible matter
into a critique of the real abstraction involved in capital’s circulation that
results in the supersensible objectivity of value.
136  P. MURRAY

Value cannot exist independently, Marx argues; it must be expressed as

money, as something other than what it is.6 Intrinsic value is no mere
abstract idea that can be seen through, then discarded, as Berkeley and
Bailey do. As the product of the ‘abstraction in action’ of capital’s circula-
tion, value is a supersensible social objectivity with observable conse-
quences: ‘in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange
relations between the products, the labour-time socially necessary to pro-
duce them asserts itself like a law of nature. In the same way, the law of
gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him’ (Marx
1976: 168). Value may be a ghostly objectivity, but its effects are palpable.
Because Berkeley and Bailey failed to recognize value as the social form
of wealth in capitalism, they failed to recognize that value is a social prop-
erty of wealth in the commodity form that arises from the real abstractions
involved in the production of wealth on a capitalist basis. In denying that
value is anything intrinsic to the commodity, they, in effect, nullify the
commodity’s social form. They bow to capital’s way of appearing, which
Martha Campbell describes: ‘What is, for Marx, the extraordinary feature
of economic activity in capitalism’ is ‘that it claims to create wealth ‘pure
and simple’ and [to be] organised by this purpose’ (Campbell 2004: 86).
Capital naturally creates ‘the illusion of the economic’, the illusion of an
economy-in-general. In that fictive barren social landscape, bad abstrac-
tions such as the economic, utility and instrumental reason and action
spring up. Even when distribution is seen to be historically variable, where
production is concerned, ‘the illusion of the economic’ persists due to ‘a
confusion and identification of the social production process with the
­simple labour process’ (Marx 1981: 1023). Berkeley and Bailey fall into
‘the illusion of the economic’. Wealth-in-general, labor-in-general and
production-­in-general are all fetish forms. They are all bad abstractions;
that is the lesson of historical materialism. However, seeing through value
as a social bad abstraction will not get rid of it. The fetish character of the
commodity is intrinsic to it because a useful thing’s social form is intrinsic
to it. That is why value is intrinsic to the commodity. Only a revolutionary
transformation of the social form and purpose of production can elimi-
nate value.
 8  MARX, BERKELEY AND BAD ABSTRACTIONS  137

Marx’s Critique of Bad Abstractions in Philosophy

A good deal of Marx’s early work involved criticizing bad abstractions in
philosophy. Graduating from a critique—adopted from Hegel—of the
separation of form and content in Kant and Fichte, he regarded Hegel and
Hegelianism to be the most important target. In his incomplete Critique
of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ and in his general critique of Hegel’s phi-
losophy in the last of the Paris Manuscripts, Marx charges Hegel with
imposing logical categories, which Marx takes to be bad abstractions, on
the world and with seeing through the things of the world to the pure
logical forms, which means giving priority to bad abstractions. In the
Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, Marx charges Hegel with impos-
ing his a priori categories on modern society. Hegel leads with his logical
abstractions: ‘However, this comprehension [Begreifen] does not, as
Hegel thinks, consist in everywhere recognizing the determinations of the
logical concept [des logischen Begriffs], but rather in grasping the proper
logic of the proper object’ (Marx 1970b: 92). In his insistence on grasping
‘the proper logic of the proper subject’, Marx takes a stand against bad
abstractions. Hegel fails to meet his own standard with respect to (the
inseparability of) form and content: ‘he does not develop his thought out
of what is objective [aus dem Gegenstand], but what is objective in accor-
dance with ready-made thought which has its origin in the abstract sphere
of logic’ (Marx 1970b: 14). Marx’s repeated charge that a thinker is
imposing ‘ready-made thinking’ on the object rather than coming to
understand its ‘proper logic’ is a protest against bad abstractions.
Marx argues that, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel reduces the
‘sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification’ of humans to the bad
abstraction of ‘sheer activity’: ‘the rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity
of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute
negativity—an abstraction which is again fixed as such and considered as
an independent activity—as sheer activity [Tätigkeit schlechthin]’ (Marx
1964: 189). If that sounds like concrete labor being reduced to abstract
labor and ‘fixed’ like the congealed abstract labor that is the substance of
value, it should. For Marx wrote: ‘Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern
political economy. He grasps labor as the essence of man—as man’s essence
in the act of proving itself: he sees only the positive, not the negative side
of labor. Labor is man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as
alienated man. The only labor which Hegel knows and recognizes is
abstractly mental labor’ (Marx 1964: 177).
138  P. MURRAY

This is mixed praise. Hegel treats nature and humanity the way that
capital does, reducing them to bad abstractions produced by abstract
thought or abstract labor: ‘The human character of nature and of the
nature created by history—man’s products—appears in the form that they
are products of abstract mind and as such, therefore, phases of mind—
thought entities’ (Marx 1964: 176). Marx precociously interprets Hegel
through the lens of the critique of value and the real abstractions involved
in the circulation of capital that had begun to emerge from his reading of
political economy.7 Just as Marx insists that the truth of the thing-like
ghostly objectivity of value is capital, which is a process, the circuit of self-­
valorizing value, he says here, ‘what Hegel does is to put in place of these
fixed abstractions the act of abstraction which revolves in its own circle’
(Marx 1964: 191 note). Marx appears to be reading the course of con-
sciousness as Hegel presents it the Phenomenology along the lines of capi-
tal’s ‘abstraction in action’.
Returning to his reference to those ‘fixed’ abstractions, Marx pays
Hegel another left-handed compliment: ‘Hegel’s positive achievement
here, in his speculative logic, is that the definite concepts, the universal
fixed thought-forms in their independence vis-à-vis nature and mind are a
necessary result of the general estrangement of the human essence and
therefore also of human thought, and Hegel has therefore brought these
together and presented them as moments of the abstraction-process’
(Marx 1964: 189).
Because Hegel reduces human consciousness to sheer thought, he nec-
essarily generates ‘fixed thought-forms’ set against nature and spirit. This
bonds Marx’s criticism of Hegel’s Phenomenology with his criticisms of his
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and the Philosophy of Right.
Anticipating his view that value necessarily is expressed in money, Marx
says of Hegel: ‘Logic (mind’s coin of the realm, the speculative or thought-
value of man and nature—their essence grown totally indifferent to all real
determinateness, and hence their unreal essence) is alienated thinking,
and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and from real man:
abstract thinking’ (Marx 1964: 174).
So, Marx imagines Hegel’s Logic as a bank, a treasury of bad abstrac-
tions produced by the abstract thinker: ‘His thoughts are therefore fixed
mental shapes or ghosts dwelling outside nature and man. Hegel has
locked up all these fixed mental forms together in his Logic’ (Marx 1964:
190). In his Encyclopedia, Hegel puts logic before nature and spirit, so
that ‘the whole of nature only repeats for him the logical abstractions in a
 8  MARX, BERKELEY AND BAD ABSTRACTIONS  139

sensuous, external form’ (Marx 1964: 91). Just as useful things in the
commodity form count as ‘carriers of value’, Hegel treats the wealth of
nature and society as mere carriers of logical (bad) abstractions.8
We can see this remarkable reading of Hegel through Berkeley’s eyes as
a tale of abstraction gone wrong. Hegel’s logical categories are bad
abstractions: ‘As a result there are general, abstract forms of abstraction
pertaining to every content and on that account indifferent to, and, con-
sequently, valid for, all content—the thought-forms or logical categories
torn from real mind and from real nature’ (Marx 1964: 189). Marx draws
the conclusion regarding these ‘general, abstract forms of abstraction’ that
Berkeley drew regarding abstract general ideas: ‘Thus, the entire Logic is
the demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself’ (Marx
1964: 189).

Detecting Bad Abstractions in Political Economy

The lesson of Marx’s historical materialism is that needs, wealth, labor,
production and distribution all have constitutive social forms and pur-
poses. Provisioning processes always have inseparable social forms and
purposes, which is why a mode of production is ‘a way of life’ (Marx and
Engels 1976: 31). This phenomenological insight sets up Marx’s critique
of a nest of bad abstractions associated with political economy, which
operates within ‘the illusion of the economic’. The illusion is to think that
there is an economy-in-general and that it is the object of economic
inquiry. Usually, as with Ricardo, the illusion involves conflating capitalist
production with the economy-in-general: ‘[B]ourgeois or capitalist pro-
duction … is consequently for him [Ricardo] not a specific definite mode
of production, but simply the mode of production’ (Marx 1968: 504,
note).9 It is as if you mixed up a pear with the Fruit, or a horse with the
Animal. But the economy-in-general no more exists than does the Fruit or
the Animal, which means that economics is missing its object of study. The
economy-in-general is a bad abstraction and a generator of bad abstractions.
The bad abstraction of the labor process-in-general deserves special
attention since some readers of Capital will find it in the title of its seventh
chapter, ‘The Labour Process and the Valorization Process’. That reading,
however, twists a useful general category, the labor process, into a bad
abstraction by positing an actual labor process-in-general.10 Marx insists
that labor is always of some specific social kind even when he calls atten-
tion to the fact that the general concept of labor, being general, abstracts
140  P. MURRAY

from every social sort: ‘The fact that the production of use-values, or
goods, is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf does
not alter the general character of that production. We shall therefore, in
the first place, have to consider the labour process independently of any
specific social formation’ (Marx 1976: 283).
Marx’s general concept of the labor process abstracts, precisely because
it is general, from the tools or materials required, and from the social form
and purpose of the labor process. That has led to the mistaken notion that
Marx’s general concept of labor abstracts from these complexities alto-
gether. ‘Considering something independently’ is just what Hume, fol-
lowing Berkeley, called making a distinction of reason. To consider the
labor process apart from social form and purpose is not to claim that it can
exist as a labor process-in-general. The phenomenological breakthrough
of historical materialism is to show that there can be no such thing.
Considering the labor process in abstraction from social form, Marx
identifies three general features of the labor process: ‘The simple elements
of the labour process are (1) purposeful activity, that is work itself, (2) the
object on which that work is performed, and (3) the instruments of that
work’ (Marx 1976: 284). With these general features of the labor process,
Marx sets up his critique in Chapter 48 of Capital 3, ‘The Trinity Formula’,
of the fetishizing of the three revenue forms: interest, rent and wages.11
There Marx relies on two key phenomenological points: (1) the three fac-
tors of production always have a determinate social form and (2) produc-
tion requires that all three factors be involved.
(1) The formulation of the Trinity Formula produced means of produc-
tion—interest, land—rent, labor—wages presents the three factors of the
labor process-in-general as mysteriously invested by nature with the social
powers of yielding revenues in the forms of interest, rent and wages. In
this formula, we have the consistent conflation of the general categories
produced means of production, land and labor with the socially specific
revenue forms interest, rent and wages (and, correlatively, with three social
classes: capitalists, landowners and wage laborers). Revenues in these spe-
cific social forms: ‘appear to grow out of the roles that the earth, the pro-
duced means of production and labour play in the simple labour process,
considering this labour process simply as proceeding between man and
nature and ignoring any historical specificity’ (Marx 1981: 964).
This mismatch is the outcome of twisting the general abstraction, the
labor process, into the bad abstraction that posits a labor process-in-­
general and conflates it with the capitalist valorization process.
 8  MARX, BERKELEY AND BAD ABSTRACTIONS  141

(2) The fact that three factors of production in the production of wealth
are distinguishable can lead to the fallacious reasoning of the Trinity
Formula, which, taking its lead from the forms of revenue: wages, interest
and rent, isolates the contributions of the three factors: ‘In the formula
capital-interest, earth-ground-rent, labour-wages, capital, earth and labour
appear respectively as sources of interest (instead of profit), ground-rent
and wages as their products or fruits—one the basis, the other the result,
one the cause, the other the effect—and moreover in such a way that each
individual source is related to its product as something extruded from it
and produced by it’ (Marx 1981: 955).
Marx expands on the image of fruit, saying of the three forms of reve-
nue: ‘They appear as fruits of a perennial tree for annual consumption, or
rather fruits of three trees’ (Marx 1981: 960). Marx’s image of three fruit
trees, each producing its own fruit, recalls his earlier use of ‘the Fruit’ as a
bad abstraction (Marx and Engels 1975: 60). The image represents ­general
concepts that have been twisted into bad abstractions. The notion of three
independent sources of revenue, the three perennial fruit trees, betrays a
phenomenology of the labor process that separates distinguishable factors
into three independent sources. Marx’s phenomenological point is that all
three factors of production are required to produce fruit from any tree.
No orchard has a ‘land trees’ row, a ‘means of production trees’ row and
a ‘labor trees’ row—that is a phenomenological joke.
When Marx takes up labor as an isolated member of the ‘Trinity’, he
writes, ‘“die” Arbeit’ to mimic, I believe, ‘“the” Fruit’. This gets lost in
David Fernbach’s translation of ‘“die” Arbeit’ simply as ‘labour’ (Marx
1981: 954). Marx calls ‘“the” labour’ ‘a mere spectre … nothing but an
abstraction and taken by itself cannot exist at all’ (Marx 1981: 954). Taken
in abstraction—a bad abstraction—from the two other necessary factors in
the labor process, produced means of production and raw materials,
human labor is not the source of any wealth.

A Role for General Concepts in Marx

Like Berkeley’s endorsement of general ideas while rejecting abstract ones,
Marx’s phenomenological discovery that every provisioning process has a
social form and purpose means that there is no production-in-general—
that is a bad abstraction—but it does not mean that nothing can be said in
general about production:
142  P. MURRAY

Whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always production

at a definite stage of social development—production by social individu-
als…. However, all epochs of production have certain common traits, com-
mon characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational
abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and
thus saves us repetition…. Nevertheless, just those things which determine
their development, i.e. the elements which are not general and common,
must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such,
so that in their unity—which arises already from the identity of the subject,
humanity, and of the object, nature—their essential difference is not forgot-
ten. The whole profundity of those modern economists who demonstrate
the eternity and harmoniousness of the existing social relations lies in this
forgetting. (Marx 1973: 85)

Care must be taken to distinguish between general categories and those

that are specific to a mode of production. Marx does that here: ‘Labour is
a natural condition of human existence, a condition of material inter-
change between man and nature, quite independent of the form of society.
On the other hand, the labour which posits exchange-value is a specific
social form of labor’ (Marx 1970a: 36). When the general and the socially
specific are conflated, a category mistake is made, and general categories
get twisted into bad abstractions.

How Practical Abstraction Generates

the Supersensible Social Objectivity of Value

Interpreting Marx’s theory of value poses many difficulties.12 The first is to

get past the tenacious mistake of identifying it with the classical or
Ricardian labor theory of value. Marx does not base his theory of value on
a general conception of labor; it is the specific social form that labor takes
in capitalism that generates value. Value, Marx writes, is ‘purely social’: ‘It
is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which
assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things’
(Marx 1976: 165). Value is supersensible, a ‘phantom-like objectivity
[gespenstige Gegenstandlichkeit]’ that is the consequence of the social form
of labor in capitalism (Marx 1976: 128). Commodities have a contradic-
tory double character: they are useful things (use-values) and values. As
values, commodities are ‘merely congealed quantities of homogeneous
human labor’ (Marx 1976: 128). Commodities owe their usefulness to
 8  MARX, BERKELEY AND BAD ABSTRACTIONS  143

concrete labor; they owe their value to ‘human labor in the abstract’. Marx
identifies ‘human labor in the abstract’ with human physiological expendi-
ture of energy: ‘however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive
activities, it is a physiological fact that they are functions of the human
organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or its
form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and
sense organs’ (Marx 1976: 164).
If congealed ‘human labor in the abstract’ is the substance of value,
then how are we to think about abstract labor and its relation to value?
Here is a thorny problem.
Isaak I. Rubin rightly insists that, for Marx, value is not something tran-
shistorical but rather is specific to the capitalist mode of production. There
are countless passages in Marx that support Rubin. For example, ‘It is only
by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire a socially uniform
objectivity as values’ (Marx 1976: 166). Value exists only where there is an
extensive and well-established sphere of simple commodity circulation,
that is, only where wealth is generally produced in the commodity form.
Marx states that this is true only where capitalist production predominates
(Marx 1976: 272). But this generates a conundrum that I call ‘Rubin’s
dilemma’ (Murray 2016: 124ff). The problem is that if value is historically
specific, and if congealed abstract labor is the substance of value, then
abstract labor must be socially specific. Rubin puts it this way:

One of two things is possible: if abstract labor is an expenditure of human

energy in physiological form, then value also has a reified-material character.
Or value is a social phenomenon, and then abstract labor must also be
understood as a social phenomenon connected with a determined social
form of production. It is not possible to reconcile a physiological concept of
abstract labor with the historical character of the value which it creates.
(Rubin 1972: 135)

I agree, but, since Rubin has only one concept of abstract labor in play,
he is forced to say that abstract labor is socially specific to capitalism.13 But
this conflicts with passages in Capital such as ‘all labour is an expenditure
of human labour-power, in the physiological sense’ (Marx 1976: 137). Is
there a way out?
Moishe Postone comments that passages such as these ‘are very prob-
lematic. They seem to indicate that it [value] is a biological residue, that it
is to be interpreted as the expenditure of human physiological energy’
144  P. MURRAY

(Postone 1993: 144). Like Rubin, Postone insists: ‘If, however, the cate-
gory of abstract human labor is a social determination, it cannot be a
physiological category’ (Postone 1993: 145). Postone concludes: ‘The
problem, then is to move beyond the physiological definition of abstract
human labor provided by Marx and analyze its underlying social and his-
torical meaning’ (Postone 1993: 145). Yes, we must ‘move beyond the
physiological definition of abstract human labor’, but not by eliminating
it. There is no need to correct Marx; he provides what is needed. The
dilemma arises not because Marx’s definitions of abstract human labor are
problematic. No, the problem lies in thinking that Marx puts only one
concept of abstract labor in play and, consequently, that he identifies
abstract labor as value-producing labor. Labor is value-producing, Marx
says, insofar as it is abstract: ‘it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract,
human labour that it forms the value of commodities’ (Marx 1976: 137,
my emphasis). It is fallacious to reason: since labor is value-producing only
insofar as it is abstract, and since all labor can be analyzed as abstract,
physiological labor, therefore all labor is value-producing. Abstract labor is
not value-producing labor; in fact, abstract labor is not a kind of labor. It is
not a candidate to be the cause of value.
The way out of the dilemma is to recognize that Marx has three con-
cepts in play in the first chapter of Capital; two pertain to abstract labor.
Marx has a general concept of human labor, which is his concept of con-
crete labor (Marx 1976: 128). All labor is concrete labor, labor that is
technically specific, oriented to the accomplishment of specific purposes
such as hammering nails to attach one board to another to construct a
bookcase. The lesson of historical materialism is that all labor is socially
specific as well. Marx highlights these two features of his general phenom-
enology of human labor: ‘If there is no production in general [Marx is
summarizing the point that production always has a specific social form
and purpose.], then there is also no general production. Production is
always a particular branch of production—e.g. agriculture, cattle-raising,
manufactures etc.—or it is a totality’ (Marx 1973: 86).
According to Marx’s general phenomenology of human labor, human
labor is always socially and technically specific; there is no human labor in
the abstract. Sound familiar?
The first concept relating to abstract labor is that of physiological exer-
tion. Like the general concept of human labor, this concept is generally
applicable; it cuts across human history: ‘all labour is an expenditure of
human labour-power, in the physiological sense’ (Marx 1976: 137). This
 8  MARX, BERKELEY AND BAD ABSTRACTIONS  145

concept abstracts from both social and technical particularity, which are
inseparable from human labor. That phenomenological fact means that
abstract labor in this physiological sense cannot stand on its own. Abstract
labor is not a kind of labor, much less the kind of labor that could give rise
to value. Rather, the concept of abstract labor as physiological exertion
isolates and identifies a feature common to all human labor. The substance
of value, congealed (socially necessary) abstract labor, is a bad abstraction.
Dominated by the law of value, capitalist society is ruled by bad abstrac-
tions—a nightmare scenario for Berkeley. Since value results from practical
abstraction—not a theoretical mistake—it can be overcome only by social
action that replaces real abstraction as the dominant form of social
mediation.
In view of the practical abstractions that characterize the capitalist mode
of production, we can call value-producing labor, ‘practically abstract’.
Postone rightly insists that we must ‘investigate the historically specific
social relations that underlie value in order to explain why those relations
appear and, therefore, are presented by Marx, as being physiological—as
transhistorical, natural, and thus historically empty’ (Postone 1993: 145).
Yes, but the answer lies in the concept of ‘practically abstract’ labor as
labor that is socially validated in its most abstract characteristic, as physi-
ological labor. Martha Campbell observes that it is social labor of this type
that generates the ‘phantom-like objectivity’ of value: ‘The objectivity of
value stems from the indirectly social (in other words, simultaneously pri-
vate and social) character of production. The entire significance of money
as universal equivalent is that it mediates (allows the existence of) this
contradiction but does not remove it’ (Campbell 2004: 224).
This ‘indirectly social’ character of commodity-producing labor is what
requires the money-mediated processes of ‘real abstraction’ in the circula-
tion of wealth as capital; that is why the circulation of capital is ‘abstraction
in action’. What distinguishes it and makes it ‘practically abstract’ is that
labor in capitalist society is socially validated as abstract, physiological labor,
with indifference toward its useful features.14
Marx needs to introduce the concept of abstract, physiological labor to
explain the sense in which ‘practically abstract’ labor is abstract. From the
opening sentence of Capital, Marx tells us that he is writing about those
societies where wealth is generally produced in the commodity form.
From the start, he is writing about the social sort of labor that produces
commodities. How is commodity-producing labor socially validated? It is
validated through the sale of its products. But that sale transforms prod-
146  P. MURRAY

ucts of every sort of concrete labor into quantities of money, extinguishing

their concrete differences: ‘Circulation becomes the great social retort
into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal’
(Marx 1976: 229). Here, we have a social process of real abstraction; this
is a kind of bad abstraction that Berkeley did not contemplate.15
Commodity-­producing labor is ‘practically abstract’ labor because it is
socially validated as abstract, physiological labor, because it counts only as
‘mere congealed quantities of undifferentiated human labour’. Its specific-
ity as useful labor is a matter of indifference, but indifference is ‘practically
abstract’ labor’s social character, not the lack of one, just as being indiffer-
ent is a mood, not the absence of one. Capital covers its tracks by giving
itself the appearance of lacking a social character altogether, but ‘within
this world the general human character of labour forms its specific social
character’ (Marx 1976: 159–160). ‘Practically abstract’ labor is a social
kind of labor; it is value-­producing labor.

Conclusion: Measuring Wealth by a Bad Abstraction

Marx works in the spirit of Berkeley in complementing analysis with phe-
nomenological investigations to determine when the distinguishable is
separable and when not. These investigations enable him to expose bad
abstractions. Marx criticizes the bad abstractions of philosophy, especially
those he finds in Hegel and Hegelianism; he employs his historical mate-
rialist insight that the production process always has a social form and
purpose to disclose the bad abstractions of political economy; he criticizes
the capitalist mode of production as rule by bad abstractions (value and
capital) that result from social practices of real abstraction and he shows
how capital ‘raises a dust’ by creating ‘the illusion of the economic’, which
encourages and seems to validate the bad abstractions of political economy.
Value is socially instituted through real abstraction. In capital, value
comes to life as ‘self-valorizing value’, ‘an automatic subject’. Through the
price system and capital’s boundless drive to accumulate, value dominates
the society that sustains it. In its indifference toward all use-values, value
is a bad abstraction and a perverse measure of wealth. The perverseness of
measuring wealth by a standard that violates the very nature of wealth—
usefulness—reveals the power of bad abstraction over the society that
generates it.
 8  MARX, BERKELEY AND BAD ABSTRACTIONS  147

Acknowledgments  For help and inspiration over many years, I am indebted to

many persons; here, I will thank just three: Jeanne Schuler, James Collins and
Moishe Postone. I would also like to thank the editors, Angel Oliva, Antonio Oliva
and Ivan Novara for their invitation and patience.

Notes
1. One aim of the present chapter is to argue that taking an interpretive per-
spective ‘from Berkeley to Marx’ provides a valuable vantage point on
modern philosophy and political economy. In his Interpreting Modern
Philosophy, James Collins discusses the significance of ‘reforming the from-
to perspectives’ on modern philosophers (Collins 1972: 212–231).
2. Marx comments on the match between Berkeley’s philosophy and his
nominalist theory of money: ‘Very fittingly it was Bishop Berkeley, the
advocate of mystical idealism in English philosophy, who gave the doctrine
of the nominal standard of money a theoretical twist’ (Marx 1970a:
78–79).
3. On Marx’s relationship to Bailey, see Chapters 6 and 17 of Murray (2016).
4. See Chapter 18 of Murray (1988).
5. We may wonder if Berkeley, with his talk of observing that certain colors,
tastes, smells and so on ‘go together’, leading us to ‘account’ such a ‘col-
lection’ as ‘one distinct thing’, may remain closer to Locke’s account of
experience than he might like. On Hegel’s critique of Locke for putting
simple ideas ahead of objects, see Schuler (2014).
6. See Chapter 11 of Murray (1988) and Chapters 8 and 9 of Murray (2016).
7. We may wonder if Marx is too clever. Is Marx imposing on Hegel by view-
ing him through the lens of his incipient critique of the practical bad
abstractions of value and capital?
8. On these topics, see Murray (1988: 45–51).
9. Marx attributes Ricardo’s ‘inability to grasp the specific form of bourgeois
production’ to his ‘obsession that bourgeois production is production as
such’ (Marx 1968: 529).
10. Jürgen Habermas misreads Chapter 7  in this way. Consequently, he
wrongly attributes to Marx a conception of labor (conceived of as instru-
mental or purposive-rational action) as ‘in principle solitary’ (Habermas
1971: 137). This misstep led Habermas away from Marx’s critical theory
of value and capital toward a neo-Weberian critique of instrumental action.
11. See Chapter 14 of Murray (2016). Martha Campbell, in correspondence,
points out that the phrase ‘fetishism of the factors of production’ should be
corrected to ‘fetishism of the capitalist revenue forms, interest, rent, and
wages’.
12. See Chapter 4 of Murray (2016).
148  P. MURRAY

13. Postone (1993) and Murray (1988), among others, follow Rubin in this
reasoning.
14. ‘Practically abstract’ labor must produce useful things for which there is
demand in order to produce value, but how it is useful is a matter of
indifference.
15. Real abstraction in capitalism is not restricted to the circulation of money
and commodities: it pervades the capitalist mode of production. One of
the first interpreters to introduce the idea of real abstraction as a descrip-
tion of processes in capitalist society, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, did limit it to
exchange (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 77–78). For a criticism, see Postone (1993:
178).

References
Berkeley, G. (1957). A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.
Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.
Campbell, M. (1993). Marx’s Concept of Economic Relations and the Method of
Capital. In Marx’s Method in “Capital” (F. Moseley, Ed.). Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press.
Campbell, M. (2004). Value Objectivity and Habit. In R. Bellofiore & N. Taylor
(Eds.), The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s “Capital”.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Collins, J. (1972). Interpreting Modern Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Descartes, R. (1970). Meditations on First Philosophy. In The Philosophical Works of
Descartes (E.  Haldane & G.  R. T.  Ross, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and the Human Interests (J. J. Shapiro, Trans.).
Boston: Beacon Press.
Marx, K. (1964). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (D. J. Struick, Ed.;
M. Milligan, Trans.). New York: International Publishers.
Marx, K. (1968). Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II (S.  W. Ryazanskaya, Ed.;
R. Simpson, Trans.). London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, K. (1970a). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (M. Dobb,
Ed.; S. W. Ryazanskaya, Trans.). New York: International Publishers.
Marx, K. (1970b). Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” (J.  O’Malley, Ed.;
A. Jolin & J. O’Malley, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marx, K. (1971). Theories of Surplus-Value, Part III. (S.  W. Ryazanskaya and
Richard Dixon, Eds.; Jack Cohen and S.  W. Ryazanskaya, Trans.). London:
Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse (M.  Nicolaus, Trans.). Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books.
 8  MARX, BERKELEY AND BAD ABSTRACTIONS  149

Marx, K. (1975). Notes (1879–80) on Adolph Wagner. In T.  Carver (Ed. &
Trans.), Karl Marx: Texts on Method. New York: Harper and Row.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital: Volume 1 (B.  Fowkes, Trans.). Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books.
Marx, K. (1978). Capital: Volume 2 (D.  Fernbach, Trans.). Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books.
Marx, K. (1981). Capital: Volume 3 (D.  Fernbach, Trans.). Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books.
Marx, K. (1988). Economic Manuscript of 1861–1863 (L.  Miskievich, Ed.;
B. Fowkes & E. Burns, Trans.). In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works
(Vol. 30). New York: International Publishers.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1975). The Holy Family (R. Dixon & C. Dutt, Trans.). In
Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works (Vol. 4: Marx and Engels:
1845–47). New York: International Publishers.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1976). The German Ideology (C. Dutt, W. Lough, et al.,
Trans.). In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works (Vol. 5: Marx and
Engels: 1845–47). New York: International Publishers.
Murray, P. (1988). Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge. Atlantic Highlands:
Humanities Press International.
Murray, P. (2016). The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form.
Leiden: Brill.
Postone, M. (1993). Time, Labour, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of
Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rubin, I. I. (1972). Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (M. Samardzija & F. Perlman,
Trans.). Detroit: Black & Red.
Schuler, J. (2014). Empiricism without the Dogmas: Hegel’s Critique of Locke’s
Simple Ideas. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 31(4), 347–368.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology
(M. Sohn-Rethel, Trans.). London: Macmillan.
 PART II

Repercussions in the Method and in

the Critique of the Social System
 CHAPTER 9

On Capital as Real Abstraction

Werner Bonefeld

Introducing Real Abstraction

Marx’s critique of political economy recognizes that in capitalist society,
Man is not the subject of his own social world. Rather, he is a personifica-
tion of objectively unfolding economic forces that impose themselves on
the acting individuals seemingly according to their own innate laws and by
their own volition. Their movement enriches the owners of the means of
life and is crisis-ridden, with often devastating effect on especially the
direct producers of social wealth. At the blink of an eye, suddenly and
without warning, amidst an accumulation of great social wealth and after
prolonged struggles for better conditions, the economic forces tend to cut
them off from access to the means of subsidence and then society ‘sud-
denly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears
as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every
means of subsistence’ (Marx and Engels 1997: 18).
In distinction to traditional Marxist accounts associated with dialectical
materialism, the economic laws of development are not laws of some
abstractly understood transhistorical economic nature that unfolds

W. Bonefeld (*)
Department of Politics, University of York, York, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 153

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_9
154  W. BONEFELD

through history and which manifests itself in the historically specific

modalities of concrete social relations. In distinction to this view, the
circumstance that Man has to eat and therefore exchange with nature does
not explain capitalism nor does capitalism derive from it. Man does not eat
in the abstract. Critically understood historical materialism is critique of
capitalist society understood dogmatically as natural. That is to say, the
economic laws of development are entirely determined by the social rela-
tions of production. What appears in the appearance of society as a rela-
tionship between economic things is not some abstractly conceived nature.
Rather, what appears in society as economic objectivity is Men in their
social relations. That is, the so-called economic laws of development
express the social nature of a definite form of social relations.1 The ques-
tion of ‘capital’ thus becomes a question about the social relationship
between persons expressed as a relationship between economic things,
that is, real economic abstractions.
In capitalism, Man is ruled by economic abstractions over which he has
no control. The economic categories manifest social compulsion by real
abstractions as natural necessity. Their natural force articulates the innate
necessity of the capitalistically organized metabolism with nature. Marx’s
critique of ‘the’ economists has therefore to do with the simple fact that
they treat economic matter in distinction from society, transforming the
social nature of the capitalist social relations into pretended laws of nature.
Economics is the science of incomprehensible economic matter.2
The term real abstraction articulates the vanishing appearance of Man
as an embodiment of the ghost-walking economic categories.3 In the lit-
erature, the ‘properties’ of real abstractions are sometimes referred to as
‘value abstraction’, ‘commodity abstraction’, ‘exchange abstraction’ and
also as economic abstraction. Marx says that the ‘individuals are now ruled
by abstractions’ (Marx 1973: 164). He also refers to ‘actual abstraction’ in
the context of value as an actual abstraction from concrete labor, for which
he uses the term ‘abstract labor’, which is the category of the value pro-
ducing socially necessary labor.4 The contemporary use of the term real
abstraction in the critique of political economy goes back to Sohn-Rethel
(1971). He conceives of it as an abstraction from the use-value of the
commodity, from its material quality. It manifests the commodity in purely
quantitative terms. For him, real abstraction asserts itself in exchange. The
category ‘real abstraction’ has thus to do with the value-validity of the
private appropriation of social labor. Value-validity manifests itself in
exchange. It presents itself in the form of money, expresses itself in a cer-
 9  ON CAPITAL AS REAL ABSTRACTION  155

tain quantity of money and manifests value-validity in abstraction from its

concrete character. One hundred pound of this is the same as a hundred
pounds of that. That is, in capitalism, wealth, that is valorized value, pres-
ents itself without an atom of utility. That is, ‘there is no difference or
distinction in things of equal value. One hundred pounds worth of lead or
iron, is of as great a value as one hundred pounds worth of silver or gold’.
The one is the ‘same as any other’ (Marx 1990: 127–128, 129). The act
of an equivalent exchange therefore ‘implies the reduction of the products
to be exchanged to their equivalents, to something abstract, but by no
means—as traditional discussion would maintain—to something material’
(Adorno 1976: 80). The foundation of value equivalence cannot be found
in ‘the geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of com-
modities. Such properties come into considerations only to the extent that
they make the commodities useful, i.e. turn them into use values’ (Marx
1990: 139). According to Marx, value is the product of abstract labor—of
labor in the abstract. Value equivalence expresses therefore something
invisible that is neither divine nor natural in character. Something invisible
‘holds sway in reality [Sache] itself’ (Adorno 1976: 80) and presents itself,
however sweepingly, in the money form, in which the exchange value of a
commodity appears as a definite amount of money. Real abstraction crys-
tallizes in money, and it is through money that the social bond of capitalist
social reproduction is established. Commodities that cannot be exchanged
for money are useless regardless of their concrete properties and the indi-
vidual human needs that they could satisfy. What counts is value that
expresses itself in the form of money, which is always also of money as
more money. Labor expended in production is valid as value-producing
labor only on the condition that it achieves value-validity in exchange, in
which a concrete utility of the commodity is reduced to a pure quantity,
expressed in money.5
Exploration of Sohn-Rethel’s ‘real abstraction’ has by and large been
confined to Adorno-inspired accounts of the critique of political economy
as a critical social theory. Indeed, one could argue that Adorno’s Negative
Dialectic is a far-reaching critique of society as real abstraction (Bonefeld
2016a). After Adorno, the New Reading of Marx expounded ‘real abstrac-
tion’ into arguments about the dialectic of the value form (Backhaus
1997), exchange validity (Reichelt 2005) and conceptions of critique as
‘form-genetic explanations’ (Reichelt 1995, 2001; Backhaus 1992), which
aim at uncovering the thing-like social relations as inverted forms of defi-
nite social relations. The ghost-walking economic categories, which Marx
156  W. BONEFELD

expounds as ‘value in process, money in process and as such capital’ (Marx

1990: 256), are the categories of a social practice of real abstraction (see
Arthur 2004; Backhaus 2005; Reichelt 2007). According to Sohn-Rethel
(1978: 13) form-genetic explanation amounts to an anamnesis of the
social origin, or genesis, of real economic abstraction.6 Negative dialectic
as critique of political economy is the dialectic of the manner in which
definite social relations vanish in their own social world only to reappear
as, say, relations of price competitiveness. ‘Exchange principle and cold-
ness’ (Adorno 2003: 35) are one and the same phenomenon of real
abstraction. Real abstraction is the society as the (value-)thing (Lotz
2014: 114).

Real Abstraction and Objective Illusion:

On Social Form
The natural character of capitalist society is both an actuality and a neces-
sary illusion. The illusion signifies that within this society, economic laws
assert themselves as natural processes that govern society as if by their own
independent logic and volition. Traditional social theory conceives of gov-
ernment by (economic) things as system logic.7 In this argument, then,
the definite character of the social relations of production establishes itself
behind the backs of the acting subjects, who are compelled to accommo-
date to systemic demand.8 However real, their independent assertion is,
nevertheless, an illusion because its validity arises from a definite mode of
social reproduction. That is, Man is ‘governed by the product of his own
hands’ (Marx 1990: 772), and it is his own social product that acts with
the force of an elemental natural process. Indeed, the capitalist social rela-
tions assume the form a relationship between things, and that is, Man
vanishes in his own social world only to reappear with a price tag. What
appears in the appearance of society as an autonomic subject of valoriza-
tion, of value as surplus value, of money as more money? What appears is
not some economic nature. Rather, what appears is Man in his social rela-
tions as personification of an economic world that is governed by the
movements of coins, beyond social control. Marx’s critique of political
economy thinks against the spell of the dazzling economic forms. It wants
to get behind their secrets, to demystify their fateful appearance as forces
of nature. His critique does therefore not think about economic things.
Rather, it thinks out of them to uncover their social foundation.
 9  ON CAPITAL AS REAL ABSTRACTION  157

Marx’s Capital is not an economic text. Economics is the formula of an

inverted world of ‘silent economic compulsion’, of society under ­economic
duress. The circumstance that every individual reacts ‘under the compul-
sion’ of economic forces begs the question of their origin and the manner
in which they render individuals ‘mere character masks, agents of exchange
in a supposedly separate economic order’ (Adorno 1990: 311). This stance
raises the question about the meaning of critique in the critique of political
economy. What is criticized? Marx saw his work as a ‘critique of the entire
system of economic categories’ (Marx 1976: 254).9 Rather than arguing
from the standpoint of some abstractly conceived materiality of labor, and
connected arguments about how to regulate it in favour of this or that
social interest, society in the form of real economic abstractions has to be
understood from within its own conceptuality:

It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly kernel of the
misty creations of religions than to do the opposite, i.e., to develop from the
actual, given relations of life the forms in which they have become apotheo-
sized. The latter method is the only materialist, and therefore the only sci-
entific one. The weakness of the abstract materialism of natural science, a
materialism which excludes the historical process, are immediately evident
from the abstract and ideological conceptions expressed by its spokesmen
whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality. (Marx
1990: 494, note 4)10

For the critique of political economy, the transformation of ‘every

product into a social hieroglyphic’ requires explanation from within the
actual social relations. We need, says Marx, ‘to get behind the secret of
[men’s] 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’.
Thus, the fetishism of commodities ‘arises from the peculiar social charac-
ter of the labor that produces them’ (167, 165), and not from some pre-
sumed natural materiality of labor.11 Rather, the purpose of the critique of
political economy is to establish the actual relations of life in their per-
verted appearance as real economic abstractions. Critique of economic
categories is social critique. It is critique of the capitalist social relations as
a system of objective illusion that in the form of real economic abstractions
asserts itself as a force of nature. The critique of political economy does
not amount to an alternative economic science. It rather negates the eco-
nomic categories as inverted forms of historically specific social relations of
human reproduction.
158  W. BONEFELD

Human sensuous practice exists thus in the economic form of a super-­

sensible world of economic things. There is only one reality. Society is the
economic thing, which is the inverted world. It contains the human sub-
ject within itself as personification of her own social world (see Reichelt
2005). That is, however inhospitable to the social individuals, the objec-
tive world of real economic abstraction is the constituted world of the
social subject. Social reproduction appears thus to be governed by fate,
that is, economic objectivity entails the assertion of the economic laws as
forces ‘external to Man’ and as forces on which, as Adorno (1990: 320)
put it, “the life of all men hangs by … [to the] vanishing point in the death
of all”—and yet what asserts itself behind their back is their own world.
Men as the essence of society appears thus in the mischief [Unwesen] of a
world that degrades them to a means of economic abstractions. What pre-
vails over man prevails in and through them. Sensuous human practice
subsists against itself in the form of, say, freedom as wage slavery. What lies
within the concept of capitalist wealth—of value as surplus value—is its
social nature. As personifications of real economic abstractions, the actions
of the economic agents endow the inverted world of economic necessity
with a consciousness and a will—and they do this “without being aware of
it” (Marx 1990: 166–167).
Marx’s critique of political economy holds that the incomprehensible
economic forces find their rational explanation in human practice and in
the comprehension of this practice. It argues that the relations of eco-
nomic objectivity manifest the social nature of an inverted [verkehrte] and
perverted [verrückte] world of definite social relations. That is, it amounts
‘to a conceptualized praxis [begriffene Praxis]’ of the capitalist social rela-
tions in the form of real economic abstractions (Schmidt 1974: 207).
Marx’s work focuses on forms, at first on forms of consciousness (i.e.
religion and law), then, later, on the forms of political economy. Following
Reichelt (2000: 105), this focus ‘on forms was identical with the critique
of the inverted forms of social existence, an existence constituted by the
life-practice of human beings’. That is, every social ‘form’, even the most
simple form like, for example, the commodity, ‘is already an inversion and
causes relations between people to appear as attributes of things’ or, more
emphatically, each form is a ‘perverted form’, which causes the social rela-
tions to appear as a movement of coins that govern the individuals as
adjustable derivatives of the economic forces of cash, price and profit
(Marx 1976: 508, 1990: 169). The movement of ‘coins’ expresses a defi-
nite social relationship between individuals subsisting as a relationship
 9  ON CAPITAL AS REAL ABSTRACTION  159

between things and coins, and in this relationship, the actual social rela-
tions subsist but as coined factors of production. In capitalism, individuals
are really governed by the movement of coins. Although coins tend to
inflate or become depressed, coins are not subjects. Yet, they impose
themselves on, and also in and through, the person to the point of mad-
ness and disaster, from the socially necessary consciousness of cash and
product, money and profit, to abject misery and bloodshed. Capitalist
wealth is money as more money, and the necessity of more money objecti-
fies itself in the persons as mere ‘agents of value’ who depend for their life
on the manner in which the logic of things unfolds. What a monstrosity!
An economic thing, this coin, that really is nothing more than a piece of
metal manifests itself as an economic quantity in fateful movement, asserts
a power by which ‘the life of all men hangs by’. That is, the mythological
idea of fate becomes no less mythical when it is demythologized ‘into a
secular “logic of things”’ that akin to an abstract system-logic structures
the economic behaviors of the actual individuals by means of competing
price signals (Adorno 1990: 311, 320, 319).
The secular logic of things entails the bourgeois concept of social equal-
ity as a real abstraction. That is, equality of every member of society before
money and before the rule of law is entirely formal in character. It recog-
nizes individuals as abstract citizens, each endowed with standardized
rights, regardless of the inequality in property. Furthermore, their formal
equality as abstract citizens endowed with equal rights to trade at liberty
from direct coercion, bound only by the rule of law, is governed by the
money fetish. That is, the ‘power which each individual exercises over the
activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of
exchange value, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well
as his bond with society, in his pocket’ (Marx 1973: 156–157). Marx
writes of the money fetish that ‘a social relation, a definite relation between
individuals … appears as a metal, a stone, as a purely physical external
thing which can be found, as such, in nature, and which is indistinguish-
able in form from its natural existence’ (1973: 239). Economic objectivity
is a socially constituted objectivity—the social relations vanish in their
appearance as a metal or a stone, and this appearance is real as power over,
and in and through, them. What appears, in the appearance of society as
an economic object, is a definite social relationship between individuals
subsisting as relationship between economic things. The movement of
economic things governs the class-divided individuals as formally equal
citizens who, in and through their struggle for social reproduction, endow
160  W. BONEFELD

pieces of metal with a consciousness and a will. This will asserts itself in the
form of a seemingly natural force and regulation by invisible principles.
Society appears as some transcendental thing that governs the social indi-
viduals by means of an ‘invisible hand’, which takes ‘care of both the beg-
gar and the king’ (Adorno 1990: 251).
Marx grasps rule by economic abstractions with the category of capital.
Capital is fundamentally just a name of a definite form of social relations.12
Capital is society as economic thing, and this thing is fundamentally the
value thing. Value is invisible, like a ghost (Bellofiore 2009). The ghost of
value appears in the form of money as more money. To the point of
‘momentary barbarism’ (Marx and Engels 1997: 18) the class tied to work
hangs by the profitable exploitation of her labor power. She maintains her
employability, and therewith wage-based access to subsistence, only as an
effective producer of surplus value. The buyer of labor power and the pro-
ducers of surplus value contract on the labor market as formally equal citi-
zens. The buyer contracts labor power as resource of profit. The worker
sells to make a living. Labor-time that does not produce profit counts for
nothing. It is either expended for profit or redundant. For the sake of
profit, there is no time to lose. Unprofitable employers go bankrupt, lead-
ing to loss of employment. The notion that capitalist society is ruled by
abstractions says therefore more than it first appeared. Life-time is labor-­
time. The struggle for life-time is constant, and so is the struggle to sus-
tain access to the means of life by making a profit for the buyer of labor
power. Economic objectivity hides what is important. Hidden within the
appearance of society as a movement of economic quantities, vanished
from view, is the sheer unrest of life to make ends meet—for the laborer,
working for the profit of another class of Man is the necessary condition
of making a living. That is, the laborer makes a living on the condition that
the consumption of her labor power produces a surplus value for its buyer.
What can the seller of redundant labor power trade in its stead—body and
body substances: how many for pornography, how many for prostitution,
how many for drug mules, how many for kidney sales?
The macro-economic calculation of the unemployed as economic zeros
is not untrue. It makes clear that the life of the sellers of labor power really
depend for their life on the profitability extraction of surplus value from
their labor. Laboring for the sake of a surplus in value is innate to the con-
cept of the worker. She belongs to a system of wealth in which her labor
has utility only as a means of profit. Sensuous activity not only vanishes in
the supersensible world of economic things, of cash, price and profit. It
 9  ON CAPITAL AS REAL ABSTRACTION  161

also appears in it—as working class struggle to sustain access to the means
of subsistence and as conflict on competitive labor markets to avoid the
risk of redundancy. It also appears as competition between the employers
of labor power to avoid bankruptcy as each tries in competition with all
others to validate their private appropriation of social labor in the form of
value, that is, money as general equivalent of the socially necessary expen-
diture of labor-time. The economic argument that profit is a means of
avoiding bankruptcy is not untrue. It articulates the truth of society as
economic abstraction. Each individual capitalist has constantly to expand
‘his capital, so as to preserve it, but he can only extend by means of pro-
gressive accumulation’ (Marx 1990: 739). Thus, each individual capitalist
is spurred into action to maintain his connection to abstract wealth by
means of greater surplus value extraction, on the pain of avoiding com-
petitive erosion and liquidation of existing values. Each individual capital-
ist is therefore compelled to compress necessary labor-time of social
reproduction so as to increase the surplus labor-time of surplus value pro-
duction, expanding wealth in the form of profit by multiplying the pro-
ductive power of labor.
The fact that the rule of economic abstractions benefits the owners of
great wealth does not entail that they are in control. The personalized
critique of capitalism does not touch capitalism by thought. Rather, it
both rejects the capitalist as corrupting capitalist development for its own
self-interest and identifies capital as an economic instrument that can be
employed for the benefit of the property-less producers of surplus value.
In this manner, the critique of the capitalist transforms into an argument
for the further development of capitalism, ostensibly for the benefit of the
class that works. For the sake of making capitalism work for the workers,
it argues for the full-employment of social labor and envisages the trans-
formation of society into a centrally planned factory.13

Real Abstraction and the Time of Wealth

I have argued that the commodity form disappears as a social relationship;
instead, it asserts an abstract economic logic, which manifests the vanished
social subject as a personification of objective economic laws. The capital-
ist social subject is a value subject of profitable equivalent exchange rela-
tions. The argument of this section expounds the meaning of this last
sentence. It starts with an exploration of the contradictory character of
profitable equivalent exchange relations. Exchange is either an exchange
162  W. BONEFELD

between equivalent values or it is profitable; in bourgeois society, it is

both—a contradiction in terms, which is immanent to its objective illusion.
The capitalist exchange relations are equivalent exchange relations.
Between two equal values, there is no difference or distinction. Exchange
equivalence is entirely abstract, in that it is indifferent to the concrete util-
ity of the things that are exchanged. Exchange equivalence expresses
something invisible that is neither divine nor natural in character. In
Marx’s argument, it expresses the private appropriation of socially neces-
sary labor-time in the form of money as general equivalent of capitalist
wealth (Marx 1990: chap. 1, sect. 3). The exchange-value of a commodity
appears as a definite amount of money. In the form of money capitalist
wealth manifests the ‘continually vanishing realisation of value’ (Marx
1973: 209). Once value is expressed in the form of money, it has to be
posited again and again to maintain its ‘occult ability to add value to itself’
(Marx 1990: 255)—money is thrown into circulation to beget more
money, which is realized in the form of profit by means of an equivalent
exchange (M…M’, say £100 = £120). The conceptuality of this ‘bewitched’
reality of an equivalent exchange between money and more money is inde-
pendent ‘of the consciousness of the human beings subjected to it’
(Adorno 1976: 80) at the same time as which it prevails only in and
through the social individuals themselves. The private appropriation of
socially labor acquires value-validity in exchange with money as the equiv-
alent form of wealth. What is not validated is devalued and destroyed
regardless of the human needs that could be satisfied. Money validates the
value of things. ‘Illusion dominates reality’ (Adorno 1976: 80), and it
does so because ‘[e]xchange value, merely a mental configuration when
compared with use value, dominates human needs and replaces them’
(ibid.). Understanding of the relations of production is key to unlocking
the social constitution of money as the automatic fetish of capitalist wealth,
that is, wealth in the form of a real abstraction.
In Marx’s argument, the concept of socially necessary labor-time is the
most important. Marx’s familiar definition of the social constitution of
value—‘socially necessary labour time is the labour-time required to pro-
duce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given
society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour preva-
lent in that society’—expresses the social character of the private appro-
priation of labor in the form of a universal commensurability of a time
made abstract (Marx 1990: 129). This time appears in homogeneous units
that add to themselves, seemingly from time-immemorial to eternity. Time
 9  ON CAPITAL AS REAL ABSTRACTION  163

appears as a force of its own progress, moving forward relentlessly by add-

ing units of time to itself, as if it were a force of nature that ticks and tocks
human life dissociated from the time of actual events. This appearance is
real. In capitalism ‘time is ontologised’ (Adorno 1990: 331). This ontolo-
gized time is the time of value, and the time of value is the time of socially
necessary labor. The time of value is a real abstraction. It asserts itself in
exchange as an equivalent exchange between equal units of social labor-­
time.14 The holy trinity of social labor, socially necessary labor-time, and
value-validity in exchange is invisible. Its objectivity is spectral. Nevertheless,
the ghostlike objectivity of value becomes visible in the money form; back
in production, the ghost turns into a Vampire that feeds on living labor as
the human material of value that begets a surplus and is thus greater than
itself (see Bellofiore 2009: 185). Socially necessary labor-time is not fixed
and given. The labor-time that ‘was yesterday undoubtedly socially neces-
sary for the production of a yard of linen, ceases to be so to-day’ (Marx
1990: 202). Whether the concrete expenditure of labor-time is valid as
socially necessary labor-time can only be established post-festum in
exchange. On the pain of ruin, the expenditure of living labor is thus done
in the hope that it will turn out to be socially necessary, and that it will
thus achieve value-validity in exchange with money. ‘Time is money’, said
Benjamin Franklin, and one might add that therefore money is time. If,
then, capitalism reduces everything to time, an abstract time, divisible into
equal, homogeneous and constant units that move on from unit to unit,
dissociated from concrete human circumstances and purposes, then, time
really is everything. If time is everything, [then] man is nothing; he is, at the
most, time’s carcase (Marx 1975: 127)—a carcass of ‘personified labour-­
time’ (Marx 1990: 352–353). Expenditure of socially valid labor does not
occur in its own good time. It occurs within time, that is, the time of value
as expenditure of socially necessary labor-time. The abstraction of the
exchange process, which Sohn Rethel’s term real abstraction highlights,
‘lies therefore not in the abstracting mode of though by the sociologist,
but in society itself’ (Adorno 1997b [2000]: 32). That is, ‘the conversion
of all commodities into labour-time is no greater an abstraction, but is no
less real, than the resolution of all organic bodies into air’ (Marx 1971:
30). The time of capitalist labor appears in the form of a profitable accu-
mulation of some abstract form of wealth, of money that yields more
money. What cannot be turned into profit is burned.
The capitalist exchange relations posit the exchange of money for more
money as an equivalent exchange (M…M’). What appears in the appear-
164  W. BONEFELD

ance of an equivalent exchange of money as more money is the difference

between the value of labor power and the total value produced during the
working day. The value of labor power is the socially necessary labor-time
required for the social reproduction of labor power. It is thus the time
needed for the reproduction of a class of workers. The employment of
labor power reproduces this value of labor power during a certain part of
the working day, which Marx calls necessary labor-time. Any time spent at
work beyond this labor-time is in surplus to the reproduction of the value
of labor-power. Marx calls this labor-time surplus labor-time. It is the time
of surplus value production. The mysterious character of an equivalent
exchange of money for more money has thus to do with the transforma-
tion of the commodity labor power into a surplus value producing labor
activity (M…P…M’).15 For the sake of more money, the reduction of the
labor-time spent by the worker to reproduce her life is of the essence. It is
the condition for extending the labor-time beyond the time necessary for
the (simple) reproduction of society. This extended labor-time comprises
the surplus labor-time that expands social wealth, creating a surplus in
value, the foundation of profit. The understanding, then, of the mysteri-
ous character of an equivalence exchange between unequal values lies ‘in
the concept of surplus value’ (Adorno 1997a [1962]: 508). Expanding on
Sohn-Rethel’s concept of real abstraction as a matter arising in exchange,
Adorno thus argues that the equivalence exchange relations are founded
‘on the class relationship’ between the owners of the means of production
and the producers of surplus value, and he argues that this social relation-
ship vanishes in its economic appearance as an exchange between one
quantity of money for another (506). Society as real abstraction of eco-
nomic objectivity encompasses surplus value extraction as its hid-
den premise.

Conclusion
Neither the capitalist nor the banker, nor, indeed, the worker can extricate
themselves from the reality in which they live and which asserts itself not
only over them but also through them, and by means of them. Society as
economic subject prevails through the individuals. Money does not only
make the world go round, its possession establishes the connection to the
means of life. The struggle for access to the means of life is a struggle for
money—it governs the mentality of bourgeois society. What a misery! In
 9  ON CAPITAL AS REAL ABSTRACTION  165

the face of great social wealth, the producers of surplus value sustain them-
selves from one day to the next as the readily available human material for
capitalist wealth. Indeed, making ends meet is the real life-activity of living
labor. Nothing is what it seems. The struggle for money (as more money)
governs the mentality of bourgeois society as, seemingly, a thing in-itself.
The ‘movement of society’ is not only ‘antagonistic from the outset’
(Adorno 1990: 304). It also ‘maintains itself only through antagonism’
(311). That is, class struggle is the objective necessity of the false society.
It belongs to its concept. Hidden within ∆K rages the struggle to make
ends meet and achieve social reproduction.16 The working class does not
struggle for socialism. It struggles to satisfy its needs. The struggle of the
dispossessed sellers of labor power is ‘dictated by hunger’ (Adorno
2005: 102).
In distinction to traditional Marxist conceptions, to be a productive
laborer is not an ontologically privileged position. Rather, ‘it is a great
misfortune’ (Marx 1990: 644). In Capital, Marx develops the capitalist
class relations from the sale of the commodity labor power. However, the
trade in labor power presupposes the divorce of dependent labor from the
means of subsistence, creating the property-less laborer as the indepen-
dent seller of labor power. Coercion as the foundation of the sale of labor
and economic compulsion is the condition of the free and equal trade in
labor power (see Bonefeld 2011). On the one hand, the labor market is
the institution of the buying and selling of labor power on the basis of
contract between formally equal traders—the one buying for the sake of
making a profit, the other selling for the sake of making a living. On the
other it comprises labor market competition between individualized sellers
of labor power, each seeking to maintain themselves in gendered and
racialized, and also nationalized labor markets where the term cutthroat
competition is experienced in various forms, from arson attack to class
solidarity, and from destitution to collective bargaining, from gangland
thuggery to communal forms of organizing subsistence-support, from
strike-breaking to collective action.
Innate to the existence of a class of dispossessed sellers of labor power
is the struggle, collectively or against each other, or both, for access to the
means of subsistence. The struggle of the working class is one for wages
and conditions; it is a struggle for access to the means of life and for life.
It is a struggle against the buyer’s ‘were-wolf’s hunger for surplus labour’
and appropriation of additional atoms of unpaid labor-time, and thus
166  W. BONEFELD

against the reduction of their life to a mere time’s carcase. They struggle
against a life constituting solely of labor-time and thus against a reduction
of human life to a mere economic resource, and they struggle for employ-
ment to establish access to the means of life. They thus struggle for human
significance and, above all, for food, shelter, clothing, warmth, love, affec-
tion, knowledge, time for enjoyment and dignity. Their struggle as a class
‘in-itself’ really is a struggle ‘for-itself’: for life, human distinction, life-­
time and, above all, satisfaction of basic human needs. The working class
struggles for making ends meet, for subsistence and comfort. It does all of
this in conditions, in which the increase in material wealth that it has pro-
duced pushes beyond the limits of its capitalist form. And then, repeating
an earlier quotation, society ‘suddenly finds itself put back into a state of
momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devasta-
tion had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence’ (Marx and
Engels 1997: 18).
The dictum that ‘capital is class struggle’ (Holloway 1991: 170) does
not express something positive or desirable. Rather, it amounts to a judg-
ment on the capitalistically organized social relations of production, in
which ‘the needs of human beings, the satisfaction of human beings, is
never more than a sideshow’ (Adorno 2008: 51). The class struggle is the
dynamic force of the society as the thing of real economic abstraction, of
wealth as a value abstraction.
In conclusion, the critique of class society does not find its positive
resolution in the achievement of fair and just exchange relations between
the buyers of labor power and the producers of surplus value. Redistribution
of wealth in favor of property-less workers ‘who chew word to fill their
bellies’ (Adorno 2005: 102) is absolutely necessary to sustain them in
greater comfort. For this reason, redistribution is also the convenient fic-
tion of a socialist critique, which envisages capitalist transformation in the
form of a labor economy that is comfortable for the wage slaves. The cri-
tique of class society finds its positive resolution only in the classless soci-
ety, in which the social individuals no longer objectify themselves in the
form of a movement of real economic abstractions that are fed by a depen-
dent class of surplus value producers. Rather, this society objectifies itself
as a society of communist individuals.
 9  ON CAPITAL AS REAL ABSTRACTION  167

Notes
1. On the points raised here, see Gunn (1992), Murray (2016), Postone
(1993) and Bonefeld (2014). On social nature, see Schmidt (1971).
2. Economics deals with economic quantities without being able to tell us
what they are. For the sake of establishing itself as a science of economy
matters, it seeks to make economic things intelligible. For this reason, it
rejects the inclusion of the human social relations into economic argument
as a metaphysical distraction. Economics is, however, quite unable to estab-
lish itself as social science in distinction to society. As Joan Robinson put it
in exasperation about the seeming inability of economics to establish itself
as a science of economic matter: ‘K is capital, ∆K is investment. Then what
is K? Why, capital of course. It must mean something, so let us get on with
the analysis, and do not bother about these officious prigs who ask us to say
what it means’ (1962: 68). On the difficulty of economics to establish itself
as a discipline without subject matter, see Bonefeld (2014 chap. 2).
3. On ghost-walking, see Marx (1966, chap. 48).
4. On abstract labor, see Bonefeld (2010).
5. On Sohn-Rethel conception of real abstraction, see Engster and Schlaudt
(2018).
6. The German original says Historischer Materialismus ist Anamnesis der
Genese.
7. Traditional social theory divides society into system-logic and social action
and considers this divide as a dialectic of structure and struggle or structure
and agency, which is the premise of hegemonic social theory (see Bonefeld
1993, 2016b). Economics conceives of it as a relationship between spon-
taneous market structure and rational individual behavior.
8. In distinction, Habermas’ social theory accords to acting subjects the
power to prevent the total colonization of their life-world by the forces of
the system, keeping a space for non-instrumental properties, such as empa-
thy and human warmth. On Habermas as a traditional thinker of system-
logic and social action, see Reichelt (2000) and Henning (2018).
9. Emphasis added, and translation altered, based on the German original.
10. See Postone (1993) for a critique of Marxian economics as a series of pro-
grammatic statements about the rational planning of essentially capitalist
labor relations. Contemporary notions of anti-austerity as a politics of eco-
nomic planning present the same misconceived idea. See, for example,
Panitch et  al. (2011) and Varoufakis (2013). For critique, see Bonefeld
(2012) and Grollios (2016).
11. As the tradition of dialectical materialism argues wrongly. On this point,
see also footnote 1.
12. On this, see Bonefeld (2014).
168  W. BONEFELD

13. Leninism is not an alternative to capitalism, nor are its reformist competi-
tors or radical off-springs.
14. On this, see Bonefeld (2010).
15. M…P…M’ (or M…M’, for short) is the classical expressions for the trans-
formation of Money into the Production of essentially surplus value that is
realized in exchange in the form of greater amount of Money that expresses
the extracted surplus value in the form of profit. See Bonefeld (1996) for a
fuller account.
16. On ∆K, see footnote 2.

References
Adorno, Th. (1976). Sociology and Empirical Research. In T. Adorno, H. Albert,
R. Dahrendorf, J. Habermas, J. Pilot, & K. Popper (Eds.), The Positivist Dispute
in German Sociology (pp.  68–86, G.  Adey & D.  Frisby, Trans.). London:
Heinemann.
Adorno, T. (1990). Negative Dialectics. London: Verso.
Adorno, T. (1997a). Seminar Mitschrift of 1962. Appendix. In H.-G. Backhaus
(Ed.), Dialektik der Wertform (pp. 501–512). Freiburg: Ḉa ira.
Adorno, T. (1997b). Seminar Mitschrift of (2000). In Introduction to Sociology.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Adorno, T. (2003). Graeculus. Notizen zu Philosophie und Gesellschaft. In
R.  Tiedemann (Ed.), Frankfurter Adorno Blaetter (Vol. VIII, pp.  9–41).
Frankfurt: Edition Text und Kritik.
Adorno, T. (2005). Minima Moralia. London: Verso.
Adorno, T. (2008). Lectures on History and Freedom. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Arthur, C. (2004). The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. Leiden: Brill.
Backhaus, H.  G. (1992). Between Philosophy and Science: Marxian Social
Economy as Critical Theory. In W.  Bonefeld, R.  Gunn, & K.  Psychopedis
(Eds.), Open Marxism (Vol. I, pp. 93–132). London: Pluto.
Backhaus, H. G. (1997). Dialektik der Wertform. Freiburg: Ḉa ira.
Backhaus, H.  G. (2005). Some Aspects of Marx’s Concept of Critique in the
Context of His Economic-Philosophical Theory. In W.  Bonefeld &
K. Psychopedis (Eds.), Human Dignity. Social Autonomy and the Critique of
Capitalism (pp. 13–29). London: Routledge.
Bellofiore, R. (2009). A Ghost Turning into a Vampire. In R.  Bellofiore &
R. Fenischi (Eds.), Re-reading Marx (pp. 178–194). London: Palgrave.
Bonefeld, W. (1993). Crisis of Theory. Capital & Class, 17(2), 25–47.
Bonefeld, W. (1996). Money, Equality and Exploitation. In W.  Bonefeld &
J.  Holloway (Eds.), Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money
(pp. 178–209). London: Palgrave.
 9  ON CAPITAL AS REAL ABSTRACTION  169

Bonefeld, W. (2010). Abstract Labour: Against Its Nature and on Its Time.
Capital & Class, 34(2), 257–276.
Bonefeld, W. (2011). Primitive Accumulation and Capitalist Accumulation. Science
& Society, 75(3), 379–399.
Bonefeld, W. (2012). From Humanity to Nationality to Bestiality. Ephemera,
12(4), 445–553.
Bonefeld, W. (2014). Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy.
London: Bloomsbury.
Bonefeld, W. (2016a). Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Economic
Objectivity. History of the Human Sciences, 29(2), 60–76.
Bonefeld, W. (2016b). Bringing Critical Theory Back in at a Time of Misery.
Capital & Class, 40(2), 233–244.
Engster, F., & Schlaudt, O. (2018). Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Real Abstraction and the
Unity of Commodity-Form and Thought Form. In B. Best, W. Bonefeld, &
C.  O’Kane (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory
(Vol. I, pp. 284–301). London: Sage.
Grollios, V. (2016). Syriza’s Delusions and the Nihilism of Bourgeois Culture.
Constellations, 23(3), 404–412.
Gunn, R. (1992). Against Historical Materialism. In W.  Bonefeld, R.  Gunn, &
K. Psychopedis (Eds.), Open Marxism (Vol. II, pp. 1–45). London: Pluto.
Henning, C. (2018). Jürgen Habermas: Against Obstacles to Public Debates. In
B. Best, W. Bonefeld, & C. O’Kane (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt
School Critical Theory (Vol. I). London: Sage, forthcoming.
Holloway, J. (1991). Capital Is Class Struggle. In W.  Bonefeld & J.  Holloway
(Eds.), Post-Fordism and Social Form (pp. 170–175). London: Palgrave.
Lotz, C. (2014). The Capitalist Schema. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Marx, K. (1966). Capital (Vol. III). Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx, K. (1971). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. London:
Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1975). The Poverty of Philosophy. In Marx/Engels Collected Works
(MECW) (Vol. 6). London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, K. (1976). Theories of Surplus Value (Vol. III). London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, K. (1990). Capital (Vol. I). London: Penguin.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1997). The Communist Manifesto. London: Pluto.
Murray, P. (2016). The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form.
Leiden: Brill.
Panitch, L., Albo, G., & Chibber, V. (2011). Preface, Socialist Register 2012 (pp.
IX–XII). London: Merlin Press.
Postone, M. (1993). Time, Labour and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
170  W. BONEFELD

Reichelt, H. (1995). Why Did Marx Conceal His Dialectical Method? In

W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, J. Holloway, & K. Psychopedis (Eds.), Open Marxism
(Vol. 3, pp. 40–83). London: Pluto.
Reichelt, H. (2000). Jürgen Habermas’ Reconstruction of Historical Materialism.
In W. Bonefeld & K. Psychopedis (Eds.), The Politics of Change (pp. 105–145).
London: Palgrave.
Reichelt, H. (2001). Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx.
Freiburg: Ḉa ira.
Reichelt, H. (2005). Social Reality as Appearance: Some Notes on Marx’s
Conception of Reality. In W.  Bonefeld & K.  Psychopedis (Eds.), Human
Dignity. Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism (pp. 31–67). London:
Routledge.
Reichelt, H. (2007). Marx’s Critique of Economic Categories: Reflections on the
Problem of Validity in the Dialectical Method of Presentation in Capital.
Historical Materialism, 15(4), 3–52.
Robinson, J. (1962). Economic Philosophy. An Essay on the Progress of Economic
Thought. New York: Adlin Publishing.
Schmidt, A. (1971). The Concept of Nature in Marx. London: New Left Books.
Schmidt, A. (1974). Praxis. In Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie 2
(pp. 264–306). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1971). Materialistische Erkenntniskritik und Vergesellschaftung
der Arbeit (Marxistische Diskussion 19). Berlin: Merve.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Warenform und Denkform. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Varoufakis, Y. (2013). The Global Minotaur. London: Zed Book.
 CHAPTER 10

The Lost Roads and the Steep Paths of ‘Real

Abstraction’

Jacques Bidet

The expression ‘real abstraction’ was created by Alfred Sohn-Rethel

(1978) in an attempt to elaborate a theory of abstraction no longer based
on the Humean empiricism or the Kantian transcendental apriorism, but
on historical materialism. This led him to consider market relations—he
understood as exchange relations—which developed in the Bronze Age
and eventually gave rise to the ‘money form’ in the seventh century
BCE. In his view, conceptual abstraction, which allows the development of
science and mathematics, has been based on a real abstraction, that of the
exchange relations by which all commodities become comparable. It
means abstraction does not ultimately belong as such to the sphere of
spirit, of culture, but primarily to that of social structure.
Those who were inspired by this idea—such as Moishe Postone, Robert
Kurz and Anselm Jappe—perceived that it must be understood not in
terms of epistemology, but of social theory. But, in their opinion, this ‘real

The author thanks Gao Jingyu for her careful linguistic revision of the text.

J. Bidet (*)
Paris X University, Nanterre, France

© The Author(s) 2020 171

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_10
172  J. BIDET

abstraction’ results not from commodity exchange, but from capitalist pro-
duction, which they think is to be based on abstract labor. Yet, this abstrac-
tion itself is supposed to be produced by the market relations inherent to
the capitalist mode of production. In my opinion, this thesis confuses the
notions of abstraction, abstract labor and real abstraction. This confusion
muddles up the set of the structural, historical and political analyses it
inspires. Its most extreme formulation can be found in Postone’s (1993)
work. It is also prevalent in what I call the ‘esoteric school’—in reference
to an esoterism attributed to Marx by Hans Georg Backhaus (1978) and
assumed as such by these authors1—which tends to read Capital on the
base of its drafts and preliminary versions and, therefore, on formulations
that Marx eventually discarded when they proved unsuited to his project.
Its main focus is the current known as Neue Wertkritik2 that certainly
shares affinities with other currents, particularly those emerging from situ-
ationism, in the cultural and environmental critique of capitalism. In my
view, however, its core political content does not really exceed this mixture
of protest and resignation defined by Marx as that of religion. I argue
against these authors not on their conclusions, but their presuppositions,
which are also present in various contemporary philosophical commentar-
ies of Capital and approaches of Marxism. That is why I formulate my
critique only by putting forward my own approach of this problem.

We Must Distinguish Three Levels of Abstraction

in Capital

Regarding labor, Marx’s theoretical exposition involves the distinction

among three levels of ‘theoretical’ abstraction that require specific desig-
nations. I shall specify as L1, L2 and L3: Level 1 (L1), labor in general;
Level 2 (L2), market labor, that is, labor involved in market production as
such; Level 3 (L3), capitalist labor, this is, waged labor in capitalist rela-
tions.3 We know how this approach from ‘the abstract to the concrete’ is
important for Marx, as subsequently pointed out by Althusser. The
‘concrete-­of-thought’ (‘le concret de pensée’), which is the culmination,
the result, of the conceptual elaboration, must not be confused with the
‘real-concrete’, the really existing thing. The former helps us to discover
and understand the latter. Since real-concrete phenomena can be affected
by the ‘real abstraction’, the greatest attention must be paid not to con-
fuse the two registers: theoretical abstraction and real abstraction.
 10  THE LOST ROADS AND THE STEEP PATHS OF ‘REAL ABSTRACTION’  173

Labor in general (L1). At the beginning of chapter 1  in Volume 1,

Marx analyzes labor, on the one hand, as concrete labor performed in a
specific way, thanks to specific means of production and for a specific end,
and, on the other hand, as abstract labor, an ‘expenditure of human labour
force’, a ‘productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands,
etc.’ (MEW 23 1962: 58), abstracting all these concrete specificities. Such
a definition is evidently valid for ‘labor in general’ (L1), at least insofar as
such a concept is relevant. The expression ‘labor in general’ does not imply
the idea of a human nature, identical everywhere since ‘humankind’ exists.
It only means that, as far as a practice that can be called ‘labor’ takes place,
it consists of producing a supposedly useful object by the least expenditure
of labor force, this means as well, in the least possible time, or trying to
obtain the best possible result in a given time. This is the specific rational-
ity of this practice, by contrast with that of playing, praying, or of artistic
or sexual activity. There is no reason to believe that this only begins with
market production. The construction of the pyramids, of the great irriga-
tion canals and so on was certainly subject to such an imperative.
It is sometimes argued that, before modernity, no pure labor existed,
that is, labor in this ‘abstract’ form because labor was always intermingled
with other activities. But the same might be said for the present times.
Computer labor, for instance, is coupled with an artistic practice when it is
done with background music. That does not free the computer worker
from time constraints or from the imperative to minimize effort. To put it
briefly, this ‘concrete impurity’ of the labor process does not suppress its
characteristic of ‘abstract labor’.
Furthermore, as ‘abstract’ labor refers to the expenditure of labor force,
it has a substantial and, in this sense, a ‘concrete’ character connected to
physiology and psychophysiology. But this ‘physiologic feature’ is not sim-
ply that of medicine. It belongs to a specific social context: the body at
work is subject to historically-defined social constraints of productivity
and intensity, for instance, those of the market which Marx is dealing with
here. Moreover, although he gave up the idea of explicitly presenting that
level L1 in itself,4 the concepts of abstract labor and concrete labor intro-
duced in chapter 1 of Capital possess this general scope: labor as such is,
at the same time, concrete and abstract. All types of social labor, all ‘social
forms of production’, all ‘social divisions of labor’, are precisely specific
modes of articulation between these two terms—concrete labor and
abstract labor. The market is just a particular case.5
174  J. BIDET

Market labor (L2). Marx does not begin his exposition at L1, but
directly at L2. And what makes it somehow difficult to read is that he deals
with L1 within his exposition of L2. L2 actually implies level L1. In par-
ticular, it implies the pair constituted by concrete labor/abstract labor. But
Marx relates it to another pair, that of use value/exchange value or (equiv-
alently in this regard) use value/value. The problem he is facing here in
the initial moment of his exposition is that of the passage not from L1 to
L2, but within L2 from the concept of ‘exchange value’, which corre-
sponds to the common evidence of market relation, to the concept of
‘value’ that will take its place in his theory as that of ‘production relation’
(Produktionverhältnis), a recurring term at L2. In other words, Marx is
building the concept of value. To account for it, we need a term that is not
part of his terminology but belongs, nonetheless, to his conceptual regis-
ter: ‘market labor’. Indeed, labor as analyzed at the beginning of chapter
1 is labor under the conditions of market production: those of competi-
tion among independent productions. This context determines both a
‘value’ by the socially-necessary labor time and a ‘market price’ (term
which belongs to this same rational conceptual configuration of L2) by
the conditions of supply and demand. The ‘socially-necessary time’ relates
simultaneously to the concrete labor (the technique used) and the abstract
labor (the intensity of the expenditure) in a market context. In short, the
pair (L1) of concrete labor/abstract labor is analyzed here in the context
of market production, that is to say, of the relation between use value/value
which belongs to L2. And Marx builds the concept of ‘value’ in the spe-
cific sense in which it will function in his theory. Meaningfully, the exam-
ples he chooses, not for pedagogic simplification, but for their conceptual
scope (the carpenter, the mason) belong to the L2 of abstraction in which,
as he states in a small but extremely significant note, he still leaves aside the
question of whether or not this labor is included in a waged capitalist rela-
tion (MEW 23 1962: 59 note 15).
Capitalist labor: waged labor in the capitalist mode of production (L3).
Such a labor is, first, ‘labor in general’; therefore, it cannot be said more
or less abstract than any other kind of labor. It is also ‘market labor’, sub-
ject to the conditions of productivity and intensity of market relations
which provide abstract labor with its specific characteristics (see the com-
plex relations between intensity, productivity and value). It is, finally, spe-
cifically capitalist labor because, in its concrete and in its abstract aspects,
it displays characteristics which are not simply those of market production
as such. Thus, again, I propose a term which does not belong to Marx’s
 10  THE LOST ROADS AND THE STEEP PATHS OF ‘REAL ABSTRACTION’  175

terminology, but certainly to its conceptual register: ‘capitalist labor’. That

is, labor performed for capital, which Marx calls, in that sense, ‘productive
labor’ (producing surplus value), as opposed to ‘non-productive’ labor,
for instance, unpaid housekeeping. It is a kind of labor that is both free, in
the sense that the worker can change employers (at least, in principle…
apart from other possibilities) and subordinated. And it is a kind of labor
that is performed with the aim of accumulation of capital. Two features are
connected with this context.
On the one hand, the expenditure of labor force by the waged worker,
as abstract labor, has its counterpart in its ‘consumption’ by the capitalist,
according to an expression, which is recurrent in Marx. This pair of expen-
diture/consumption belongs to L3. In contrast with Rubin, it must be
said that here abstract labor has a ‘physiologically’ concrete substance.
Labor power, subject to capital, is spent under the coercion of interests
that are indifferent to its survival and tend to weigh on it until exhaustion,
thus giving rise to concrete struggle for survival—a bottom-up biopolitics
(Bidet 2016). In other words, there are good reasons to be careful about
the terms, ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’, which function as labels attached to
jars of jelly. It is advisable to examine these categories in order to deter-
mine which theoretical substance formulated in this formal philosophical
language they contain.
On the other hand, the characteristic of this ‘capitalist’ labor is to be
exploited in pursuit of an abstract wealth: the surplus value. In this regard,
the considerable problems found in the texts of the ‘esoteric’ current come
from the confusion between the abstraction of value (L2) and the abstrac-
tion of surplus value (L3), which makes it impossible to understand their
mutual relations defining the context of real abstraction. In my conceptual
terminology (but the concept itself is Marxian), L2 is that of ‘metastruc-
ture’ and L3, that of the ‘structure’.

The Real Abstraction of Value and the Real

Abstraction of Surplus Value
Value and surplus value are properly real abstractions in the sense that they
are included in a really existing social logic, in abstraction processes which
are embedded in the social structure itself. They are two processes dialecti-
cally connected. But, to reach that point, we must first identify what makes
their differences.
176  J. BIDET

Let us first consider value. It means we go back to L2. The true object
of the first chapter of Capital is not ‘the commodity’ as a particular item,
an element of a set, but the social relation that defines it: the market rela-
tions of production-circulation. You simply cannot understand the ques-
tion if you suppose that the object of the beginning of Marx’s exposition
is ‘circulation’ or market exchange as the esoteric current does6 for value is
properly defined by the socially-necessary time under market relations of
production. This is the starting point for understanding how it is ‘trans-
formed’ immediately into ‘market price’ and, subsequently, into price of
production’. What is described here is the set of the rational conditions
required for market production (whose counterpart is market circulation).
Market practice, that is, production for exchange, implies an abstraction:
the partners leave aside the use value of the commodity. Money, which
ensures universal exchange by making it possible to ‘abstract’ the concrete
nature of the exchanged object, is the keystone of this rational edifice. In
reality, this abstraction is never absolute: the concrete aspect of the use
value appears in different ways. In the process of market circulation, it is
somehow ‘on hold’, waiting for its moment, that of consumption. In the
process of market production, on the contrary, the abstract is immediately
connected to the concrete. The market, as a relation of production,
Produktionsverhältnis, is a kind of defined articulation, historically specific,
between concrete labor and abstract labor, which makes it possible for dif-
ferent productions to be linked with coherence. It is one form of coordi-
nation among others: from the beginning, Marx mentions by contrast
other possibilities—from (slightly imaginary, no doubt) the Indian com-
munity to the large rural patriarchal family and the systematic (and quite
real) division of labor in factories (MEW 23 1962: 56–57; 92.). Here, that
enables us to apprehend adequately the social rationality of value, that of
the market, as a real abstraction. To grasp the concrete aspect, it includes,
one must start not from circulation, but from the logic of (market) pro-
duction. This is what the esoteric school does not seem to understand.
As for surplus value, it belongs to the logic of capitalist production as
such: that of market production when labor force itself functions as a com-
modity. Thus, we must distinguish between the abstraction of value and
the abstraction of surplus value. In the process of capitalist exploitation, a
worker produces an object (good or service) of a higher value than the
goods that he receives as salary—this is, at least, a minimal formulation of
the question. It is important here to observe that Marx makes a minimal
use of the expression ‘producing value’. He essentially uses it in the
 10  THE LOST ROADS AND THE STEEP PATHS OF ‘REAL ABSTRACTION’  177

­ istinctive pair of ‘constant capital’/‘variable capital’, or c + v: in the pro-

d
cess of capitalist production, a waged worker ‘produces value v’, equal to
his salary, and ‘transfers value c’, that of the used means of production,
and also produces a value s, a ‘surplus value’. In this context, Marx aims to
demonstrate that the process is not oriented toward the production of
value, but of surplus value. In fact, it would make no sense for the capital-
ist to ‘produce value’. On the contrary, as is well known, the capitalists aim
at reducing the individual value of the commodities they produce, at pro-
ducing them in the least possible time: such is the law of competition.
They do not aim at accumulating commodities or value, but surplus value:
this abstract wealth thanks to which they will be able to appropriate more
means of production and more labor power in order to produce not more
value or more commodities, but, ultimately, more surplus value…. Surplus
value is not just an increase in value, but a different concept: the concept
of another social relation. Therefore, value and surplus value refer to social
powers of very different kinds. Value corresponds to power over things. For
Marx, there are two ‘value forms’: commodity and money. Surplus value
represents power over people: it allows the purchase not only of means of
production but also of labor forces and it makes possible their exploita-
tion. Value and surplus value are concepts of quite different kinds.7
The real abstraction of value is linked to the rationality of market rela-
tions while the real abstraction of surplus value to the irrationality of capi-
talist relations. Market rationality remains present at the heart of capitalist
irrationality. But capitalist irrationality is not to be found in market ratio-
nality. That is what the supporters of the esoteric school and many others
do not understand.
Clearly, we cannot stop here for the market includes an irrational mode:
‘market fetishism’. This is what we shall now take into consideration.

Fetishism: The Metastructural Origin

of Real Abstraction

The Original Social Act, Founder of the Market

From the very beginning of Capital, Marx deals with capitalism. But, at
L2, he tackles it as embedded in a more general social logic, that of the
market. In chapter 1, §4, he analyzes what he calls ‘the fetishism of com-
modity’. Commodities seem to be things exchanged between each other,
178  J. BIDET

and it is forgotten that, behind those things that are granted a value, what
is ultimately exchanged is human labor: it is forgotten that the market is a
relation of production. All this is well known and easily understood. What
remains more problematic is the following of the (conceptual) story. In
chapter 2, Marx actually proceeds from commodity fetishism to market
fetishism, that is, from a phenomenology to an ontology. This chapter begins
with a sentence seemingly trivial, but actually rather enigmatic: ‘It is plain
that commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges of their own
account’. Still, there must exist a market. In other words, the market is not
a fact naturally given in a society, a natural order which commodities
themselves would belong to. According to Marx, for the market to exist in
this way in this seemingly natural form, a social act is actually needed: an
inaugural act (‘In the beginning was the deed’ Im Anfang war die Tat), a
‘social act’ (die Gesellschaftliche Tat), a ‘social action’ (die Gesellschaftliche
Aktion) or even a decisive ‘normal social act’ (English version). This act is
a both ‘social and general’ (allgemein gesellschaftlich) and, at the same
time, an ‘individual’ act (individuell), and therefore it is incessantly
repeated by social actors. It consists of positioning ourselves under the law
of the market, of freely deciding that the market should reign as our mas-
ter. This is what Marx expresses in an apocalyptic formula which is also a
remake of Hobbes. ‘These have one mind and shall give their power and
strength onto the beast’. The ‘beast’ to which they thus make themselves
subject is not capital, but money, as an arbiter of the market. When they
convert the market into a law, they subject themselves to the law of the
market. This is a contradiction in terms, analogous to the contract of ser-
vitude mentioned by Rousseau, which is a real social contradiction. This
original act of the market introduced in chapter 2 is the presupposition of
capitalism: a presupposition that capitalism poses as a universal law because
it tends to convert labor force itself and every available use value into com-
modities. In this sense, fetishism is actually the fact of capitalism, making
an absolute of a market logic. It must be observed here that Marx con-
ceives the matter in terms of a social ontology in which the being is an act.
To be is to act. This is a metastructural act of L2, but only possible and
posed as such in the structural conditions of L3, that of capitalism, when
the market really becomes the universal order.
This is what can be said about capitalism when it has not yet been intro-
duced as such, that is, as a class structure founded in exploitation, but only
from the viewpoint of the market logic that governs it (that of its meta-
structure), that is, when nothing is known about it, except that it is
 10  THE LOST ROADS AND THE STEEP PATHS OF ‘REAL ABSTRACTION’  179

expected to be the full realization of a market order. And that is shown as

frightening. Nonetheless, the reader may legitimately wonder if such social
order completely under the rule of market fetishism actually exists. In
other words, what is the ontological status of this concept? Is fetishism a
direct product of a market logic? Or only the possible result of the aban-
donment to such a logic?

The Other Original Act, the Act of Organization, That Appears

at the End
To answer those questions, it should be first observed that this fetishist
decision introduced in chapter 2 is the opposite of another one which had
been evoked at the end of chapter 1: ‘Let us finally imagine […] an asso-
ciation of free men, working with means of production held in common,
and expending their many different forms of labour-force in full self-­
awareness as one single social labour force’.8 A decision to associate for
planning. But, Marx writes, this point of the ‘freely associated human,
acting consciously and masters of their own social movement’, can only be
reached at the end of a ‘long and painful development’. And that is what
is outlined in Capital. To sum up, these two contrary ‘decisions’ are pre-
sented both symmetrically and asymmetrically: one, the decision for the
market at the beginning of the ‘logical’ exposition and, the other one, the
decision for the organization at the end of the ‘historical’ exposition. In
other words, Marx begins by exposing the market logic of production
(Part 1), which makes it possible to analyze the capitalist structure (Part
3). Then, he moves on (notably from Part 7, ‘The Process of Accumulation
of Capital’) to the analysis of the historic tendency of this structure. The
development of capitalism leads to the emergence of increasingly large
companies. As this concentration increases, we are approaching the ‘ante-
chamber of socialism’. Gradually, the conditions for a revolutionary pro-
cess are met. The workers will appropriate the means of production and
will be able to produce according to a commonly agreed plan. This is the
rather surprising way in which the ‘great narrative’—consisting of a struc-
tural analysis followed by a historical analysis—proceeds from market capi-
talist coordination to organizational socialist coordination.
180  J. BIDET

The Order of Exposition in Capital: The Cunning

of the ‘Great Narrative’
Marx was wrong in his historical forecast. We must try to find out on
which theoretical error this prognosis rests. He started, however, from a
strong position. He is the first economist to organize his discourse around
the market/organization pair, an essential invention at the center of his
‘critique of political economy’. In Grundrisse, he already puts forth the
idea that there are two forms of rational coordination on a social scale,
defining them as ‘mediations’. For social production to be possible, he
writes, ‘there should be, naturally, mediation’ (Vermittlung muss natürlich
stattfinden) (MEW 42 1983: 104; Marx 1974: 88–89). More precisely,
there are two mediations: that of the market (ex post), production for
exchange (durch den Austausch der Waren), and that of the organization
(ex ante), die Organisation. In Capital, Volume I chapter 12 (particularly
in point 4), he analyzes the nature of this double mediations—that of the
organization within the firms and that of the market between them.
Within firms, the coordination is not carried out by a posteriori equilib-
rium according to supply and demand, but by an organization that articu-
lates a priori ends with means and means with ends. Marx’s purpose is to
show how, in the dialectical interrelation between technological develop-
ment and class struggle, the second mediation must prevail over the first.
The ultimate result will be the socialist revolution. We know what actually
happened…. Therefore, we must reconsider the theoretical approach that
underlies Marx’s exposition. What is not really coherent here is to attri-
bute both logical-structural and historical priority to the market, to con-
sider the organization as a pure historical phenomenon which emerges
within the capitalist market structure, and finally to expect that the former
will, in due time, blow up the latter and replace it. We therefore doubt if
this historicist arrangement of the two mediations is theoretically legiti-
mate and historically acceptable.

The Fetishism of Organization

It should not be surprising that there is, correspondingly, a fetishism of
organization. What Marx, in his manuscript ‘Chapter VI’, often referred
to as ‘The Unpublished Chapter of Capital’, defines as the ‘real subsump-
tion of labor to capital’ that appears in manufactures and flourishes in
industrial firms, should more exactly be analyzed as a subsumption to
 10  THE LOST ROADS AND THE STEEP PATHS OF ‘REAL ABSTRACTION’  181

organization, that is, as the abandonment of our other capacity of ‘coordi-

nation on a social scale’ in the hands of the managerial power without
which the capitalist property-power (the market’s power: power to pur-
chase, to hire, to lay off, to sell, to borrow, to relocate, etc.) cannot be
exercised—event if the manager and the proprietor can possibly be the
same person. In both cases of market and organization, fetishism is to be
understood as a fetishization process. According to the biblical paradigm of
the golden calf, we are humbly bowing before an idol we have made with
our own hands: before a social force that we have produced by making it
the arbiter of the social order: a ‘forgotten’ decision repressed by the social
unconsciousness, which makes us consider it a natural order. Just as the
market does, the organization implies its own content of rational abstrac-
tion. Given which, within the firm, use value can only appear as the result
of an organizational arrangement of different kinds of concrete labors (as
it was the case in the construction of the Egyptian pyramids and the
Chinese Wall long before the market existed). We make our two capacities
of rational coordination (and, therefore, abstraction) represented by the
market and the organization, idols to which we subject ourselves. This
double process of fetishization corresponds, as we have seen, to Level 2
where the specific mechanisms of capitalism are not yet supposed. It
includes the organization to the same extent as the market. To be correct,
the theoretical exposition (which defines the theory) should locate these
two concepts at the same initial position L2.9 For the theory of the ‘bour-
geois’ or ‘modern’ society announced by Marx in his preface, to be really
coherent, it must include these two poles from the very beginning. It can
only be properly exposed by a discourse that starts with the articulation
between these two mediations. That is what Marx, in my opinion, did not
really understand. And this results in a myriad of consequences (a topic
which exceeds the limits of this chapter) because these two relations of
production constitute two modes of real abstraction conflicting with each
other within the same mode of production.

The True Nature of the ‘Inaugural Act’

Here, I leave aside the historical dimension10 of Marx’s presentation and
focus on the coherence of his structural exposition. It is well known that
the theoretical object Marx considers in Capital is the ‘edifice’ whose eco-
nomic ‘infrastructure’ is linked to its juridical and political ‘superstruc-
ture’, that is, in modern nation-states, as we can see in the chapter on the
182  J. BIDET

working day and the struggle for its limitation through national legisla-
tions. For Marx, writing Capital was the first stage of a larger investigation
into the world as a whole. Such a comprehensive project that exceeded his
strength was later resumed in the theories of the World-system which
emphasize its immanent ‘coloniality’. Now, in the nation-state form of
modern society that Marx takes as a reference, the organization is as ‘meta-
structuring’ and ‘structuring’ as the market. If this is the case, for the
exposition to be in accordance with its object, it should be stated in the
first section: within the metastructural ‘prologue’ L2 of the structural
exposition L3. In fact, why would not these modern producers, consid-
ered at the market L2 where they are supposed to relate to each other as
free, equal and rational humans (according to the modern ‘popular preju-
dice’, Volksvorurteil, of an equality that, as Marx highlights, was unimagi-
nable for Aristotle in the times of slavery) (MEW 23 1962: 74), be able to
decide to limit the reign of the market by commonly decided regulations?
Therefore, what is missing in the ‘logical’ development of the exposition
is a correct start based on the initial coexistence of market and organiza-
tion in the metastructure itself and consequently in the structure of this
form of society. That is the point we have now to consider. As we will see,
such is the ontological context of the real abstractions, of the contradic-
tions and struggles they arouse.

The Complexities of Real Abstraction

and the Struggle for Overcoming Them

Class Struggle: Concreteness Versus Abstraction

Real abstractions correspond to real contradictions. But these do not take
place between use value and value as the esoteric current claims. In fact,
these elements are not contradictory: they do not form a contradiction
(Widerspruch). This term was ostensibly present in the first version of
Capital, but Marx erased it in the second (Marx 1980: 44). Use value and
value are counterparts (Gegenteile), complementary factors (Faktoren),
whose relation constitutes, as we have seen, the rationality of market pro-
duction. The essential contradiction inherent to capitalism is the one
between use value and surplus value, because, in fact, the logic of surplus
value, that of abstract wealth, makes the capitalist dismiss and despise use
value as such. This contradiction opposes capitalists and workers and, also,
 10  THE LOST ROADS AND THE STEEP PATHS OF ‘REAL ABSTRACTION’  183

the rest of the population (whose vital interests does not interest capital).
In addition to an economic contradiction (any reduction of salary result-
ing in an increase in surplus value), there is a vital contradiction that leads
to the maximum possible consumption of the labor force and to the deg-
radation of all economic, social, cultural and political conditions of human
life. On the other hand, this contradiction has a positive side as a produc-
tive contradiction. Capitalists, who are only interested in abstract wealth,
that of surplus value, can only accumulate it through producing some
concrete commodity that must have a use value, at least for some people,
even if for a nefarious social use, such as in the production of weapons of
mass destruction. Anyway, as such, the requirement of a use value paves
the way for a political contradiction. Actually, for producing commodities,
coercion is not enough: a certain consent of the producer-consumer is
required. More precisely, people, as collective producer-consumer, have
some social power and show historically the ability, particularly in the con-
text of nation-states, to determine the nature of material and cultural
objects to be produced, such as schools, hospitals, housing, public trans-
port and so on. One cannot, indeed, derive all these concreteness of use
values from ‘capital’ as such, that is, from projects or mechanisms that
would belong to it. When capital has an opportunity in colonies, it imposes
slavery, keeping native or imported workers in the state of foreigners. On
the contrary, in the context of nation-states, the people from below make
the ‘real abstraction’ recede as they unite in class struggles. Class struggles
produce ‘real concreteness’ in opposition to real abstraction. The speculative
focus of the esoteric theorists on the thematic of ‘real abstraction’ corre-
sponds to a pathetic rhetoric by which the philosopher, abandoning the
hope of being recognized as a king, disguises himself as a prophet. Such a
posture means nothing else but the reversal of historicism into resignation.
Thus, for Moishe Postone, the mobilizations of unions, feminism and
other movements are nothing more than ‘expressions of the system’. The
same condescendence can be found in Anselm Jappe.11 Yet we should not
ignore, among other things, the fact that the only social forces, which have
proved historically committed against productivism, are those of the
worker’s movements that fought incessantly for the 8-hour workday, the
40-hour week, the 35-hour week, now 32, retirement at the age of
60 years and so on. With the motto, ‘We work too much! Enough! Life is
not for producing, but for living!’. Limiting production is saving the planet.
To better understand this class confrontation, we have to go back to the
theoretical abstraction of L2, that of mediations and the ‘immediacy’ they
184  J. BIDET

imply: to the potential of discursive cooperation. What is the legitimate

‘beginning’ among free and equal human beings, toward which every
conflict leads them back? Isn’t it the use of deliberation that decides what
could be given to the ‘immediate’ discursive cooperation and what, due to
its complexity, should be managed (under the control of discourse in com-
mon, supposedly freely and equally) by mediation of either organization
or market? Here, we can turn to Talcott Parsons’ well-known perspective:
it is impossible for human beings to regulate the whole complexity of the
social order by discursive collaboration. In Marx’s words, ‘Mediations are
necessary’. Parsons uses the term ‘media’. For Habermas and his disciples
in this regard, they are the market and the organization. Not surprisingly.
His only mistake is to assign the market to economy and the organization
to administration and politics. In a sense, and in spite of these various
distortions, we are here in the wake of Marx. Parsons’ analysis reveals,
below the coordination by the two media, the ‘immediacy’ of which they
are the supposed extension: the discursive exchange of immediate coop-
eration. In this sense, ‘in the beginning was the word’. But, as soon as ‘the
word’ (language, discourse) is not enough to bring order to the complex-
ity of social existence, abstraction devices are necessary: market and orga-
nization. Market prices spare us infinite negotiations, and, likewise, the
Highway Code (all kinds of rules, norms, etc.) prevents unnecessary argu-
ments. As for the supposedly shared discourse, that of politics, it will focus,
for a good part, on what will be assigned, respectively, to the market and
to the organization. This metastructural configuration is not the founda-
tion of the modern order, but its fictional reference, its declared and instru-
mentalized assumption.
In effect, modernity must not be understood as the triumph of reason,
but as the manifestation of its constant inversion. The metastructural
approach reinterprets the Frankfurt School’s theme of ‘instrumental rea-
son’. I propose a quite different approach, analyzing modernity as the
instrumentalization of reason, as a conversion, the reversal of these two
rational mediations into a primary pair of class factors. This ‘metastructura-
tion’ is the basis for a split within a dominant class between a property-
power that dominates the market and a competency power that dominates
the organization. The dominant class therefore has two ‘poles’ that refer
to two quite different class powers, two closely intertwined but partially
separable powers. Both converging and diverging are not exercised or
reproduced in the same way. Facing this dominant class, made of those
privileged with property in the market or with competency in the
 10  THE LOST ROADS AND THE STEEP PATHS OF ‘REAL ABSTRACTION’  185

­ rganization, the bottom class, which I call the ‘fundamental class’ or the
o
‘popular class’, is composed of those who do not have any property or
competency privilege. This does not mean that they do not have knowl-
edge (their knowledge can be as ample as or more than the knowledge of
those called ‘competent’, but they are not included in a competent author-
ity) or power. They have a collective social potency, a potential to hold on
a power that simply aims to accumulate and govern, regardless of the inter-
ests of concrete life. We saw above how this pair of ‘productive’/‘political’
contradictions open the way for the rise of the fundamental class. We must
now show that, in this regard, the fundamental class has a different relation
to these two dominations.12

The Meta/Structural Concept of the ‘Triangular Duel’

and the Question of Popular Hegemony
Competency power within the organization is, in fact, less ‘abstract’ than
property-power in the market. The power in the market is exercised by the
silent mechanisms of competition (which are not counterbalanced—quite
the opposite—by the discourse of advertisement, unilateral and competi-
tive by itself). By contrast, the competency power can only be exercised by
communicating itself at least to some extent, by providing explanation or
justification. The fundamental class, therefore, has more hold on compe-
tency power. This explains that modern class struggle is always, at the
same time, a dual—fundamental class against dominant class—and a tri-
angular one because this dominant class includes two poles with which
the fundamental class maintains an unequal antagonism. The perspective
from below is to break the dominant class, to dissociate its two sides, to
divide it in order to defeat it. This requires that class struggle be as intense
against the competent pole, but with an ‘hegemonic’ perspective in the
Gramscian sense, aiming to mobilize some of its strata and fractions against
the capital-power; and this popular hegemony is possible only if the fun-
damental class shows the most powerful and is able to gather all its con-
stituent parts, particularly those most exploited, usually excluded from the
political sphere. This extensive topic, which is the horizon of the debate
about the ‘real abstraction’, implies different registers. For good (meta-
structural) reasons—albeit actually for the best and for the worst—the
Marxist tradition distinguishes two of them.
Let us designate the first register as that of ‘socialism’. The people from
below can only fight against the real abstraction of the capitalist market,
186  J. BIDET

that of surplus value, by opposing it organization: by demanding that the

social institutions be structured according to a common organization and
not in a market form. That includes large fields of education, health, sci-
entific research, public safety, urbanism, social services and a comprehen-
sive list would include, in the current conditions, wide sectors of material
and digital production. At the same time, it is necessary to fight against
market or pseudo-market relations not to replace the organized form
within large companies or large administrations, as it is more and
more the case.
The second register, as immediately required as the first on our agenda,
is ‘communism’, often called ‘the common’ (‘le commun’) or given other
names. We can nowadays perceive its presence in many experiences and
utopias. What is now on the agenda is to defeat both the dictatorship of
the capitalists and that of the competent: to go beyond market and orga-
nization toward cooperation between free and equal human beings. Only
this kind of grassroots cooperative practice of production can forge a col-
laborative consciousness able to intervene at the highest levels of the
social edifice.
This second register, communism, is that of democracy. The challenge
is, in fact, to master the market by means of the organization and to master
the organization by means of unmediated discourse, equally exchanged
among all. This means a democratic struggle against the dominants of
both types by imposing to the masters of the market and of the organiza-
tion what they are opposed to in a myriad of ways: a government based on
free and equal discursive exchange at every level.
The situation may seem desperate, as capital-power seems to have
absorbed competency power (and, concurrently, as the right seems to have
absorbed the ‘left’, a question that I am not addressing here13). A nation-­
state has been the crucible for some kind of encounter, within the project
of a ‘social state’, between the common people and the competent, albeit
within a narrowly national horizon. Under neoliberalism, it suffered a
deep degradation which resulted in the competent pole being completely
hegemonized by the capital pole. Yet we cannot see that other strategic
principles would be more conceivable than that of such a ‘popular hege-
mony’. It remains only to be seen how to implement it in today’s world,
reunited and re-divided by the digital technology, where a nation-state has
become factually problematic. But we have no reason to think that neolib-
eralism is the end of history because the ‘metastructuration’ structures
 10  THE LOST ROADS AND THE STEEP PATHS OF ‘REAL ABSTRACTION’  187

modern society as radically as before, under the sign of an interpellation to

emancipation, on a never-wider scale.
At the end of this exposition, the most crucial issue remains that of the
ecological abstraction. Marx demonstrates that the ultimate aim of capital
is nothing else but this abstract wealth: surplus value. Thus, Marx must be
recognized as the founder of a political ecology. He reveals the true nature
of this abstraction: its indifference toward the consequences for human-
kind and nature. Ecological disaster is the culmination of real abstraction.
Humankind can confront it only by engaging in all of its intellectual
resources, those of the various natural and social sciences. And that should
be the commitment of all, every minute of every day… Marxist knowl-
edge, which refers to historical materialism, can really contribute only
under the condition of being consistent in itself and clearly conscious of
the scope and limits of its concepts. Let us remember what Marx wrote to
his translator, Joseph Roy, on March 18, 1872, ‘There is no royal road to
science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep
paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits’ (Marx 1872: 7).
This article was translated by Andrés Pacheco and Renata Farías.

Notes
1. See Anselm Jappe: ‘It is necessary to assume the difference between the
‘exoteric’ and the ‘esoteric’ Marx, between the conceptual core and the
historical development, between the essence and the phenomenon’ (Jappe
2017a: Kindle position 5589). Here, I also refer to his main book (Jappe
2017b).
2. This current has affinities with the New Dialectic, whose interpretation
about Hegel’s Logic is still better connected with the main Marxist tradi-
tions. See the critique I formulated some time ago in Bidet (2005) of
Christopher Arthur (2004).
3. In a decisive text at the end of Chapter 5, Marx mentions, respectively, the
‘production process’ (L1), the ‘commodity production process’ (L2) and
the ‘capitalist production process’ (L3): ‘Als Einheit von Arbeitsprozess
und Wertbildung ist der Produktionsprozess von Waren, als Einheit von
Arbeitsprozess und Verwertungsprozess ist er kapitalistischer
Produktionsprozess, kapitalistische Form von Warenptoduktion’ (MEW
23 1962: 211).
4. He only addresses this point marginally; for instance, in the paragraph
entitled Arbeitsprozess (MEW 23 1962: 192–199). See also the passage
about Robinson, taken as the producer in general.
188  J. BIDET

5. If Marx does not insist on this point in Capital, it is without a doubt

because he thought it was self-evident. We can see the irony directed at
those who did not understand this simple idea. Thus, in Notes on Wagner
(MEW 19 1987: 375–376), he emphasizes that ‘the “value” of the com-
modity only expresses, in an evolved historical form, what exists in the
same way, but under different appearance, in all other historical social
forms; this is, the social character of labour, to the extent to which labour
exists as an expenditure of “social” labour power. (…) therefore, the
“value” of the commodity is, simply, a specific form of something that
exists in all societal forms’. To sum up, the pair consisting of concrete
labor/abstract labor (as expenditure) is common to all forms of society.
6. It is advisable to interpret properly Marx’s wording at the end of Part 2 of
Volume 1: we now abandon ‘the sphere of circulation of commodities’
where freedom and equality reign and we enter ‘the hidden abode of pro-
duction, on whose threshold there stares us in the face No admittance
except on business’. That does not mean that we move from the domain of
circulation which would have been the topic since the beginning of Capital
up to this point, to the domain of production which will be considered in
Part 3. Market circulation as mentioned here at the end of this analysis of
L2, is just a counterpart to market production (as such, as the most abstract
level of capitalist production) that opens Part 1 as we have seen. The eso-
teric interpretation ignores, among others, that important point.
7. For a long time, Marx tried to proceed from one to the other, from the
‘value form’ to the ‘surplus value form’, by means of a categorial exposi-
tion. He eventually gave up: it is not possible to proceed dialectically from
a purely market ‘C-M-C form’ to a capitalist ‘M-C-M form’ because it
simply would not make sense. In Capital, the ‘transformation’,
Verwandlung, of money into capital (i.e. of a market relation into a capital-
ist relation, of the market abstraction into the capitalist abstraction) is pro-
duced not by the critique of a ‘form’, but of the (vulgar) ‘formula’ of
capital as money that is capable of producing more money. This analytic
path does not produce a dialectical move from one to the other as previous
versions of this exposition attempted to achieve, but a gap between two
levels of reality, that is, between two levels of the theoretical abstraction, of
which the second represents a regime of real abstraction specific to the
capitalist mode of production. This is the hypothesis that I develop in my
book published in Bidet (1985), see Bidet (2007a: 153–163). I believe
that it is now an accepted hypothesis. See also Bidet (2004: 101–102,
2010: 112–113).
8. Here, the French version Marx (1993: 90–91), as ‘reviewed by Marx’, is
more explicit than the German original text (MEW 23 1962: 92–94).
Nonetheless, the idea is the same.
 10  THE LOST ROADS AND THE STEEP PATHS OF ‘REAL ABSTRACTION’  189

9. This is the supposedly more ‘adequate’ exposition I attempted in Bidet

(2004), translated into Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Portuguese (Spanish
translation: Bidet 2007b) but not into English.
10. ‘Capitalism’ does not begin only by the market. It begins equally, as it is
well known, by the ‘original accumulation’ and by several organized pro-
cesses at the state or economic levels. More importantly, it emerges from a
social context in which the market and the organization are combined. The
question of this beginning is the subject of Chapter 7 of Bidet (2011)
available in CAIRN Info. The ‘logical development’ of the exposition must
not be expected to follow a course parallel to the ‘historical’ development:
it is simply supposed to help us to understand it.
11. ‘The historical role of the workers’ movements consisted of, above all,
beyond its proclaimed intentions, promoting the integration of the prole-
tariat’ (Jappe 2017a: Kindle position 5615).
12. If this holds true, the theoretical presentation must begin with an analysis
of this meta/structural configuration of modern nation-states; and this is
the first stage toward a theory of the world-system and of the ‘coloniality’
inherent to modernity. We must observe that modernity, understood in
this way, emerges at the same epoch in China and in Europe, as some
European and Chinese medievalists point out (see the Kyoto School),
much before the age of industrial capitalism. The metastructural approach,
embedded in the Marxian perspective of a theory of modernity as a global
phenomenon, is to be understood as a site open to all the social sciences
(economics, law, sociology, history, psychopathology, etc.). As what is at
stake is the instrumentalization of ‘reason’ in its double sense of Verstand
and Vernunft, and class struggle as immanent to their interrelations, phi-
losophy must always feel here at home. Such an argument, of course, can-
not be comprehensively developed in the space of a short article.
13. This is the topic of my last book (Bidet 2018) “Eux” et “Nous”? Une poli-
tique à l’usage du peuple, Paris, Kimé, 2018.

References
Arthur, C. (2004). The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. Leiden: Brill.
Backhaus, H.-G. (1978). Materialien zur Rekonstruktion der Marxschen
Werttheorie. In Gesellschaft. Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie (Vol. 11,
pp. 16–177). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Bidet, J. (1985). Que faire du Capital? Materiaux pour une refundation. Paris:
Klincksieck.
Bidet, J. (2004). Explication et reconstruction du Capital. Paris: Collection Actuel
Marx Confrontation, PUF.
190  J. BIDET

Bidet, J. (2005). The Dialectician’s Interpretation of Capital. In Historical

Materialism (Vol. 13, 2). Brill Publishers.
Bidet, J. (2007a). Exploring Marx’s Capital. Philosophical, Economic and Political
Dimensions. Leiden; Boston: Brill.
Bidet, J. (2007b). Refundación del marxismo: reconstrucción y explicación de El
Capital. Santiago: LOM.
Bidet, J. (2010). Explicaçào e reconstrucào do Capital. Capinas: Editora Unicanp.
Bidet, J. (2011). L’Etat-monde. Paris: PUF.
Bidet, J. (2016). Marx et la Loi-travail, Le corps biopolitique du Capital. Paris:
Editions Sociales.
Bidet, J. (2018). “Eux” et “Nous”? Une politique à l’usage du peuple. Paris: Kimé.
Jappe, A. (2017a). La société autophage, Capitalisme, démesure et auto destruction.
Paris: La Découverte.
Jappe, A. (2017b). Les aventures de la marchandise, Pour une critique de la valeur.
Paris: La Découverte.
Marx, K. (1872). Le Capital (traduction de M. J. Roy), entièrement revisée par
l’auteur. Paris: M. Lachâtre et Cie. Editeur. Resource document. Bibliothèque
nationale de France. Retrieved September 30, 2017, from https://gallica.bnf.
fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1232830/.
Marx, K. (1974). Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Berlin:
Dietz Verlag.
Marx, K. (1980). Das Kapital, Buch I [Reprint of 1867 Edition]. Hildesheim:
Gerstenberg Verlag.
Marx, K. (1993). Le Capital. Critique de l’économie politique. Livre 1 / Karl Marx;
ouvrage publié sous la responsabilité de Jean-Pierre Lefebvre; texte français
établi par Étienne Balibar, Gérard Cornillet, Geneviève Espagne et al.; intro-
ductions et notes de Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. Paris: PUF.
MEW 23. (1962). Karl Marx  – Friedrich Engels Werke. Band 23. Berlin:
Dietz Verlag.
MEW 42. (1983). Karl Marx  – Friedrich Engels Werke. Band 42. Berlin:
Dietz Verlag.
MEW 19. (1987). Karl Marx  – Friedrich Engels Werke. Band 19. Berlin:
Dietz Verlag.
Postone, M. (1993). Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of
Marx’s Critical Theory. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Warenform und Denkform. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
 CHAPTER 11

On Real Objects That Are Not Sensuous:

Marx and Abstraction in actu

Maurício Vieira Martins

What holds up the bird is the branch and not the laws of elasticity. If we
reduce the branch to the laws of elasticity, we must no longer speak of a
bird but of colloidal solutions. At such a level of analytical abstraction, it is
no longer a question of environment for a living being, nor of health nor
of disease. Similarly, what the fox eats is the hen’s egg and not the chem-
istry of albuminoids or the laws of embryology (Canguilhem 1978: 159).
In his controversy with the biologists who divested the phenomenon of
life of its sensuous characteristics, philosopher Georges Canguilhem saw
himself forced to evoke, in quite visual terms, how important a phenom-
enology of the real world is. Our take is, at least at first, in agreement with
Canguilhem: What the fox eats is in fact a hen’s egg, and not the chemis-
try of albuminoids, and what holds the birds up is, glaringly, the tree
branch. And yet the question remains: Is there in the history of thought a
supplementary way to approach this thematic field, a way that preserves
the integrity of the sensuous world but also manages to demonstrate the
strength of the underlying relations that organize it?
We believe there is. Marx’s career illustrates particularly clearly the path
of a thinker who, in his first works, aimed to deal exclusively with the

M. V. Martins (*)
Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Brazil

© The Author(s) 2020 191

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_11
192  M. V. MARTINS

analysis of the sensuous world but progressively evolved toward acknowl-

edging the casual force of relations that cannot be grasped through the
senses. We posit that the topic of real abstraction1 in Marx—the general
aim of this volume—can be better understood within this context.
It would exceed the scope of this brief chapter to trace the different
stages in Marx’s thought on this topic up to the position he enunciated in
his maturity (here analyzed). However, a characteristic of The German
Ideology—young Marx and Engels’ seminal work—should be briefly men-
tioned, if only for the sake of contrast. Despite this work’s richness, in it
the reader will find a series of ideas that show a strong reliance on empiri-
cal reality to support what they there call real knowledge (to be gained in
spite of the deceptions of the neo-Hegelian school). In fact, a recurrent
reason for the controversy with B. Bauer, M. Stirner and D. Strauss is their
difficulty in dealing with the harshness that characterizes the real world.
Marx and Engels write that, fascinated by philosophical abstractions, the
young Hegelians trapped themselves in a closed circuit that refracted real
verification. Therefore, the recurrent statements in The German Ideology
that combat such position: ‘These premises can be thus verified in a purely
empirical way’; ‘Empirical observation must in each separate instance
bring out empirically, and without any mystification, the connection of the
social and political structure with production’; and ‘…every profound
philosophical problem is resolved, (…) quite simply into an empirical fact’
(Marx and Engels 1981: 22–28). This is the predominant tone of the
harsh controversy among the German idealists in the mid-40s.
The progress of Marx’s studies on economic politics nuanced the posi-
tion he had taken as regards the role of abstractions in understanding real-
ity. More precisely, discovering value as a hidden reality (though not a
metaphysical one) that allows establishing equivalences between sensu-
ously different objects made his youthful approach more complex.
Although we may not endorse Althusser’s thesis of an epistemological
rupture within Marx’s work—a problematic thesis that empties the texts
written in his youth of their undeniable productivity— there is shift of
emphasis that must not be overlooked. If in The German Ideology the ref-
erences to philosophical abstractions are, with rare exception, negative—
envisioned almost like a deceiving veil standing between the researcher
and reality—in Marx’s maturity such a perspective was modified. In the
first Preface to The Capital, on the other hand, there is an explicit valoriza-
tion of the ability to abstract: ‘In the analysis of economic forms, neither
microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction
11  ON REAL OBJECTS THAT ARE NOT SENSUOUS: MARX AND ABSTRACTION…  193

must replace both. In bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the prod-

uct of labor, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic cell-
form’ (Marx 1996: 130).
Here, the ability to abstract is, instead of associated to a sign of error,
accepted as the proper manner in which thinking proceeds, piercing
through the immediate appearance of phenomena toward their most
essential structure. Confirming such assessment, the first chapter of The
Capital starts with an analysis of commodity, object that appears to the
senses, but as the analysis progresses it evidences first the exchange-value
of commodities, then value and finally abstract labor as the substance of
value. As a synthesis of this first abstract proceeding, there is the now clas-
sic formula: ‘Let’s consider now the residue of each of these labor prod-
ucts. It consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation
of homogeneous human labor’ (idem: 168).
Marx delves deeper into the particulars of this unsubstantial reality—
which, not being a metaphysical object, is first and foremost a product of
a certain kind of labor—as conditions for the understanding of the frame
of capitalist society. However, it was not only in The Capital that Marx
explicitly pronounced an affirmative relation with the abstract proceeding.
Back in the 1950s, there was a passage in Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy that, although not explicitly using the category of real
abstraction, persuasively shows its coherence with Marx’s thought. In ref-
erence to the equating of commodities to the labor-time that produces
them, Marx states:

To measure the exchange-value of commodities by the labor-time they con-

tain, the different kinds of labor have to be reduced to uniform, homoge-
neous, simple labor, in short to labor of uniform quality, whose only
difference, therefore, is quantity.
This reduction appears to be abstraction, but it is an abstraction which is
made every day in the social process of production. (…) This abstraction,
human labor in general, exists in the form of average labor which, in a given
society, the average person can perform (…). (Marx 2008: 55–56)

The passage is crucial: Abstraction exists. That is to say, the reduction of

all commodities to labor-time is not only a product of thought but also
takes place within society itself. Marx unveils a process of abstraction (in
the core sense of reduction) at work in the real proper, even though this
statement is at odds with common sense, as well as with an old philosophi-
194  M. V. MARTINS

cal tradition. In the case here illustrated, the operation of abstraction done
by thought is the counterpart of a real process. Therefore, there is a modi-
fication in the antinomy opposing the so-called real object to the object of
knowledge (the former understood as an empirical thing only, the latter as
a thing of thought only). This is an intertwining of the so-called cognitive
process with the most basilar determinations of commercial production,
responsible for the emergence of the real abstraction.2
Once the real basis of this abstraction is acknowledged (it can be called
an ontological basis), there is a qualification of the greatest importance to
be made. It is the truth or falsehood tenor that a research manages to
attain. As regards scientific activity, and Marx not being a relativist, he
continuously wonders at the criterion that allows to determine the truth
value of a group of theoretical propositions. Getting to the point: There is
a true, productive scientific abstraction, as well as there is a wrong one,
that wanders away from what it sought to explain. While the former man-
ages to shed light on the causal mechanisms underlying the phenomenon
in focus, the latter is content with its most partial and peripheral aspects.
A very clear distinction is found in a passage of Theories of Surplus Value,
in which Marx disagrees with a recurrent critique to David Ricardo, as the
British economist was accused of being too abstract. In response, Marx
inverts the terms of the matter in one of his most antiempiricist statements:

Ricardo commits all these blunders, because he attempts to carry through

his identification of the rate of surplus-value with the rate of profit by means
of forced abstractions. The vulgar mob has therefore concluded that theo-
retical truths are abstractions which are at variance with reality, instead of
seeing, on the contrary, that Ricardo does not carry true abstract thinking
far enough and is therefore driven into false abstraction. (Marx 1968: 437)

The difference with The German Ideology is almost palpable. As we have

seen, in this text the neo-Hegelians were criticized for their excessively
abstract analyses, and ‘every profound philosophical problem is resolved,
(…) quite simply into an empirical fact’ (Marx and Engels 1981: 34).
Already in Theories of Surplus Value there is a different conceptual outlook,
in which Ricardo had not taken true abstract thinking far enough to grant
him the understanding of the phenomenon at hand. It can be also noticed
that in his maturity Marx particularly emphasized a conception of reality
stratified into different levels: The first of them can be accessed through
the senses, but it is not the only one or the most determining.
11  ON REAL OBJECTS THAT ARE NOT SENSUOUS: MARX AND ABSTRACTION…  195

Because it overcomes the old dichotomy opposing inductive proce-

dures to deductive procedures, some commentarists called the method
adopted in the texts of Marx’s maturity (Archer et al. 1998) a retroduc-
tion. In it, the starting point is an apparent reality, analyzed until we arrive
at its subterranean causal mechanism, which is not apprehended by the
senses, but is, nevertheless, responsible for the empirical configuration
that appears before us. There are various examples in Marx’s work:
Commodities covering the labor-time needed for their production: the
salary—sensuous reality—hiding the surplus value; the population—itself
data apparent to the senses—as the apparent form assumed by the social
classes that structure it; and so on.

* * *

In analyzing this rational working in the real proper as a real abstraction

(and at times as a separation also), it is necessary to clarify that the aware-
ness of its existence comes to us only a posteriori. Marx writes in The
Capital that he passing of the centuries in the history of humanity was
necessary to decipher the value-form. In the case of commercial produc-
tion it expanded in extension and density, and the homogenization of the
different kinds of human labor, real basis for abstract labor, started to be
fully valid. The second reason is linked with a basic Marxist supposition,
which states that the analysis categories are not a priori constructions but
‘forms of being, the characteristics of existence’ (Marx 2011: 59).3 For
thinkers to formulate certain categories, these should have some counter-
part in the real being, even a seminal one. When Marx analyzed a fragment
of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—Marx was very fond of Aristotle—he
dealt with the reason why the Greek philosopher did not manage to deci-
pher the form of the value. Instead of a subjective limit in Aristotle, what
is found in a first layer of analysis is the inherent limits of Greek society
(based on slave labor), in which the concept of human equality was non-­
existent, which in turn made the scientific deciphering of value impossible
(Marx 1996: 186–187).
Marx’s comment on Aristotle’s limit brings forward wider issues about
the historic discontinuity in the fully developed value system. Its emer-
gence can be compared to a new object in the world (Maar 2016), in a
wide sense, a group of relations that establishes a new logic for sociability.
The discontinuity should be emphasized, bearing in mind that still today
in various academic spheres it is said that the fundamental topics for phi-
196  M. V. MARTINS

losophy were already present in classical philosophy—although developed

in later centuries. From the elements already developed in this chapter, it
is evident that such statement demands rectifying. A theory of value is a
wide theoretic field4—with implication in different areas of human knowl-
edge—that only centuries after the Greeks could be properly developed. Only
when the whole social life was subordinated to the production of goods
could such a theoretical development be possible.
This debate becomes more complex as we notice that, as the labor
power entered the productive circuit, there came capitalist merchant pro-
duction, the most advanced moment of a merchantilization already pres-
ent at the beginnings of the bourgeois society. It is undeniable that the
entrance of the labor power in the trading circuits changed the meaning of
production as a whole—it becomes more and more expansive: ‘… by
incorporating living labor with their dead substance, the capitalist at the
same time converts value, i.e., past, materialized, and dead labor into capi-
tal, into value big with value, a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies’
(Marx 1996: 312).
Marx insists: The expansive quality of the capital is precisely the con-
tinuous incorporation of the living labor power into its objectivity.
However, this incorporation takes place at a specific time and place: a
series of historical presuppositions are necessary, such as the generalized
monetization of the economy, which must be articulated with the expro-
priation of the small independent producer. It follows that minimizing
how important the arc of history is in political economy (arguing that
what matters is only deducing the logical categories) is a procedure alien
to Marx himself, who emphasizes the historical marks of the process: ‘The
conversion of money, which is itself only a converted form of the com-
modity, into capital only takes place once labor capacity has been con-
verted into a commodity for the worker himself; hence once the category
of commodity trade has taken control of a sphere which was previously
excluded from it, or only sporadically included in it’ (Marx 1975: 124).
This explicit reference to certain historical processes—which will later
be undertaken by the capitalist accumulation proper—opens an opportu-
nity to digress slightly in the argument and tackle the tenor of Marx’s
relationship with his sources. Scholars frequently notice Marx’s progres-
sively growing apart from Feuerbach as he incorporated certain topics
from Hegel’s Science of Logic. On the one hand, we understand this is so
and it highlights the aspects of Hegel’s work valued by Marx. On the
other hand, it was decided not to follow this path in the present chapter.
11  ON REAL OBJECTS THAT ARE NOT SENSUOUS: MARX AND ABSTRACTION…  197

This is so because Marx hugely inverted the categories of political econ-

omy, which we believe render only partially true the suggestion that Marx
‘applied’ Hegel’s logic in economic matters. Furthermore, Marx reformu-
lated Hegel’s issues so profoundly that it raises Marx to a different theo-
retical level—from himself, authorial, in the strong sense of the word—that,
even if indebted with his sources, is better visualized within the new hori-
zon he himself opened.
Retaking the thread of our exposition, we would say that we should
avoid the frequent mistake that many make in assuming that the nucleus
of Marx’s argument on the expansion of value can be found only in the
first three chapters of The Capital (which analyze the commodity, the
exchange process and money). Although these memorable chapters
already present the structural determinations of the mercantile society, the
analysis must move on to properly make room for the aforementioned
impact of the entrance of the labor power as a commodity in the capitalist
circuit. For the topic we are focusing on here, it is interesting to highlight
the dynamic (not static) quality of the value as abstraction in actu: ‘Those
who regard the gaining by value of independent existence as a mere
abstraction forget that the movement of industrial capital is this abstrac-
tion in actu’ (Marx 1983: 78).
Well, if the movement of the industrial capital is the abstraction in actu,
it soon becomes evident that the latter generates effects in reality, it is caus-
ally powerful. Once again, the antiempiricist quality of Marx’s position is
extremely clear; bear in mind that even today it is reproduced as common
sense the notion that only ‘concrete facts’ can generate other concrete
facts, and so ignoring the possibility of abstract processes (which, in the
specific sense we here give evidence of) also generates uninterrupted
effects on reality. Toward the end of his life, György Lukács stressed prop-
erly this phenomenon: ‘In the nineteenth century, millions of independent
artisans experienced the effects of this abstraction of socially necessary
labour as their own ruin, i.e. they experienced in practice the concrete
consequences, without having any suspicion that what they were facing
was an achieved abstraction of the social process; this abstraction has the
same ontological rigour of facticity as a car that runs you over’ (Lukács
2012: 315).
Let us remember that the time of socially necessary labor is connected
to the level of automatization that the economy has reached and with
competition between the different capitalists to progressively achieve it: an
additional factor to the effects of the aforementioned artisan’s ruin. ‘Silent
198  M. V. MARTINS

co-action’ of the economic relations, as Marx puts it, the abstraction in

actu constrains the social life as a whole.

* * *

In a well-known passage, economist Andrew Kliman stated that ‘What

controls the world economy is not the IMF or the WB or the US Treasury
or Wall Street. What controls the capitalist world economy is rather an
impersonal law, the law of value’ (Kliman 2000/2001). It is a retroductive
postulate, we could say, that goes beyond the concrete institutions (the
World Bank, the IMF, etc.) to point to the non-sensory regularity that
determines them. If we compare Kilman’s argument with G. Canguilhem
quoted at the beginning of this chapter (that states that what holds up the
bird is the branch and not the laws of elasticity), we may reach the conclu-
sion that they are practically antithetic. The French philosopher values the
sensory world as the most genuine manifestation of an ontology, whereas
Kliman chooses to emphasize the impersonal relations underlying
this world.
In consequence, we posit that what was unique in Marx’s position was
promoting a very intimate fusion of theoretical approaches that usually
appear to oppose one another in a debate. The Capital is still a work of
great explicative force because it manages to concretize the enunciated
‘synthesis of multiple determinations.’ Throughout the text, the most
abstract category determinations—characteristic of the value law—are
addressed as intimately linked to the historic experience of men and
women; it is shockingly exposed, for example, in the chapters about ‘The
Working day’, or ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’.
However, in making these considerations, we do not seek to equalize
the causal force of these different determinations. If we were asked which
group of relations ultimately has greater causal force, our answer would
point to the ‘value that valorizes itself,’ a regularity that is not immediately
perceived through the senses. It is the predominant moment of this causal
complex. And, on a personal note, as a researcher of Latin America, I
understand that the aforementioned predominance explains why we fre-
quently wonder at the similarities we find when studying historical pro-
cesses in different countries of the region. If we take recent examples, the
concrete characters at play in each country are different: Michel Temer in
Brazil, Mauricio Macri in Argentina, Pedro Kuczynski in Peru, and so on.
But the researcher with a Marxist conceptual background will soon see
11  ON REAL OBJECTS THAT ARE NOT SENSUOUS: MARX AND ABSTRACTION…  199

that behind these singular historical figures, there are connections that
repeat periodically: their direct or indirect links to big international capi-
tal; the successive plans of fiscal conservatism; the most vulnerable social
groups as their preferred target; and so on. Needless to say, such structural
marks repeat throughout the world: even countries previously preserved
from the voracity of the capital find themselves involved in the diktat of
the capitalist mercantile logic, concrete commands that flesh out what
Marx called the value law, an abstraction in actu that generates devastating
effects in our lives.
On the other hand, it is necessary to realize that what is called the
Marxist school has sometimes had difficulty in maintaining the dialectic
unit of its founder. In the reception of his work, it is frequently verified that
there is a rift between the different but interconnected approaches mentioned
before. To be more explicit: what for Marx was a taut articulation between
the systematic plan of analysis (at the highest level of abstraction) and the
historical approach (that points to the unavoidable presence of the social
classes and their conflict) became an antinomy in some of his followers. So
we find on the one hand a Marx for the economists and philosophers, who
barely concerned with the lineament of the most general structures: when
this happens, the validity of the value law becomes a fantasy almost, alien-
ated from historicity and the growing social violence (a risk that, because
of what was presented above, must, of course, be avoided at all costs). On
the other hand, there are researchers more talented in historical research,
who reconstruct with precision the different temporal and spatial facets in
which the concrete processes develop, but sometimes giving less impor-
tance to those more abstracts recursions, entwined in the richness of the
historical experience.
Having acknowledged this, we should immediately add that, while at
the level of concepts it is necessary to be clear as to the causal power of the
value law, of course the concrete political struggle focuses on a very real
group. One doesn’t struggle against imperialism in the abstract, for
instance, but against its most direct representatives and, above all, against
the policies of expropriation that they put forward, knowing also that, if
eventually one of these representatives disappear, almost immediately
another arises in an equivalent place, due to the reasons mentioned. This
taut articulation between the core category determinations is what must
be faced in each concrete junction.
In a wider philosophical level, we would say that the topic of abstrac-
tion in actu in Marx leads to a much more complex understanding of real-
200  M. V. MARTINS

ity, which rejects its identification with the merely sensuous order. In his
own field of research during his maturity—political economy—Marx man-
aged to overcome the dichotomy that opposed real to metaphysical
objects, a dichotomy that goes back to Plato. The relevance of this proce-
dure is evident: it discerns progressively stratified levels of a real that it is
not exhausted in its appearance. This procedure allows the connection of
Marxism and other fields of knowledge, even the so-called natural sciences
(such as physics, chemistry, etc.), which have long freed themselves from
the prison of the empiricist vision of the world. Against the proud praise
of the fragment as an end in itself (praise to be found in some postmodern
authors is the clearest example), there is a progress toward a more complex
vision of the world in which we live in, to be found in the assumption of
the real abstraction and the abstraction in actu. In the level of political
action, some projects are left in check: those projects that imply it is pos-
sible to transform the capitalist society by altering its most immediate
effects, such as the concentration of income, for example, through pro-
grams of wealth distribution—praiseworthy in themselves, but with evi-
dent limitations. What truly begs transforming, through organized
political action, is the inherent logic of the value law and its deleterious
effects; otherwise, we will forever be dealing with consequences, without
reaching the underlying mechanisms that produce them.

Acknowledgments  I thank Professor Antonio Oliva, from Universidad Nacional

de Rosario, Argentina, for his kind invitation to participate in this volume.
This article was translated by Sol Golzman.

Notes
1. Specialists argue whether it is possible to locate in Marx’s lengthy work
(which hasn’t been published in full) the term real abstraction. It seems it is
not the case. Having said that, throughout this chapter, we quote passages
from the author that show that this category is coherent with Marx’s
thought. To historically reconstruct the debate—A. Sohn-Rethel’s impor-
tance, the subsequent repercussion, and so on—the following papers can be
consulted: A.  Toscano (2008) and H.  Reichelt (2007). We chose to also
include in this chapter the category of abstraction in actu—with emphasis in
its dynamic aspect—to be found in the second volume of The Capital.
2. However, it is not affirmed that all abstractions made by human thinking are
analogous to the one here examined. That would be an overgeneralization,
11  ON REAL OBJECTS THAT ARE NOT SENSUOUS: MARX AND ABSTRACTION…  201

taking into account the obvious ascertainment that a cognitive theory

involves several other determinations present in conceptual thinking (which
are the legitimate object of other disciplines). The aim here is, through the
trail left by Marx, to evidence the correspondence between the capitalist
commercial production and the aforementioned abstraction process, which
political economy brought about, for example, elaborating the category of
general labor.
3. I have dealt more thoroughly with the categories immanently belonging to
the real in my paper, Martins (2017).
4. In contrast to Antonio Negri, who claimed that Marx’s value theory had
expired, a more recent, extensive bibliography shows how indispensable
such theory is to understand the economic processes that we are living in the
twentieth century. On the fragility of Negri’s position, see the dossier with
the work of authors from various countries organized by H. Amorim (2014).

References
Amorim, H. (2014). Dossiê – O trabalho imaterial em discussão, Caderno CRH,
Salvador, 70, V. 27, jan./abr. Retrieved from http://www.scielo.br/scielo.
php?script=sci_issuetoc&pid=0103-497920140001&lng=pt&nrm=iso.
Archer, M., Collier, A., Bashkar, R., et  al. (1998). Critical Realism: Essential
Readings. London: Routledge.
Canguilhem, G. (1978). O normal e o patológico. Rio de Janeiro:
Forense-Universitária.
Kliman, A. (2000/2001). The Crisis, the Debt and the Law of Value. The
Hobgoblin, 3 (Winter). Retrieved from http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/jour-
nal/h32002_AK_Debt.htm.
Lukács, G. (2012). Para uma ontologia do ser social (Vol. I). São Paulo: Boitempo.
Maar, W. L. (2016). O novo objeto do mundo: Marx, Adorno e a forma valor.
Doispontos, 13(1), 29–40. Curitiba: São Carlos.
Martins, M. Vieira. (2017). Espinosa e Marx: pensadores da imanência. Verinotio –
Revista on-line de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas. XII. Retrieved from http://
www.verinotio.org/conteudo/0.8939226622636641.pdf.
Marx, K. (1968). Theories of Surplus Value. Volume IV of Capital. Part II. Moscow:
Progress Publishers.
Marx, K. (1975). Capítulo inédito d’O capital: resultados do processo de produção
imediato. Porto: Publicações Escorpião. English: https://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch01.htm.
Marx, K. (1983). O capital: crítica da economia política (Vol. 2). São Paulo:
Abril Cultural.
Marx, K. (1996). O capital: crítica da economia política (Vol. 1). São Paulo: Nova
Cultural. English: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/down-
load/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf.
202  M. V. MARTINS

Marx, K. (2008). Contribuição à crítica da economia política. São Paulo: Expressão

Popular. English: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/down-
load/Marx_Contribution_to_the_Critique_of_Political_Economy.pdf.
Marx, K. (2011). Grundrisse. São Paulo: Boitempo. English: https://www.marx-
ists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/, https://www.marxists.
org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Capital_Vol_2.pdf.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1981). A ideologia alemã. Lisboa: Edições Avante!.
English: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_
The_German_Ideology.pdf.
Reichelt, H. (2007). Marx’s Critique of Economic Categories. Historical
Materialism, 15(4), 3–52.
Toscano, A. (2008). The Open Secret of Real Abstraction. Rethinking Marxism:
A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 20(2), 273–287.
 CHAPTER 12

The Concept of Form in the Critique

of Political Economy

Alberto Bonnet

In this chapter we will try to precise the meaning that holds the concept
of form within the Marxian critique of political economy and, so far as real
abstraction is an attribute of the form, contribute in that way to the task
that summons us in this volume. Given the fact that every contemporary
reading of classical texts, like Marx’s critique of political economy, is medi-
ated by some subsequent reading, we will avoid the naive presumption of
recovering a supposedly original and authentic meaning in these texts.
Therefore, we confess beforehand that we read Marx’s critique of political
economy from the Critical Theory perspective and, more specifically, in
the way it was assimilated within the so called Open Marxism. The concept
of form is, from this perspective, a key concept to the critique of capitalist
social relations. But it is also a very complex concept. The efforts trying to
precise its meaning in these few pages will force us, in consequence, to
adopt an epigrammatic style.

A. Bonnet (*)
Buenos Aires National University (UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina
Quilmes National University (UNQ), Bernal, Argentina

© The Author(s) 2020 203

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_12
204  A. BONNET

1. Marx repeatedly employs the term ‘form’  (‘Form’) in his writings

about the critique of political economy, although not in a univocal way
(see García Vela 2015). Let us just consider the first chapter of his Capital.
The term already appears in the first sentence: ‘The wealth of societies in
which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense
collection of commodities’; the individual appears as its elementary form’
(Marx 1982: 125).1 The form (in this case the commodity-form) appears
here as the existence of a matter (wealth) socially and historically deter-
mined (in those societies in which the capitalist way of production pre-
vails). This employment is confirmed right away when Marx claims that
use value ‘constitute[s] the material content of wealth, whatever its social
form [gesellschaftliche Form] may be’ (idem: 126). The commodity-form
appears as the socially and historically determined way of existence of use
value that, so far as it is a dimension of commodity, converts itself in the
‘material bearers of… exchange value’ (ibidem).
However, Marx also claims that commodities manifest their commodity-
form ‘in so far as they possess a double form, i.e., a natural form and value
form’ (idem: 138). And he repeatedly refers to that ‘natural form’ as the
‘motley natural form’ (idem: 139) or the ‘physical form’ (idem: 147) of use
value, as well as the transformation of that ‘form of the materials’ through
concrete labor (idem: 133). He also refers to the ‘different concrete forms’:
the concrete labors of the joiner, the mason or the spinner assume (idem:
128); the labors of the taylor or the weaver as ‘different forms of expendi-
ture of human labour-power’ (idem: 134); and the ‘difference between its
useful forms’ of the different and concrete labors from the taylor and the
weaver (idem: 135). Finally, he refers to labor in general as ‘expenditure of
human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim’
(idem: 137).
Now, that claim that the commodity-form is a double, given that its
‘natural form’ (Naturalform) and its ‘value form’ (Wertform) coexist
raises a question: does form mean the same in both cases? And the same
question is risen when money-form is introduced claiming that ‘commod-
ities have a common value-form [gemeinsame Wertform] which contrasts
in the most striking manner with the motley natural forms [Naturalformen]
of their use values. I refer to the money-form’ (idem: 139). Does form
mean the same in these other expressions? Even assuming that, in a broad
sense, not only value but also the use value of the commodity is socially
and historically determined (e.g. by the level the development of social
labor and productive powers have reached) or even that, in a more specific
 12  THE CONCEPT OF FORM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY  205

sense, the use value is historically and socially determined as long as it is

the material base of exchange value (within the commodity-form), it seems
difficult to define the concept of form equally in both cases. Indeed, in the
last case, the matter of use value form remains material in the common
sense of the term, while the matter of value form is purely social. And this
difference seems to lead to differences as regards the meaning of the con-
cept of form in both cases.
On a side note, let us add that the very definition of exchange value as
‘the mode of expression, the “form of appearance”, of a content distin-
guishable from it’ (idem: 127) or ‘the necessary mode of expression, or
form of appearance, of value’ (idem: 128) arouses a new difficulty, given
that it seems to force us to distinguish between a concept of form as a way
of existence per se (value) and a concept of form as a way of manifestation
(exchange value) of that same form.
New problems, although with different character, raise the subsequent
treatment of the relationships of value in two different senses. On the one
hand, Marx employs the term ‘form’ in order to refer to the two poles of
expressions of value, the ‘relative value-form’ and the ‘equivalent form’
(idem: 139 and subsequent). And this seems to lead to an assimilation of
the concept of form to that of function.2 On the other hand, Marx employs
the term ‘value form’ (Wertform, ibidem) to refer to those same value
expressions. However, only one of these value forms, the money-form, is
the way of existence of a really existent matter, while the remaining refers
to logical moments of his derivation of this money-form.3 Indeed, the
‘simple, isolated, or accidental form of value’ (ibidem) would only be, in
reality, the form of bartering. The ‘total or expanded form of value’ (idem:
154), on the other hand, would not correspond to any reality. And even
the ‘general form of value’ (idem: 157) exists only in reality per se as the
subsequent money-form. In these cases, simply put, the form appears not
only as a way of existence but as a moment of a reasoning. Finally, the very
introduction of the money-form as the ‘specific kind of commodity with
whose natural form the equivalent form is socially interwoven’ (idem:
162) seems to bring back the necessity of distinguishing between the
employment of the concept of form to a bare social matter (as ‘equivalent
form’, that is to say, money) and a material matter in a vulgar sense (the
‘natural form’ of a specific commodity, namely, gold). The difference
between these two employments of the concept of form seem evident
considering the difficulties it implies thinking that the latter gets ‘socially
interwoven’ (gesellschaftlich verwächst) with the former—fusion that
would actually refute the emergence of fiduciary money.
206  A. BONNET

2. This multivocal definition of the term ‘form’ seems to place any

attempt of defining its concept in front of a dilemma: either we adopt a
broad definition, poor in determinations, that allow us to apply the term
to subjects so diverse as social relations, matter in a vulgar sense and logi-
cal relations or we adopt a narrower definition, richer in determinations,
but exclusively applicable to social relations.
The first option is possible and, as a matter of fact, the determinations
of the concept of form, defined in that sense, are relevant and maintained
in a narrower definition. Such broad definition wouldn’t be strictly
Marxian, rather it would inscribe itself in a philosophical tradition which
origins go back to the antiquity and, especially, to Aristotle (1994).4 Its
fundamental determinations would be the following: the form is one
dimension of the couple form/matter (εἷδος or μορφή / ὕλη, in Aristotle).
Form and matter are inseparable, and therefore form is the way matter
exists. There is no matter without form, even though the same matter can
acquire different forms. There is also no form without matter, except in
thought. Every object (οὐσíα, in Aristotle) that exists out of thought is, in
this sense, a hylemorphic compound. Form and matter can be understood
both in absolute and relative terms (both interpretations are possible in
Aristotle). And the relation between form and matter can be considered as
a static relation (as μορφή: structure of the object) or as a dynamic one (as
εἷδος: activity that converts the object into what it is). The form is, in both
cases, that which makes the object what it is (the τὀ τἰ ἦν εἶναι, τὀ τἰ ἐστι,
that is to say, its essence). And therefore, the form of the object is always
the reference of our concept from that object.5
Defined this way, however, the concept of form is too broad and cannot
become the key concept for the critique of capitalist social relations that
we are interested in. We therefore must add to it more determinations that
are not available nor could be found in Aristotle’s thought, but instead we
must look for them in Hegelian-Marxist tradition. We will examine the
fundamental determinations of this narrower concept of form in the next
section.
3. It still remains true that the concept of form is unthinkable unless
thought as one dimension of the couple form/matter, and that form and
matter are inseparable. Form remains, therefore, the way a matter exists.
But in this case, matter reveals itself, at least in principle, as social relations.
And, at the same time, form reveals itself, in consequence, as the in-forma-
tion of that matter from social-historical determinations. The latter is, as
Marx’s claim affirms, that wealth adopts the commodity-form in ‘those
 12  THE CONCEPT OF FORM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY  207

societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails’. Let us see

this difference more thoroughly.
In Aristotle, the matter (ὕλη) par excellence of form is matter in a natu-
ral sense (the φύσει; see Aristotle 1995: II). Consequently the privileged
relationship between form and matter is the in-formation of matter from
an activity of self-conservation that acts as final cause within organisms.
This is so, even when Aristotle also considers in a subordinate way the
artificial relationship between form and matter in a technical (τέχνει)
sense—subordination that, of course, reveals the magnificent contempt
his slave society held for labor.
But social relations already were, in fact, the matter par excellence of
form in German Idealism—even though this social characteristic was
hypostatized through different mechanisms in their systems. It so happens
when, confronted against the subject/object dualism, idealism had to
assume form as the result of an in-formation activity from the subject—
assumption that was caution and that, by the way, did not lack of a critical
dimension. Kant’s transcendental subject is not but the hypostasis of flesh
and bone empirical subjects and the capacities they acquired by living in
society throughout their history. And so it also happens when, embold-
ened, idealism tried to overcome that dualism between subject and object
within that very same subject—because all idealism is a subjectivism.
Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, likewise, was not but the hypostasis of society
itself as history’s subject-object.
Let us remember, on this matter, some lines from Adorno: ‘Hegel, in
his chapter on master and servant, develops the genesis of self-consciousness
from the labor relation, and that he does this by adjusting the I to its
self-determined purpose as well as to heterogeneous matter. The origin of
“I” in “Not I” remains scarcely veiled. It is looked up in the real living
process, in the legalities of the survival of the species, of providing it with
nutriments. Thereafter, Hegel hypostatizes the mind, but in vain.6 […]
The idealist concept of the spirit exploits the passage to social labor: it is
easy for the general activity that absorbs the individual actors to be trans-
figured into a noumenon while the individuals are ignored.7 […] But even
to imagine a transcendental subject without society, without the individu-
als whom it integrates for good or ill, is just as impossible. This is what the
concept of the transcendental subject founders on. Even Kant’s universal-
ity seeks to be one for all, that is to say, for all rational beings; and the
rational are a priori socialized’ (Adorno 1973: 198–200).
208  A. BONNET

Social relations are, then, the matter of the forms. However, it suffices
taking in consideration this reference from Adorno to the adaptation of
the one who works on heterogeneous material to see that this statement is
insufficient. Actually, wealth adopts the commodity-form from social and
historical determinations in ‘those societies in which the capitalist mode of
production prevails’, as we said, but its matter does not subdue to social
relations, given that the products of labor are commodities ‘only because
they are something two-fold, both objects of utility, and, at the same time,
depositories of value’. The form use value is, certainly, a form of social
relations. It is a social form inasmuch as (a) the usefulness of commodities
can only be so to its consumers, and it is always socially and historically
determined (by the so-called norms of consumption, etc.). It is also social
inasmuch as (b) the way the process of (concrete) labor in-form the use
value of commodities always presuppose social and historical conditions
that are determined (a certain degree of development of social labor pro-
ductive forces, etc.). And, finally, it is a social form inasmuch as (c) in com-
modities that use value acts as a mere material support of its value (let us
recall the phenomena of obsolescence, planned by companies, of com-
modities usefulness).
However, it is still true that, that use value is a ‘natural form’. Nature
also, in summary, integrates the matter of its form. Even more, if we
assume that the matter of the form are social relations, we must acknowl-
edge that in every case nature integrates that matter inasmuch as it medi-
ates both poles of labor: as nature in the object of labor and as nature in
the very subject that performs the labor. It is true that both the external
nature and the internal nature exist only in that terrain as realities socially
mediated by labor (as forms) and by thought (as concepts). But this does
not imply that nature can be subdued to society just like that. As Schmidt
(2014: 70) points out, ‘in Marx nature is not merely a social category’.8
And this is not without consequences: the very dialectic of the form com-
modity is unconceivable if we do not keep in mind use value as its ‘natural
form’. The ultimate matters of forms, in summary, are social relations and
the socially mediated nature.
It is necessary to remark, before moving on, that we refer to these social
relations and to that socially mediated nature as ‘ultimate’ matter of forms
because the relationship between form and matter should be understood
in relative terms. Actually, the mentioned Marxian definition of exchange
value as a ‘necessary way of expression or form of manifestation of value’,
or the very definition of this value as ‘abstract human labour’ objectified
 12  THE CONCEPT OF FORM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY  209

in commodity (Marx 1982: 129), among others, suppose that, even

though those social relations and socially mediated nature remain the ulti-
mate matter, certain forms are also matter of other more fundamental
forms. The statement that social relations and socially mediated nature are
the ultimate matter of the forms imply, also, that our analysis of forms rests
in the assumption that human beings are social beings and that they inter-
act with nature. This feature of human beings, considered in itself, escapes
the historical and social determinations of forms and, consequently, those
assumptions possess the status of trans-historical.9
4. The relation between form and matter must also be understood as a
dynamical one. It was expected that Hegel recovered with enthusiasm this
aspect of Aristotelian thinking: the active character this relationship pos-
sess in Aristotle versus the mainly passive it had in Plato (Hegel 1955: 138
and subsequent). But the confirmation of this dynamism is not enough—
nor could be enough to Hegel—to comprehend the true significance of
the relation between form and matter. The discord in the couple is miss-
ing. The introduction of contradiction in the relation between the form
and its matter implies we should not understand it as an organic relation,
moved by an increasing adaptation of the matter to its forms, but basically
as a social relation, moved precisely by the unyielding inadequacy of the
forms with respect to their matter.
Contradiction, naturally, surrounds Hegel’s system completely, as all
the objects considered in his system are inherently contradictory and the
relations among them are explained by this contradiction. But toward our
objective it is convenient to focus, specifically, in the way Hegel presents
the relation between form and matter in the doctrine of essence of his
great Logic. The truth of being is the essence, but is mediated by being;
therefore the knowledge of essence is performed through being. This pen-
etration of being to reach the essence is a process of abstraction, that is to
say, of negation of determinations. But, given that in Hegel logic is ontol-
ogy, this process represents at the same time the movement of being itself
and, therefore, the negativity we refer to is inherent to that very being:
‘essence is what it is, not through a negativity foreign to it, but through
one which is its own—the infinite movement of being’ (Hegel 2010:
338). This movement of being, that is to say, reflection, is therefore a
negative movement. Negativity propels the reflection of being over itself,
and essence is not but the development of the auto-contradiction of being.
Hegel enunciates, then, the concept of essence as reflection in itself (in the
relation between essence and appearance: the essence as simply opposed to
210  A. BONNET

being, the essence coming to existence as appearance and the reflection of

essence in itself that conducts to the unity between essence and appear-
ance) and the determinations of this reflection (the determined essences or
essentialities: the identity, the difference and the contradiction). And it is
precisely at this point, in the setting of contradiction as the foundation of
existence, that Hegel introduces the relationship between form and matter
(idem: 392 and subsequent).
Hegel, then, presents this relationship between form and matter as a
contradictory one. Inside the relation between the foundation and what is
founded, form is distinguished from essence: form is the active pole that
determines, while essence is the passive pole, undetermined, in which the
formal determinations subsist. Essence turns out to be the matter of form.
Now, the relationship and in-formation of matter by form implies the
mutual mediation that is inherent to the relationship of contradiction: ‘the
activity of the form on the matter and the reception by the latter of the
form determination is only the sublating of the semblance of their indiffer-
ence and distinctness. Thus the determination referring each to the other
is the self-mediation of each through its own non-being’ (idem: 393). And
this relationship, precisely, consists the contradiction in strict sense, that is,
in its specificity not only with respect to identity but even with respect to
difference, either as diversity or as opposition.
The relation between form and matter, therefore, is a contradictory
one. And setting this contradiction as the foundation of existence allows
Hegel (nothing less!) to think in its entirety as a contradictory totality: as
a reality that is, in itself and at the same time, reality and possibility (idem:
465 and subsequent; Marcuse 1955: 149 and subsequent). But the pro-
cess of reflection in its entirety carries from the determinations in itself
(from the doctrine of essence) to the determinations for itself (to the doc-
trine of the concept) because essence, from the start, is not but a moment
of concept.10 And so ends Hegel’s dialectic, in the doctrine of the concept,
with the hypostasis of the latter, as the absolute Idea that ‘contains all
determinateness within it’ and which essence ‘consists in returning
through its self-determination’ (idem: 735).
On the contrary, a consequent concept of this contradictory relation-
ship between form and matter requires a dialectic that is consequently
negative. That is, a dialectic that does not end that contradiction between
form and matter in concept nor, needless to say, in a hypostasized concept
as Absolute Idea, but that can conserve it when thinking the relation
between concept and its object. That is, precisely, the very definition of
 12  THE CONCEPT OF FORM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY  211

Adorno’s negative dialectic: ‘The name of dialectics says no more, to begin

with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a
remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.
Contradiction is not what Hegel’s absolute idealism was bound to trans-
figure it into: it is not of the essence in a Heraclitean sense. It indicates the
untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing
conceived’ (Adorno 1973: 5). Negative dialectic provides us, then, the
most accurate way of thinking critically the contradictory relationship
between form and matter.
5. Precisely, the relationship between form and matter is a contradic-
tory one, given the antagonic character of capitalist society. Form, as we
said, is a way of existence. Therefore, the relationship between form and
matter is contradictory because, in capitalist society, social relations exist in
an antagonic manner. Forms (commodities, money, etc.) in-form their
matter (social relations) in a contradictory way. This statement about the
character of contradiction that takes place inside the relationship between
form and matter is not without consequences. First, as regards the concept
of contradiction itself, the contradiction we are referring to is not, natu-
rally, ‘Heraclitean essence’ of idealism, but an attribute of the way social
life is specifically organized, socially and historically. In other words, as
Adorno puts it, ‘Regarding the concrete utopian possibility, dialectics is
the ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would
be free of it: neither a system nor a contradiction’ (Adorno 1973: 11).
Second, as regards the contradiction between form and matter, for now
considered statically, that contradiction implies that matter does not get
reduced to its form—and, therefore, that object is not reduced to its con-
cept. However, if we understand form as the way matter exists, this does
not mean (nor could mean) there is something positive in matter that
escapes form, that is, something in matter that exists separately from
form—and can, therefore, be separately conceptualized. Naturally, social
relations have actually adopted non-capitalist ways of existence in all pre-
capitalists societies, and many social relations still adopt non-capitalist
ways of existence within the very capitalist society. However, inasmuch as
social relations assume capitalist forms, their non-capitalist dimensions
exist exclusively as an immanent contradiction to the very relationships
between the so mentioned social relations both as matter and capitalist
forms they adopt. The subsumption of social relations under capitalist
forms converts the non-capitalist dimension from something different to
them into something negative in them. That is the meaning of that
212  A. BONNET

subsumption: to convert the external difference in negativity internal to a

contradiction. And this, at the same time, converts the contradiction
between form and matter in an internal contradiction to form itself.
Negative dialectic is the consequent thought of that contradiction—
though conserving in its horizon the emancipation of difference with
respect to its confinement in negativity. ‘Contradiction is non identity
under the aspect of identity […] Dialectics is the consistent sense of non
identity’ (idem: 5).
Third, and fundamentally, as regards the contradiction between form
and matter, now dynamically considered, that contradiction is what con-
verts the relationship between both into a dynamical one or, considering
it as internal to form itself, a process-form. Precisely, form is not but a
process of in-formation of its matter or, in other words, of subsumption of
that matter through that conversion between external difference into neg-
ativity internal to form itself. Commodity, money and so forth, in this
sense, must be understood as historical process of commodification, mon-
etization and so on of social relations. The relationship between form and
matter considered from a dialectical perspective is, in this sense, inevitably
historical. ‘The mediation of ὕλη is, actually, its implicit history’. But the
history we are talking about is not, naturally, the inevitable deployment of
Absolute Spirit’s self-determination, as in Hegel, but the circumstantial
class struggle of Marx. ‘It is when things in being are read as a text of their
becoming that idealistic and materialistic dialects touch. But while ideal-
ism sees in the inner history of immediacy its vindication as a stage of the
concept, materialism makes that inner history the measure, not just of the
untruth of concepts, but even more of the immediacy in being’ (idem: 52).
It is convenient to stop for a moment in this historical character of
form, because it has a decisive importance in this context. Holloway
(1980: 134 and later writings) attributes the conception of form as
process-form to Sohn-Rethel. Indeed, Sohn-Rethel had ciphered in the
authentically historical character of form the difference between the
employments of that concept in Marx and in Hegel. ‘The Marxian mode
of thought is characterised by a conception of form which distinguishes it
from all other schools of thinking. It derives from Hegel, but this only so
as to deviate from him again. For Marx, form is time-bound [zeitbedingt].
It originates, dies and changes within time. To conceive of form in this
way is characteristic of dialectical thought, but with Hegel, its originator,
the genesis and mutation of form [formgenetische und formverändernde
Prozeß] is only within the power of the mind. […] The Hegelian concept
 12  THE CONCEPT OF FORM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY  213

of dialectic finally entitles the mind not only to primacy over manual work
but endows it with omnipotence. Marx, on the other hand, understands
the time governing the genesis and the mutation of forms as being, from
the very first, historical time—the time of natural and of human history’
(Sohn-Rethel 1978: 18–19).
However, through the introduction of the concept of process-form,
Holloway actually radicalizes Sohn-Rethel’s point.11 Indeed, it is not
enough to just claim the procedural character of capitalist forms in their
origin and historical transformations; it is also necessary to add that its
everyday reproduction possesses that procedural feature. The latter state-
ment is, actually, a corollary of the former, as it would ridicule the opposite
claim, that the foundation of the existence of form, of its origin and trans-
formations, is radically different to the foundation of its everyday repro-
duction. That foundation is the contradictory character of capitalist forms
as the way of existence of antagonistic social relations. And, in conse-
quence, forms are not given forms, constituted-forms, but process-forms,
forms in process of being constituted. They are not forms that have already
in-formed their matter, but permanent processes of in-formation of that
matter. The money and commodity-forms we have already mentioned are,
therefore, everyday processes of commodification and monetization of
social relations.12 This has enormous consequences that will be recovered
in what follows.
6. Now, in capitalist society, these relations between form and matter
adopt a specific characteristic that we have not yet mentioned: fetishism.
Indeed, fetishism is an attribute of capitalist forms. ‘Whence, then, arises
the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes
the form of a commodity? Clearly, it arises from this form itself13’ (Marx
1982 I: 164). This is also of enormous significance in this context.
Forms, as we have already said, are ways of existence of a given mat-
ter. But this statement is still too general and does not precise the spe-
cific way in which social relations exist as matter of capitalist forms.
Indeed, social relations, as matter of capitalist forms, specifically exist ‘in
the mode of being denied’ (according to Gunn’s precise expression).
‘That is, one term [social relations] may exist in and through another
which contradicts it [commodity, in our case]. This, I take it, is the key
to Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism. When we learn that social
relations which appear as “material relations between persons and social
relations between things” appear, thus, as “what they are” […], we are
being informed of a circumstance that is unintelligible unless the
214  A. BONNET

notion of existence-in-the-mode-of-being-denied is taken on board’

(Gunn 1992: 23, who refers Marx 1982 I: 166).
This existence in the way of being denied does not mean any way of
concealment of matter behind form, but a specific concealment that
involves an inversion: the relationships between human beings adopt the
form of relationships between things. ‘It is nothing but the definite social
relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fan-
tastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx 1982 I: 165). And this
inversion involves two moments, which can be analytically distinguished,
although they are inseparable in the real exchange that takes place.
On the one hand, the reification of the social character of individual
labors in their products: proper commodity fetishism. ‘The mysterious
character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that
the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own as objective
characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural
properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation to the
sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which
exists apart from and outside the producers’ (idem: 164–165).
On the other hand, the reification of this last global labor in a specific
commodity is money: money fetishism consummates, therefore, com-
modity fetishism. ‘It is however precisely this finished form of the world of
commodities—the money form—which conceals the social character of
private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by
making those relations appear as relations between material objects,
instead of revealing them plainly. If I state that coats or boots stand in a
relation to linen because the latter is the universal incarnation of abstract
human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless,
when the producers of coats and boots bring these commodities into a
relation with linen, or with gold or silver (and this makes no difference
here), as the universal equivalent, the relation between their own private
labour and the collective labour of society appears to them in exactly this
absurd form [verrückte Form]’14 (idem: 168–169).
It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of this inversion. Indeed, the
inversion that takes place in this money and commodity fetishism is, natu-
rally, the inversion between subject and object: the relations between sub-
jects adopt the form of relations between objects. And this specific
inversion is nothing less than the foundation—or, better, the proton pseu-
dos, to honor Adorno’s term—of social objectivity in capitalist society
(Backhaus 1993: 56 and subsequent). The relationships between subjects
 12  THE CONCEPT OF FORM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY  215

(their social relations) appear to them as an object (as a second nature).

Society is the subject-object relationship in an inverted way. ‘Society as
subject and society as object are the same and yet not the same’ (Adorno
1976: 34). Therefore, this specific social objectivity of capitalist society
cannot be understood neither assuming society as its own subject (e.g.
through the understanding of social action like Weber does) nor under-
standing it as simple object (through the investigation of social facts, as
Durkheim does), but only as ‘the sign of relationships between men which
have grown increasingly independent of them, opaque, now standing off
against human beings like some different substance’ (Adorno 1989: 275).
The possibility of this task ‘to comprehend the incomprehensible’ (ibi-
dem) can arouse serious doubts. But we must remember that forms are
process-forms. Fetishism, the reification of social relations inherent to
those forms, involves certainly a concealment of this progressive character
of fetishized forms. ‘All reification is forgetting’ (Horkheimer and Adorno
2002: 191). But the forms in question are still contradictory process-
forms. And, if we conceive forms as process-forms, we must consider the
very fetishism as a process of fetishization (see Holloway 2002: 43 and
subsequent). Commodity and money fetishism are, therefore, everyday
processes of social relations fetishization and, consequently, open pro-
cesses. ‘Fetishism is a process of fetishisation, a process of separating sub-
ject and object, doing and done, always in antagonism to the opposing
movement of anti-fetishisation, the struggle to reunite subject and object,
to recompose doing and done’ (idem: 89).
7. This fetishism, inherent to the adoption of capitalist forms by social
relations, brings to light another attribute of them: their abstraction.
‘Equality in the full sense between different kinds of labour can be arrived
at only if we abstract from their real inequality, if we reduce them to the
characteristic they have in common, that of being the expenditure of
human labour-power, of human labour in the abstract’ (Marx 1982 I:
166). Indeed, the exchange of commodities mediated by money, brings
out to light the abstract character of their forms, since it presupposes that
commodities only intervene as values (as regards their use value, it presup-
poses they have one and that they are different between them, although
not considering the uniqueness of this use values) and money only inter-
venes as an universal equivalent (i.e. its use value plainly matches with its
function of embodiment of exchange value). These abstractions lay bare,
in the exchange process, the conversion of human labor in abstract labor,
since the specific labors, qualitatively different from each other, are related
216  A. BONNET

between themselves as objectified abstract labor quantities in different

commodities, and this abstract labor, as a whole, is objectified in an inde-
pendent matter in money.15
It goes without saying that this abstraction is not a mental one, but a
real one—reale Abstraktion, to honor the expression employed by Sohn-
Rethel.16 This is the sense of the well-known Marx’s sentence: ‘by equat-
ing their different products to each other in exchange as values, they
equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. They do this with-
out being aware of it’ (idem: 166–167). Commodity and money are not
abstract forms that result from subjective processes of abstraction (men-
tal), but from a process of objective abstraction (real) that operates in the
reality itself of commodities exchange.17 Inasmuch as it is all about
fetishized forms, although this process of abstraction requires the practice
of commodities exchange in the market, it works behind the back of the
consciousness of the agents involved in that practice. Commodity and
money are, in this sense, objectively abstract forms. Hegel, when discuss-
ing with classical political economy, already had defined money as an
objective abstraction: ‘Money is this material, existent concept [materielle,
existirende Begriff], the form of unity or the possibility of all the things of
necessity’ (Hegel 1975: 324) ‘But money is not in fact one particular
resource among others; on the contrary, it is the universal aspect of all of
them, in so far as they express themselves in an external existence’ (Hegel
2003: 338). And Marx is now without idealism which, repeating Hegel,
refers to money as ‘existing and active concept of value’ (Hegel 2010:
326; Reichelt 2007).
This abstraction, objective attribute of capitalist forms, possesses impor-
tant ontological implications, as it allows us to precise a little bit more the
features of the social objectivity in capitalist society. The concrete relations
between the subjects appear objectified to them as abstract relations. The
second nature is, therefore, a world of abstractions. ‘The system consti-
tuted by abstract labor embodies a new form of social domination’,
according to Postone, ‘a form of abstract, impersonal domination’ (2003:
158–159).
The concept of real abstraction has got, besides, epistemological impli-
cations. In the first pages we said that the form of the object is always the
reference of its concept. This relation between concept and object must
now be specified in the light of distinction between mental abstraction and
real abstraction. All concept remains, naturally, the result of a process of
mental abstraction. But there is a specificity when this subjective process
 12  THE CONCEPT OF FORM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY  217

of abstraction has as its counterpart a process of objective abstraction

given that, in such case, the former may aspire to reproduce the latter in
thought. If, as affirmed by Sohn-Rethel, the abstraction of exchange pos-
sesses the form of thought, thinking then consists in reproducing that
form in thought.18
Marxist dialectics can be understood as such an attempt to reproduce
those forms in thought. Forms continue to in-form matter in objects, and
remain being the reference of our concepts in this dialectic. Forms con-
tinue to play, therefore, a constitutive role, similar to the one the forms of
sensitivity and categories of understanding play in Kant’s transcendental
aesthetics and logic. But there are important differences. The main one is
the status of a priori inherent to that constitution in both cases. Indeed, in
Marxist dialectic, this a priori status does not only involve the subject that
knows but also the object to be known; it is not transcendent but imma-
nent to history and, as long it involves that knower, it is not generical but
social. This means that the forms in question are not only subjective but,
at the same time, objective; that, both in objective and subjective terms,
they are products of historical development; and that, in subjective terms,
therefore, they are not attributes of human being in general but of indi-
viduals socialized in specific historical conditions.19
8. What has been exposed up to this point suffices, in some measure, to
precise the meaning of the concept of form within the Marxian critique to
political economy. However, before we conclude, we must reconsider the
concept of form from the perspective of class struggle, that is, get back to
our claim that it is a key concept to the critique of capitalist social relations
and make the reasons that justify this claim explicit, as well as its political
implications.
We claim that the concept of form explains the way in which social rela-
tions in capitalist society exist. And, in this way, from the point of view of
the anti-capitalist critique, it allows us to precise the objectives of such
critique. This, in itself, is already decisive. Marx himself dedicated innu-
merable pages to argue against other socialists of his time with regard to
the objectives an anti-capitalist critique should have. Let us remember, for
example, his objections to the idea the ‘socialist Ricardians’ held, that is,
that suppressing money should overcome social inequalities that were
breaking through commodities exchange. Already in his early critique to
Proudhon, Marx precisely identified the weak spot of this idea: ‘the first
question he [Proudhon] should have asked himself was, why, in exchanges
as they are actually constituted, it has been necessary to individualize
218  A. BONNET

exchangeable value, so to speak, by the creation of a special agent of

exchange’ (Marx 2010c: 145). That idea of suppressing money within
exchange is irrelevant, Marx suspected at the time, because there is a nec-
essary relation between commodity-form and money-form within it. But
Marx would only precise the nature of this relation when, thanks to the
development of his critique of political economy, he precised also the
nature of those money and exchange forms. In his next critique to Gray,
Marx raises the same question: ‘since labour time is the intrinsic measure
of values, why use another extraneous standard as well? Why is exchange
value transformed into price? Why is the value of all commodities com-
puted in terms of an exclusive commodity, which thus becomes the ade-
quate expression of exchange value, i.e. money? This was the problem
which Gray had to solve’ (Marx 2010d: 321). But Marx’s answer was
more accurate this time: commodities ‘are only comparable as the things
they are’, and they are ‘products of isolated independent individual kinds
of labour, and through their alienation in the course of individual exchange
they must prove that they are general social labour’ (idem: 321–322).
Money must necessarily face the individual commodities, within exchange,
as the incarnation of that social general labor. And commodities, there-
fore, should be exchanged according to prices. The idea of suppressing the
money-form in conditions where wealth still assumes the commodity-
form implies then the absurd that ‘goods are to be produced as commodities,
but not exchanged as commodities’ (idem: 322). In short, the ‘differentia-
tion of the commodity into two elements, commodity and money
[Verdopplung der Ware in Ware und Geld]’, is a necessary one because it is
not but ‘an external opposition which expresses the opposition between
use-value and value which is inherent in it’ (Marx 1982 I: 199).
The strategy the socialists had of suppressing money overlooked this
necessary bond between commodity and money. But let us acknowledge
that, at least, their critiques to money implied that they recognized money
as one of the fundamental ways of existence of capitalist social relations.
The importance of the concept of form for anti-capitalist critique becomes
even more evident when we consider strategies that without further ado
ignore the fact that these social relations assume determined and funda-
mental ways of existence. Indeed, in capitalist society, the antagonistic
character of social relations, once a certain threshold within the processes
of collective subjectivation is overcome, tends to express itself as class
struggle. But this class struggle tends, at the same time, to adopt capitalist
ways of existence. Class struggle adopts different ways of unfolding in
 12  THE CONCEPT OF FORM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY  219

different social scenarios and different historical circumstances, but these

ways of unfolding always tend to be in-formed by capitalist forms. On its
end, these capitalist forms, as ways of existence of antagonistic social rela-
tions, crystallize balances of power between classes, whatever the
circumstances.
Now, social struggles are normally oriented to a modification of these
crystallized balances of power that capitalist forms have, instead of tending
to their suppression. And this is not random as it has to do, on the one
hand, to that same tendency of capitalist forms of in-forming the very class
struggles and, on the other hand, to the inherent fetishism of those forms.
In consequence, if we did not possess the concept of form, we would be
incapable of differentiating between the struggles that remain within the
boundaries of capitalist forms and those that tend to overcome them. We
could not distinguish, for example, between struggles that remain locked
inside the wage-form and those who tend to overcome it.
We may argue that the difference between a struggle for wage raise and
a struggle for the workers management of a factory is evident and does not
require the assistance of the analysis of the form. However, this objection
would underestimate the influence of the fetishism inherent to wage-form
in the workers’ consciousness, thanks to which wage appears regularly as
the payment the worker provides to the production process of wealth, pay-
ment supposedly in accordance to their level of productivity (Marx 1982
III: 1056). And that objection is even completely irrelevant the moment
we consider examples of class struggle that face even more fetishized forms
of social relations, like state-form.20 If the difference between a wage raise
and the suppression of waged labor seemed evident, it is not evident at all
the difference between the modification of the balance of power that is
instituted in state apparatus and the suppression of state itself as a form.
The appearance of state neutrality, that is, the concealment of its necessary
capitalist character inasmuch as it is a form behind the circumstantial bal-
ance of power that crystallizes within itself as apparatus, is a product of the
fetishism the very state-form possess. Reformist strategies as a whole can
be defined, in this sense, as strategies that underestimate forms, underesti-
mation normally disguised as demagogic pragmatism that is not but the
conversion to ideology of the very fetishist character of those forms. These
forms constitute, on the other hand, the main point of attack of revolu-
tionary strategies.
All this, though important, does not expose completely the importance
of the concept of form for anti-capitalist critique. In effect, up to this
220  A. BONNET

point, the concept of form has helped us precise the objectives of this cri-
tique, but it does not tell us anything about the possibility of such critique.
It may even appear that the concept of form closed that possibility inas-
much as, on the one hand, we claim that forms in fact in-form social rela-
tions in a fetishist way and, on the other hand, we assume that such critique
can only be immanent to them.21 However, even when it is true that the
concept of form also helps us to understand the difficulties the anti-
capitalist critique faces, it does not close its possibility. Indeed, as we have
already pointed out, capitalist forms are ways of existence of antagonist
social relations and, therefore, are contradictory forms. Let us add now
that, in this contradiction of capitalist forms, we found its aperture.
Capitalist forms, inasmuch as they are contradictory, are not closed forms
but process-forms. And, also, the fetishism of these forms, as process-
forms, is not a closed one, but a process of fetishization. In the end, the
reproduction or not of capitalist forms, that is to say, of the irrational way
social relations exist under capitalism, depends of class struggle.

This article was translated by Santiago Soulignac.

Notes
1. This does not mean, however, that Marx’s argument starts with the form
commodity. As Holloway correctly pointed out already (Holloway 2015),
his starting point is wealth (der Reichtum) in its diversity, wealth that
appears enclosed in the commodity-form, in those societies in which the
capitalist way of production prevails (see, to extend his argument, Holloway
2018). The importance of this nuance will be clear further.
2. Because of this Marxian use of the concept, Rubin tends to assimilate the
concepts of form and function (Rubin 1990: 31 and subsequent). Although
there actually is a relation between both concepts, which we cannot exam-
ine here, it is not convenient to reduce the analysis of form to one function.
3. If we accept that the Marxian exposition of the categories follows a logical
order instead of a historical one (as it should, since Rosdolsky 1977: 109
and subsequent), some moments of that exposition do not have to be
referred to forms in the sense of effective ways of existence of social rela-
tionships—although naturally, in such cases, Marx would be employing the
concept of form in a different way.
4. Surely Marx kept in mind Aristotelian thinking when employing the con-
cept of form in his critique of political economy. Already, young Marx
knew about the Aristotelian employment of the concept (as it is evident in
his reading notes of De Anima in 1839–1840) and, in particular, the
 12  THE CONCEPT OF FORM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY  221

Aristotelian and anti-Platonic doctrine of the soul as an inseparable form of

the body (Aristotle 1978: 48 and subsequent). He also profoundly admired
the ‘Greek philosophy’s Alexander of Macedon’ (according to the expres-
sion he used in his doctoral thesis of 1841; Marx 2010a: 34).
5. Our recovery of the antique meaning of the concept of ‘form’ may seem
irrelevant, but it is not, because the relation between the inherited thought
and language should not consist in inventing new terms nor attributing
arbitrary meanings to the ones that are available. Adorno claimed on that
respect: ‘the task of a philosophical treatment of philosophical terminology
cannot other than to rekindle the coagulated life in those terms’ and ‘the
most fruitful way of communicating an original thought from the point of
view of language consists in palming with the terminology that was inher-
ited from tradition, while incorporating to it new constellations through
which the related terms are expressed in a completely different way’
(Adorno 1983: 15, 35). This is exactly what Marx did when recovering
that old term in his critique of political economy.
6. Adorno naturally refers to the Hegelian development of the key concept of
self-consciousness (Hegel 1977: 111–119). This link between spirit and
labor, established in the introduction to the system (in the Phenomenology
of Spirit), is lost in his further unfolding (particularly in the Science of
Logic). But, as it is known, young Marx took advantage of that dialectic of
lordship and bondage to his notion of alienated labor (Marx 2010b: 270
and subsequent).
7. Transfiguration is mirrored, according to Adorno, in ‘Marx’s Hegelian-
trained theory of the law of value, which capitalism realizes over the heads
of men’ (Adorno: ibidem). We will keep this in mind further.
8. The just and necessary rejection of vulgar materialism does not imply (as it
happens in young Lukács 1971) the reduction of nature to a mere social
category. On the contrary, an accurate definition of materialism requires
avoiding that reduction (see the argument in favor of the ‘object’s prepon-
derance’ in Adorno (1973: 183)).
9. Although it is true that, in some way, young Marx (2010b) fell in tempta-
tion of articulating this supposition in an anthropological philosophy—
attempt that he would abandon later—we do not believe that it is a
supposition that compromises his further analysis of forms in his critique of
political economy.
10. Essence is not, as Hegel had already warned us at the beginning of the cor-
responding section of his tiny Logic, ‘the concept as posited concept’—as
confessing beforehand that his system would not be constructed from con-
tradiction—but that it had already been constructed retrospectively from
identity (Hegel 1991: 175).
222  A. BONNET

11. Radicalization that results from the very ‘opening of Marxist categories’
proposed by open marxism. ‘This openness appears in, for instance, a dia-
lectic of subject and object, of form and content, of theory and practice, of
the constitution and reconstitution of categories in and through the devel-
opment, always crisis-ridden, of a social world’ (Bonefeld et al. 1992: 11).
12. The elementary forms of commodity and money are enough to develop
our argument because in the in-formation of human activity as abstract
labor and of the product of that activity as value objectified in the com-
modity and represented in money, we find the expression of the antagonis-
tic character of social relations in capitalism. But we cannot forget at this
point that the same considerations are valid for the capital form. The con-
tradictory character of capital as a way of existence of antagonistic social
relations, which is expressed in an aggravated way in its big crisis and its
corresponding process of reorganization—or, eventually, in its overcoming
as an irrational way of organizing society—is also characteristic in its every-
day reproduction.
13. Needless to say that this fetishism Marx attributes here to the elementary
commodity-form is, even more, still an attribute of the more complex
forms that social relations assume in capitalist society: it is money fetishism
(Marx 1982 I: 187), capital fetishism (1982 II: 303) and money-capital
fetishism (1982 III: 515).
14. Bonefeld (2001) notices that this expression from Marx (‘verrückte Form’,
translated in English as ‘absurd form’) actually has two meanings, both
relevant: ‘absurd form’ (verrückte) certainly refers to the irrationality of
money as a way of organizing social relationships; ‘displaced form’ (ver-
rückte), on the other hand, acknowledges the reification of social labor as
a whole in a specific commodity (translating ‘perverted form’, in that case,
would be even more appropriate).
15. The conversion of human labor into abstract labor is manifested in
exchange but, inasmuch capitalist production is commodity production,
such conversion is a process that actually starts in the sphere of produc-
tion—and it is consummated in the sphere of circulation. Labor as an activ-
ity and its product are already in-form as abstract labor and value in the
process of production.
16. This idea of a process of abstraction that operates in reality itself is distinc-
tively Marxian—although unthinkable without the development of
German idealism in general and Hegelian in particular. It does not find any
place, in consequence, in Althusser’s (1969) distinction between the con-
crete (‘real object’) and the abstract (‘object of thought’) that, malgré lui,
is barely a sophisticated version of the Diamat’s crude objectivism (see
Sohn-Rethel 1978: 20).
 12  THE CONCEPT OF FORM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY  223

17. To further precise the features of this idea of real abstraction, in contrast
with mental abstraction, it is convenient to go back at the way Marx distin-
guishes between labour in general and abstract labour in 1857 Einleitung—
given that the abstraction of the forms commodity and money has its roots
in the abstraction of labour as activity in capitalist society (Marx 1973: 103
and subsequent).
18. It is worth noting here that not all concepts may aspire to have such forms
as counterparts. Marx usually employs the term ‘categories’ (Kategorien)
to refer to the concepts of commodity, money, that is to say, precisely those
concepts that manifest the fundamental ways of existence of social relations
in capitalism. But this does not imply that Marx only employs these kinds
of concepts (see the distinction between the concepts of labor in general
and abstract labor indicated in the previous endnote).
19. Due to the limitations of space, we cannot stop here to consider bolder
interpretations of these relationships between subjective and objective
forms, such as the relationship established by Sohn-Rethel 1978) between
form and abstract thought or the analogy drawn by (Žižek 1989) between
form and unconscious.
20. It is known that Marx—although he thought of doing so—never got to
systematically derive the state-form within his critique of political econ-
omy. The so called State derivation debate, however, showed definitively
that Marxian critique of capitalist forms could be extended to the state-
form (Holloway and Picciotto 1978; Bonnet and Piva 2017 in Spanish).
21. To assume criticism as immanent is equivalent, in political terms, to assume
emancipation as self-emancipation, i. e., the first thesis of the International
Association of Workers: ‘The emancipation of the working class must be
the work of the working class itself’.

References
Adorno, T. (1973). Negative Dialectics. London; New York: Routledge.
Adorno, T. (1976). Introduction to Th. W. Adorno, et al: The Positivist Dispute in
German Sociology. London: Heinemann.
Adorno, T. (1983). Terminología filosófica I. Madrid: Taurus.
Adorno, T. (1989). Society. In S. E. Bronner & D. Mackey Kellner (Eds.), Critical
Theory and Society: a Reader. New York; London: Routledge.
Althusser, L. (1969). For Marx. London: Penguin Press.
Aristóteles. (1978). Acerca del alma. Madrid: Gredos.
Aristóteles. (1994). Metafísica. Madrid: Gredos.
Aristóteles. (1995). Física. Madrid: Gredos.
224  A. BONNET

Backhaus, H.-G. (1993). Between Philosophy and Science: Marxian Social

Economy as Critical Theory. In W.  Bonefeld, R.  Gunn, & K.  Psychopedis
(Eds.), Open Marxism I (pp. 54–92). London: Pluto Press.
Bonefeld, W. (2001). Social Form, Critique and Human Dignity. Zeitschrift für
kritische Theorie, 13, 97–120.
Bonefeld, W., Gunn, R., & Psychopedis, K. (1992). Introduction. In W. Bonefeld,
R.  Gunn, & K.  Psychopedis (Eds.), Open Marxism I (pp. IX–XX). London:
Pluto Press.
Bonnet, A., & Piva, A. (Eds.). (2017). Estado y capital. El debate alemán sobre
la derivación del estado. Buenos Aires: Herramienta. Retrieved from http://
www.herramienta.com.ar/ediciones-herramienta/estado-y-capital-el-debate-
aleman-sobre-la-derivacion-del-estado.
García Vela, A. (2015). Forma y sustancia: una aproximación desde El capital y los
Grundrisse. In Bajo el volcán. Revista del Posgrado de Sociología (pp. 15–40),
15(2). Puebla: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla.
Gunn, R. (1992). Against Historical Materialism: Marxism as First-Orden
Discourse. In W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, & K. Psychopedis (Eds.), Open Marxism
II (pp. 1–45). London: Pluto Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1955). Lectures on the History of Philosophy II. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Hegel, G.  W. F. (1975). Jenaer System entwürfe I.  Das System der spekulativen
Philosophie. In Gesammelte Werke VI. Hamburg: Felix Meisner Verlag.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, G.  W. F. (1991). The Encyclopaedia Logic. Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Company.
Hegel, G. W. F. (2003). Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hegel, G.  W. F. (2010). The Science of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Holloway, J. (1980). El estado y la lucha cotidiana, en Cuadernos Políticos
(pp.  7–27), 24. México. (In English: Holloway, J. (1991). The State and
Everyday Struggle. In S. Clarke (Ed.), The State Debate. London: Macmillan).
Holloway, J. (2002). Change the World Without Tanking Power. The Meaning of
Revolution Today. London: Pluto Press.
Holloway, J. (2015). Read Capital: The First Sentence. Historical Materialism,
23(3), 3–26. London: Brill.
Holloway, J. (2018). Una lectura anti-identitaria de El capital. Buenos Aires:
Herramienta – ICSyH-BUAP.
Holloway, J., & Picciotto, S. (Eds.). (1978). State and Capital. A Marxist Debate.
London: Edward Arnold.
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (2002). Dialectics of Enlightenment. Philosophical
Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
 12  THE CONCEPT OF FORM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY  225

Lukács, G. (1971). History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics.

Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Marcuse, H. (1955). Reason and Revolution. Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.
London: Penguin / (1983). Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. In
K. Marx & F. Engels, Werke XLII. Berlín: Dietz Verlag.
Marx, K. (1982). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin /
(1983). Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie I. In K. Marx & F. Engels,
Werke XXIII. Berlín: Dietz Verlag.
Marx, K. (2010a). Differences Between the Democriten and Epicurean Philosophy of
Nature. In K. Marx & F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 1. Laurence and Wishart.
Marx, K. (2010b). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In K. Marx &
F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3. Laurence and Wishart.
Marx, K. (2010c). Poverty of the Philosophy. Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by
M.  Proudhon. In K.  Marx & F.  Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6. Laurence
and Wishart.
Marx, K. (2010d). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In K. Marx
& F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 29. Laurence and Wishart.
Postone, M. (2003). Time, Labour, and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of
Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reichelt, H. (2007). Marx’s Critique of Economic Categories: Reflections on the
Problem of Validity in the Dialectical Method of Presentation in Capital.
Historical Materialism, 15(4), 3–52.
Rosdolsky, R. (1977). The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’. London: Pluto Press.
Rubin, I. I. (1990). Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Montréal: Black Rose Books.
Schmidt, A. (2014). The Concept of Nature in Marx. London: Verso.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Intellectual and Manual Labour. A Critique of
Epistemology. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press / (1989). Geistige und
körperlische Arbeit. Zur Epistemologie der abendländischen Geschichte. Weinhem:
VCH Verlagsgesellschaft.
Žižek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
 CHAPTER 13

The Real Contradictions (Commodities

as Coherence of Contradiction)

Cristián Sucksdorf

Contradiction and Reality
The concrete task in these pages is to establish some interpretative guide-
lines for Marx’s understanding of the relationship between bodies and
representations, but limiting the analysis to its most evident manifestation:
the real existence of contradictions.
We still need to establish which can be the common thread to make
explicit how Marx analyzes, from the perspective of the praxis, the specific
relationship between contradictions and reality in capitalism. Firstly we
should be aware of something evident: a contradiction (counter-dictio) is
something of the order of discourse, that is, of the order of representation
or abstraction, but not of the bodies. There is no contradiction (nor nega-
tion) whatsoever between bodies.1 What is more: contradiction in the
strong sense (logic contradiction) shows the limit of language, the point
in which language cannot even point to something in the world. An
unbreachable barrier that therefore becomes the ultimate criterion of
falsehood: if it is possible to demonstrate that a discourse is contradictory,

C. Sucksdorf (*)
Buenos Aires National University (UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina

© The Author(s) 2020 227

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_13
228  C. SUCKSDORF

it follows it must necessarily be false; such is the most classical means of

refutation.
Matters became more complicated as Hegel located the heart of truth
in contradiction precisely. Identity based on its rejection2 would express
only half-truth: the abstract part of truth. Reality would be then not the
stillness of identity, but the movement of ‘get to be’. Meaning was not in
the indeterminate being (indistinguishable from nothingness), but in the
swinging movement between being and nothingness which are the deter-
minations, that is, the becoming (werden). Then, this is about becoming
what one is: the Idea that returns to itself. So, in the dialectic conflict,
contradiction finds its right to the world. But such right has a cost: the
World is under the sovereignty of dialectics; the order of the bodies sub-
sumed to meaning and, consequently, to thought.
We are facing symmetrical orders. On the one hand, the classical way
that radiates contradiction out of the world. From this perspective, contra-
diction is not only impossible in the World of the bodies—and therefore
has only an ideal existence—but also is the limit of language and what is
thinkable; it is, then, even if this may be apparently redundant, of an
unreal identity. On the other hand, there is Hegel’s way, which empha-
sizes the ‘real’ quality of contradiction, but at the expense of turning real-
ity itself in its derivation, that is to say, in idealization. Contradiction is
then real, but only because reality has become ideal. In both cases, the
ideal quality of contradiction is asserted, be it real or unreal.
Going back to Marx, we may now notice what makes his approach sin-
gular and separates him from tradition. Firstly, we must point out that
Marx does not conceive contradiction in terms of ideality,3 contradiction
is in itself is real, that is, it is articulated in an immediate way with the bod-
ies, although that does not imply that bodies and meanings get con-
founded in the same plane.4 But how is it possible to conceive a
contradiction as reality if not subsuming it, as Hegel does, to the reality of
representation, to ideality, so that both will coincide?
As we saw before, Marx’s position implies a double order. Looking
closely at it, we find it evident that any contradiction in itself, as long as it
is an abstraction, belongs to the order of discourse and, therefore, it ‘does
not exist’ in the world of the bodies (or, considering it a body, merely
flatus vocis). However, to be considered ‘real contradiction’, it must be
part of reality, that is to say, be of the same substance as bodies. How to
interpret such a relationship in which the abstraction belongs also to real-
ity? It may be useful to resource, for the sake of illustration, to a more
 13  THE REAL CONTRADICTIONS (COMMODITIES AS COHERENCE…  229

developed form of this approach. Among the most remarkable continua-

tions of this conception—which Marx leaves underdeveloped or not very
explicitly developed—there is Foucault’s critique to Marxism; more spe-
cifically, his conception of the ‘dispositif’. With this concept, Foucault
(who claims not to be Marxist, but whose work is very influence by Marx’s
thought) tried to understand the situation in which ‘something that does
not exist able to become something [real]. It is not an illusion since it is pre-
cisely a set of practices, real practices, which established it and thus imperi-
ously marks it out in reality’ (Foucault 2008: 37). But how can something
does not exist become real, in other words, be at once real and inexistent?
Let us have a look to Foucault’s most quoted example, the dispositif of
sexuality. The emergence of ‘sexuality’ as a dispositif is formed by the dis-
courses and practices that order the bodies; it belongs then to a discursive
order, essentially performative. Simply put: a series of discourses that pro-
mote and circumscribe practices and that, from a certain historical point
onward, manage to establish as a horizon of action for the bodies in a
certain sphere that, at the same time, they have created. Foucault stresses
that a dispositif consists of the fact that it ‘effectively marks out in reality
that which does not exist’ (idem). What this concept of dispositive makes
particularly visible is that to avoid dualist options we must conceive reality
in a way that accounts for the innervation of discourse—that is, of mean-
ing—in the bodies and their practices. Meanings do not exist in reality—
but as flatus vocis—but once they constitute the discursive order, they
innervate the bodies and determine their horizons of possibility, and thus
have a real, practical existence.
And this is precisely the novelty in Marx’s thought5: a way to avoid the
dualist Choice is to broaden the field of the real6 and include in it the
meaning as articulation of the bodies. We must make clear that, for Marx,
this was not just a reflection on the general forms of the relationship
between bodies and representations, he aimed to investigate their specific
articulation in the capitalist society; to account for the differential ways in
which representations—the meaning—constitute real practices and thus
modify the bodies and their interrelations, but also, how that meaning
forms in the active life—in actual, concrete practices—of the many inter-
related bodies. Possibly the best-known (and best-rounded) expression of
these relations is the one Marx develops in the section The Fetishism of
Commodities, in the Volume I of The Capital, but we believe all his work
gravitates in some way toward this problem.
230  C. SUCKSDORF

It is to account for that non-explicit kernel of Marx’s thought that we

resource to the concept of real abstraction. In his work Intellectual and
Manual Labor, Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1980) proponed that Marx’s work
conceives the relationship between bodies and meanings that constitutes
capitalism as a conglomerate of ‘real abstractions’, that is, a system of rep-
resentations that take place not only in thought but also have a real exis-
tence among the bodies, a practical existence, although they still remain
abstractions. Commodities, those ‘physical-metaphysical’ things and
money as their developed form constitute a central manifestation of such
real abstractions.
In these pages—and as a work hypothesis—we assume that these real
abstractions with which Marx interrogates the historical specificity of capi-
talism7 do not consist of abstractions in general, but, as we have men-
tioned before, it is contradictions that support the grid of bodies and
representations: a growing system of real contradictions. We must admit,
however, that in this use of the concept of real abstraction—reconfigured
as real contradiction—we are moving away from the original determina-
tions given by its author and the specific sphere where they functioned.
Let us briefly see what the original proposal in Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual
and Manual Labor consists of, so as to retake later the problem of the real
contradiction.

Real Abstractions
Although Sohn-Rethel intended to broaden the general understanding of
Marx’s thought—as, in his view, ‘the unproclaimed theme of Capital and
of the commodity analysis is in fact the real abstraction’ (Sohn-Rethel
1980: 28)—his concept seeks mainly to account for the possibility condi-
tions of pure thought, separated from the world and experience.8 That is
to say, the conditions for the ‘thought-form’ (Denkform) which is the
basis for the Western world. His intent is to establish a genealogy of the
abstract quality of thought, and this genealogy will find its unproclaimed
origin in commodities. But how is it possible for commodities to account
for the raise of pure thought? The starting point of Sohn-Rethel is the
assumption of a ‘the secret identity of commodity form and thought form’
(idem: 9). Such identity (or, strictly speaking, isomorphism) of thought
and commodity is not a given, a mere fact; understanding it presupposes
tracking down its material genesis. In other words, its historical inscription
as a determination of practical life is precisely what will allow linking the
 13  THE REAL CONTRADICTIONS (COMMODITIES AS COHERENCE…  231

abstract way of thinking to commodities. The determination of practical

life—therefore real and historical—that commodities produce and lie at
the foundation of abstract thinking is, for Sohn-Rethel, the Trading
Exchange in general and money as its developed expression. Consequently,
it is the practice of trading exchange where the historical determinations
of pure thought are to be sought.
The discipline that bourgeois society developed to account for that
thought-form is the philosophical epistemology: ‘the theory of scientific
knowledge undertaken with the aim of elaborating a coherent, all-­
embracing ideology to suit the production relations of bourgeois society’
(idem: 22). And Kant’s Critique, to Sohn-Rethel, is ‘the classical manifes-
tation of the bourgeois fetishism of intellectual labour’ (ibidem). That is
why, in Kant’s epistemology, it must be proven that pure thought, the
thought-form, presupposes (and is based on) the trading Exchange, and
therefore individual commodity is its fundamental form.9 Therefore, to
inscribe historically and materially the faculty to know implies for Sohn-­
Rethel to trace the history of trading exchange. This is why the genealogy
he undertakes goes back to ancient Greece and the emergence of the cur-
rency as foundations for abstract thought.10 So in Sohn-Rethel’s view, the
practice of trading exchange—developed until reaching the currency
mediation—is what produced the passage from the brute fact of material
existence to the representation that transfixes it into ‘abstract fact’, and
consequently, in which the rift opens in the core of material reality, a dis-
crimination in identity: an abstraction in reality.
The practical and material production of abstraction begins in the hand
before it reaches the mind. Paraphrasing famous words: individuals do the
abstraction that trading exchange presupposes although they do not know
it. Sohn-Rethel’s work then entails in showing the genesis of the
‘commodity-­abstraction’ to extend its determinations to the ‘thought-
abstraction’.

Differences with Sohn-Rethel
At this point, we separate from the original determinations of Sohn-­
Rethel’s concept because our concern is not the formation of pure con-
sciousness or abstract thinking, but the particular mode of construction
and functioning of real abstractions (or real contradictions) in Mark’s
work. We leave aside then any reference to Kant’s epistemology and the
formation of consciousness. But before redirecting the analysis of Marx’s
232  C. SUCKSDORF

thought, we must raise objections to the basis of Sohn-Rethel’s thesis, as

the aspects of it that depart from Marx will aid our passage from the ‘uni-
versal’ form of real abstraction (that is to say, from ancient Greece to our
days) to the particular form of real contradiction in terms of a specific dif-
ference of capitalism.
The first objection is the fact of building real abstraction exclusively on
the grounds of the exchange of commodities in general, regardless of
whether the exchange occurred in, for example, the capitalist mode of
production, in feudal times or in antiquity. Such equiparation is possible
because the analysis closes at the moment of exchange, leaving out its spe-
cific relation with production and consumption, and so the mere existence
of commodities (with the sole specificity that the use of currency has been
achieved) is enough to equiparate modes of production as diverse as the
ancient, the feudal and the capitalist one. The second objection regards
assimilating the abstraction implied in a commodity to the act of separat-
ing use during the exchange. Let us see the first of our disagreements.

Commodity in General and Capitalist Commodity:

‘An Immense Accumulation of Commodities’
Sohn-Rethel’s argument begins with the idea that wherever there is trad-
ing exchange, there is already real abstraction. Consequently, those
abstractions are the same in antiquity, feudal times or in the capitalist
modernity: ‘The class antagonisms which commodity production engen-
ders in all its stages—in Marx’s terms ‘the ancient classical, the feudal, and
the modern bourgeois modes of production’ are intrinsically connected
with closely corresponding forms of division of head and hand (…)’
(Sohn-Rethel 1980: 18, our italics).
What this perspective does not take into account is that there are many
senses to ‘commodity’. Or better still, that in capitalism, the commodity
has a specificity that separates it from any other historical instant of trading
exchange as a mere exchange of surplus production. Only in capitalism do
commodities become the dominant mode of social relations and exchanges.
Lukács cleverly noticed this specificity of capitalist commodities: ‘the
problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even
regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, struc-
tural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the
structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the
 13  THE REAL CONTRADICTIONS (COMMODITIES AS COHERENCE…  233

objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms
corresponding to them’ (Lukács 1969: 89).
The matter is that in capitalism, all social relations refer to commodi-
ties. This is why the via regia to understand capitalist societies is to analyze
commodities; however, it is for the same reason the specificity of com-
modities makes it impossible for it to be a universal category through
which to analyze any society at any historical time. A category that we
endeavor to use for the analysis of reality cannot be central to any histori-
cal time or any society. A concept that encompasses a universal reality is
incapable of having a hold in the world; it belongs to theology or meta-
physics in the most ethereal sense. For each historical moment, there can
only be a group of simple categories (which in turn must consist of ever-
more concrete forms, following the method indicated by Marx in his
famous 1857 Einleitung) to explain that reality and not ‘reality in gen-
eral’, which is nothing but the negation of reality, that is, ideality.
But what are those specific determinations of commodities in capital-
ism? Marx states it in the first sentence of The Capital (descendent from
that of contribution to the Critique): ‘The wealth of those societies in
which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an
immense arsenal of commodities”, its unit being a single commodity’
(Marx 1973: 3, our italics).11 What defines the capitalist commodity then
is that it is the way in which wealth presents itself and not just one of its
many manifestations. But there is more: the commodity is the unit of
wealth, so, in capitalism, wealth comes in the form of commodities. If we
take into account that for Marx wealth is considered in itself (i.e. ‘beyond
its limited bourgeois form’), it is ‘the universality of individual needs,
capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal
exchange’ (Marx 2007: 447; MEW 42 1983: 396), we can infer then that
the commodity-form is, in capitalism, the form of social relationships.
Briefly put, all social relationships in capitalism are ruled by the trade
grammar, that is, its form. Consequently, commodities in capitalist societ-
ies are not ‘things’ or mere objects or surplus products, they are the objec-
tive form of subjective Bonds; in other words, the interrelations in which
individuals exist have become things, an ‘immense accumulation of com-
modities’. Because of these determinations, exclusive to capitalism, Lukács
asserts that the commodity is the ‘the model of all the objective forms of
bourgeois society, together with all the subjective forms corresponding to
them’ (Lukács 1969: 89).
234  C. SUCKSDORF

It is for this reason that there are many meanings to ‘commodity’. In

ancient and feudal societies, it refers to a marginal, secondary phenome-
non of trading surplus products (and therefore, a signal of the limits
between a community and the next one)12; in the capitalist society, to the
way in which wealth presents itself as a monstrous grid of things. This
implies the crystallization of social relationships in a ‘relation’ between
objects. To sum up, only in capitalism are commodities invested with the
quality of ‘fetishism’.13
If we turn our attention back to Sohn-Rethel’s generalization on the
explicative force of the analysis of the ‘exchange of commodities in all its
stages’, we shall see it is based on a confusion between the exchange of
commodities in general (a mere scheme, supra-historic form and therefore
non-existent in the world) and the real determinations that commodities
concretely adopt in capitalism, and that turn it into the central category
for the analysis of these societies in particular. Consequently, if in certain
society, commodities are not the form of wealth, or the way in which it
‘presents itself’ (something that only occurs in capitalism, and so it is its
specificity), that category cannot be the main one to understand the deter-
minations of such society. Briefly put, the problem in equiparating the
mere exchange of surplus products in different communities (the antiquity,
for instance) to the trade grammar characteristic of capitalism, which con-
sists in the crystallization of social relationships (fetishism), or, what is
another aspect of the same thing, in wealth presenting itself as an ‘immense
accumulation of commodities’.

Exchange and Use Value: From Abstraction

to the Dissolution of Contradiction

Our second disagreement with Sohn-Rethel’s proposal regards the way in

which he deals, in practice, with real abstraction. His starting point is
unquestionable: ‘The form of commodity is abstract and abstractness gov-
erns its whole orbit’. In other words, the identity of that (real) abstraction
and commodity. On the other hand, the problem arises when we enquire
about the orbit referred, or, better still, the concrete social practice that
holds the real abstraction in commodities. Sohn-Rethel clearly points out:
‘(…) to be labour products is not a property which accrues to the com-
modities and to money in the relationship of exchange where the abstrac-
tion arises. The abstraction does not spring from labour but from exchange
 13  THE REAL CONTRADICTIONS (COMMODITIES AS COHERENCE…  235

as a particular mode of social interrelationship, and it is through exchange

that the abstraction imparts itself to labour, making it “abstract human
labour”’ (Sohn-Rethel 1980: 15–16, our italics).
The abstract quality of commodities would then spring only from
exchange, and not from labor. Its origin as a commodity would be in the
immediacy of exchange, not in the modality of labor that produced it,
because ‘to be labour products is not a property which accrues to the com-
modities’. Labor generates a mere product, a utility; exchange turns that
into a commodity. This is so, simply, because the only general determina-
tion of commodities, in other words, valid for any historical moment, is to
be an exchangeable product. Therefore, following this thread of thought,
labor is always concrete labor that creates useful things and only post fes-
tum exchange reconverts that concrete labor into ‘abstract human labor’.
But there is more, as the choice to base the real abstraction of the
commodity-­form in the moment of exchange—instead of doing so in the
production and labor—entails also a reduction of commodity to only one
of its parts: value. The abstraction that started in the commodity-form
ends as the separation (abstraction) of use value (La abstracción que
comenzaba con la forma-mercancía, culmina ahora como separación
(abstracción) del valor de uso):

commodity exchange is abstract because it excludes use; that is to say, the

action of exchange excludes the action of use. (…) Therefore while it is
necessary that their action of exchange should be abstract from use, there is
also necessity that their minds should not be. The action alone is abstract.
The abstractness of their action will, as a consequence, escape the minds of
the people performing it. In exchange, the action is social, the minds are
private. (Idem: 35)

The commodity becomes then pure value: the currency form abstracted
from its dealing with the things. If we stick to the definition of commodity
as a bearer (Träger) of use value, there would not be an exchange of com-
modities, given that the trading circulation, C-M-C (‘selling for buying’),
as well as the circulation of money, M-C-M (‘buying for selling’), entails
the metamorphosis of commodities into money, and therefore imply that
the use value is something ultimately inseparable from value. If exchange
disregarded use value and limited itself to exchange values, there would be
the motionless and impossible form: Money-Money-Money. That is,
­nonsense.14 Such abstraction of use value would mean, in turn, that in the
236  C. SUCKSDORF

exchange, there has been an abstraction of the commodity itself.

Abstraction would have lost its justification. The contradictory materiality
of commodity—its body, as Marx would say—disappears then from the
real scene and only plays a phantom role15 in the mind of the buyer. The
practice is reduced to the exchange of values, not commodities; and so, we
are not facing real abstraction, but, yet again, an ideal abstraction. The
contradictory unit of commodity has been supplanted by a juxtaposition
of two different modalities, which are in some sense contradictory: ‘the
action is social, the minds are private’. We are no longer looking at a con-
tradiction, but at the contraposition of a real form, the action of exchang-
ing, to the ideal form, a representation in the mind.
A shift has taken place. At the beginning, abstraction had its basis in the
commodity as an abstraction that exists in reality, given that ‘The form of
commodity is abstract and abstractness governs its whole orbit’. However,
as more determinations are added, we understand that the true basis of
real abstraction for Sohn-Rethel is not the commodity itself, but the
actions of exchange and use that it presupposes: ‘Marx begins by distin-
guishing use-value and exchange-value as the major contrasting aspects of
every commodity. We trace these aspects to the different human activities
to which they correspond, the actions of use and the action of exchange.
The relationship between these two contrasting kinds of activity, use and
exchange, is the basis of the contrast and relationship between use-value
and exchange-value’ (Idem: 31).
What does this shift from commodities to the actions of use and
exchange imply? As we have seen, it is possible to understand commodities
in two senses. In the first place, a general mode, in which commodities
exist since antiquity (although never as the central form of societies, being
just its limits and porosity) that consists only of being a surplus product
from labor, interchangeable for others. Secondly, a mode specific to capi-
talism, in which the totality of commodities (‘immense accumulation of
commodities’) is the way in which wealth presents itself and, therefore, the
representation of all social bonds (let us bear in mind that those bonds
constitute wealth beyond the ‘limited bourgeois form’). The latter mode
of commodities as the form of wealth, and, fundamentally, of the social
bond, is the only one that is of interest to Marx because it is specific to
capitalism. Having said that, it is evident that this way in which wealth
presents itself as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’ is already an
abstraction. Something, of the order of meaning, different from the mere
existence of bodies.16 It is the irruption of abstraction in the realm on
 13  THE REAL CONTRADICTIONS (COMMODITIES AS COHERENCE…  237

active life. The social relations that make up wealth in its total form, that
is to say, the active life and its possibility conditions (accumulated and pos-
sible relations of individuals among themselves and with nature) present
themselves now projected or re-presented on things. In other words, the
meaning of commodities in capitalism makes the products of labor insepa-
rable from the fact that social relations are represented in them: commodi-
ties are that impossible unity of value and use value. These two
determinations of commodities—value and use value—can be expressed in
different contradictory pairs, depending on which aspect we stress: as
physical-metaphysical or sensuous-suprasensuous, as individual-universal
or private-social and so on, but its most important expression is the one
that points to its genesis in contradiction, that is, the fact that it is at the
same time a result of concrete labor (use value) and abstract labor (value).
The real and the idea coexist in the commodity as contradiction.
At this junction, we can better understand the consequences or the shift
that Sohn-Rethel proponed to give basis to the real abstraction. Firstly,
such passage is done through an unspoken operation: it equiparates the
determinations of commodities’ (exchange) value and use value, with the
actions of exchanging and using, and so this equiparation hides precisely
the difference between these moments. Which is that difference hidden by
the equiparation? The contradiction. Use and exchange are unrelated activ-
ities; they could not be linked at all. If they are related, it is accidentally,
externally, in their borders and limits. They can only exist together as
­alternation: when exchanging takes place, using disappears from the real
scene and accrues to the possible, and vice versa. In the determinations of
commodities, on the contrary, the relation between use value and value
implies contradiction, but also identity. Each instance is negating the
other, while at the same time it is asserting it as a necessary correlation.
With use value only, it is not a commodity, but a mere object or good; on
the other hand, value as such always points back to its material dimension,
that is, to some use value. Without that material dimension, value is noth-
ing. For the products of labor to be commodities, then their existence
must be subjected to the double quality of being at the same time value
and use value. This is the meaning hidden in the oxymoron with which
Marx defines the commodity: ‘sensuously suprasensuous thing’ (sinnlich
übersinnliches Ding) or ‘physical-metaphysical’. In the passage from the
determinations of ­commodities to the actions of using and exchanging,
there is also a passage from a contradictory unit (the commodity) to an
alternative relation (exchanging and using) that is not underlined by any
238  C. SUCKSDORF

contraction. Consequently, the final movement through which Sohn-

Rethel refers to real abstraction as a substitution of commodities for pure
value (use abstraction) prevents precisely the understanding of the funda-
mental determination of capitalism, that is, the fact that constitutive social
relations (wealth in a wide sense) are represented in a contradictory unit
of materiality and social existence, use value and (exchange) value.
Let us sum up the points of contention we hold against Sohn-­
Rethel’s ideas:

(a) The equiparation of any historical period and the subsequent obscur-
ing of the specific role of commodities in capitalist societies (and
only in them), that is, wealth presents itself as an ‘immense accu-
mulation of commodities’. Such equiparation obscures the fact
that commodities in capitalism are not mere surplus products, but
a representation in objects of the social relations.
(b) Explaining the commodity-abstraction only in terms of exchange and
denying the importance of production and the mode of labor at its
formation. This shift from production to exchange reduces the
contradiction between concrete labor and abstract labor to a pro-
jection of the abstraction of use value, and therefore what disap-
pears is the abstract quality of the real activity, what Marx called in
his early work alienated labor (entfremdete Arbeit). We can add,
then, that the real abstraction embodied in commodities happened
before in the lives and bodies of concrete individuals, that is, in
their active life and their vital activity.
(c) Changing the double form of commodities (value and use value) for
pure value, or, in other terms, hiding the trade contradiction in the
money form. Not only is the materiality of commodities lost when
ascribing the basis of real abstraction to the separation and abstrac-
tion of use value during exchange, the real quality of the contradic-
tion between value and use value is reconverted into the
juxtaposition of the reality of exchanging (‘the social action’) and
the ideality of using (‘the private minds’) hidden in the circula-
tion of money.

What we can notice now is that these three points in which Sohn-Rethel
grows apart from Marx’s thought are not casual. They are fundamental
aspects in which Marx himself addresses the contradictory quality of real-
ity under the hegemony of the commodity-form, that is, the trade gram-
 13  THE REAL CONTRADICTIONS (COMMODITIES AS COHERENCE…  239

mar. We also find that these three points constitute a unit. Commodities
cannot only be understood as pure value, that is, as non-contradictory
forms (reduction on subsumption of commodities to money) unless they
are reduced to the moment of exchange, unless their contradictory form—
private and social at once—of labor that produced them is hidden.
Additionally, the moment of exchange cannot be considered fundamental
unless commodities are regarded as mere surplus products, and so liable to
be equated supra-historically to any other mode of production. If, in con-
trast to that, we consider that commodities are a representation of wealth,
it is no longer possible to reduce it to the moment of exchange, it must
include the historical form of labor that produced it. What has been
pushed away from the understanding of real abstraction is contradiction.
The movement underlying real contradiction has been substituted for the
still picture of an idealized valorization, that is, for the reduction of com-
modities to exchange, money and value; but, more importantly, the
wholeness of its grid, of the representation of wealth, has been dissolved.
It is still left for us to analyze the consequences of halting so the move-
ment of contradiction into a picture of real abstraction. To do so, we shall
review some aspects of how Marx’s thought develops these problems of
real contradiction.

The Continuity of Use Value: The Commodity-­

Money-­Capital Metamorphosis
We have pointed out that Sohn-Rethel ascribes the basis of real abstraction
to the abstraction of use value during exchange. Commodities enter the
exchange with a double quality of value and use value, but in that material
practice, its use value undergoes abstraction; in other words, individuals
deal with them materially as if they were only value; use value remains
confined to the interior of the buyer’s mind, not surfacing in the practical
reality. Therefore, with regard to that activity, the role of use value is no
longer real, it is only ideal. Abstraction would then be the act through
which use value undergoes abstraction, or is put aside, outside practical
reality and reduced to a mere element in the buyer’s mind. It is in this
aspect that Sohn-Rethel radically departs from Marx’s understanding of
exchange. Fundamentally because, for Marx, it is the metamorphosis of
commodities into money. It is the real, not merely ideal, transit between
two extremes: the commodity (value and use value) and money (represen-
240  C. SUCKSDORF

tation of pure value). But because of the same reason, this transit presup-
poses asserting the point of departure as well as the arrival.
Of commodities, Marx says, ‘Its property of being a value not only can
but must achieve an existence different from its natural one’. From the
start, we are facing two orders of the existence of commodities. However,
it is not merely different, complementary aspects, profiles that coexist in
succession, but, on the contrary, it is a contradiction: ‘each commodity
must be qualitatively different from its own value [this is use value]. Its
value must therefore have an existence which is qualitatively distinguish-
able from it [money], and in actual exchange this separability must become
a real separation [real abstraction], because the natural distinctness of
commodities must come into contradiction with their economic equiva-
lence’ (MEW 42: 76; Marx 2007: 66).
The double existence of commodities ‘must become a real separation’,
that is, the contradiction between use value and value culminates in the
annihilation of the self-same relation: the terms must separate. This sepa-
ration, however, is not possible in the commodity closed in itself. How is
it possible, then? In the relation that each commodity supposes with the
others. That relation is expressed in an ideal mode in the exchange value
as a price, that is, a sum of money and, in a real mode, in the conversion
of commodities into money. So, the contradiction between use value and
value is transferred to the mediation of money. What takes place in this
shift is that the contradiction inherent to any commodity finds resolution
in its relation to the rest of the commodities through money (which is,
really, particular money, but at the same time, it is ideally the universal
representation17 of all commodities). The contradiction then moves from
an individual commodity to money in general as the general form of con-
tradiction. Finally, the abstraction of use value occurs, as Sohn-Rethel says,
but now we understand that exchange is only a moment, and so is real
abstraction. Marx says:

Every moment, in calculating, accounting etc., that we transform commodi-

ties into value symbols, we fix them as mere exchange values, making
abstraction from the matter they are composed of and all their natural quali-
ties. On paper, in the head, this metamorphosis proceeds by means of mere
abstraction; but in the real exchange process a real mediation is required,
a means to accomplish this abstraction. In its natural existence, with its
natural properties, in natural identity with itself, the commodity is neither
constantly exchangeable nor exchangeable against every other commodity;
 13  THE REAL CONTRADICTIONS (COMMODITIES AS COHERENCE…  241

this it is only as something different from itself, something distinct from

itself, as exchange value. (Idem: 66; 76)

We can identify two moments underlying exchange, a first one in which

there is contradiction within the commodity (contradiction between use
value and value) and a second one in which the commodity becomes
money. What is fundamental is that such commodity metamorphosis does
not resolve the contradiction; it is transferred to the second instance, the
money. That is why money must move non-stop, because the contradic-
tion is never resolved but deferred: always redirected from one sphere to
another. The total movement in the transit of the contradiction presup-
poses the presence of materiality, that is, of use value, because it is the
origin of the objectified labor. The labor contradictory in itself (abstract
and concrete) is objectified in a product with use value and value, the
metamorphosis of that commodity into money manages to separate
(abstract) the value from its material support. But the abstraction is merely
a moment, given that money itself must also undergo metamorphosis, that
is, become capital, which will in turn be imbued in the contradiction that
money inherited from the commodity, now as the contradiction between
living and dead labor. And this contradiction will also be deferred by the
restarting cycle, although it will be at a more developed level, that is, of a
greater accumulation. The total meaning of the contradiction deferral is
the process of valorization of capital. Capital must, then, start Sisyphus’
task over and over again: buying labor force (variable capital) so that living
labor is objectified into commodities (use value), which in the exchange
process are converted into money with which to extract and obtain
surplus-­value. The aim of the whole metamorphosis cycle is the accumula-
tion of value, that is, capital. But this is only possible through the insepa-
rable chain of production, exchange and consume (productive or not),
that is, through the whole unending process of capital-labor-commodity-­
money-accumulated capital metamorphosis. The difference between capi-
tal and accumulated capital is the degree of value accumulation.
This allows us to understand that these metamorphoses are but the
quintessential meaning of commodities in capitalism: the possibility of
wealth (capacities of the bodies, needs, pleasures, social relations and rela-
tion to nature, etc.) presenting itself as a monstrous cumulus of things: the
‘immense accumulation of commodities’. And this is the specificity of
capitalism that precisely makes impossible to ascribe the basis of real
abstraction to the moment of exchange and value, disregarding produc-
242  C. SUCKSDORF

tion and consumption as well as use value (during the exchange). To sum
up, Sohn-Rethel’s approach does not allow relating the real abstraction
with the process of valorization. Precisely, this is so because that process is
not a simple abstraction, but a real contradiction, which is only possible
due to the vertiginous, repeating escape from itself (metamorphosis) that
the commodity—or its total form, the capital—undergoes.

Deferral and Mystery: The Accumulation

of Commodities

From the inseparable quality of the moments of production, exchange and

consumption18 in the existence of capitalist commodities, we have reached
to the need for continuity of the use value, one of the moments in the
metamorphosis of commodities into money. Then we understood that
such metamorphosis is but one moment in the metamorphosis process
that goes from labor to accumulation of capital and restarts non-stop.
These metamorphoses are the real, possible form of the contradiction,
which, should it not be deferred, would make the system impossible. What
we had noticed up to now, however, was that contradiction taken as a
whole is precisely the representation of wealth; in other words, the repre-
sentation under the commodity-form (trade grammar) of all the relation-
ships of human individuals with themselves, one another and with nature.
The existence of capital as a process of valorization is the correlation of
a continuous deferral of contradiction, always about to find resolution and
always deferred. The mediation of one extreme and the other is the meta-
morphosis, which restarts the process. Let us re-state it: the contradiction
between wage labor and capital is not resolved but displaced in production
(which is also consumption) as concrete labor and abstract labor to the
determination of commodities, that is, their use value and value. And this
contradiction will be deferred again as it transforms in the exchange of
commodities for money, whose contradiction is underlaid by its particular
and yet general quality of its existence (money represents any commodity
in general, but only can be exchanged by a particularity; it represents, at
the same time, the public and private qualities of the labor of the
commodity-­producer). And, as expected, the contradiction of money is
also deferred in the metamorphosis of money into capital, which in turn
becomes constant capital (means) and variable capital (labor). The cycle
restarts then, but it is not circular, but an expansive spiral, or, in other
worlds, accumulation.
 13  THE REAL CONTRADICTIONS (COMMODITIES AS COHERENCE…  243

Nevertheless, it could be argued that, as it is continually deferred, the

contradiction is not real but a mere abstraction; the re-representation, the
repetition, of a contradiction forever to come. If we have asserted the real
quality of the contradiction, on what grounds do we claim its reality?
Where does the contradiction lie, beyond the metamorphoses? Simply, in
the total form of this dynamics, in other words, in the complete circuit
initial capital—wage labor—commodity—money—accumulated capital.19
This complete circuit is the representation of wealth under the commodity-­
form, or, better still, the expanding representation of the social bonds
(with oneself, others and nature) under the form of the trade metamor-
phosis, that is, its grammar. The necessary expansion of the cycle presup-
poses that, progressively, all human relations must fall under the trade form.
The contradiction of the capitalist mode of production manages to be
avoided at any particular moment, but this is not so in the general move-
ment. Therefore, the contradiction is equal to the complete movement of
the metamorphoses, that is, to capital as a whole: that immense accumula-
tion of commodities. The contradiction is the global total capital, its exis-
tence itself. The deferral of such contradiction is what comes to the capital
in its compulsory, non-stop accumulation, that is, its growth. And so, not
unlike the sharks that cannot stop swimming not even to sleep for fear of
drowning, capital cannot stop growing, that is, accumulating because oth-
erwise its constitutive contradiction would catch up. When the movement
of capital partially stops, what also happens is the partial destruction of the
productive forces, in other words, the contradiction has caught up with
the capital. The mystery of the growth of capital is the need to run away
from itself. This contradiction is what is called a crisis. But in those crises
is also at stake the destruction of the lives of those individuals who main-
tain (or are) those contradictory relations.

From Triviality to the Dancing Table:

The Coherence of Contradiction
Up to here, we have only seen one perspective on the problem of the
articulation between bodies and meanings, or between materiality and
ideality. It presented itself to us under the guise of a real contradiction of
the ‘objective’ type, whose vortex was capital and its form the commodity.
However, the same transit Could be traced from the point of view of the
subjective forms that correspond to the real contradiction, that is, to the
244  C. SUCKSDORF

mode in which the contradiction is inscribed onto the interrelated indi-

viduals as an articulation of their bodies and meaning.20 In his conflict
against dualisms, Marx envisaged early how inseparable the ‘subjective’
and ‘objective’ poles were. He writes in the 1844 Manuscripts: ‘The worker
is the subjective manifestation of the fact that capital is man wholly lost to
himself, just as capital is the objective manifestation of the fact that labour
is man lost to himself’(MEW 40: 523; Marx 1982: 606). Both aspects, the
subjective and the objective one, are intimately entwined.
The contradiction, to be possible—and therefore real—must go unno-
ticed in its ‘objective’ as well as ‘subjective’ aspects. The condition for its
deferral to be circulation movement is that at no time must the contradic-
tion be apprehended as such. As objectively, the contradiction is hidden
and deferred by the metamorphoses of circulation, also subjectively it must
be avoided. This means that an experience of contradiction must not be
lived. How is that possible? Provided that the metamorphoses that avoid
contradiction are but the form of wealth, the metamorphoses are its inter-
relations, human actions. Therefore, this contradiction that appears on the
outside must previously (i.e. in the formation of every human subject) be
a contradiction constitutive of the self. León Rozitchner claimed that for
a fetishism of commodities to be possible, there should be first a fetishism
of the subject. Consequently, subjects are isomorphic to commodities.
Their constitutive separation is coherent with the separation that orders
the contradictory planes of commodities.
It would seem that at this point we go back to Sohn-Rethel’s approach,
but this is not so when examined closely. According to him, real abstrac-
tion, which is the commodity-form, is the basis of the abstract mode of
thinking. What we have pointed out here is in order that the contradiction
be real, it must be based on a coherence. This coherence consists in the
fact that the subjective and objective contradictions are two sides of the
same movement, which manages to avoid in every single one of its stages
the contradiction, but which entails it in its complete form.
From this perspective, to Marx, one of the fundamental characteristics
of commodities is that their existence, or better still, their experience, takes
place in the immediacy as something trivial: our dealings with commodi-
ties are by no means strange, we flesh them out. Only analysis will later
show us their theological traces and metaphysical subtleties. And then
chairs stand on their legs and start dancing. But this only happens in the
especial attitude of analysis; in contrast, in everyday life, tables and other
commodities remain exasperatingly still. We deal with commodities daily
 13  THE REAL CONTRADICTIONS (COMMODITIES AS COHERENCE…  245

and to us they seem to be shrouded in no mystery (MEW 23 1962: 85;

Marx 2009: 87). In this ‘triviality’ of commodities, there is the ultimate
form of the entwining contradictions we have here discussed; for this ‘triv-
iality’ is nothing but the manifestation of the profound coherence that
exists between the subjective and objective contradictions, different
aspects of a single separation. The section about commodity fetishism may
be the most correct protocol for this point of reunion and articulation
between the subjective and the objective.
This article was translated by Sol Golzman.

Notes
1. This is a traditional Western topic. Among its most famous expressions,
there is the Aristotle’s founding classic (Aristotle 1982) Organon and
Kant’s approaches with Kant (2003) in which contradiction has been rel-
egated to the ideal and also to the limit of its decomposition. As the impos-
sibility of the real. In a manner radically different from tradition, Freud
states that negation does not exist in the unconscious, but that it arises
from an action from which the conscious and the ego emerge (Freud 1992:
249–250), Sartre (1993) claims in Being and Nothingness that negation
depends on nothingness, which is only possible because of the human atti-
tude of interrogation, in other words, a nihilization of the being-in-itself
produced by the being-for-itself.
2. That is, the Basic forms of the logic principles, as those of identity, non-­
contradiction, excluded middle and so on.
3. Evidently, this does not mean that for Marx there is no logical contradic-
tion; on the contrary, as Hegel does, Marx conceives the existence of
another kind of contradiction, which allows broadening knowledge.
4. As there is in Foucault, a paradoxical follower of Marx’s position with
regard to idealism and nominalism, Deleuze and Guattari develop in a
similar way to Marx the relationship between bodies and meanings. See
Deleuze and Guattari (2002).
5. It may be that the explicative power of Foucault’s concept over Marx’s is
due to the former is a developed form of what in the latter is merely an
intuition.
6. This broadened reality has been attempted in several ways, among them
surrealism and psychoanalysis have been very fruitful. Walter Benjamin
envisaged their possibilities as he suggested that revolutionary art would be
that which managed to ‘win the energies of drunkenness for the revolu-
tion’ (Benjamin 2007: 313).
246  C. SUCKSDORF

7. For an analysis of the notion of reality in Marx, see Henry (1976:

280–401).
8. On the problem of consciousness in young Marx, it is fundamental to the
early work of León Rozitchner on the 1844 manuscripts, La negación de la
conciencia pura en la filosofía de Marx (Rozitchner 2015: 99–138).
9. ‘The pivot of the argument lies with the structural form of social being,
or, more precisely, with the formal characteristics attaching to commod-
ity production and to the social synthesis arising from it’ (Sohn-Rethel
1980: 8).
10. See also Thomson (1975).
11. For this work, we take the Spanish version of Wenceslao Roces, which in this
as in other cases has more occurrence than translation. Marx’s text says
‘ungeheure Warensammlung’ (MEW 23 1962: 49), which literally is
‘monstrous set of merchandise’; closer to the text, Pedro Scaron translates
‘enormous accumulation of merchandise’ (Marx 2010: 43). But although
the version of Roces is not very faithful to the text, we believe that the
occurrence ‘immense arsenal’ expresses Marx’s image much better than
the soberer version of ‘enormous ensemble’.
12. ‘In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that
the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion
of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which,
however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach
nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called,
exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in
the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient
social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society,
extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the
immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the
umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal com-
munity, or upon direct relations of subjection’ (MEW 23 1962: 93; Marx
2010: 96–97). ‘The distinction between a society where this form is domi-
nant, permeating every expression of life, and a society where it only makes
an episodic appearance is essentially one of quality. For depending on
which is the case, all the subjective phenomena in the societies concerned
are objectified in qualitatively different ways’ (Lukács 1969: 90–91).
13. Evidently, Marx deals with the core of this problem in the section the
Fetishism of Commodities. For a more detailed analysis, see Sucksdorf
(2012).
14. It is evident that not even the most developed financial speculation can
hold such an outline without going through the real metamorphosis M-C
at some point.
 13  THE REAL CONTRADICTIONS (COMMODITIES AS COHERENCE…  247

15. On the phantom-like quality of capitalism, there are contributions as

diverse as fruitful. Among the most remarkable (some of them classics), we
could mention Walter Benjamin’s (2004), Jacques Derrida (1998) or León
Rozitchner (2011) (Materialismo ensoñado, Buenos Aires, Tinta limón).
16. And this is so not because wealth is a monstrous accumulation of com-
modities in the societies in which a capitalism mode of production rules,
but because this is how it presents (erscheint) itself.
17. ‘As a value, the commodity is general; as a real commodity it is particular.
As a value it is always exchangeable; in real exchange it is exchangeable only
if it fulfills particular conditions’ (MEW 42: 76; Marx 2007: 66).
18. It is well known that Marx deals in detail with the co-continuity of produc-
tion, exchange and consumption in Einleitung (1857).
19. This is evidently a simplified diagram of the logical stops of the circuit,
given that, for example, the relation between capital and wage labor is also
a trade exchange: labor force being a commodity exchanged for money.
20. In this path, we have followed another work, still unpublished, based fun-
damentally on the concept of generic being (Gattungswesen) as the articu-
lation between bodies and meaning.

References
Aristotle. (1982). Tratados de lógica (Organon) (Miguel Candel Sanmartin,
Trans.). Madrid: Gredos.
Benjamin, W. (2004). Libro de los pasajes. Madrid: Akal.
Benjamin, W. (2007). El surrealismo. In Walter Benjamin Obras, II., Vol. 2
(pp. 301–316). Madrid: Abada. Editores.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2002). Postulaciones de la lingüística. In Mil mesetas.
Capitalismo y esquizofrenia (pp. 81–116). Valencia: Pre-textos.
Derrida, J. (1998). Espectros de Marx (3rd ed.). Madrid: Trotta.
Foucault, M. (2008). El nacimiento de la biopolítica Curso en el College de France
(1978–1979). Buenos Aires: FCE.
Freud, S. (1992). La Negación [1925] in Sigmund Freud, Obras completas, Vol.
19 (1923–1925) (pp.  249–250) (José Etcheverry, Trans.), fourth reprint.
Buenos Aires: Amorrortu.
Henry, M. (1976). Marx. Une philosophie de la réalité. Une philosophie de l’économie.
Gallimard, París [Spanish edition of the first part: (2011): Marx, Buenos Aire:
La cebra].
Kant, I. (2003). Attempt to introduce the concept of negative magnitudes into
philosophy [1763]. In Immanuel Kant: Theoretical philosophy 1775–1770
(pp.  165–204), (David Walford, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lukács, G. (1969). Historia y conciencia de clase. Mexico: Grijalbo.
248  C. SUCKSDORF

Marx, K. (1973). El Capital (Wenceslao Roces, Trans.). México: FCE.

Marx, K. (1982). Escritos de juventud (Wenceslao Roces, Trans.). México: FCE.
Marx, K. (2007). Elementos fundamentales para la crítica de la economía política
(Grundrisse) (Pedro Saron, Trans.), Tomo 1. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.
Marx, K. (2009). El Capital (Pedro Scarón, Trans.), Tomo 1, Vol. 2. Buenos
Aires: Siglo XXI.
Marx, K. (2010). El Capital (Pedro Scarón, Trans.), T. 1, Vol. 1. Buenos Aires:
Silgo XXI.
MEW 23. (1962). Marx-Engels Werke (Vol. 23). Berlín: Dietz Verlag.
MEW 42. (1983). Marx-Engels Werke (Vol. 42). Berlín: Dietz Verlag.
Rozitchner, L. (2011). Materialismo ensoñado. Buenos Aires: Tinta limón.
Rozitchner, L. (2015). La negación de la conciencia pura en Marx. In Marx y la
infancia (pp. 98–138). Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional.
Sartre, J. P. (1993). El ser y la nada. Ensayo de ontología fenomenológica (9th ed.).
Buenos Aires: Losada.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1980). Trabajo intelectual y trabajo manual. Colombia:
Ediciones.
Sucksdorf, C. (2012). El fetichismo de la mercancía y nuestro secreto. In VV.AA.
(Enrique Carpintero ed.), Actualidad de El fetichismo de la mercancía. Buenos
Aires: Topía.
Thomson, G. (1975). Los primeros filósofos. Buenos Aires: Siglo XX.
 CHAPTER 14

Reification and Real Abstraction in Marx’s

Critique of Political Economy

Ingo Elbe

In light of an increasing uncontrollable capitalist mode of production that

almost completely takes hold of individuals, Marx’s concepts of reification
and ‘real abstraction’ possess a factually justified currency, which has been
reflected in German social-philosophical debates of the last few years.1
The concept of reification was considerably shaped in the philosophical
discourse by Georg Lukács (1970) and the reception of his book History
and Class Consciousness. However, Lukács only takes up Marx’s theories in
an unsystematic way, also mixing them with socio-ontological assumptions
from the Hegelian tradition as well as culture-critical content from the
sociology of Max Weber (rationalization theory) and Georg Simmel
(abstraction theory), without Lukács verifying their commensurability
with Marx’s approach. Moreover, in Lukács’ work, the theoretical levels of
the diagnosis of reification found in Marx’s work are not clearly

This text is the revised version of an article that will appear shortly in Garofalo
and Quante (2017): Attualitá di Marx in Italian.

I. Elbe (*)
Carl von Ossitzky University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany

© The Author(s) 2020 249

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_14
250  I. ELBE

­ istinguished and related to each other, so that fundamental categories of

d
value theory (abstract labor, the commodity form, the fetish character of
the commodity) merge unchecked with the concept of the real subsump-
tion of the labor process under capital (rationalization, standardization,
machine-aided division of labor, the de-qualification of labor-power).
Ultimately, Lukács subsumes various matters, namely the real process of
objectification and its ideological processing, under a single concept—that
of reification. This had fatal consequences for the entire history of the
reception of the term, since this conceptual diffuseness, paired with a
Hegelian metaphysics of spirit, led to an idealist (all social interrelations
are mental things) and an irrational social ontology (social interrelations
under capitalism are logically contradictory). The topos of real abstraction
is essentially mentioned in the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel. I will not go
into his equally questionable misappropriation of Marx’s categories for
epistemological ends,2 but rather demonstrate that the idea of a ‘real
abstraction’ consummated in the act of exchange is a central theoretical
aspect of Marx’s analysis of reification.
In the following, I briefly present central motifs of Marx’s original con-
cepts of reification and real abstraction, advocate for clear conceptual dif-
ferentiation with regard to real differing issues, and finally highlight
irrationalist models of reception of Marx’s concept of reification, as they
can be found in the debate in Germany following Lukács and Adorno, in
particular, and also the work of Lucio Colletti (1977), which is very influ-
ential in Germany.
Although Marx only rarely uses the term explicitly, the circumstances it
describes are central to his work and are also addressed in concepts such as
objectification (Versachlichung), alienation (Entfremdung), inversion
(Verkehrung), mystification and fetishism. This conceptual field, which at
first appears unwieldy, nevertheless, has a clear systematic structure in
Marx’s mature critique of political economy from 1857 on essentially (1)
the real reification and autonomous status of social relations in capitalism
and, (2) arising from this, the ideological reification (fetishization, mysti-
fication) of these relations as natural characteristics of things or universal-­
historical social patterns have to be distinguished. In the following, I
explicate these levels on the basis of a few basic concepts of value theory,
leading to the following thesis: according to Marx, value as a historically
specific form of socialization of the products of private, isolated productive
units is an objectively mediated relation of production represented in objects
 14  REIFICATION AND REAL ABSTRACTION IN MARX’S CRITIQUE…  251

(ad 1) which incorrectly appears to be an intrinsic property of these objects

(ad 2). Marx’s concept of reification thus addresses the domination of
objectively mediated capitalist relations of production over people and the
spontaneous ideological safeguarding of this domination, both of which
he considers worthy of criticism.

‘Alienation’: Reification as Real Objectification

and Autonomization of Material Reproduction

Already in the year 1844, Marx diagnosed the ‘society of private property’
as ‘the complete domination of the estranged thing’ (Marx and Engels
2010a: 221). Without yet being able to explain this domination, recurring
motifs of the real objectification of the relations of production and their
socio-psychological and ethical consequences are thematized—in the late
work as well—primarily under the concept of alienation:

• the domination of capital over the entire process of production and

the subordination of all human aims to the goal of producing profit
(idem: 220–222);
• treating other human beings as mere means to the end of the com-
petitive, market-mediated and objectified recognition of needs and
services—only the ‘language of commodities’ is understandable to
market participants; they have to be indifferent to non-paying needs
(idem: 226 ff.);
• the internalization of an external-appropriative relationship to things
and human beings—the sense of proprietary ownership takes the
place of the appropriation of things in the course of formative pro-
cesses (idem: 300);
• treating one’s own productive potentials as things, as mere means to
the end of animal self-preservation (idem: 309); and
• the false anthropologization of the alienated form of labor as labor
‘as such’—reification in the sense of an ideological phenomenon (on
this, see point 2) (idem: 217, 270f.).

In his later works, Marx then attempts to explain by means of value

theory how this dynamic of objectification and autonomization of capital-
ism emerges.
252  I. ELBE

The Constitution of ‘Value Objectivity’ Through

‘Real Abstraction’
Marx’s central insights consists first of all in the fact that in all modes of
production based on the division of labor, labor has the function of satisfy-
ing social needs, but only under private conditions with a division of labor,
which imply systematic exchange relations, which have the additional social
function of creating a social nexus—that is to say, of relating concrete-­
useful acts of labor to each other. This function of labor, according to
Marx, cannot be carried out in its concrete form, but only in its property of
being labor as such—as abstract labor. As such, it represents the common
element that makes the exchange of qualitatively different goods possible.3
Thus, in capitalism, we are dealing with the socialization of concrete labor
by abstract labor, whereas in all previous modes of production, acts of labor
and their products are socially recognized through direct force or social
norms (Postone 1993: 149 ff.). Marx notes ‘It follows from the preceding
not that there are two differing kinds of labour lurking in the commodity,
but rather that the same labour is specified in differing and even contradic-
tory manner’ (MEGA II/5 1983: 26)—a socially unspecific regard as con-
crete labor, and in a socially specific regard as abstract labor. In private
social relations with a division of labor, producers first enter into contact
with one another in a mediated way via the exchange of their products,
thus in a manner mediated by objects: ‘The individuals confront each other
only as proprietors of exchange values, as such individuals who have given
themselves reified being for each other through their product, the com-
modity. Without this objective mediation, they have no relation to each
other’ (Marx and Engels 2010b: 467 ff.).
The socialization of their own labor thus confronts human beings in
the form of a social relationship between things; their social unity con-
fronts them autonomously as the attribute of the value of their products
of labor. Marx writes of ‘objective [sachliche] relations between persons
and social relations between things’ (corrected translation of Marx 1976:
166). Abstract labor and value constitute the social unity of acts of labor
and products under the condition and with the consequence of their sys-
tematic dissociation as private acts of labor and products.4
Value objectivity is only given to commodities within this specific social
relation between things; it is a relational attribute, since, according to
Marx, no good is a commodity in itself:
 14  REIFICATION AND REAL ABSTRACTION IN MARX’S CRITIQUE…  253

none is for itself value objectivity as such […] outside of their relationship to
each other—the relationship in which they are equal—neither the coat nor
the linen possess value objectivity or their objectivity as mere congelations of
human labor as such. They only possess this social objectivity as a social
relationship
keines für sich solche Werthgegenständlichkeit [...]. Ausserhalb ihrer
Beziehung auf einander—der Beziehung, worin sie gleichgelten—besitzen
weder der Rock noch die Leinwand Werthgegenständlichkeit oder ihre
Gegenständlichkeit als blosse Gallerten menschlicher Arbeit schlechthin.
Diese gesellschaftliche Gegenständlichkeit besitzen sie [...] nur als gesell-
schaftliche Beziehung. (MEGA II/6 1987: 30)

The process of exchange, however, is the only real social relationship of

the products to each other as commodities:

The reduction of various concrete private acts of labor to this abstraction of

equal human labor is only carried out through exchange, which in fact
equates products of different acts of labor with each other.
Die Reduction der verschiednen konkreten Privatarbeiten auf dieses
Abstractum gleicher menschlicher Arbeit vollzieht sich nur durch den
Austausch, welcher Producte verschiedner Arbeiten thatsächlich einander
gleichsetzt. (Idem: 41; Marx 1976: 166)

In another work, Marx describes this ‘reduction’ to an ‘abstraction’ as

a ‘real (…) abstraction’ (Marx and Engels 2010b: 272), which is not a
subjective mental act on the part of human beings, but rather an ‘objective
equalisation of unequal quantities of labour forcibly brought about by the
social process’ (idem: 299). Prior to this real abstraction mediated by
exchange, products—however much they are aimed at exchange—are,
according to Marx, private products and the labor that goes into them is
private labor (see MEGA II/5 1983: 41); labor within the immediate
process of production is thus not abstract labor in the sense of value theory.
However, the relationship of things to each other does not originate
from the things themselves and does not originate from their physical
properties, that is, it is not a natural relationship. Rather, they are placed
in relation to one another by people under specific conditions of the
socialization of their labor. It is first this that turns ‘goods’ into ‘things of
value’. In this relation, the recognition of private acts of labor as socially
general labor occurs in an objectively mediated and unconscious way.
‘Objectively mediated’ means that the recognition of the concrete acts of
254  I. ELBE

labor of private producers as socially useful activity asserts itself as an attri-

bute of the products of labor and consists in an objective act of reduction
of their concrete acts of labor to labor as such. ‘Unconscious’ refers to the
non-knowledge of this process on the part of commodity owners (‘They
do this without being aware of it’ (Marx 1976: 166 ff.), not to internal
psychological unconsciousness).
Thus, in capitalism, the socialization of products of labor takes on a
specific form—value objectivity. This objectivity is a ‘socially practiced rela-
tion of validity’ (Heinrich 1994: 60), whereas use value represents the
‘material’ content of wealth. That is to say, use value comprises a natural
substrate which is reshaped in the concrete labor process within the frame-
work of applicable natural laws according to specific human aims, and with
the intention of satisfying specific human needs. In contrast, value objec-
tivity exists in the relation of products of labor as mere products of human
labor as such within the exchange process, thus there ‘substance’ is the
relating of acts of labor to each other in the same act as human labor as
such.5 Abstract labor as the substance of value and value as a relation of
social validity have thereby two ‘non-relational’ attributes as bearers: first,
concrete labor (‘expenditure of brains, muscle, nerves’ in the interaction
with a specific piece of nature) and its product, use value, as well as second,
abstract labor as a nominal abstraction (as the fact, ascertained by the
theorist, that every concrete act of labor possesses the attribute of being
human labor as such).

(1) Concrete acts of labor/use value are thus first non-relational attri-
butes and bearers of relational attributes. Use value (and the con-
crete labor that constitutes it) is also a relation—the usefulness of
objects for human beings or as concrete labor, the socially medi-
ated reshaping of nature in order to make natural objects appropri-
ate to human ends. But first, this usefulness cannot be thought
without objective attributes, which is why Marx speaks of ‘natural
material’ (with regard to concrete labor: not without concrete
forms of activity, e.g. tailoring, and a real relation to natural objects,
e.g. cloth), and secondly, it is not dependent upon specific social
relations that use value as such (or the relation of concrete labor)
exists—it exists in all human societies. Of course, use values and
 14  REIFICATION AND REAL ABSTRACTION IN MARX’S CRITIQUE…  255

their manners of use also have their history, but one can sit on a
chair whether it was created under feudalism or capitalism.
According to Marx, ‘not an atom of matter’ (Marx 1976: 138)
enters into the attribute of value or the substance of value, and it
constitutes a historically specific social relationship—under feudal
relations of production, for example, it is not the equality of acts of
labor that constitutes the nexus of material reproduction.
(2) Abstract labor, as a general attribute ascertained by means of nomi-
nal abstraction, is secondly the bearer of abstract labor as the sub-
stance of value, because, in order to be related to each other in the
process of exchange as products of human labor as such (i.e. to
have value), products of labor must also, independently of this rela-
tion, be products of labor. Abstract labor as a nominal abstraction
is therefore in this sense non-relational.

If, in contrast to the theoretical definition of labor (nominal abstrac-

tion) of labor of human labor as such, in the case of abstract labor as the
substance of value, there is talk of ‘real abstraction’ (Sohn-Rethel 1973:
38), this does not mean, however, that the attribute of ‘human labor as
such’ grasped with the nominal abstraction does not really exist or only
exists in the mind of the theorist until the ‘reduction’ to abstract-human
labor is consummated in exchange. It merely implies that in order to
establish the social nexus between private-isolated acts of labor in exchange,
the general property fixed by abstraction—which also exists independently
of exchange as a real property of all concrete acts of labor (is not merely
‘flatus vocis’)—in a specific manner obtains significance6 that it did not
already have independently of exchange, and which is not consciously-­
conventionally ascribed to it by those engaging in exchange, but rather is
constituted by the social nexus of the objective relationship between peo-
ple.7 Real abstraction means that the general attribute of acts of labor of
being human labor as such, in and through exchange, obtains—without
the conscious intervention of those engaging in exchange—the specific
significance of being the social form of private acts of labor. The elemen-
tary constitution of wealth is accordingly determined by Marx to be a
process that is repeated in everyday life in which individuals as ‘mental
systems’ represent only its ‘environment’.
256  I. ELBE

‘The Language of Commodities’: The Material

Representation of the Objectivity of Value
in the Forms of Value

In exchange, things signify something about their physical attributes and

their usefulness to human needs, which also belong to them indepen-
dently therefrom, going beyond. But ‘commodities are things. What they
are, they must be objectively or demonstrate in their own objective rela-
tionships’ (MEGA II/5 1983: 30). The substance of value and value must
necessarily appear in order to regulate the social metabolism. The social
quality of commodity things, their value, however, can only be expressed
in the sensuous objectivity of every other commodity, which is due not
only to the purely social manner of existence of value but also to the spe-
cific mode of expression of the social quality of objects:

Since the value of the individual commodity cannot appear in any medium
distinct from its use value (the commodity is a dead object that has no ges-
tures, no language, etc.), its value cannot appear at all in its own body. The
commodity cannot be grasped as the social distinct from its use value, but
rather solely as use value. If the commodity must appear as value, and if it
cannot do so in any medium other than that of use value, then the commod-
ity can only appear in a use value that is distinct from its own. (Wolf
1985: 118)

The objects or services exchanged possess, as Marx expresses meta-

phorically, the ‘language of commodities’ (Marx 1976: 143), since the
expression of value is not consciously induced by the participants in
exchange. A further stage in the autonomization of value is thus rooted in
the fact of the representation of the sociality of things in (ultimately) an
excluded commodity which is regarded as the objective form of existence
of this sociality—so that one can carry around the social nexus and partici-
pation in social wealth in one’s trouser pocket, but just as well also lose it
(Marx 1973: 157, 221 ff.).
In the form of value, as Marx names this relation of representation,
value, an unconscious and invisible product of the social metabolism,
obtains a sensuous-objective independence: through the representation of
the value of Commodity A in the use value of Commodity B (e.g. that
’20 yards of linen are worth a coat’) there emerges a ‘unification’ of the
value of the first commodity with the use value of the second ­commodity—
 14  REIFICATION AND REAL ABSTRACTION IN MARX’S CRITIQUE…  257

which must be distinguished from the attribute of both commodities

being unities of use value and value. The natural form of B (e.g. coat)
counts as the form of value of A in this relation. In doing so, the value (of
A) is not transformed into the use value (of B) nor is use value (of B)
transformed into value (of A). The form of value ‘x commodity A is worth
y commodity B’ is a polar opposition. Its poles are reflective determina-
tions, that is to say, attributes that they only have within their relationship
to each other and are to be distinguished from common causal relations
(Hegel 1999: #258 ff.; Esfeld 2002: 22 ff.).
Value and value form are regarded by Marx as stages of the autono-
mization of the social form of labor in capitalism from concrete acts of
labor and the commodity owners. Thus a central meaning of the early
concept of alienation, the ‘domination of the thing’ or ‘wealth as an utterly
alien power’ (MECW 3 2010a: 315) is deciphered from the starting point
of the concept of abstract labor. In this sense, reification proves to be a
form of alienation specific to capitalism (Wallat 2009: 79). The social
nexus of acts of labor accordingly consists in capitalism not as a personal
normatively mediated one. According to Marx, the form of wealth, value,
is constituted as a specific social relationship of validity through initial
conditions structured by a private division of labor, and the social recogni-
tion of products of labor through the mediation of exchange. This first
form of the autonomization in the form of value of people own social
bond was further conceptually pursued in the form of value as the second
stage of autonomization. Here now, the social nexus, ‘social power’ liter-
ally carried in one’s trouser pocket, can become ‘the private power of pri-
vate persons’ (Marx 1976: 230), since the socially general form value is
ultimately represented by the simple and unified form of value of money.
Money as the measure of value and means of circulation becomes autono-
mous with regard to all other commodities, which are therefore only
regarded as specific use values, whereas only money counts as value as such.
With the movement from value to money, Marx also claims proof that
commodities and money stand in a ‘inner necessary connection’ (MEGA
II/5 1983: 43). This has decisive significance for his concept of socializa-
tion as abstract labor as a nexus of autonomization: money is for Marx first
of all neither a natural attribute of a thing nor a conventional product to
facilitate natural exchange relations. Rather, it is the expression of a form
of socialization mediated by things that has been wrested from the control
of participants. Markets, according to Marx, can second of all only be
thought of as being mediated by money. Thus the possibility of crisis is
258  I. ELBE

already inherent to the concept of the market. Marx demonstrates that in

order to sell, one does not have to buy at the same time, which enables a
friction of the economic process (Marx 1976: 208 ff.). Third of all, money
is thus for Marx also not a harmless ‘medium’ of an economy supposedly
geared to ‘satisfying needs’ because value as the ‘medium’ of the social
metabolism takes on a life of its own with regard to commodities in fur-
ther stages and thus transforms from a means to the end of exchange: in
money as money, value also takes on a life of its own with regard to its
vanishing functions as measure of value and means of circulation. The
form of circulation commodity-money-commodity is replaced by that of
money-commodity-money. But with that, value has not yet truly become
autonomous. It cannot do so in the objective form of money as a horde or
world money. First, as a process, that is, as capital, does value become
autonomous at a final stage, in the form of ‘M-C-M’, namely as value that
is maintained and at the same time increased through a specific class-­
divided productive relationship. Capital is thereby a qualitatively and
quantitatively ‘limitless’ (idem: 253) (materially tautological: money-­
money) process of the appropriation of ‘wealth in the abstract’ (idem:
254), the reified form of the social nexus of private products. The objec-
tive ‘aim’ of capital is the expansion of value as such, which has no limit
beyond expansion. Since capital is a process of the increase of value, it must,
in order to remain capital, constantly—that is to say, endlessly—continue
this process (Heinrich 2013: 106 ff.). The competition-mediated social
nexus of capital production forces individual capitals to constant accumu-
lation under penalty of going under (Marx 1976: 381, 739).

Reification as an Ideological Phenomenon:

Fetishization and Mystification of Really Objectified
Relations of Production
According to Marx, the existence of forms of value is also associated with
the pitfalls of fetishism, which indicate an ideological mixture of (first)
nature and ‘culture’: the fact that social relations between private owners
are represented by things means first of all that these relations appear to
market actors as ‘thing-like in volume […]’ (Brentel 1989: 287) in repre-
sentational form, in the form of manifestations of value not conceived as
such: value appears in gold as money or in means of production as capital.
These forms of appearance are a real movement of the whole, the
 14  REIFICATION AND REAL ABSTRACTION IN MARX’S CRITIQUE…  259

­ erception of which first becomes false without reference to its hidden

p
context of justification and referral (Brentel 1989: 285).8 Forms of appear-
ance of value are correctly perceived, but falsely related to each other, in
that causal or ontological interrelations that are not empirically graspable
(Marx speaks of a ‘mediated’ ‘process’ that ‘vanishes in its own result, leav-
ing no trace behind’ (Marx 1976: 187)) cannot be mentally reproduced.9
When Marx speaks explicitly of ‘reification’ (Marx 1981: 969, 1020), he
means these forms of misrecognition which are also referred to as ‘fetish-
isms’ or ‘mystifications’. According to him, they constitute not only a
religion of everyday life (idem: 969); as ‘objective forms of thought’, they
also constitute the ‘categories of bourgeois economy’ (Marx 1976: 169).
The entirety of Marx’s Capital now reconstructs, beginning with the
fetish character of the commodity, an increasingly complex sequence of
stages of mystification of the real relations of production (the fetishism of
money and capital, the mystification of the wage form, the fetishism of
interest, etc.).
However, in the concept of fetish in Capital, Marx pulls together the
critique of two phenomena—the critique of the misrecognizing natural-
ization of social relations suggested by the objectification and autono-
mization of the social nexus, and the critique of this objectification and
autonomization of relations itself.10 This has caused grandiose confusion
in the reception of Marx’s work, especially against the background of an
irrationalist Hegelian social ontology attributed to Marx—is the fetish a
phenomenon of consciousness or not? Is capitalist reality ‘wrong per se’ or
only its perception? Thus a number of interpreters11 have claimed that
Marx conceives of the commodity itself as a fetish and thus assumes that
as a use value, it has attributes that it cannot have at all as a use value, that
it is a mystery, since a fetish is something that has properties attributed to
it that it does not have at all. Use value is thus use value and yet not use
value, namely value, at the same time and in the same regard. Also popular
in connection with this is the assumption that all of these contradictions
are real contradictions of an ‘untrue’ or ‘inherently false reality’ which
cannot be comprehended by common scientific methods. But that is not
Marx’s thesis. According to him, the commodity is use value in a socially
unspecific regard, and value in a specific regard; it has the latter attribute
as a relational attribute which is not a mystery and which it only has under
conditions of private production with a division of labor. What is mysteri-
ous is solely the idea, suggested by the objective representation of the
value of one product in the use value of another, that this value is inherent
260  I. ELBE

to it as a natural, material attribute. However, the mentioned irrationalist

interpretations (e.g. Colletti, Jappe, Grigat) or interpretations demon-
strating irrationalism in Marx’s work (e.g. Iorio) might refer to a mislead-
ing statement by Marx, in which he suggests that value is a fetish. It is
as follows:

The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply

in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s
own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves,
as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the
social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation
between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the produc-
ers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities,
sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social. (Marx
1976: 164)

Of course, it is not through this substitution, that is to say through this

misunderstanding, this mix-up,12 that products of labor become commod-
ities. They become commodities because they are created under private
relations of production with a division of labor and mediated by the form
of the market. If, as Marx clearly states, the commodity form is the source
of the mystification (‘Whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the
product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity? Clearly,
it arises from this form itself’ (idem: 164)),13 then it cannot be the mysti-
fication that makes the products of labor into commodities (‘through this
substitution, the products of labour become commodities’). So one has to
take the confusion of recipients seriously and at the same time establish
that it’s nonsense to apply the same category to two interrelated but sepa-
rate states of affairs. All questions concerning an ‘ontological’ or ‘episte-
mological’ character of the fetish concept are simply dissolved if one uses
the concept of alienation for the critique of real autonomization, and the
concept of fetish for the cognitive effects of the same.14
This article was translated by Alex Locascio.

Notes
1. See Honneth (2005), Wallat (2009), Deutsche Zeitschriftfür Philosophie
(2011), Bitterolf and Maier (2012), Friesen and Lotz (2012).
2. See Sohn-Rethel (1973: 38). For a critique of Sohn-Rethel, see Reichardt
(2008).
 14  REIFICATION AND REAL ABSTRACTION IN MARX’S CRITIQUE…  261

3. I cannot deal further here with the considerable problems caused by this
thought in Marx’s theoretical frame of reference, in particular with regard
to the mediation of the quality and the quantity of the determination of
value. See Elbe (2010: 261–263) as well as Ellmers (2016).
4. ‘As use values or goods, commodities are corporeally distinct things. Their
existence as value, in contrast, constitutes their unity. This unity does not
originate in nature, but rather in society’ (MEGA II/5: 19). Things are
similar with regard to the ‘substance’ of value: ‘As useful activity directed
to the appropriation of natural factors in one form or another, labour is a
natural condition of human existence, a condition of material interchange
between man and nature, quite independent of the form of society. On the
other hand, the labour which posits exchange value is a specific social form
of labour. For example, tailoring if one considers its physical aspect as a
distinct productive activity produces a coat, but not the exchange value of
the coat. The exchange value is produced by it not as tailoring as such but
as abstract universal labour, and this belongs to a social framework not
devised by the tailor’ (Marx and Engels 2010b: 278).
5. See: ‘by equating their different products to each other in exchange as
values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour’ (Marx
1976: 166).
6. ‘Tailoring and weaving’ both ‘therefore possess the general property of
being human labour, and they therefore have to be considered in certain
cases, such as the production of value, solely from this point of view’ (Marx
1976: 150). ‘In every social form of labor, individual acts of labor of dif-
ferent individuals are also related to each other as human labor, but here,
this relationship itself counts as the specific social form of the acts of labor’
(MEGA II/5 1983: 41).
7. See: ‘The validation of concern here is neither one agreed upon by those
engaging in exchange, nor imposed by the state. Rather, it is a relation
structurally given in an economy based upon exchange’ (Heinrich 2008:
119).
8. This state of affairs arises from a passage in Capital that is usually not
understood, in which Marx on the one hand emphasizes that it’s only a
specific social relationship between people ‘which assumes here, for them,
the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx 1976: 165) and on
the other hand writes that ‘to the producers, therefore, the social relations
between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not
appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather
as material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations
between things’ (ibid.: 166). On this, see Wolf (1985: 217).
9. What ‘vanishes’ in the empirical forms of wealth is not the fact that labor is
necessary to create its material bearers, but rather that the form itself is the
262  I. ELBE

exclusive result of a specific social relation, abstract labor as the substance

of value.
10. This is also practiced in the most elaborated commentaries; see Fischer
(1978: 80 ff.), Heinrich (2008: 174) and Lindner (2013: 289, 346). The
overloading of the concept of fetishism corresponds to that of the concept
of reification in Lukács’ work.
11. Extreme examples are Colletti (1977: 28 ff.), Jappe (2005: 161, 193),
Grigat (2007: 53) and Iorio (2010: 254 ff.). For a critique of irrationalism
in the reception of Marx, see Elbe (2008), Elbe (2010: 139 ff., 251) and
Wolf (1985: 221 ff.).
12. See also: ‘the effects of a certain social form of labour are ascribed to
objects, to the products of this labour; the relationship itself is imagined to
exist in material form. We have already seen that this is a characteristic of
labour based on commodity production, on exchange value, and this quid
pro quo is revealed in the commodity, in money […] and to a still higher
degree in capital’ (Marx and Engels 2010c: 428).
13. See also: ‘this fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the pecu-
liar social character of the labour which produces them’ (Marx 1976: 165).
14. Dannemann (1987: 41ff.) and Wallat (2009: 87) go in this direction when
they distinguish between two forms of reification: real inversion and ideo-
logical inversion.

References
Bitterolf, M., & Maier, D. (Eds.). (2012). Verdinglichung, Marxismus, Geschichte.
Von der Niederlage der Novemberrevolutionzurkritischen Theorie. Freiburg i.
Br.: Ca Ira.
Brentel, H. (1989). Soziale Form und ökonomisches Objekt. Studienzum Gegenstands-
und Methodenverständnis der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Opladen:
Westdeutscher Verlag.
Colletti, L. (1977). Marxismus und Dialektik. Frankfurt M.; Berlin; Wien: Ullstein.
Dannemann, R. (1987). Das Prinzip Verdinglichung. Studiezur Philosophie Georg
Lukács. Frankfurt/M: Sendler.
Deutsche Zeitschriftfür Philosophie. (2011). Schwerpunkt Verdinglichung, 59 (5).
Elbe, I. (2008). Marxismus-Mystizismus – oder: Die Verwandlung der Marxschen
Theorie in deutsche Ideologie. In Wissenschaftliche Mitteilungen des Berliner
Vereinszur Förderung der MEGA-Edition, Heft 6: Gesellschaftliche Praxis und
ihrewissenschaftliche Darstellung. Beiträgezur ‘Kapital’-Diskussion (pp. 187–209).
Berlin: Argument.
Elbe, I. (2010). Marx im Westen. Die neue Marx-Lektüre in der Bundesrepublik,
zweitekorr. Aufl. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
 14  REIFICATION AND REAL ABSTRACTION IN MARX’S CRITIQUE…  263

Ellmers, S. (2016). Abstrakte Arbeit und Anerkennung. Unveröffentlichtes

Manuskript.
Esfeld, M. (2002). Holismus. In der Philosophie des Geistes und in der Philosophie
der Physik. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Fischer, A. M. (1978). Der reale Schein und die Theorie des Kapitals bei Karl Marx.
Zürich: Europa Verlag.
Friesen, H., & Lotz, C. (Eds.). (2012). Ding und Verdinglichung: Technik- und
Sozialphilosophie nach Heidegger und der Kritischen Theorie. Wilhelm Fink.
Garofalo, P., & Quante, M. (Eds.). (2017). Lo spettro è tornato! Attualità della
filosofia di Marx. Milano; Udine: Mimesis.
Grigat, S. (2007). Fetisch und Freiheit. Über die Rezeption der Marxschen
Fetischkritik, die Emanzipation von Staat und Kapital und die Kritik des
Antisemitismus. Freiburg i. Br.: Ca Ira.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1999). Wissenschaft der Logik. Zweites Buch: Die Lehrevom Wesen.
In Id., Hauptwerke in 6 Bänden. Hamburg: Meiner.
Heinrich, M. (1994). Abstrakte Arbeit. In W. F. Haug (Ed.), Historisch-kritisches
Wörterbuch des Marxismus (pp. 56–64). Band 1. Hamburg: Argument.
Heinrich, M. (2008). Wie das Marxsche Kapital lesen? Hinweisezur Lektüre und
Kommentarzum Anfang von “Das Kapital”. Stuttgart: Schmetterling.
Heinrich, M. (2013). Wie das Marxsche Kapital lesen? Leseanleitung und
Kommentarzum Anfang des “Kapital”. Teil 2. Stuttgart: Schmetterling.
Honneth, A. (2005). Verdinglichung. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.
Iorio, M. (2010). Fetisch und Geheimnis. Zur Kritik der Kapitalismuskritik von
Karl Marx. In Deutsche Zeitschriftfür Philosophie (pp. 241–256). 58/Heft 2.
Jappe, A. (2005). Die Abenteuer der Ware. Füreineneue Wertkritik. Münster: Unrast.
Lindner, U. (2013). Marx und die Philosophie. Wissenschaftlicher Realismus, ethis-
cher Perfektionismus und kritische Sozialtheorie. Stuttgart: Schmetterling.
Lukács, G. (1970). Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein. Studienübermarxistische
Dialektik. Neuwied; Berlin: Luchterhand.
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse (Martin Nicolaus, Trans.). London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital, Vol. 1 (Ben Fowkes, Trans.). London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1981). Capital, Vol. 3 (David Fernbach, Trans.). London: Penguin.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010a). Marx-Engels Collected Works (Vol. 3). London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010b). Marx-Engels Collected Works (Vol. 29). London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010c). Marx-Engels Collected Works (Vol. 32). London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
MEGA II/5. (1983). Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band,
Hamburg 1867.
MEGA II/6. (1987). Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band,
Hamburg 1872.
264  I. ELBE

Postone, M. (1993). Time, Labor and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Reichardt, T. (2008). Aporien der soziologischen Erkenntnistheorie Alfred Sohn-­
Rethels. In Wissenschaftliche Mitteilungen des Berliner Vereinszur Förderung der
MEGA-Edition, Heft 6: Gesellschaftliche Praxis und ihrewissenschaftliche
Darstellung. Beiträgezur ‘Kapital’-Diskussion (pp. 242–266). Berlin: Argument.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1973). Geistige und körperliche Arbeit. Zur Theorie der gesell-
schaftlichen Synthesis, Erg.u. überarb. Aufl. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Wallat, H. (2009). Der Begriff der Verkehrungim Denken von Marx. In Marx-­
Engels-­Jahrbuch 2008 (pp. 68–102).
Wolf, D. (1985). Ware und Geld. Der dialektische Widerspruchim Kapital.
Hamburg: VSA.
 CHAPTER 15

The Critique of Real Abstraction:

From the Critical Theory of Society
to the Critique of Political Economy
and Back Again

Chris O’Kane

There has been a renewed engagement with real abstraction in recent

years. Scholars associated with the New Reading of Marx (including
Postone (1996); Arthur (2004, 2013); Murray (2016); Bellofiore (2016)
and others) have employed the idea in their important reconstructions of
Marx’s critique of political economy. Toscano and Bhandar (2015),
Endnotes (2013) and Moore (2015) have utilized and extended these
theorizations to conceive of race, gender and nature as real abstractions.
Both the New Reading and these new theories of real abstraction have
provided invaluable work. The former has contributed to systematizing
Marx’s inconsistent and unfinished theory of value as a theory of the
abstract social domination of capital accumulation and reproduction. The
latter has supplemented such a theory. Yet their exclusive focus on real
abstraction in relation to the critique of political economy means that the

C. O’Kane (*)
St John’s University, Jamaica, NY, USA

© The Author(s) 2020 265

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_15
266  C. O’KANE

critical Marxian theories of real abstraction—developed by Alfred Sohn-­

Rethel, Theodor W.  Adorno and Henri Lefebvre—have been mostly
bypassed by these new theories and have largely served as the object of
trenchant criticism for their insufficient grasp of Marx’s theory of value by
the New Reading. Consequently, these new readings and new theories of
real abstraction elide important aspects of Sohn-Rethel, Adorno and
Lefebvre’s critiques of real abstraction, which sought to develop Marx’s
critique of political economy into objective-subjective critical theories of
the reproduction of capitalist society.1 However, two recent works by
Bonefeld (2014) and Lotz (2014) have taken a different tactic; drawing
together elements of the critical theories of real abstraction and the new
reading of real abstraction, pointing toward a new reading of the critical
theory of real abstraction.
In what follows, I map the development of the critique of real abstrac-
tion from its origins to the present.2 In the first section, I discuss the
ambiguous status of the critique of real abstraction in Marx. In the second
section, I provide an overview of the development of the critique of real
abstraction as a critical theory of capitalist society in Sohn-Rethel, Adorno
and Lefebvre’s work. In the third section, I look at their reception in the
New Reading of Marx and the New Reading’s systematization of the the-
ory of real abstraction in the critique of political economy. In the fourth
section, I compare the new theories of real abstraction with Lotz and
Bonefeld, pointing to the shortcomings of the former and demonstrating
how the latter utilize the critique of real abstraction to integrate the critical
theory of real abstraction and the new reading of real abstraction. I close
by pointing to several ways I have further developed this new reading of
the critical theory of real abstraction and indicate how it can be further
developed by drawing on the ideas of Sohn-Rethel, Adorno and Lefebvre
and integrating the work of Toscano/Bhandar, Endnotes and Moore.

The Prehistory of Real Abstraction

Marx’s Critique of Real Abstraction

Marx never used the term ‘real abstraction’, yet he was concerned with
two types of abstraction of central concern to the notions of real abstrac-
tion examined here. These abstractions consist in the social constitution
and constituent properties of the supraindividual socially-objective cate-
gories of political economy and the inability of utopian socialists and
 15  THE CRITIQUE OF REAL ABSTRACTION: FROM THE CRITICAL THEORY…  267

­olitical economists to grasp this historically-specific process of social

p
domination due to their ill-conceived methodology of abstraction. Marx’s
most concise formulation of this relationship comes in an 1846 letter to
Annenkov, where he remarks that:

Mr Proudhon, chiefly because he doesn’t know history, fails to see that, in

developing his productive faculties … man develops certain inter-relations,
and that the nature of these relations necessarily changes with the modifica-
tion and the growth of the said productive faculties. He fails to see that
economic categories are but abstractions of those real relations that they are
truths only in so far as those relations continue to exist. Thus he falls into
the error of bourgeois economists who regard those economic categories as
eternal laws and not as historical laws which are laws only for a given histori-
cal development, a specific development of the productive forces. Thus,
instead of regarding politico-economic categories as abstractions of actual
social relations that are transitory and historical, Mr Proudhon, by a mystical
inversion, sees in the real relations only the embodiment of those abstrac-
tions. (Marx and Engels 1982: 100)

From this perspective, Capital can be seen as an attempt to systemati-

cally work out these insights by means of a double-faceted critique of politi-
cal economy. As Marx states in the preface to Capital, such a critique takes
a distinct ‘scientific’ approach to the mystified social reality of the capitalist
mode of production. Since ‘all science would be superfluous if the outward
appearance and the essence of things directly coincided’ (Marx 1993: 97)
where this critical science ‘comes in is to show how the law of value asserts
itself’ (Marx 1988: 70). On one level, Marx’s critique thus unites essences
and appearances by showing how capitalistically organized social labor nec-
essarily appears in the real abstractions of value, which mediate the accumu-
lation and reproduction of capital, thus exposing how the law of value
asserts itself. On another level, it criticizes the discipline of political econ-
omy, in which ‘the fetishism peculiar to bourgeois political economy […]
metamorphoses the social, economic character impressed on things in the
process of social production into a natural character stemming from the
material nature of those things’ (Marx 1982: 227).
To cut a long story short, Capital demonstrates that it is the historically-­
specific capitalist social form—entailing production for profit by privately
owned independent firms incumbent on the separation of producers from
the means of production and of the sphere of production from circula-
tion—that creates the dual character of concrete and abstract labor. Due
268  C. O’KANE

to the former, abstract labor (the substance of value) necessarily appears in

the value-form of money and commodities. This value-relation necessarily
appears in the process of capitalist accumulation and reproduction. The
‘movement’ of this process as represented in the formulas of political
economy (MCM’) is not a ‘mere abstraction’ but rather the representation
of a dominating supraindividual socially-objective ‘abstraction in actu’
(idem: 111), compelling capitalists to exploit workers in order to generate
profit and workers to sell their labor power in order to survive.
Marx’s critique of the discipline political economy is linked to this
aforementioned method of presentation. As the above has shown, Marx
establishes that ‘the categories of bourgeois economics’ are ‘forms of
thought which are socially valid and therefore objective for the relations of
production belonging to this historically determined mode of social
production’(idem: 169). However, since political economy only reflects
upon this process ‘post-festum with the results of the process of develop-
ment to hand’, they fail to grasp this historically-specific process of social
abstraction and domination, instead proceeding to treat the categories of
bourgeois economics as ‘natural and immutable forms of social life’
(idem: 168).
Yet it is important to note that Marx’s double-faceted critique of politi-
cal economy was incomplete, and that there are important ambivalences in
his account of the genesis and characteristics of real abstraction. Not only
does he define abstract labor as a historically-specific social and trans-­
historical physiological entity,3 Marx likewise equivocates as to whether
the process of abstraction takes place in production or exchange.4 In addi-
tion, he also notes that this process is only fully realized in the incarnation
of world money on the world market, a point at which he never arrived in
his method of presentation.5 Finally, Marx proceeds to critique political
economy on the basis of an ideal model of the capitalist mode of produc-
tion, abstracted from capitalist society. Thus rather than a systematic elab-
oration of the social constitution and reproduction of the capitalist mode
of production, let alone capitalist society, in which people within the capi-
tal relation are dominated by abstractions they collectively produce behind
their backs, Marx presents an intriguing if unsystematic critique of the
genesis and reproduction of capital qua accumulation as a process of
abstract social domination. The two approaches to real abstraction that I
focus on in the second and third sections would try to fill in these gaps in
two different ways via the development of the critique of the abstract
domination of capital into a critical theory of the reproduction of capitalist
 15  THE CRITIQUE OF REAL ABSTRACTION: FROM THE CRITICAL THEORY…  269

society and then on the basis of the New Reading of Marx’s theory of
value that provides a systematic reconstruction and expansion of the accu-
mulation and reproduction of capital.

Real Abstraction in Critical Theories of Society

Sohn-Rethel
Alfred Sohn-Rethel was the first to use the term ‘real abstraction’ in
Marxian theory. Simmel (2004) first used the term in 1900. In part, a
rejoinder to what he saw as the insufficiencies of the ‘objective’ status of
Marx’s theory of value, Simmel’s work promulgated a neo-Kantian ‘sub-
jective’ theory of value that investigated the effects of money in the con-
text of what he saw as the inextricable separation of subject from object in
modern society.6 For Simmel, the real abstraction of value exemplified
this: ‘Exchange, i.e. the economy, is the source of economic values because
exchange is the representative of the distance between subject and object
which transforms subjective feelings into objective valuation’ (Simmel
quoted in Reichelt 2007: 15).
In contrast to Marx, for Simmel, the real abstraction of value was thus
established by individuals using the Kantian faculties of the mind embed-
ded in market exchange; an inevitable consequence of the complex divi-
sion of labor of modern society that separated subjects from the objects
they create. Instead of a historically-specific-form of social domination
constituent of the capitalist mode of production, real abstraction was thus
the hallmark of the tragedy of modern culture.
As his use of the term implies, Sohn-Rethel’s critique of real abstraction
consisted in an immanent criticism of the neo-Kantian tragedy of culture
on a Marxian basis. Such a critical theory was established by drawing on
the critique of political economy. For Sohn-Rethel, critical Marxism was
premised on the notion that ‘Marxian thinking is undogmatic and critical
to the core’ (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 192). Accordingly, Sohn-Rethel held that
Marx’s methodology entailed ‘an approach to reality, but by way of the
‘critique’ of the historically given consciousness’ (idem: 194–195), which
consisted in ‘tracing the genetical origin of any current ideas and concepts,
on the very standards of the social existence determining ideas and
­concepts’ (idem: 195). In Marx’s case, such a method was employed to
critique the ‘particular mode of consciousness of political economy’ as the
‘necessary false consciousness’ of capitalist society, by unveiling ‘the
270  C. O’KANE

­ istorical origin of the seemingly timeless concept of ‘value’, and thus to

h
aid the overcoming of such a society. However, given some inconsistencies
in Marx’s work, his inability to grasp its full importance, and the socio-­
historical transformations that had occurred in the 100 odd years between
the publication of Capital and Intellectual and Manual Labor, Sohn-­
Rethel also held that ‘an extension to Marxist theory’ was ‘needed for a
fuller understanding of our own epoch’ (idem: 1).
Faced with the bureaucratic class rule in the self-proclaimed socialist
countries of the East and the tragedy of modern culture cultivated by his
neo-Kantian peers, Sohn-Rethel thus expanded Marx’s critique of political
economy into a critical theory of society. He did so by demonstrating the
internal socio-historical relationship between the supposedly trans-­
historical forms of scientific thought and the class antagonistic division of
mental and manual labor, in order to criticize the integral roles these sub-
jective and objective capacities played in perpetuating the false societies of
capitalism and really existing socialism.
This critique was established by Sohn-Rethel’s development of the ‘for-
mal’, rather than the ‘labour’, aspect of Marx’s analysis of the commodity.
According to Sohn-Rethel, the latter ‘holds the key not only to the cri-
tique of political economy, but also to the historical explanation of the
abstract conceptual mode of thinking and of the division of intellectual
and manual labour, which came into existence with it’ (idem: 33). This is
because the real abstraction of value is created by the social synthesis of a
class antagonistic division of intellectual and manual labor. For, drawing
on Marx’s notion that ‘they do it but they are not aware of it’:

the abstraction comes about by force of the action of exchange … out of the
exchanging agents practising their solipsism against each other. The abstrac-
tion belongs to the interrelationship of the exchanging agents and not to the
agents themselves. For it is not the individuals who cause the social synthesis
but their actions in exchange, the action is social, the minds are private.
(Idem: 44)

Contra Simmel, such a process of abstraction is not then created by the

anthropological faculties of the mind when confronted by an inevitably
complex modern society, but it proceeds from a class antagonistic socio-­
historical basis and is realized in the mind. Moreover, the very qualities of
Simmel’s neo-Kantian epistemology, and scientific understanding in gen-
eral—what Sohn-Rethel terms ‘conceptual abstraction’—are correspond
 15  THE CRITIQUE OF REAL ABSTRACTION: FROM THE CRITICAL THEORY…  271

to and issue from the properties of the exchange abstraction generated by

such a society. Thus, in contrast to bureaucratic socialism and the tragedy
of culture, these subjective and objective entities are inextricably linked to
the antagonistic social synthesis of class society and thus integral to
­reproducing these societies (idem: 203). Overcoming class antagonism
would thus entail the overcoming of the division of intellectual and man-
ual labor, enabling human flourishing in truly socialist forms of produc-
tion that overcome this division.
Intellectual and Manual Labour thus sought to supplement Marx’s cri-
tique of political economy by developing a critical social theory of real
abstraction, which demonstrated that the Kantian scientific intellect, and
the division between intellectual and manual labor are likewise forms of
‘necessary false consciousness’ that are inextricably linked with reproduc-
tion of class societies held together by exchange. Sohn-Rethelian real
abstraction served as the fulcrum of this critique insofar as the socially
synthetic act of exchange in class societies, characterized by the division of
intellectual and manual labor, gives rise to the real abstraction of value,
which is created by the hand, not the head, whose characteristics, in turn,
are mirrored in the conceptual abstraction of scientific understanding. It
was thus a critical social theory of real abstraction.

Adorno
As their correspondence shows, Adorno was an enthusiastic supporter of
Sohn-Rethelian real abstraction, even if Adorno’s parallel project differen-
tiated itself in important, if often neglected, ways. This can be seen in
Adorno’s famous statement that ‘Alfred Sohn-Rethel was the first to point
out that … in the general and necessary activity of the Spirit, inalienably
social labor lies hidden’ (Adorno 2001a: Redirection of the Subjective
Reduction).7 For, as I shall now show, this passage points to the similari-
ties and differences between Sohn-Rethel and Adorno’s critical theory of
real abstraction.
Like Sohn-Rethel, Adorno also characterized his critical theory of soci-
ety as an attempt to adapt Marx’s critique of political economy to the cur-
rent epoch through his own interpretation of Marx’s theory of ‘exchange’.
However, unlike Sohn-Rethel, as the quotation indicates, such a critique
entailed an account of the social formation of epistemology via the fetish-
istic exchange abstraction that brought together Marx, Kant and Hegel.
Moreover, this notion of abstraction was also tied to Adorno’s theory of
272  C. O’KANE

social domination and the formation of maimed subjectivity. Thus, while

Sohn-Rethel and Adorno formulated theories of real abstraction that elu-
cidated the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity in order to
critique the reproduction of capitalist society, Adorno’s critical theory pos-
sesses these distinct points of emphasis.
Adorno’s critical social theory of the fetishistic exchange abstraction
thus sought to supplement what he saw as two important theoretical
insufficiencies in Marx’s critique of political economy. In the first place,
Adorno held that Marx’s lacked a ‘completely developed notion of dialec-
tics’ (Adorno et  al. 1981: 24) and ‘out of disgust for petty academic
squabbles rampaged through … epistemological categories like the pro-
verbial bull in the china-shop’ (Adorno 2001a: Materialism Imageless). In
the second, since Marx’s prognostications of pauperization and revolution
had not come about, but his law of crisis was nonetheless the ‘model’ of a
dialectic concept of meaning, in which societal essence which shapes
appearances, appears in them and conceals itself in them, ‘modifications’
in historical development ‘should also be derived from it’ (Adorno et al.
1981: 37). Therefore, since ‘exchange was still key to society’ Adorno
endeavored to develop a dialectical critique of society that addressed
these gaps.
These concerns were addressed by Adorno in his late work through the
internally related ideas of society as subject, society as object, exchange
and conceptuality. For Adorno, the negative totality of capitalist society is
subject and object. Individuals within the class relation unwittingly consti-
tute the fetishistic exchange abstraction, which possesses the autonomous
supraindividual properties of a ‘mediating conceptuality’, inverting to
dominate and maim the subjects who collectively create the former, com-
pelling them to reproduce capitalist society.8 Consequently, since, ‘the
abstraction … in question is really the specific form of the exchange pro-
cess itself, the underlying social fact through which socialization first come
about’ (Adorno et  al. 1981: 31) this means that ‘The law which deter-
mines how the fatality of mankind unfolds itself is the law of exchange’;
(Adorno et al. 1981: 80) a ‘mediating conceptuality’ that is ‘independent
both of the consciousness of the human beings subjected to it and of the
consciousness of the scientists’ (idem) and yet is internally related to iden-
tity thinking and subject formation.
Consequently, as the necessary consciousness of the false society,
Adorno characterized the collectively and unconsciously constituted con-
 15  THE CRITIQUE OF REAL ABSTRACTION: FROM THE CRITICAL THEORY…  273

ceptuality of exchange as the ‘phenomenology of the non-mind’, which is

internally related to the epistemology of identity thinking via the process
of ‘socialization’. Like Sohn-Rethel, the origins of scientific epistemology
thus lie in the exchange abstraction. Yet, in contrast to Sohn-Rethel, this
relationship is not simply characterized by deriving the analogous proper-
ties that the categories of the understanding possess from exchange, but
via the mutually reinforcing properties of exchange and identity thinking.
This is also supplemented by the meditation between the transcendental
subject and with it the categories of understanding and the exchange
abstraction, which pertains to the constitution of subjectivity and to the
social objectivity of exchange, and thus in turn to subjects constituting
and reproducing society.9
Therefore, not only did the formation of the transcendental subject
establish an epistemological framework that cannot grasp its own gen-
esis, but it also deformed subjectivity. As ‘a relationship between human
beings’ that is ‘just as much founded in them as it comprehends and
constitutes them, the ‘universal domination of exchange-value over
human beings’, maims individuals; rendering them ‘powerlessly depen-
dent on the whole’ (Adorno 2001a: Redirection of the Subjective
Reduction 178–180), compelling them to reproduce society for the
sake of self-preservation.
Taken in tandem with Adorno’s periodization of late capitalism10—
wherein Marx’s theory of crisis had been counteracted by the affluence of
the ‘Keynesian Golden age’—Adorno’s utilized his theory of the fetishistic
exchange abstraction to account for an integrated mass society. For
Adorno, the resultant social totality was ‘negative’.
Yet, Adorno also held that the exchange abstraction was a fetishistic
objective illusion and that ‘totality was a critical category’ (Adorno 2001b;
Adorno et al. 1981: 13) oriented toward the subject. His critical theory
thus sought to cultivate the autonomy of subjects by pointing to the con-
tradictory character and ultimate irrationality of the antagonistic social
relations that constitute the exchange abstraction and reproduce the dom-
ination, maiming and misery inherent in such society, in order to negate
it. Hence, Adorno’s notion of the fetishistic exchange abstraction mirrors
Sohn-Rethel’s notion of real abstraction insofar as the former is the ful-
crum of Adorno’s extrapolation of Marx’s theory of value into a critique
of the objective-subjective reproduction of capitalist society.
274  C. O’KANE

Lefebvre
Henri Lefebvre is often portrayed as the ‘leading prophet of alienation’
(Merrifield 2006: XXXII). Yet his lifelong project of critiquing the repro-
duction of capitalist society, via his elaboration of the domination of lived
experience in his critique of everyday life, cities and space, was likewise
centered on a critical Marxist critique of fetishistic concrete abstraction
that paralleled Sohn-Rethel and Adorno’s work.11
Like Sohn-Rethel and Adorno, for Lefebvre, Marx’s theory was ‘not a
system or dogma’, but a ‘starting point that is indispensable for under-
standing the present-day world’ (Lefebvre 1968: 77). Like these thinkers,
Lefebvre held that Marx’s ‘basic concepts’ had ‘to be elaborated, refined,
and complemented by other concepts where necessary’ (idem: 188).
Consequently, mirroring these figures, Lefebvre’s critique of real abstrac-
tion, was thus developed as part of his elaboration of the relationship
between his interpretation of fetishistic concrete abstraction in the critique
of political economy and a critique of the domination of lived experience
in the objective-subjective entities of everyday life, cities and space in capi-
talist society.
Lefebvre’s interpretation of fetishistic concrete abstraction entailed
‘social reality, i.e., interacting human individuals and groups’, creating
‘appearances which are something more and else than mere illusions’ for
these ‘appearances are the modes in which human activities manifest
themselves within the whole they constitute at any given moment’. What
Lefebvre called ‘concrete abstractions’ are thus real abstractions; these
appearances are ‘abstract’ social forms which are nonetheless ‘concrete’
since they are constituted by social labor (Lefebvre 2009: 76). Like Sohn-­
Rethel and Adorno, Lefebvre also stressed that concrete abstractions are
not created by the mind, but possess a ‘practical power’. They ‘have a
concrete, objective reality: historically (as moments of the social reality)
and actually (as elements of the social objectivity)’ (idem: 76–77). For
‘The starting-point for this abstraction is not in the mind, but in the prac-
tical activity … Abstraction is a practical power’ (idem: 109).
Moreover, mirroring Adorno, Lefebvre emphasized that the extent of
form-determinate domination is limited. ‘For the logic of commodities …
does not succeed in forming a permanent closed system’. The ‘complex
determinations’ of ‘human labour’ are ‘not entirely taken over by this
form’ (Lefebvre 1968: 100). Rather, the reification of persons is prevented
by the internal opposition of the qualitative content of these forms.
 15  THE CRITIQUE OF REAL ABSTRACTION: FROM THE CRITICAL THEORY…  275

Lefebvre’s ensuing critique of fetishistic concrete abstraction thus

‘implies and envelops the critique of political economy of Marx and tries
to apprehend the social being whose existence is based on economic activ-
ity and beyond’ by extending and complementing the critique of political
economy in order to understand how capitalist society is reproduced and
resisted in everyday life, cities and space.
These three approaches to the domination of lived experience are
brought together in The Production of Space where ‘social space encom-
passes … the critical analysis of urban reality and … everyday life’. From
this perspective, Lefebvre’s theory of social space is a critical social theory
that attempted to critique the reproduction of capitalist society via his
utilization and enhancement of the critique of political economy as a cri-
tique of real fetishistic concrete abstraction. For, ‘If the critique of political
economy … were … to be resumed, it would no doubt demonstrate how
that political economy of space corresponded exactly to the self-­
presentation of space as the worldwide medium of the definitive installa-
tion of capitalism’ (Lefebvre 1992: 104). Accordingly:

Social relations, which are concrete abstractions, have no real existence save
in and through space. Their underpinning is spatial … the connection
between this underpinning and the relations it supports calls for analysis.
Such an analysis must … explain a genesis and constitute a critique of those
institutions …. and so forth, that have transformed the space under consid-
eration. (Idem: 404)

From this, it follows that the ‘concrete abstraction’ of the commodity-­

form possesses a ‘social’ ‘practical power’, which has a social underpin-
ning, since it is produced by social labor. Marx’s critique of the
commodity-form must then be supplemented by a critique of the abstract
space it inhabits. Abstract space is thus generated by social labor and pos-
sesses the characteristics of a concrete abstraction. The three abstract
forms of ‘neo-capitalism’ (which also includes analogous types of bureau-
cracy) are thus embedded in ‘spatial practice’; a wide-ranging category
that ‘subsumes the problems of the urban sphere’ and ‘everyday life’,
where the domination of abstract space transforms ‘lived experience’ and
‘bodies’ into ‘lived abstractions’, maiming them and compelling them to
reproduce capitalist society. Yet, because ‘capitalism and the bourgeoisie
can achieve nothing but abstractions’, spatial practice is also a contradic-
tory space where abstract space and the concrete abstractions of
276  C. O’KANE

‘­neo-­capitalism’ meet their inherent qualitative opposition in qualitative,

localized, differentiated oppositions.
Lefebvre’s critique of the real abstraction of abstract space thus drew on
his interpretation of fetishistic forms of concrete abstraction, complement-
ing Marx’s critique of political economy by showing where the concrete
abstraction of the ‘great fetish’ forms of domination emerge and how they
dominate and regulate life in the realm of spatial practice. At the same
time, the real abstraction of abstract space is opposed by the qualitative
contents of concrete space. Consequently, mirroring Sohn-Rethel and
Adorno, Lefebvre’s notion of concrete abstraction is integral to his critical
theory of the reproduction of capitalist society via his elaboration of the
domination of lived experience by the real abstractions of capitalist society
in abstract space. Moreover, further echoing Sohn-Rethel and Adorno, in
promulgating such a critique, Lefebvre holds that via such a critique man
can become ‘conscious of’ and ‘transcend the momentary form’ of these
‘relations’, seizing on the inherently human content and annulling the
concrete abstractions that oppose them with ‘practical methods’, and
‘with practical energy’ (Lefebvre 2008: 38). As a whole, these critical the-
ories of real abstraction thus drew on and developed Marx’s critique of
political economy into critical theories of the reproduction of capital-
ist society.

Real Abstraction in the New Reading of Marx

The critical-theoretical lineage of what is known as the New Reading of
Marx is marked by the influence of Sohn-Rethel, Adorno and, to a lesser
degree, Lefebvre.12 Yet as these designations imply, thinkers in this strand
of scholarship—such as Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt, Moishe
Postone and Chris Arthur—are primarily concerned with developing a
systematic reconstruction rather than supplementation of Marx’s critique
of political economy. Consequently, as I now show, these thinkers tend to
have an ambiguous relationship with Adorno, Sohn-Rethel and even
Lefebvre’s critiques of real abstraction. On the one hand, they are
undoubtedly influenced by their conception of the critique of political
economy as a critique of the social constitution of social domination. Yet,
on the other hand, even if they sometimes pose their work as resolving
problems in the Marxian bases of Adorno, Sohn-Rethel’s and Lefebvre’s
theories, they also lodge trenchant criticisms of these thinkers in their
respective reconstructions of Marx’s theory of value. Thus, while these
 15  THE CRITIQUE OF REAL ABSTRACTION: FROM THE CRITICAL THEORY…  277

scholars’ contributions and criticisms have proven invaluable, they have

also had the unintended consequences of shifting and narrowing the pur-
view of the critique of real abstraction from the critical theory of the
reproduction of capitalist society to the critique of the accumulation and
reproduction of the capitalist mode of production.

Postone
Moishe Postone’s seminal work, Time, Labor and Social Domination,
undertakes a critical-theoretical reconstruction of Marx’s critique of polit-
ical economy that systematizes Marx’s ambiguous theorization of abstract
labor. For Postone, it is ultimately the historically-specific reciprocal deter-
mination of concrete and abstract labor in conjunction with abstract time
that compulsively mediates the ‘treadmill’ dynamic of capitalist accumula-
tion and reproduction. The cornerstone of this interpretation is Postone’s
argument that ‘in Marx’s analysis, the category of abstract labor expresses
this real social process of abstraction; it is not simply based on a conceptual
process of abstraction’ (Postone 1996: 152). This means that for Postone,
the critique of real abstraction is tantamount to the critique of political
economy as a historically-specific critique of labor.
On this basis, Postone puts forward pertinent and trenchant criticisms
of Sohn-Rethel’s notion of real abstraction as ‘not a labor abstraction but
an exchange abstraction’. For, as Postone rightly notes ‘Sohn-Rethel …
does not relate the notion of labor abstraction’ but that of exchange ‘to
the creation of alienated social structures’.13 This means that Sohn-Rethel
treats classless society as tantamount to abolishing exchange, not the capi-
talist division of labor.
Moreover, as Postone intriguingly argues Sohn-Rethel’s notion of real
abstraction undermines his corresponding critique of epistemology. In this
first place, it ‘weakens his sophisticated attempt at an epistemological read-
ing of Marx’s categories’. In the second, his ‘emphasis on exchange, which
excludes any examination of the implications of the commodity form for
labor, restricts his social epistemology to a consideration of forms of static,
abstract mechanical thought necessarily excludes many forms of modern
thought from the purview of his critical social epistemology’, thus pre-
venting Sohn-Rethel from ‘dealing with nineteenth- and twentieth-­
century forms of thought in which the form of capital-determined
production itself takes on a fetishized form’ (idem: 178).
278  C. O’KANE

Postone’s work focused on developing his own epistemological reading

of Marx’s categories as subjective forms of thought generated by the real
abstraction of labor. He developed an important critique of the epistemol-
ogy of anti-Semitism as a foreshortened and regressive critique of capital-
ism. Unfortunately, he never provided a critique of social epistemology in
correlation to this critique of labor nor extended his systematic recon-
struction of the critique of political economy into a critique of the repro-
duction of capitalist society.14

Reichelt
Helmut Reichelt argues that ‘The “principle of exchange” and, connected
to this, the “exchange abstraction” as “real abstraction” form a central
component of Adorno’s concept of society’ (Reichelt 2007: 3). This is
because ‘Adorno’s critical theory … understands the capitalist economy as
an inverted reality in which individuals no longer “interact with one
another” on the market as rationally acting subjects, as the idea of the
exchange economy suggests’ (idem: 5). Yet, as Reichelt perceptively points
out, despite its programmatic status in Adorno’s critical theory, Adorno
only ‘assumes’ that the whole economy is to be developed out of the
exchange principle, meaning that ‘How this process of autonomisation is
to be conceptualised in detail is not explained by Adorno’ leaving ‘the
central concepts—objective abstraction, inversion, autonomisation, total-
ity, power of the universal over the particular’ as ‘postulates with regard to
their concretisation as far as the critique of economics is concerned’
(idem: 6).
From this vantage point, Reichelt has developed a notion of real
abstraction with regard to his elaboration of Marx’s monetary theory of
value. Such a theory holds that the atomized capitalist process of produc-
tion for exchange constitutes a sensible supersensible inverted world, in
which sensuousness in its widest sense—as use value, labor, exchange with
nature—is demoted to a means of the self-perpetuation of an abstract pro-
cess that underlies the whole objective world of constant change… the
whole sensuous world of human beings who reproduce themselves
through the satisfaction of needs and labor is step-by-step sucked into this
process, in which all activities ‘are themselves inverted’ (Reichelt
2005: 46–47).
This is because the sensible productive activity of individuals within the
class relation of the capitalist social division of labor are necessarily realized
 15  THE CRITIQUE OF REAL ABSTRACTION: FROM THE CRITICAL THEORY…  279

and mediated by the supersensible real abstractions of the value-forms of

political economy, resulting in the accumulation and reproduction of capital.
While Reichelt’s early work attempted to reconstruct this theory of
value, his later work held that Marx’s monetary theory of value was incom-
plete, and Reichelt attempted to complete and systematize the former on
the basis of his notion of validity. While such a notion of validity has its
detractors,15 it is also important to note that in spite of his starting point,
Reichelt’s systematization of Marx’s theory of value refrains from address-
ing how such an interpretation solves the aforementioned gap in Adorno’s
interpretation of Marx, let alone how it pertains to Adorno’s critical the-
ory of society, nor has Reichelt used this formulation of Marx’s theory of
value to articulate the reproduction of capitalist society.

Kerr
Finally, Derek Kerr points out that Lefebvre’s theory of abstract space
refrains from properly integrating Marx’s theory of accumulation. By ‘sep-
arating out contradictions of space from those in space and by reducing
class struggle and history to the latter, it is not clear what constitutes the
contradictions of space’. In ‘abandoning the Marx of Capital’, Lefebvre’s
theory of ‘the relation between the mode of production and its space is
never specified’ (Kerr 1994: 25). Drawing on the early work of Bonefeld,
Kerr argues that Marx’s critique uncovers ‘the contradictory constitution
of the capital relation as it attempts to transform and express itself through
the spatial and temporal modalities of existence’ (idem: 32). While making
the incisive point that it is the time of surplus production that is realized
in the relation between time and abstract space, Kerr has not explored the
relationship between these forms of real abstraction, abstract space and the
domination of lived experience as proposed by Lefebvre.
In sum, the New Reading of Marx is undoubtedly correct at pointing
to the systematic shortcomings in the value-theoretical bases of Sohn-­
Rethel, Adorno and Lefebvre’s critical social theories of real abstraction.
Postone and Reichelt’s systematizations of the ambiguous aspects of
Marx’s theory of value that elaborate the constitution and reproduction of
capital via the social objectivity of abstract labor and the forms of value are
likewise important conceptions of real abstraction. Yet the unintended
consequences of the new reading has been to diminish the status of the
critical theory of real abstraction, reducing it to an errant ersatz reading of
the critique of political economy.
280  C. O’KANE

In the next section, I argue that this approach has served as the basis for
a number of new theories of real abstraction. I then contrast this approach
with work that has brought together the new reading of Marx and the
critical theory of society. I close by arguing that the second approach
should be further developed to articulate what I call the New Reading of
the Critical Theory of Real Abstraction.

New Theories of Real Abstraction

Toscano’s widely influential works on the notion of real abstraction, are
both representative of and influential on these new theories of real abstrac-
tion. In his most influential article on real abstraction  Toscano (2008),
depicts Sohn-Rethel as part of the ‘debate on real abstraction’. According
to Toscano, this debate centers on the interpretation of the introduction
to the Grundrisse and includes a number of scholars from divergent theo-
retical perspectives16 who are said to have elaborated theories of real
abstraction ‘in terms of both the methodology of Marxism and the logic
and ontology of capitalism’ (Toscano 2008: 273). Toscano does point out
that Sohn-Rethel differentiates his critique of epistemology from the cri-
tique of political economy and bases his notion of real abstraction on com-
modity fetishism rather than the 1857 introduction. Yet a number of
scholars have followed or collaborated with Toscano in formulating new
theories of the real abstractions of race, property, gender and nature on
the basis of elaborating the systematic roles these social phenomena play in
the logic and ontology of capitalist accumulation on the basis of a Marxian,
rather than Sohn-Rethelian or critical-theoretical, methodology that draws
on the new reading.
Drawing on Postone and Arthur’s value-form theory, Endnotes sys-
tematically dialectically derives gender as a real abstraction by virtue of the
role that gendered reproductive labor plays in capital accumulation and
reproduction. Toscano and Bhandar (2015) bring the value-theoretic
interpretation of real abstraction together with Hall, Althusser, Dunbar
Ortiz, Locke and others to conceive of property and race as ‘real abstrac-
tions’ due to their integral roles in capital accumulation. Finally, drawing
on Toscano, Moore (2015, 2016) argues that the historical creation of
Nature as a real abstraction is the underlying condition of capital accumu-
lation insofar as relegating the ecosystem and non-white males to the
realm of nature is the premise that appears in these results.
These new theories certainly are important and focus on types of domi-
nation integral to capitalist society, which were not included in the critical
 15  THE CRITIQUE OF REAL ABSTRACTION: FROM THE CRITICAL THEORY…  281

theories of real abstraction. Yet, in conceiving of these phenomena as ‘real

abstractions’ on the basis of the roles that they play in the logic of accumu-
lation and reproduction of capital, they refrain from elaborating how these
social phenomena are objective/subjective entities that are implicated in
the wider process of the reproduction of capitalist society. Moreover, in
eschewing the subjective components of these phenomena, they occlude
the experience of domination, the shaping of subjectivity, and how these
processes contribute to the dynamic of the reproduction of capitalist total-
ity. A critical theory of the reproduction of capitalist society is thus passed
over in favor of a systematic deepening of the critique of political economy
that consequently provides a foreshortened critique of these social phe-
nomena. In contrast, the recent work of Bonefeld and Lotz has brought
together the new reading of Marx with the critical theory of society in a
manner that eschews these shortcomings.

New Critical Theories of Real Abstraction

Much like these new theories of real abstraction, Bonefeld (2014) calls for
the development of the critical interpretation of Marx rather than a recon-
struction. In elaborating the former, however, Bonefeld brings the New
Reading together with Adorno’s late critical theory of society. This entails
envisioning society as a negative totality characterized by unity as disunity
constituted and reproduced by the relations between subject and object.
On this basis, Bonefeld criticizes, synthesizes and further develops the
New Reading. He points out that Postone’s historically-specific critique of
labor and Reichelt’s monetary theory of value ultimately complement
each other, filling in their respective blind spots. Moreover, Bonefeld
grounds Postone’s historically-specific critique of labor on primitive accu-
mulation, while also developing an Adornian notion of class as a negative
identity that compels individual action. Finally, Bonefeld also supplements
this systematic development of economic categories with a theory of the
state and world market that conceptualizes the former as ‘the concen-
trated force of social order’. The state, thus, not only ‘depoliticizes the
socio-economic relations and so guarantees contractual relations of social
interaction’ (Bonefeld 2014: 185–186) but also cultivates entrepreneurial
instincts via vital politics. These social, economic and political premises
characteristic of unity as disunity appear in ‘the form of a movement of real
economic abstractions that, endowed with an invisible force, govern over
and prevail through the social individuals’ (idem: 64) compelling the
282  C. O’KANE

reproduction of the separated unity of capitalist society. As the ‘anamnesis

of the genesis’, the critique of political economy as a critical theory of
society reduces this overarching social dynamic to the historically-specific
social relations that constitute and reproduce such a society.
While Bonefeld refrains from examining epistemology and subjectivity,
Lotz’s notion of the capitalist schema amounts to a return to Marx via
Sohn-Rethel and Adorno that also proceeds to re-read Adorno and Sohn-­
Rethel in conjunction with the new reading of Marx. Lotz argues that
money, rather than Kantian epistemology, is a real abstraction that via its
totalizing process of socialization schematizes and thus creates subjectivity.
For Lotz, ‘the capitalist schema “frames the whole of social relations under
capitalism, as well as determines the form of everything that becomes subor-
dinated to capital and its temporal horizons”’ (Lotz 2014: 114). Lotz pro-
ceeds to sketch a re-reading of the culture industry on this basis. Accordingly,
Adorno’s notion of ‘total socialization [totale Vergesellschaftung] of a “sub-
jectless subject” is only possible through the fluidity of capital as existing in
the general intellect and its communicability i.e., in every aspect of life’
(idem: 129), which as ‘industries that take on the whole mental apparatus of
capitalist individuals’ (idem: xv) produce thought, experience and reflection
via the relationship between schematization, real abstraction accumulation
and social reproduction. Like Bonefeld, Lotz’s theory of real abstraction
unites the new reading with the critical theory of real abstraction to show
how the objective-subjective elements of social totality are mediated and
reproduced via the real abstraction of money.

Conclusion
Bonefeld and Lotz’s work point toward how I contend that the critical
theory of real abstraction might be further developed, not merely as a
reconstruction or systematic elaboration of Marx’s theory of value, but
through the integration of critical theories and new readings of real
abstraction.
My own recent work (O’Kane 2018c) has sought to further develop
such a new reading of the critical theory of real abstraction, arguing how
Adorno’s idea of society as subject and object, qua exchange, can be refor-
mulated to critique ‘neoliberalism’, the 2007 crisis and the ensuring
embrace of authoritarianism. My forthcoming work seeks to extend it to a
conception of the negative totality of capitalist society that includes house-
hold production and the domination of nature.
 15  THE CRITIQUE OF REAL ABSTRACTION: FROM THE CRITICAL THEORY…  283

Such a New Reading of the Critical Theory of Real Abstraction might

be further developed via productively drawing together the critical theo-
ries of real abstraction and the new readings of real abstraction in a num-
ber of ways. For instance, Sohn-Rethel’s critique of the division between
intellectual and manual labor might be joined with Postone’s insights to
critique the recent ground swell of support for bureaucratic notions of
social democracy as well as the implicit continuation of this separation in
promethean notions of accelerationsism and fully automated luxury com-
munism. In addition, Greig Charnock (Charnock et al. 2014; Charnock
2014, 2018) and Japhy Wilson’s work (Wilson 2014) also provides the
bases for critical Marxian readings of abstract space qua time that might
incorporate the elements of Lefebvre’s notions of the abstract domination
of lived experience. Finally, the notions of race, gender and Nature as real
abstractions developed by Toscano/Bhandar, Endnotes and Moore might
be integrated into such an approach leading to the articulation of the sub-
jective formation and domination of these types of subjectivity in the
reproduction of capitalist society. Following this line of development
would not only widen the scope of contemporary theories of real abstrac-
tion but return the theory to its integral role in critical theories of the
reproduction of capitalist society.

Notes
1. As I argue below Marx’s notion of accumulation entails the reproduction
of social relations in the sphere of production and circulation in the capital-
ist mode of production. Capitalist society refers to the objective and sub-
jective domains of the capitalist economy as well as the state and private
sphere, which are implicated in, yet distinct from, the process of capital
accumulation.
2. See Elena Louisa Lange (forthcoming), for a discussion of the develop-
ment or real abstraction from a value-theoretical perspective.
3. Marx’s trans-historical definition of abstract labor holds that ‘all labour is
an expenditure of human labour, in the physiological sense, and it is this
quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour, that it forms the value of
commodities’ (Marx n.d.: 137). This is contrasted with his historically-
specific definitions which states that ‘not an atom of matter’ enters into this
process of abstraction in which ‘value is realized only in exchange, i.e. in a
social process’ (idem: 105). For a recent debate on these two definitions of
abstract labor, see Bonefeld (2010) and Kicillof and Starosta (2011).
284  C. O’KANE

4. For an example of the former, see Marx’s statement that ‘The different
proportions, in which different sorts of labour are reduced to simple labour
as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the
back of the producers and, consequently, seems to be fixed by custom. In
the values coat and linen, abstraction is made from the difference of their
use-values; now we have seen that also in the labour that represents itself in
these values, abstraction is made from the difference of its useful forms of
tailoring and weaving’ (Marx n.d.: 134–135). For the latter, see the French
edition of Capital where Marx added the following sentence: ‘it is evident
that one abstracts from the use-value of the commodities when one
exchanges them and that every exchange relation is itself characterized by
this abstraction’ (Marx quoted in Ehrbar 2010: 439). As I show below,
these interpretations are represented by Sohn-Rethel and Postone.
5. Although this is mentioned in Chapter 3.3 of Volume I.
6. See David Frisby’s introduction to Simmel (2004), Winder (n.d.).
7. The Redmond translation does not include page numbers, so I will include
the name of the section when quoting from Negative Dialectics.
8. Adorno’s most cohesive exposition of this process of abstraction can be
found in Adorno (2018). For shorter variations, see also ‘Sociology and
Empirical Research’ in Adorno et  al. (1981), as well as Adorno (2002:
31–32). For a detailed reconstruction of Adorno’s account of this process,
see O’Kane (2018b).
9. Hence ‘transcendental universality is no mere narcissistic self-exaltation of
the I …but has its reality in the domination which ends up prevailing and
perpetuating itself through the exchange-principle’ (Adorno 2001a: On
the interpretation of the transcendental 180–182).
10. For a discussion of Adorno’s periodization of late capitalism, see O’Kane
(2018c).
11. This section draws on O’Kane (2018a).
12. The critical-theoretical lineage refers to thinkers who develop their new
reading of Marx within the tradition of critical theory and includes not
only students of Adorno but thinkers in other critical Marxist traditions,
such as Open Marxism. This distinguishes them from others who work
within this theoretical discourse, such as Michael Heinrich and Chris
Arthur, who are influenced by the work of Backhaus, Reichelt and others
but do not see their attempts to reconstruct the critique of political econ-
omy as part of the critical-­theoretical tradition.
13. For an elaboration of this critique of Sohn-Rethel’s notion of real abstrac-
tion, see Jappe (2013).
14. This is because while here and elsewhere Postone points to the relations
between the treadmill dynamic, the state, crises and mass psychology, it is
unfortunately the case that he has yet to systematically elaborate them.
 15  THE CRITIQUE OF REAL ABSTRACTION: FROM THE CRITICAL THEORY…  285

15. See Lange (forthcoming) for an overview of the criticism of Reichelt’s

notion of validity.
16. Although he refrains from mentioning Adorno or Lefebvre, Toscano does
include Althusser, someone Sohn-Rethel influenced (Virno) and a number
of current scholars (Finelli, Zizek and Postone) as participants.

References
Adorno, T. W. (2001a). Negative Dialectics (Dennis Redmond, Trans.). Retrieved
June 15, 2018, from http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ND2Trans.txt.
Adorno, T. W. (2001b). Late Capitalism Or Industrial Society? (Dennis Redmond,
Trans.). Retrieved June 15, 2018, from https://www.marxists.org/reference/
archive/adorno/1968/late-capitalism.htm.Last.
Adorno, T. W. (2002). Introduction to Sociology. London: Polity Press.
Adorno, T. W. (2018). On Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociology. Historical
Materialism, 26(1), 1–11.
Adorno, T. W., et al. (1981). The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. London:
Ashgate Pub Co.
Arthur, C. (2004). The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. Leiden: Brill.
Arthur, C. (2013). The Practical Truth of Abstract Labour. In R.  Bellofiore
et  al.  (Eds.), In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse
(pp. 101–120). Leiden: Brill.
Bellofiore, R. (2016). Marx After Hegel: Capital as Totality and the Centrality of
Production. Crisis and Critique, 3(3), 31–64.
Bonefeld, W. (2010). Abstract Labour: Against Its Nature and on Its Time.
Capital and Class, 34(2), 257–276.
Bonefeld, W. (2014). Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On
Subversion and Negative Reason. London: Bloomsbury.
Charnock, G. (2014). ‘Lost in Space’ Lefebvre, Harvey and the Spatiality of
Negative. South Atlantic Quarterly, 113(2), 313–325.
Charnock, G. (2018). Space, Form and Urbanity. In B. Best et al. (Eds.), The Sage
Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. London: Sage.
Charnock, G., Purcell, T. F., & Ribera-Fumaz, R. (2014). The Limits to Capital in
Spain. London: Palgrave.
Ehrbar, H. (2010). Annotations to Marx’s Capital. Register. Retrieved from
http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~ehrbar/akmc.pdf.
Endnotes. (2013). The Logic of Gender, in Endnotes. Gender, Race, Class and
Other Misfortunes, 3. Endnotes Register. Retrieved June 15, 2018, from
https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/endnotes-the-logic-of-gender.
Jappe, A. (2013). Sohn-Rethel and the Origin of Real Abstraction. Historical
Materialism, 21(1), 3–14.
286  C. O’KANE

Kerr, D. (1994). The Time of Trial by Space: Critical Reflections on Henri

Lefebvre’s Epoch of Space. Common Sense, 15, 18.
Kicillof, A., & Starosta, G. (2011). On Value and Abstract Labour: A Reply to
Werner Bonefeld. Capital and Class, 34(2), 295–305.
Lange, E. L. (forthcoming). Real Abstraction. In S. Farris et al. (Eds.), The SAGE
Handbook of Marxism. London: Sage.
Lefebvre, H. (1968). The Sociology of Marx. London: Pantheon.
Lefebvre, H. (1992). The Production of Space. London: Wiley.
Lefebvre, H. (2008). The Critique of Everyday Life. London: Verso.
Lefebvre, H. (2009). Dialectical Materialism. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Lotz, C. (2014). The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money and the Culture of Abstraction.
Lexington Books.
Marx, K. (1982). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. II. In K. Marx &
F. Engels (Eds.), Collected Works (Vol. 36). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, K. (1988). Letter to Kugelmann July 11 1868. In K.  Marx & F.  Engels
(Eds.), Collected Works (Vol. 43). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, K. (1993). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 3).
London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (n.d.). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (Hans g. Ehrbar,
Trans.). Retrieved June 15, 2018, from http://content.csbs.utah.edu/
~ehrbar/akmc.htm.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1982). Marx/Engels Collected Works (Vol. 38). London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Merrifield, A. (2006). Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (New ed.). London:
Routledge.
Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso.
Moore, J. W. (2016). Nature/Society & the Violence of Real Abstraction. Register.
Retrieved June 15, 2018, from https://jasonwmoore.wordpress.com/2016/
10/04/naturesociety-the-violence-of-real-abstract.
Murray, P. (2016). The Mismeasure of Wealth. Leiden: Brill.
O’Kane, C. (2018a). Fetishistic concrete abstraction, social constitution and social
domination in Henri Lefebvre’s writings on everyday life, cities and space.
Capital and Class, 42(2), 253–271.
O’Kane, C. (2018b). Introduction to Theodor W.  Adorno. On Marx and the
Basic Concepts of Sociology. Historical Materialism, 26(1), 137–153.
O’Kane, C. (2018c). ‘Society Maintains Itself Despite the Catastrophes That May
Eventuate’: Critical Theory, Negative Totality and Crisis. Constellations.
Retrieved June 15, 2018, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/
10.1111/1467-8675.12341.
Postone, M. (1996). Time, Labor and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
 15  THE CRITIQUE OF REAL ABSTRACTION: FROM THE CRITICAL THEORY…  287

Reichelt, H. (2005). Social Reality as Appearance: Some Notes on Marx’s

Conception of Reality. In W.  Bonefeld & K.  Psychopedis (Eds.), Human
Dignity. Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism (pp.  31–68).
London: Ashgate.
Reichelt, H. (2007). Marx’s Critique of Economic Categories: Reflections on the
Problem of Validity in the Dialectical Method of Presentation in Capital.
Historical Materialism, 15(4), 3–52.
Simmel, G. (2004). The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of
Epistemology. London: Macmillan.
Toscano, A. (2008). The Open Secret of Real Abstraction. Rethinking Marxism,
20(2), 273–287.
Toscano, A., & Bhandar, B. (2015). Race, Real Estate and Real Abstraction.
Radical Philosophy, 194(1), 8–17.
Wilson, J. (2014). The Violence of Abstract Space: Contested Regional
Developments in Southern Mexico. International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 38(2), 516–538.
Winder, J. (n.d.). The Tragedy of Concept Formation: Simmel’s Philosophy of
Money and Real Abstraction. Register. Retrieved June 15, 2018, from https://
www.academia.edu/2453087/The_Tragedy_of_Concept_Formation_
Simmels_Philosophy_of_Money_and_Real_Abstraction.
 CHAPTER 16

Real Abstraction in Light of the ‘Practical

Revolution in Epistemology’ (Labriola):
Considerations on the Uses and Limits
of a Concept

Wolfgang Fritz Haug

Words can become a ‘label by which the true believers recognize one
another’; thus Marx angrily judged one of the phrases in the founding
program of the Socialist Workers Party of Germany of 1875 (Marx and
Engels 24 2010a: 91; MEW 19 1987: 25).1 His own concepts were some-
times also not immune to similar misuse, such as his notion of ‘value
abstraction’, indispensable for the analysis of the value-form, the gateway
to understanding Capital. Such was also the case for the concept of ‘real
abstraction’, with the help of which Alfred Sohn-Rethel claims to expose
the conditions of possible potential and range of this Marxian conception.
For the criterion for concepts is their contribution to understanding con-
crete reality. This is also the case for Sohn-Rethel’s abstract-general, meta-­
theoretical concept of real abstraction. Initially, it confronts us as a

W. F. Haug (*)
Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 289

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_16
290  W. F. HAUG

­paradoxical word. Paradoxical because it is built from two words usually

understood to be opposites. That’s called an oxymoron in rhetoric. We
can only understand by means of abstractions. That which is to be com-
prehended, we subsume under the name reality. Does that mean that what
is to be grasped is always already understood? And that, because it goes
without saying? In order to not cause confusion, I will first put a few of the
abstractions that I will work with in the following into order.

I
Our first word was ‘words’. What do we mean, when in contrast to that we
say concept in a theoretical context? Now, every theoretical concept also
initially confronts us as a word. But then it is the name for a piece of the-
ory. We can speak of a theorem. When we go through it to say what a
concept means, we in turn use other concepts, whose network is always
traceable, referring to a theory in the sense of a theoretically permeated
real problem field.
Are concepts accordingly the categories of a theory? They are often
regarded as such, and in Soviet Marxism–Leninism they were ‘officially’
declared to be so. But then Marx spits in this conceptual soup with the
fundamental statement of his critique: ‘Classical political economy bor-
rowed the category “price of labour” from everyday life without further
criticism, and then simply asked the question, how is this price deter-
mined?’ (Marx 1976: 677f.). If we additionally consider how he himself
worked this field, we recognize the transition to a positive-theoretical con-
ception: labor as such cannot be sold at all; only products of labor can
(which includes services). Under the wage relation, what is sold is labor-­
power, measured in terms of the duration of time of its expenditure. The
value of labor-power, in turn, is measured in terms of the labor necessary
for its reproduction. Here is where the axiomatic statements apply: labor
does not have value; it creates value. Where there were once categories,
there are now concepts, which constitute a theorem. The category—in
our example, the wage as the ‘price of labor’—can however now be grasped
in its own positivity. It is not simply false, but rather, as the everyday form
of praxis of wage workers, saturated with empirical evidence. Marx gener-
ally determines that categories of this sort ‘express the forms of being, the
characteristics of existence, and often only individual sides of this specific
society, this subject’ (Marx 1973: 106). Marx knew Ancient Greek very
well and know that the category of kategoreuo, ‘to publicly accuse s­ omeone
 16  REAL ABSTRACTION IN LIGHT OF THE ‘PRACTICAL REVOLUTION…  291

of something’, comes literally from Agora, the marketplace. The funda-

mental categories of our social existence are always already explicit. What
Marx said about price applies to them: ‘Everyone knows, if nothing else,
that commodities have a common value-form which contrasts in the most
striking manner with the motley natural forms of their use-values. I refer
to the money-form’ (Marx 1976: 159). And thus ‘everyone’ also knows
that the wage is the price of labor, and everyone knows just as well that
capital yields profit and land yields ground rent.
It is knowledge in the mode of self-evidence. It comes to us in that we
move within our social relations, in which we have constituted ourselves as
subjects. In German, that can be expressed as the effect of behavior in rela-
tions (Verhalten in Verhältnissen). In the interaction between behavior and
relations, the network of categorical determinations of our social being
opens up. They are ‘in’ us, because we always already live in these determi-
nate relations. We spontaneously feel at home in them.
In Capital, Marx begins with this kind of knowledge, but then he takes
us on the path from common sense to historical materialist science. It is the
path of analysis and the genetic reconstruction of our relations. Category
by category, things are conceptually reconstructed. The self-evident trans-
forms step-by-step into a ‘bewitched, distorted and upside-down world
haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same
time social characters and mere things’ (Marx 1981: 969). Now we can
honor ‘the great merit of classical economics’, of having dissolved ‘this
false appearance and deception, this autonomization and ossification of
the different social elements of wealth vis-a-vis one another, this personi-
fication of things and reification of the relations of production, this reli-
gion of everyday life, by reducing interest to a part of profit and rent to the
surplus above the average profit, so that they both coincide in surplus-­
value; by presenting the circulation process as simply a metamorphosis of
forms, and finally in the immediate process of production reducing the
value and surplus-value of commodities to labour’ (idem).
But why did we need Marx for this, when it was already accomplished
by Smith and Ricardo? We have to return again to the beginning.

II
In his critique of Hegel from 1843, the young Marx criticized—at this
time, still close to Feuerbach—the operation with ‘abstractly logical cate-
gories’ as well as their subjectification, which causes the real d
­ eterminations
292  W. F. HAUG

to appear as merely ‘formal’ (Marx and Engels 3 2010c: 16ff.). Fourteen

years later, Marx deals with this problematic in the famous chapter on
method introducing the Grundrisse, but now already with the intellectual
means of historical materialism. Here, he can be observed circling the
problem. It is not a dogmatic text, not a doctrine of finished thought, but
rather a text of theoretical production. Marx poses the problem as a ques-
tion of the theoretical construction of his project of a critique of political
economy. What role can universal-historical categories play in the theory
of a historically specific mode of production; modern capitalism in this
case? Marx experiments with the concept of ‘production in general’. Is it
not one of the ‘traits’ or ‘characteristics’ that is ‘common’ to all ‘epochs of
production?’ That’s why its concept appears to be an ‘abstraction’, mea-
sured against concrete-capitalist production, ‘but a rational abstraction in
so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves
us repetition’ (Marx 1973: 85). But that fails at first due to the contradic-
tion between historical change and a generalizing fixation that abstracts
from time. There is no ‘production in general’ and also ‘no general pro-
duction’. Spoken in terms of epistemological generality: determinations
are not independent; they are ultimately always determinations of some-
thing real-concrete. But Marx rejects the question concerning the ‘rela-
tionship between scientific presentation and the real movement’ by stating
that it does not ‘belong here yet’ (idem: 86). Initially, he analyzes the
circular interrelation between production, distribution, exchange, and
consumption, which all ‘form the members of a totality’ (idem: 99), and
arrives at the important concept of the ‘predominant’ in the relation
between these four always-present aspects of the economic—he thus
determines the general status of abstract production (idem: 94). But he
appears to be unsatisfied with this; rather, he starts again, now no longer
directly as a factual issue, but rather as a question concerning the ‘method
of political economy’.
He now turns to the question of the conceptual reconstruction of capi-
talist economy and first demonstrates—like Hegel at the beginning of the
Phenomenology of Spirit—the failure of common sense, to which it sponta-
neously appears correct ‘to begin with the real and the concrete, with the
real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population,
which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of produc-
tion’ (idem: 100). However, this, the most immediately concrete, proves
to be ‘an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is
composed’. The classes, for their part, ‘are an empty phrase if I am not
 16  REAL ABSTRACTION IN LIGHT OF THE ‘PRACTICAL REVOLUTION…  293

familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital,
etc.’, which in turn are empty abstractions without the division of labor,
exchange, value, money, price, etc., not to forget labor, ‘ever thinner
abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations’ (idem).
From here, ‘the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally
arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception
of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations’.
This is ‘is obviously the scientifically correct method’ (idem: 101). In
these passages, Hegel’s formula of ascending from the abstract to the con-
crete begins its career as the Marxist understanding of method. One was
not disturbed by the fact that Marx thus described the act of theoretical
construction begun by Smith and classically carried out by Ricardo; that of
‘retracing the journey’: ‘As soon as these individual moments had been
more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic
systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division
of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between
nations and the world market’. (idem: 100) May we conclude from this
that he did not yet have his own path in view? After all, the Grundrisse
(Outlines) Of the Critique of Political Economy, where he still had to strug-
gle to present his object, were still ahead of him. Still hidden in the future
for him, however, were the first volume of Capital—the only one com-
pleted by him in the two editions he had shaped and the French transla-
tion with its progressive layers of revision—in which he practiced his
dialectical method as well as further developing (Haug 2006b) it and con-
ceptualizing it. The manuscripts for the third volume quoted above also
still largely don’t ‘know’ anything of it.
But theoretically educated Marxists could know—at least since the
beginning of the project of the first MEGA in the early Soviet Union and
at the latest since the publication of the MEW. For Capital does not and
could not begin—Althusser, who asked his readers to ‘abstract’ from the
beginning of Capital, may forgive me—with abstract labor, but rather
with the ‘simplest concrete element of economics’ in the form of ‘the sim-
plest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contem-
porary society’, the commodity form (Marx and Engels 24: 2010a:
544–545). This structure alone, obvious at first glance in the table of
contents, should actually suffice for this commonplace to lose credibility.
294  W. F. HAUG

III
A key question is in fact the one initially only dealt with in a rudimentary
manner by Marx, that of how the ‘relationship between scientific presenta-
tion and the real movement’ (see above) is to be processed in a historical
materialist manner. It is made concrete in the question concerning the
beginning, then of how transitions from one level of reality to a more
complex one are to be achieved. A priori constructions, also those in the
name of Hegelian dialectic, are inadmissible. ‘Inquiry’, Marx writes in the
Postface to the Second Edition, ‘has to appropriate the material in detail,
to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner
connection. Only after this work has been done can the real movement be
appropriately presented’ (Marx 1976: 102). But that only describes, it
does not explain, how Marx is to accomplish and epistemologically con-
ceptualize this presentation. The task that Marx poses in the quoted
Postface from 1873, and the solution to which he calls ‘my dialectical
method’, sounds more concrete: grasping ‘every historically developed
form as being in a fluid state’ and presenting it out of this rhythm of
becoming and passing away (idem: 103). He returns to the ‘how’ of solv-
ing this task halfway, at the beginning of the chapter on machinery and
large-scale industry, in a footnote where, 16 years after the introduction to
the Grundrisse, he casually—as if in a protocol of reflection upon his theo-
retical mode of production—returns to the question of the scientifically
correct method, but now looking back on what has already been achieved
and looking forward with a clearer view to what has yet to be achieved. In
context, it is a critical history of technology. Surprisingly, Marx refers back
to his fourth thesis on Feuerbach from 1845, where he confronts
Feuerbach’s analytical reduction of the ‘religious world’ to its ‘secular
basis’ with the insight that the genesis of the religious world ‘can only be
explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular
basis’ (Marx and Engels 5 2010d: 4). Now, in Capital, with regard to
technology, he returns to this: ‘It is, in reality, much easier to discover by
analysis the earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion than to do the
opposite, i.e. to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms
in which these have been apotheosized. The latter method is the only
materialist, and therefore the only scientific one’ (Marx 1976: 493, ff. 4).
Within the context of the history of technology, Marx attributes the key
role to the ‘active relation of man to nature’. In the social, especially
 16  REAL ABSTRACTION IN LIGHT OF THE ‘PRACTICAL REVOLUTION…  295

e­ conomic context, this practical behavior is at the same time embedded in

specific social relations and the form-determinacies characteristic of them.
With an attentiveness sharpened by these hints, this same epistemologi-
cal thought can already be discovered in the fourth part of the first chapter
of Capital as the key to Marx’s actual procedure, and thus to the opera-
tion significance of his conception of dialectic. That which characterizes
Feuerbach’s achievement and deficits in the critique of religion appears
here analogously as the achievement and deficits of classical political econ-
omy: It had ‘analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and
has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But 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 measure-
ment of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value
of the product’ (Idem: 174).

IV
Marx approaches bourgeois economics and its science with this question.
He begins with the ‘immense collection of commodities’ as which the
wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production predomi-
nates first confronts the superficial view of the passerby in the shop win-
dow, reduces it to the abstraction of the ‘individual commodity’ in general,
and begins with the emergence of its dual character. The analysis leads him
to the finding that the dominant determination of ‘value’, which initially
emerges as the exchange relation between two commodities, does ‘not
contain an atom’ of the use value that interests the potential buyer (idem:
128). This equation of two unequal commodities abstracts from it.
Analysis follows this abstraction, and in the search for the equal element in
the unequal hits upon the abstraction of the product of labor as such. It
follows it into the sphere of production and initially follows the dual char-
acter of the commodity in commodity-producing labor. He then demon-
strates the condition of its possibility, indeed necessity in the relations of
private (non-social) production that is at the same time characterized by a
division of labor (social). With that, he has found the entity (Instanz) that
stamps the forms and above all form-relations (the reign of the real-­
abstract category of value over that of use value) encountered thus far on
the commodities and their production. In it, and in its form-imprint he
recognizes the ‘point […] crucial to an under-standing of political econ-
omy’ (idem: 132).
296  W. F. HAUG

Up to this point, his path corresponds—at least formally—to that of

‘the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins’
(Marx 1973: 100). Now he must also, if the ‘scientifically correct method’
of the Introduction from 1857 is still valid for Capital, follow the theoreti-
cal construction of the bourgeois classics. He in fact does so, however,
only in its external sequence. Now, one can immediately discover that the
parallels to the historical development of political economy were also only
external. For what centrally occupies Marx from the first page—and which
is announced in the preface to the first edition—neither is a topic in his-
tory nor in the bourgeois classics: namely that value as form-determination
of human practice in relations of private production under conditions of
social division of labor discloses its determination and its opposedness to
the correspondent of human needs, use value.
Marx traces how practice in this form, on the basis of its contradictions
together with the relations from which it originates, changes. The first trial
by fire is the analysis of the forms of value, with the genetic reconstruction
of the money form. The second trial by fire is the transitional from money
to capital. In my Introductory Lectures on Capital I have shown in detail
that Marx actually—according to his criteria, first envisaged in the Theses
on Feuerbach and then in stages—follows the process direction of dynam-
ics fed by the market participants’ behavior in their contradictory rela-
tions. I will return to the question of what this surprising pertinence of the
Theses on Feuerbach for a close reading on The Capital signifies for our
investigation (Haug 2017a).
First, in staccato, to avoid the usual misunderstandings: the object of
the famous analysis of the forms of value is the ‘mode of expression’ (Marx
1976: 128) or ‘value expression’ of commodities.2 Occasionally, the opin-
ion is put forward that the second chapter on the process of exchange is
dispensable because it doesn’t add anything new to the analysis of the
forms of value. Whoever makes such a judgment has mixed up the ‘mode
of expression’ of the value of commodities with their exchange. The for-
mer is dealt with in chapter 1.4, the latter in chapter 2. All further under-
standing depends upon this distinction. Just as the form of value is to be
understood as a ‘form of praxis’ of those living within these relations, the
expression of value is to be understood as a praxem, that is to say as a
moment of praxis in this form: the value expression precedes exchange.
Whereas exchange between two actors occurs ‘through an act to which
both parties consent’ (idem: 178), the expression of value occurs initially
as an offer by one of both parties to potential partners in exchange, who
 16  REAL ABSTRACTION IN LIGHT OF THE ‘PRACTICAL REVOLUTION…  297

do not yet appear, however. To abstract from this and the realized exchange
is decisive in order to trace the ‘genesis’ of the ‘money form’. I will not
repeat the details here. They are, so to speak, depicted in slow motion and
by means of the force of abstraction that replaces the microscope that
Marx announces in the foreword, in my Vorlesungen, supplemented by a
few bridges to practical, everyday consciousness. Here only so much: the
genetic reconstruction of the transitions from the simple to the expanded
form of value and from this to the general form of value and finally to the
money form, only presuppose (in the laboratory-like exclusion of (abstrac-
tion from) foreign—that is external to the exchange relationship being
initiated—influences (which is why the reconstruction is genetic and not
historical) one thing: that namely the driving force of interest in exchange
as well as its objects continues to operate. Under this condition, the value
form transitions into a more complex one ‘on its own’.

V
Marx had already discovered in his Introduction of 1857 that genesis and
history diverge, and how this plays into the use of methodical abstraction
in relation to objective moments or aspects. Namely where, as with the
category of production, he raises the question as to universal concepts
valid for all historical forms of production. The category ‘labor’, ‘labor as
such’, ‘labor sans phrase’ offers itself, that is the abstraction of the category
‘labor’; not to be confused with the concept of ‘abstract labor’! (Marx
1973: 105). And it becomes clear to him how epistemological capacity
and historical fact drift apart in such cases. As with other such abstractions,
labor also ‘by no means begins only at the point where one can speak of it
as such’, but rather ‘possess a truth for all other forms of society’ (idem).
Only, in capitalism, effective-practical truth comes along: in the USA, ‘the
most modern form of existence of bourgeois society’ of his time, Marx saw
‘the abstraction of the category “labour”, “labour as such”, labour pure
and simple, becomes true in practice’ (idem). The truth of the abstraction
here stands for the fact that—as Adorno says in the appropriate context—it
clings (schmigt sich an) to a practical reality. In both cases, it is a question
of opening up reality by means of a genetic reconstruction.
With that, we have again arrived at the question of real abstraction. It
has consistently accompanied us as a dynamic moment of praxis in
­conditions of private production with a division of labor. For Marx, the
value abstraction is a transitional point to its complementary opposite, a
298  W. F. HAUG

more complex concreteness—initially in the shape of the ‘dazzling money-

form’ (Marx 1976: 139), ‘the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become
visible and dazzling to our eyes’ (idem: 187). His dialectical method with-
stands its trial-by-fire in the genetic reconstruction of that which we can
name real concretion. The usefulness of the concept of real abstraction is
measured by the real concreteness that opens it up, right up to the ‘great
civilizing influence of capital’ (Marx,1973: 409), the flip-side of the
undermining of ‘the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker’
(Marx 1976: 638).

VI
Belonging to the reality that can be conceived of as real abstraction is the
great para-ideological power of capitalist mass culture, to wit commodity
aesthetics. Here, real abstraction means tangible autonomization in rela-
tion to the production of use value. This goes hand in hand with the real
concretion of a particular economic sector, accompanied by the emer-
gence of special art schools, where one learns to design imaginary use
values independently of the real use value in the mode of aesthetic abstrac-
tion. These institutions act according to the ‘basic law of commodity aes-
thetics […]: It is not real use value that triggers the purchase, but rather
the promise of use value’ (Haug 1980: 41, 44; 1986). Additionally, there
is the pseudo-concretion according to the ‘operational law of commodity
aesthetics’. The potential buyers have to promise the use value of the com-
modity to themselves, and this, their self-activity, must be able to rely on
the appearance of the product produced in the abstract for itself. Therefore,
the Archimedean point from which the mistrust of these addressees can be
aesthetically unhinged, and the desire that motivates them to buy as an
‘inner means of coercion’(Sombart) can be triggered, lies ‘within’ the
potential buyers (52). The aesthetic abstraction of use value clings to this
interior. This is our next real abstraction in the shape of a simulated
concretion.
What is to be grasped here is the dialectic of opposites: the striving for
abstract wealth becomes the spring from which modern semblance flows.
Indifference cries out difference. It is precisely the indifference of capital
toward its transitory use value that is expressed in its most fantastic stag-
ing. The abstraction from use value manifests as the aesthetic promise of
use value and leads to the formation of aesthetic monopolies of use value.
In short: real abstraction appears here as illusory concreteness for the pur-
 16  REAL ABSTRACTION IN LIGHT OF THE ‘PRACTICAL REVOLUTION…  299

chasing masses. It is precisely the abstraction from these masses that the
real-ideological abstraction by distraction of their direct or mediated pro-
ducer existence what expects these masses to convert them in consumers.
In a certain way, all the aesthetics that have been specifically differenti-
ated are indebted to an aesthetic abstraction. The bourgeois institutional-
ization of ‘aesthetics’ as a discipline and socially recognized form of
practice has lent aesthetic abstraction the significance of a projection
screen of the imaginary. ‘Autonomous art’, thus constituted, could act as
a sphere that reconciles a society torn apart and reified in the economic
sphere in a ‘beautiful illusion’ (Haug 1994: 675). The ‘reconciliation’
turns into mass deception, where, as Walter Benjamin observed in the
fascist mass rallies, the masses are helped to their ‘expression’ in a way that
deprives them of their ‘right’ (Benjamin 1989: 382).

VII
The use that Sohn-Rethel made of his concept is a dual one. For one
thing, he derives from the mercantile capitalist abstraction of value the
upsurge of abstract thought in the Hellenic seaport cities of the sixth
century BC; for another thing, the acute status of the problem of social
synthesis. These assumptions cannot be dismissed. Only, their analytical-
reductive or, as Sohn-Rethel repeatedly states, implementation as ‘deriva-
tion’ is poorly compatible with the principles of historical materialism.
Also an unsecured change is the ‘derivation’, without further ado, ‘of
purely theoretical thought from the commodity economy’ (Sohn-­Rethel
1972: 90). As Klaus-Dieter Eichler has shown, the emergence of the
ancient philosophical impetus toward abstraction cannot be explained by
this alone, since ‘the world market […] is not a cult community of univer-
sal extent’ (Eichler 2006: 35). In other words: it does not require abstrac-
tion from each individual cult community—an essential condition for the
‘pure’ mode of rationality that is meant.
The mistake rests upon the logical totalization of the value abstraction.
This can be seen in the example of the real abstraction of abstract labour.
In that its real abstraction is derived from the totality, it turns into an ideal
abstraction. This is so because the logical totality is beyond any real whole.
Marx thus mocks logicism in the light of reality at every opportunity. He
also bridges the gap between the speculative totality and the relative, ever
more renewed and decaying wholeness to be analyzed in reality with con-
cepts of mediation and transition. What they have in common with the
300  W. F. HAUG

concept of real abstraction is that—it should be noted: measured against

traditional epistemological dualism!—they are paradoxically constructed.
In Capital this starts with ‘individual value’ as ‘measured by the labour-­
time that the article costs the producer in each individual case’, and dis-
tinct from the ‘real value’ measured by ‘the labour-time socially required
for its production’ (Marx 1976: 434). But socially necessary labor time is
a concept of averages, resulting from the ‘simultaneous’ interaction of
forces, that is to say, of forces interacting for periods of time that cannot
be clearly delimited from one another. With regard to space, time, and the
participation of actors, one could speak of a regional compromise that
constantly fluctuates. It is not a technical magnitude, for the labor time
expended in the over—or underproduction of a quantity of commodities
that is too little or too much counts as socially unnecessary, and enters into
the compromise as such. The concept of ‘individual value’, which is para-
doxical to naive logicists, is therefore repeated at the more complex level
of the third volume of Capital in the shape of the ‘market value’ as the
‘average value of the commodities produced in a particular sphere’ (Marx
1981: 279). This is one example of what I’ve referred to as ‘regional’. But
this shape also contains too much mental abstraction, because real abstrac-
tion demands weighing the immanent differences of the ‘sphere’ con-
cerned and the value that occurs empirically most frequently, called the
modal value in statistics. In order to be logical, all temporality—and there-
fore its procedural character—has to be expelled from the average. Society
must also be statically total, or totally static like that fictitious ‘crystal’ that
according to Marx society precisely is not, as ‘an organism capable of
change, and constantly engaged in a process of change’ (Marx 1976: 93).
In order to say that the fluctuations and transformations cannot be fol-
lowed in detail in his general theory of capital, Marx uses once in the
manuscript to Volume III the topos of the ‘ideal average’, relativized by an
‘as it were’ (Marx 1981: 970). It is the emblematic straw to which the
logical reading of Capital clings in its attempts to come to terms with
theoretical contradictions. It gets entangled in the latter in its attempt to
evade the real contradictions. It has never occurred to anyone, even the
rigorous MEGA editorial staff, to investigate the meaning of this expres-
sion. It was generally taken to mean ‘average value’, but the German
expression Durchschnitt (average) comes from the verb durchschneiden (to
cut through). As one can even ascertain from the Internet, the ‘ideal
­average’ was an illustration method commonly used in natural science in
Marx’s time to represent organisms, individual organs or other complex
 16  REAL ABSTRACTION IN LIGHT OF THE ‘PRACTICAL REVOLUTION…  301

realities, especially the earth’s crust in the case of geology, in cross-section.

In French, this is not a moyenne, but a coupe transversale. Marx was aware
that by this he would have killed his object of investigation. The term in
his sense must have in common with real abstraction that the mental
reconstruction measures itself against the real structure of its object. He
achieves this in the image of the ‘fluctuations of the barometer’. The
reproduction of capitalism and producers, indeed of all members of soci-
ety within it, is consummated ‘in the division of labour within society, an
a posteriori necessity imposed by nature, controlling the unregulated
caprice of the producers, and perceptible in the fluctuations of the barom-
eter of market prices’ (Marx 1976: 476). ‘The possibility, therefore, of a
quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value, i.e. the
possibility that the price may diverge from the magnitude of value, is
inherent in the price-form itself. This is not a defect, but, on the contrary,
it makes this form the adequate one for a mode of production whose laws
can only assert themselves as blindly operating averages between constant
irregularities’ (idem: 197). But one should not mistake Marx for an ideo-
logue of equilibrium. It is the economic organism that reacts upon dis-
equilibria in the opposed direction, and in a multi-dimensional structure,
many of these reactive movements constantly run criss-cross.
The logical totalization of the act of circulation leads to the absurdity
of denying the products of commodity production their character as com-
modities, denying that labor creates value, and denying products their
value. The ontological peculiarity in the form of the mode of being of
something to be realized (realisandum), which Marx expresses with the
concept of determination that is fundamental for him, disappears from the
standpoint of the result, which has led ‘logical’ interpretation of Capital
to confuse ‘the realization of value with becoming real’, that is to confuse
the metamorphose of value with its coming to being (Haug 2005: 159f,
Fn. 55). Thus the objective determinations—here: to be sold on the one
hand, to be consumed on the other—were divested of their reality or effi-
cacy (Haug 2006: 36, 2013: 288). This in turn has contributed to the
abandonment of Marx’s value theory and overall to missing the process
character of Marx’s concepts (Haug 2015: 1821).
302  W. F. HAUG

VIII
Finally, I return to the question of the reality character of real abstraction
or, from the opposite side, of the abstract character of reality. Even if,
according to Pablo Nocera, the reality of real abstraction has nothing in
common with the ‘nivel de la Wirklichkeit, de las propiedades efectivas de
un objeto’ (Nocera 2005) it would, according to him, be wrong to con-
ceive of it as an abstraction of thought. ‘On the contrary, the abstraction
that belongs to the scope of the exchange is external’, actually happens
outside, in the social world. But what is this level of reality of this world?
That which Nocera approvingly quotes from Sohn-Rethel sounds like a
riddle of the sphinx: ‘no es pensamiento, pero guarda la forma de pensam-
iento’ (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 59). But what should a form of thinking be
without thinking?
Nocera’s criticism of Althusser is that his tearing apart of ‘real object’
and ‘knowledge object’ makes insoluble the fundamental problem of any
historical-materialist epistemology of measuring concepts against the real
determinations. What is at stake, then, is the specific position of Marxist
thought toward reality. So far, so good. But how can we imagine the ‘third
element’ postulated by Nocera, ‘que revoluciona el campo mismo’ of
Althusser’s distinction? Nocera calls it, following Sohn-Rethel, ‘The way
of thinking before and outside of thought’ (idem) and locates this form of
thinking preceding thinking in the ‘orden simbólico’. What speaks against
this is the fact that a historical-materialistic reflection of this Lacanian con-
cept of the ‘symbolic order’ would come up against the fact that the real
character of the social order is nothing symbolic. In this view, social cate-
gories are not signs for anything at all, but practically self-interpreting
determinations of existence. Anyone who says mother to mother is with
her, is not using a symbol. Language is not a collection of signposts.
Another way suggests itself, where Sohn-Rethel says of the ‘abstract’
form of socialization of money-mediated commodity production: ‘it is not
the people who accomplish this, not they who cause this connection, but
rather their actions’ (Sohn-Rethel 1972: 52). That’s reminiscent of the
murderer’s saying that he did not commit the murder; rather, his knife
did. No, the key is given by the sentence quoted by Sohn-Rethel and
many of those who spoke in the discussion initiated by him, with which
Marx reduced the ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’
(Luke, 25:34) to its worldly content: ‘They don’t know it, but they do it’
 16  REAL ABSTRACTION IN LIGHT OF THE ‘PRACTICAL REVOLUTION…  303

(Marx 1976: 166); ‘Sie wissen es nicht, aber sie tun es’ (MEW 23 1962: 88).
And further: ‘for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being
values is as much men’s social product as is their language’ (idem). But
unlike language, the value form is a ‘a relation concealed beneath a veil of
things’ (unter dinglicher Hülle; MEW 23 1962: 88, ff. 27), as Marx adds
in a comment on the 2nd edition of the first volume of Capital to the
Italian economist Ferdinando Galiano, who in the eighteenth century
understood the value of goods as a ‘relation [ragione] between persons’
(idem: 167, ff. 29; transl. corr. WFH; Haug 2017b). What people do can
be researched and then known. But in this case, knowledge does not
change action, the real-­abstract value form of its product ‘appears to those
caught up in the relations of commodity production (and this is true both
before and after the above-mentioned scientific discovery) to be just as
ultimately valid’ (ibid.), for it is the form of movement of the contradic-
tion of private production based upon social division of labor, in which
every producing actor ‘produces for society represented by the “market”,
but always only lines his own pocket’ (Haug 2005: I, XI.1).3
In order to further clarify the questions raised here, it is essential to
proceed from the ‘capovolgimento pratico della teorica della conoscenza’.
Antonio Labriola, the historical founder of Marxist philosophizing,
emphatically points out that this ‘practical revolution of epistemology’
(Labriola 1973: 206), or ‘la inversione pratica del problema della conosci-
bilità’ (idem: 224) is contained in historical materialism. The relatively
few to whom the name Labriola means something still know him as a
provider of keywords to Antonio Gramsci, without accounting for the fact
that Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks he became the philosophical executor
of Labriola’s project of a Marxist Philosophy of Praxis. Labriola’s thesis
that this philosophy is immanent in the things about which it philoso-
phizes, indeed that the critique of political economy follows the ‘self-crit-
icism’ of the social relations, leads him to conceive of it as the source or
‘marrow’ of historical materialism. In practice, he argues with primary
attention on material work, active thinking or thinking action is with the
things themselves, albeit not yet in scientific form. Experimental scientific
research he understands as a special form of material work aiming at such
knowledge. It is only in this being with the things themselves that the path
to the reconstruction of the concrete in thought is found. Their peculiar
way of being originates in the interweavements and dynamic autonomiza-
tions resulting from their social massiveness and from their criss-crossing
304  W. F. HAUG

and superimposing on one another in relation to what is targeted by the

individual actors. It may be reflected in the symbolic order, but does not
result from it; rather, the relevant modification of the latter results from
the former. Common sense knows ‘in principle’ about some of it, and it
has at least an inkling of other aspects; finding out the rest is a matter of
historical–social–theoretical research. This can be studied paradigmatically
in Labriola’s own ‘research on trial’, in which he critically develops the all
too direct and complexity-simplifying teachings of the late Engels, his
admired correspondence partner—for example on the history of
Christianity (Labriola 1912: 118).
(To be continued)
This article was translated by Alex Locascio.

Notes
1. In view of the Lassallian formula, Marx speaks of the ‘iron law of wages’ in
the Gotha Programme of the young German social democracy. The adjec-
tive ‘iron’—he himself used it in the Preface to the first edition of Capital
(Marx and Engels 35 2010b: 9; MEW 23 1962: 12)—suggests precise
knowledge of the ‘objective laws of social development’ and phrases the
place where further analysis is needed. So recently the word ‘logical’ as sup-
posed key to the method of the Marxian main work.
2. In the French edition: ‘l’expression de valeur’ (Marx 1969) [1872]: 17).
3. Marx’s talk of the ‘semblance of objectivity’ (Marx 1976: 167) of the fetish
character of the commodity (MEW 23 1862: 88) is therefore unfortunate,
because ‘semblance’ [Schein] suggests that one can scare it away by enlight-
enment. Pablo Nocera rightly adheres to Marx’s realization that the fetish
character of the commodity, the other face of value abstraction in motu, ‘has
an autonomous existence that does not depend on the knowledge that the
subjects have of it’ (Nocera 2005). But this is contradicted by the sentence
that it is about ‘A type of reality that is only possible on condition that the
individuals who are immersed in it are not aware of their own logic’ (idem).
However, the relations of production as one with the relations of property
are not a question of consciousness, even if many people are under the spell
of bourgeois ideology and reinforced by the power of facts, are either
unaware of it or push aside the thought of it in the certainty that they cannot
change anything.
 16  REAL ABSTRACTION IN LIGHT OF THE ‘PRACTICAL REVOLUTION…  305

References
Benjamin, W. (1989). Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VII (R.  Tiedemann and
H. Schweppenhäuser, Eds.). Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Eichler, K. D. (2006). Zum Gründungsmythos der europäischen Philosophie. In
K. Broese et al. (Eds.), Vernunft der Aufklärung – Aufklärung der Vernunft
(pp. 25–36). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Enlace Zapatista. (2017). ¡Oximoron! (La derecha intelectual y el fascismo lib-
eral). Retrieved March 25, 2018, from https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.
mx/2000/04/01/oximoron-la-derecha-intelectual-y-el-fascismo-liberal/.
Haug, W.  F. (1980). Crítica de la estética de mercancías (Guillermo Hirata,
Trans.). Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Haug, W. F. (1986). Critique of Commodity Aesthetics. Appearance, Sexuality and
Advertising in Capitalist Society, intrd. Stuart Hall. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Haug, W. F. (1987). Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology & Culture. New York &
Bagnolet (France): International General.
Haug, W. F. (1994). Ästhetische Abstraktion. In Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch
des Marxismus (Vol. 1, pp. 673–675). Hamburg: Argument.
Haug, W. F. (2005). Vorlesungen zur Einführung ins ‘Kapital’. Revised version.
Hamburg: Argument.
Haug, W.  F. (2006a). Neue Vorlesungen zur Einführung ins ‘Kapital’.
Hamburg: Argument.
Haug, W.  F. (2006b). Marx’s Learning Process: Against Correcting Marx with
Hegel. Rethinking Marxism, 18(4), 572–584.
Haug, W. F. (2013). Das ‘Kapital’ lesen – aber wie? Zur Philosophie und Epistemologie
der marxschen Kapitalismuskritik. Hamburg: Argument.
Haug, W.  F. (2015). Marktwert II.  In Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des
Marxismus (Vol. 8/II, pp. 1816–1824). Hamburg: Argument.
Haug, W.  F. (2016). Lecciones de introducción a la lectura de El Capital, New
revised and expanded version, transl. W. F. Haug and S. Vollmer. Barcelona:
Laertes Trebol Negro.
Haug, W. F. (2017a). En la cueva del león. ¿Se puede leer El Capital de Karl Marx
a partir de sus Tesis sobre Feuerbach? In Memoria (pp. 28–34), 261, México.
Haug, W.  F. (2017b). On the Need for a New English Translation of Marx’s
Capital. Socialism and Democracy, 31(1), 60–86.
Labriola, A. (1912). Socialism and Philosophy (Ernest Untermann, Trans.).
Chicago: Charles H. Keer & Company.
Labriola, A. (1973). Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofía. Turín: Einaudi.
Marx, K. (1969) [1872]. Le Capital. Critique de l’économie politique, French
translation of Joseph Roy completely reviewed by Karl Marx. Paris:
Éditions sociales.
306  W. F. HAUG

Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse (M. Nicolaus, Trans.). London: Penguin Books in

Association with New Left Review.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital, Vol. I (B. Fowkes, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1981). Capital, Vol. 3 (D. Fernbach, Trans.). London: Penguin.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010a). Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 24, (MECW).
London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010b). Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35 (MECW).
London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010c). Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3 (MECW).
London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010d). Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5 (MECW).
London: Lawrence & Wishart.
MEW 23. (1962). Marx/Engels Werke. Band 23. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
MEW 19. (1987). Marx/Engels Werke. Band 19. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Nocera, P. (2005). La abstracción real en el Capital de Marx: elementos para una
reconstrucción. In Nómadas. Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas, 12
(2). Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1972). Geistige und körperliche Arbeit. Zur Theorie der gesell-
schaftlichen Synthesis (Rev. ed.). Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Warenform und Denkform. Mit zwei Anhängen.
Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
 CHAPTER 17

Real Abstraction in the History

of the Natural Sciences

Peter McLaughlin and Oliver Schlaudt

Technology and Science
What is the relation of science and technology? A common view is that
technology applies science—the view is sometimes even radicalized as:
Science is pursued for the sake of technology. Francis Bacon is often cited
in this connection: ‘Nature to be conquered must be obeyed’.1 The natu-
ral interpretation of this slogan is that, if you want to dominate nature,
you should pursue science, learn nature’s laws, and then obey them in
their application to technology. But we can also read the relation in the
other direction and say that since we do in fact regularly conquer nature in
technology, we must having been implicitly obeying her laws all the time;
and thus our technology already embodies natural laws. If we study what
is done in technology, we can learn about the laws of nature. Furthermore,
this view allows us to avoid speculations about the noble—or ignoble—
motives of individual scientists and to concentrate on the structural deter-
minants of social action (cf. Merton 1939). The interpretation of nature

P. McLaughlin (*) • O. Schlaudt (*)

University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 307

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_17
308  P. MCLAUGHLIN AND O. SCHLAUDT

in terms of technology or the view of the world as a machine is an integral

part of the early modern scientific world view. The metaphor of the clock-
work universe is compatible with both versions of Bacon’s dictum: science
can be pursued for the sake of technology, but science can also be pursued
on the basis of technology.
The view of technology as the source rather than the goal of science is
articulated by Galileo Galilei in the opening lines of his Discorsi of 1638:

Frequent experience of your famous arsenal, my Venetian friends, seems to

me to open a large field to speculative minds for philosophizing, and par-
ticularly in that area which is called mechanics, inasmuch as every sort of
instrument and machine is continually put in operation there.
(Galilei 1974: 11)

Galileo visited the Arsenal in Venice, not to build better ships but to ‘phi-
losophize’, that is, to use his training in Aristotelian natural philosophy
and Archimedean mathematics to study technology and thereby learn
about nature.
This Galilean perspective on the relation of science and technology was
at the core of Marxist historiography of science in the first half of the
twentieth century as represented by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann.2
Early historiography of science had made it clear that in spite of all the
proclamations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the utility of
science for the improvement of production and the wealth of society, it
was only in the nineteenth century that science actually became useful for
production. Whereas traditional historians concluded that technology
was, therefore, irrelevant to an explanation of the Scientific Revolution of
the early modern age,3 Hessen and Grossmann viewed technology not as
the final cause of science but as the material basis of an experimental explo-
ration of nature. They saw in the development of (especially mechanical)
technology the basis and determining factor for the subsequent emer-
gence of a science of mechanics. To give an example, the production norm
of a transmission mechanism such as a clockwork expresses an abstract
notion of friction-free motion. This abstract notion is in a sense already
embodied in the technology as such.
What we are interested in here is the extent to which science can be
viewed as the analysis of technique/technology and the extent to which
the analysis of technology can be seen as the articulation or conceptualiza-
tion of the ‘real’ abstractions performed by technology. When we ask what
can be learned about nature or the study of nature from various human
practices, the concept of real abstraction might be useful, even if used in a
 17  REAL ABSTRACTION IN THE HISTORY OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES  309

different way than it has been used in sociology. We shall propose a notion
of real abstraction for the study of the nature and history of the natural
sciences, especially with regard to their relation to technological practice.

Real Abstraction
The term ‘real abstraction’ was brought to currency by Alfred Sohn-Rethel
in Intellectual and Manual Labour (1978) to describe the fact that in the
exchange of goods people actually, but in general not consciously, abstract
from the use value of the commodity which they trade away. This means
that in the exchange itself, a commodity is used only as a means for obtain-
ing a different commodity, not as a means to the end that defines its own
use value or utility. The commodity is so to speak ‘frozen’ into pure quan-
tity and immutable substance. Even if the people involved in the exchange
of goods are not conscious of the abstraction from the commodity’s use
value, the abstraction still constitutes an objective feature of their actions.
In this sense the abstraction is real as opposed to being effected merely in
thought. This phenomenon is of philosophical importance according to
Sohn-Rethel because he holds the real abstraction, once the exchange of
goods becomes a widespread practice in a society, to impose a certain view
of the world on the members of this society. Real abstraction is thus similar
to the Kantian categories that structure experience or like a looking-glass
which shows us an image of the world in terms of numbers and general laws.
The mechanism by which the real abstraction that takes place in
exchange is translated into categories of thought, however, remains mys-
terious, as has been noted by many critics (e.g. Falk 1977: 393–394). We
think, nonetheless, that the notion of real abstraction can be made useful
for understanding the history of the natural sciences, and we will offer a
reading that permits us to use this concept without having to rely on such
obscurities. The basic idea is to view the exchange of commodities, from
which Sohn-Rethel derived the real abstraction, as just one special case of
a more general process of real abstraction. Thus any abstraction that is car-
ried out so to speak by hand rather than merely in thought may be called
a real abstraction.
Marx himself provides an instructive example. In the first chapter of
Capital Marx explains how in exchange one commodity, which in itself is
simply one particular use value among others, becomes the expression of
the economic value of another commodity: ‘use value becomes the form
of manifestation, the phenomenal form of its opposite, value. The bodily
310  P. MCLAUGHLIN AND O. SCHLAUDT

form of the commodity becomes its value form’. Marx illustrates this point
by comparing the exchange of goods of equal value to establishing an
equilibrium on the balance between objects of the same weight. He then
goes on saying (Marx and Engels 1975: 35, 66–67):

A sugar-loaf being a body, is heavy, and therefore has weight: but we can
neither see nor touch this weight. We then take various pieces of iron, whose
weight has been determined beforehand. The iron, as iron, is no more the
form of manifestation of weight, than is the sugar-loaf. Nevertheless, in
order to express the sugar-loaf as so much weight, we put it into a weight-­
relation with the iron. In this relation, the iron officiates as a body represent-
ing nothing but weight. A certain quantity of iron therefore serves as the
measure of the weight of the sugar, and represents, in relation to the sugar-­
loaf, weight embodied, the form of manifestation of weight. This part is
played by the iron only within this relation, into which the sugar or any
other body, whose weight has to be determined, enters with the iron. Were
they not both heavy, they could not enter into this relation, and the one
could therefore not serve as the expression of the weight of the other. When
we throw both into the scales, we see in reality, that as weight they are both
the same, and that, therefore, when taken in proper proportions, they have
the same weight. Just as the substance iron, as a measure of weight, repre-
sents in relation to the sugar-loaf weight alone, so, in our expression of
value, the material object, coat, in relation to the linen, represents value alone.

Here Marx establishes an analogy between economic value and physical

weight. Let us isolate the crucial elements. We start with some given con-
crete objects, say pieces of iron and sugar-loafs. These objects can be put in
different kinds of relations: We can trade iron for a sugar-loaf in an exchange.
Within such an exchange relation, the pieces of iron are reduced to economic
value, or more precisely, to the bodily manifestation of the economic value of
the sugar-loaf they are to be exchanged for. Similarly, we can put both kinds
of objects on a balance, first the sugar-loaf in the one pan and then add iron
pieces in the other until equilibrium is reached. Now, the pieces of iron have
been reduced to embodiments of weight or, more precisely, to the expres-
sion of the weight of the sugar-loaf in the opposite pan of the balance.
The key to our approach is that, in exchange, goods are not reduced to
pure quantity, as Sohn-Rethel would have it, but to the (the expression of)
economic value, that is, the quantity of the qualitative dimension, eco-
nomic value. Once this is taken into account, it becomes clear that weight
is analogous to value. Of course, Marx carefully determines the limits of
 17  REAL ABSTRACTION IN THE HISTORY OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES  311

this analogy: weight is a ‘natural’ property whereas economic value is

purely ‘social’. This difference, however, does not affect the possibility we
want to explore in this paper: namely that both properties, weight and
value, are the outcome of analogous types of abstractions. The categorical
difference between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ properties simply reflects corre-
sponding categorical differences between the underlying material pro-
cesses of abstraction: on the one hand, the balance, a physical device, and
on the other, commodity exchange, a cultural practice. Indeed, what Marx
actually describes in the passage cited above is that, when we put concrete
objects on the balance, we reduce them to their character as weights and
abstract from all other properties. For the engineer this perspective is quite
normal. From an engineering point of view, an object is a multidimen-
sional causal actor, interacting with its environment in various ways: by
reflecting and absorbing light, through direct contact and through various
kinds of forces acting at a distance through fields (electric, magnetic and
gravitational). A balance in this perspective is a particular material arrange-
ment which ‘filters’ modes of interaction. The balance reacts to weight but
not to color, odor or electric charge. It thus really carries out an abstrac-
tion from various properties, that is, it effects a real abstraction.
Thus Marx’s analysis of the exchange relation, from which Sohn-Rethel
derives the concept of real abstraction, can also be seen as the analysis of
an equivalence relation on the example of the exchange of commodities.
From this perspective we have an analysis that applies more generally and
points to a more general form of abstraction that also occurs in other areas
of human practice. We agree with Sohn-Rethel in his attempt to locate the
source of key abstractions in human thought in the real abstractions made
in human practice, but we reject his restriction of the forms of practice to
those of commodity exchange. There are multifarious examples of real
abstraction in technological practice. Furthermore, Sohn-Rethel’s distinc-
tion between the form of science (determined by the exchange abstrac-
tion) and the content of science (determined by problems derived from
production) is not fruitful for the analysis of science (Sohn-Rethel 1976:
45/6). Sohn-Rethel allowed the content of science to be derived from the
sphere of production but insisted that the theory form of science was due
exclusively to the distribution sphere. Thus, he was unable to envision real
abstraction in production—or anywhere but commodity exchange.
The aim of our contribution is to discuss the extent to which abstrac-
tion, understood in this way, can be regarded as a common phenomenon
in the history of science, and thus as a useful key to concept formation in
312  P. MCLAUGHLIN AND O. SCHLAUDT

the sciences. The view which we want to put forward in this paper is that
things happened in the opposite way as usually conceived. That is, from an
historical perspective, the device, embodying a real abstraction, often
comes first and only afterwards is the concept of the quality it instanti-
ates derived.

An Example: The Law of the Lever

In what follows we shall examine a real abstraction on the example of the
first mechanical law, the law of the lever, showing how some basic con-
cepts of science were formed by studying technology, namely the balance
with unequal arms.
If the concept of real abstraction is to help us give a satisfying account
of the emergence of a new concept, there are two main questions that have
to be addressed: (1) In what sense can a technical device ‘be there’ with-
out first being invented in order to serve the specific purpose that gives it
its name? (2) Under what circumstances are the real abstractions embod-
ied in technical devices discovered and translated into corresponding con-
cepts? We shall deal with both questions in our example.
The Law of the Lever, which posits the inverse proportionality of
weights and lengths on a lever/balance in equilibrium, was first formu-
lated near the end of the fourth century BC in the Peripatetic short trea-
tise, Mechanical Problems, written by Aristotle (1936) or one of his better
disciples.4 This work is the first documented example of a sustained theo-
retical reflection on mechanical knowledge in Europe. Although the text
that has come down to us is a hodge-podge of disparate topics thrown
together, parts of the work also contain an ambitious program of theoreti-
cal investigation of technical devices, reducing each of them to the lever
and the lever to a balance with unequal arms—and then the balance arms
are reduced to radii of circles.
The aim of the Mechanical Problems is to explain why technical devices
work—and also to show that their success is compatible with Aristotle’s
physics—although the latter goal appears to be secondary. What is shown
again and again is that technical devices can be made intelligible on the
model of the balance, the lever and the circle. Particular concrete objects
and relations are taken as instantiations of abstracted concepts and rela-
tions: an oar or a mast is a lever; a nutcracker is two levers fixed together,
long boards bend more than short ones because they are like levers farther
from the fulcrum. All these devices can be analyzed in terms of lever, load,
 17  REAL ABSTRACTION IN THE HISTORY OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES  313

fulcrum and force. What the author does is to develop general abstract
concepts in the study of technical devices which embody these abstrac-
tions. Theoretical analysis (science) arises here in a particular kind of study
of technique.
A special role in the construction of the Mechanical Problems is played
by the balance with unequal arms. This asymmetric balance, which became
common in Greece after the mid-fifth century, had a fixed counter-weight
and a moveable suspension point, which could be adjusted until the beam
reached equilibrium—unlike later Roman devices with a moveable coun-
terweight. This device is characterized as at once a balance and a lever. As
a balance, it establishes equilibrium or equality in which counteracting
forces mutually cancel out each other’s effects. And as a lever, it allows a
smaller weight (on the longer arm) to balance or overcome a greater
weight. In the Mechanical Problems, the asymmetric balance provides the
point of departure and the model for the cognitive development realized
in the treatise.
There are many technical devices embodying some form compensation
of weight by length or length by weight. The shadoof, a long pole with a
bucket on one end and a counterweight on the other, had long been in
use in Mesopotamia and Egypt in irrigation to lift water from a river or a
basin. The Macedonian army under Aristotle’s employer Phillip, by put-
ting counterweights on its long spear (sarissa), was able to increase the
effective length of the spear without reducing the maneuverability of the
phalanx. All such devices embody a ‘complementarity’ of weight and dis-
tance and make the experience possible that weights are balanced not only
by other weights (as in the symmetric balance) but also by lengths. The
abstraction from the dimensional difference between length and weight is
made by the device itself. The subsequent question will then be: When
and how is this real abstraction intellectually recognized and appropriated
in thought.
The answer to our first question as to how a technical device can ‘be
there’ without first being intended to serve the specific purpose that gives
it its name, hence simply, is that the device first served a different purpose,
as is exemplified by the shadoof and the sarissa. This answer probably holds
in general. Any material device can be used for various ends, including
ends they were not originally intended. A similar phenomenon is known
in evolutionary biology as exaptation. Biologists Gould and Vrba (1982)
introduced this term to account for traits that evolved for one function
and were later adapted for another. The French archaeologist, Sophie de
314  P. MCLAUGHLIN AND O. SCHLAUDT

Beaune has applied this term to technological invention in prehistory in

order to account for more complex inventions without having to refer to
pure chance or ingeniousness (2008: 83). Finally the dialectics of means
and ends also applies to commodity exchange: People discover that goods
can also be used for acquiring different goods, that is, that they have an
exchange value. Understanding ‘real abstraction’ in the way, we suggest,
thus demands that we identify an original end, which was served by the
tool, and which led to the practice with the device that created the real
abstraction.
But let us get back to Aristotle and asymmetric balance in order to
think about the second question, under what circumstances are the real
abstractions embodied in technical devices discovered and translated into
corresponding concepts?
Due to their military and architectural activities, the Greeks possessed
practical mechanical knowledge of the simple machines and the planning
knowledge needed for their application. And counterweights, which prac-
tically embody the complementarity of weight and distance (or provide a
real abstraction from their difference), were common in ancient Greece.
Any such device could in the right context have occasioned theoretical
investigations. But there are good reasons why the asymmetric balance
provided that occasion. As a lever and balance at the same time, the asym-
metric balance embodies two conflicting notions. It is a lever, that is a
machine that allows a smaller force to conquer a greater force and thus
tricks nature by (seemingly) getting more out than it puts in. However it
is also a balance and thus is a machine for establishing equality of weight
(equilibrium). As long as these different practices are separate, the conflict
need not become a problem. But in the context of Aristotle’s project of
cataloguing and analyzing practices in order to integrate them into an
encompassing system of knowledge, the conflict has to be dealt with. A
concept was needed that permitted the reconciliation of the lever and the
balance by identifying the equal within the unequal, the equality of cause
and effect when the smaller weight overcomes the larger one. The concept
of weight is a real abstraction embodied in the symmetric balance, and the
notion of ‘inclination’ (rhopê) or momentum, denoting the combined
effects of weight and length, could be discovered on any counterweight
devices. But the real abstraction in the asymmetric balance is much more
complex than the simple complementarity of the sarissa and simply equal-
ity of the standard balance. The asymmetric balance embodies the equality
 17  REAL ABSTRACTION IN THE HISTORY OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES  315

of inclination, which can be formulated as the law of the lever, when we

discover the real abstraction in this device.
This answer to this second question differs in nature from the answer to
the first question. First, it is less likely to be generalized. Whereas the first
answer hinted at a dialectics of means and ends which might turn out to
be quite general in cultural and even in natural evolution, the second
answer made it necessary to tell a highly specific story about the circum-
stances under which the law of the lever was discovered. A second differ-
ence consists in the fact that the story told in the second answer, referring
to logical constraints of Aristotle’s intellectual project, resembles much
more traditional history of ideas. We insist however that we do not intend
to engage in traditional history of ideas. On the contrary, we suggest a
model of discovery in science driven by developments in technology. In
order to fully understand discovery in science, that is, to provide a full
historical account rather than to gesture at a general scheme, the relevant
technological developments must be studied in the specific cultural con-
text which triggered the discovery of real abstractions embodied in exist-
ing technological devices and practices.

Conclusion
The use of the concept of real abstraction in the history of science presup-
poses that technical devices can be studied to recognize such real abstrac-
tions and thus that the development of technology has a role in determining
the direction of scientific development—not as the final cause but as the
material basis or subject matter of science. Boris Hessen pointed to the
striking fact that the development of physics in the nineteenth century
from mechanics to thermodynamics to electrodynamics did not follow any
a priori immanent logic of physics but rather followed the actual develop-
ment of technology.5
It is worth mentioning that Sohn-Rethel is one of the few critics of
Hessen or Grossmann to correctly describe their view of the relation of
science and technology. In fact he criticized them specifically for believing
that science arises out of technology not for the sake of technology: ‘The
argumentation therefore leads involuntarily to the strange view that
machines generate natural sciences rather than the reverse’. And in another
paper he sharpens the critique: ‘After all, it is science that helps to build
machines, rather than the machines hatching out science, even mechanis-
tic science’.6 Sohn Rethel was one of the few to understand the thrust of
316  P. MCLAUGHLIN AND O. SCHLAUDT

the analyses of Hessen and Grossmann, but he failed to see the fruitfulness
of their position because he restricted real abstraction to the distribution
sphere. If there is a real abstraction in technique, then of course the
machines (with our help) can ‘hatch out’ science. This disregard for the
production sphere reflects a more general disdain of instrumental reason,
common in the Frankfurt School, which hinders any serious analysis of the
intellectual opportunities offered by the second reading of Bacon’s dic-
tum, which hints at a general dialectics of means and ends. Instrumental
reason need not be restricted to searching for appropriate means for given
ends, as Horkheimer would have it (1947: 3–4), but can also discover new
ends contained in given means as real abstractions.

Notes
1. ‘Natura enim non nisi parendo vincitur’ (Bacon [1620] 1858, Bk. I, §3).
2. Hessen (Social and Economic Roots) cites the opening lines of the Discorsi as
his first appendix. On the historical work of Hessen and Grossmann see
Freudenthal and McLaughlin (2009).
3. See especially Koyré (1943, 1948).
4. For a detailed account of this work and of the role Greek balances see Renn
and McLaughlin (2018).
5. See Hessen in Freudenthal and McLaughlin (2009: 78–82).
6. Sohn-Rethel (1973a: 85, 1973b: 37). A long footnote on Hessen and
Grossmann was not included in the English version of the book (1978).

References
Aristotle. (1936). Mechanical Problems. In W.  S. Hett (Ed.), Aristotle: Minor
Works (pp. 329–411). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bacon, F. ([1620] 1858). Novum Organum. In J. Spedding, R. Ellis, & D. D.
Heath (Eds.), The Works of Francis Bacon (Vol. 1). London: Longmans.
De Beaune, S.  A. (2008). L’homme et l’outil. L’invention technique durant la
préhistoire. Paris: CNRS Editions.
Falk, P. (1977). Review of R.  W. Müller, Geld und Geist. Acta Sociologica,
20(4), 393–396.
Freudenthal, G., & McLaughlin, P. (Eds.). (2009). The Social and Economic Roots
of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann. Boston
Studies in the Philosophy of Science 278. New York: Springer.
 17  REAL ABSTRACTION IN THE HISTORY OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES  317

Galilei, G. (1974). Two New Sciences, Including Centers of Gravity and Force of
Gravity and Force of Percussion. Trans. with introduction and notes, by Stillman
Drake. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Gould, S. J., & Vrba, E. S. (1982). Exaptation – A Missing Term in the Science of
Form. Paleobiology, 8(1), 4–15.
Horkheimer, M. (1947). The Eclipse of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press.
Koyré, A. (1943). Galileo and Plato. Journal of the History of Ideas, 4, 400–428.
Koyré, A. (1948). Les philosophes et la machine. I: L’appréciation du machinisme.
Critique (pp. 324–333), 3. [Reprint in (1961). Etudes de la pensee philosophique
(pp. 279–309). Paris: Armand Colin].
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1975). Collected Works (MECW) (Vol. 35). London:
Lawrence & Wishart.
Merton, R. K. (1939). Science and the Economy of Seventeenth Century England.
Science & Society, 3, 3–27.
Renn, J. and McLaughlin, P., (2018): The Balance, the Lever and the Aristotelian
Origins of Mechanics, in: R.  Feldhay/J.  Renn/M.  Schemmel/M.  Valleriani,
Emergence and Expansion of Pre-Classical Mechanics, New  York: Springer,
Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1973a). Geistige und körperliche Arbeit. Zur Theorie der gesell-
schaftlichen Synthesis. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1973b). Intellectual and Manual Labour. An Attempt at a
Materialistic Theory. Radical Philosophy, 6, 30–73.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1976). Das Geld, die bare Münze des Apriori. In P.  Mattick,
A.  Sohn-Rethel, & H.  G. Haasis (Eds.), Beiträge zur Kritik des Geldes
(pp. 35–117). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Intellectual and Manual Labour. A Critique of
Epistemology. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.
 CHAPTER 18

Zapatista Autonomy: The Invention of Time

as a Discontinuity and Untotaling Category

Sergio Tischler

Introduction
Time in capitalism is a secularized and reified category. It is the expression
of a praxis determined by the power of general labor or abstract labor over
concrete labor, that is, a praxis whose synthesis is produced with Money as
a means (Sohn Rethel 2001. Tr.1). As a part of the form of value, time is
made of an objective abstraction, a real one, and it is also an alienated
category for domination. It is in no way neutral or detached from class
antagonism.
The revolutions which evolved from the so-called real socialism were
incapable of changing time in a radical manner, of generating a time eman-
cipated from that abstract and objective form, which would be an expres-
sion of collective self-determination of society. Those revolutions failed as
projects of human emancipation, and a central part of that failure concerns
that matter.2
Zapatismo was able to relocate the matter of anti-capitalist revolution
as the central human concern. It is not done from evocation of a

S. Tischler (*)
Autonomous University of Puebla, Puebla, Mexico

© The Author(s) 2020 319

A. Oliva et al. (eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_18
320  S. TISCHLER

r­evolutionary history whose concept became a theoretical wreck, but

assuming that the challenge of changing the world in terms of praxis
implies new ways of thinking, feeling and making the change. It is from
that perspective that we formulate the following questions, which moti-
vated our composition.
Is the Zapatista autonomy a process which seeks for a creative destruc-
tion of the capitalist domination based in the centrality of money in the
social relations? To what extent is this process a simultaneous criticism of
the capitalist state, the state in general and of politics as a part of it? In
what sense can we talk of Zapatista autonomy as a beginning of a possible
world of human self-determination where ‘many worlds fit’? To what
extent is that beginning a territory and a time where the objectified domi-
nant praxis and the abstract universality which implies the violence of
homogeneity as the means of subjugation typical of mercantile relations
and of the state are broken, denied and destroyed? To what extent is there
a breakup in the reproduction of capital and the domination based on real
abstractions such as money and the fetishism which is consubstantial to it?
In what sense it goes further than revolution as state-centered way of poli-
tics? Will it be possible to read that experience in the time of zapatismo
and, in particular, in the autonomy time that they propose?
We cannot rehearse sufficiently argued answers; at least, we risk the
hypothetical consideration of some general approaches.

Zapatista Praxis and Time

One of the most relevant aspects of zapatismo is its commitment to the
breaking of time as a vertical time of domination of social relations and the
institutions derived from this. They have not thought or expressed it on
those terms, but that perspective is sketched in their idea of non-avant-
guardist revolution; it is shown in the horizontal practices of the auton-
omy in the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Councils of Good Government), and
it is expressed in their language where the subject is an anti-capitalist
rebellious we, in which the speech is a fight against hegemony as an expres-
sion of domination. The Zapatista fight—paradoxical, as they like to label
it—does not insist on a new kind of power, but it criticizes and denies
power as an expression of ‘high and low’—to speak their language—that
is, of power as a relation of domination and subjugation of a praxis deter-
mined by capital.
18  ZAPATISTA AUTONOMY: THE INVENTION OF TIME AS A DISCONTINUITY…  321

Since their first public appearance, EZLN’s (Ejército Zapatista de

Liberación Nacional) communications outlined the idea that revolution,
understood as an avant-garde taking the power, does not guarantee the
transformation of the world, and that radical change comes from below,
from a movement of self-organization which makes the power of capital,
vertical and homogeneous, explode into an experience of collective fight
for the creation of a horizontal time. According to them, this movement
is the only assurance of the suppression of a power as a relation of
domination.
In some manner, what they suggest is like saying that the historical
criticism of the classic revolutionary subject of the socialist revolutions of
the past century was suspended with the establishment of the state power
and that such an establishment was the closure of the self-determinative
collective movement which gave life to the revolutions. This implied,
among other things, an act of denial of the revolution from below, from
the rebels moved by the collective dream of social and individual emanci-
pation, however dim it may have been. In other words, in the new constel-
lation of power represented by the state synthesis of revolution, politics is
reinstalled as a vertical time-space of domination.
Susan Buck-Morss presents a picture of this antagonism on the stage of
the Russian Revolution. When she refers to the relation between the
avant-garde (party) and the different movements of the revolutionary tor-
rent, she says:

Mass support existed for the October events, but it was not of a single mind.
Millennialists, avant-gardists, and utopian dreamers of every sort were eager
to interpret the revolutionary future as their own. Bolshevism needed to
speak for all of these people, structuring their desires inside a historical con-
tinuum that, at the same time, contained their force. In the process of being
inserted into the temporal narrative of revolutionary history, the utopian
dimension of a wide variety of discourses was constrained and reduced.
(Buck-Morss 2004: 62)

The hegemony of the state-centered time of the party became the

antithesis of time as an open category, self-determinative, experimental,
that is to say, as a horizontal experience, exactly as the artistic avant-garde
sensed it.
The effect was to rupture the continuity of time—states Buck-Morss—
opening it up to new cognitive and sensory experiences. In contrast, the
party submitted to a historical cosmology that provided no such freedom
322  S. TISCHLER

of movement. Bolshevism’s claim to know the course of history in its

totality presumed a ‘science’ of the future that encouraged revolutionary
politics to dictate to art. Culture was to be operationalized. Its products
would serve ‘progress’ as the latter’s visual representation (Buck-Morss
2004: 67).
A more dramatic history happened to the soviets, as is widely known.
Having this experience in mind, we believe to see in zapatismo a com-
mitment to overcome that contradiction of the revolution. Zapatismo is
oriented to open the process and the idea of revolution questioning the
idea of avant-garde and of hegemony, that is, the canon of the classic revo-
lutionary subject. It is remarkable that zapatismo is a revolutionary move-
ment that rejects fighting as a means to rise to power; nonetheless, this
does not imply an abstract rejection to the state, as if it were possible to
suggest the matter of revolution based on an empty contentless denial of
it. Their commitment—we think—is for the creation of a government that
is the expression of an inclusive and deliberative ‘below and to the left’,
that is to say, the expression of a moment of the horizontal movement of
the social relations, that is, a commitment for a revolutionary government
that is at the same time the denial of the state as a political form of capital
(Bonefeld 2013. Tr.).
Autonomy as an ethical and moral horizon of political praxis is not then
a naïf conception of the world transformation. An image can be found in
their horizon, of horizontality as a movement, which makes the dominio
relation of capital and the state explode. It is the commitment for a kind
of politics that is the antithesis of left politics as a part of the state form.3
And a central aspect of it is the breakup of the vertical and horizontal time
of domination. Zapatismo rejects the domestication of time in a new syn-
thesis of state power.
This movement represents a hard, difficult and contradictory effort of
‘asking we walk’, which is little or not related to the fantasy inspired by the
fetish of spontaneity.4 Zapatismo, and its autonomy as a fundamental key
of their political praxis, is a commitment for a time other in the fight against
fatality and destiny: against the fatality of accepting the capitalist world as
the only one possible, as a vertical universal human destiny, with the false
image as a background of utopia leading to the bitter nightmare of
Stalinism in its various manners.
The revolutions of the so-called real socialism—which implied the
defeat of the revolution from below marking a constitutive reactionary
moment of the emerging state power—became a historical ruin which
18  ZAPATISTA AUTONOMY: THE INVENTION OF TIME AS A DISCONTINUITY…  323

carried along with its debris the idea of revolution. Maybe the great
achievement of zapatismo was rescuing the idea of revolution and of hope
from that ruined condition. It created an imaginary space for thinking the
change of the world in a different and fresh fashion, fed by an image of
revolution against the model that made its vertical and state-centered
manner hegemonic.
However, this idea of radical change does not imply the establishment
of a new model of revolution, neither the projection of a fixed image of
the future which must be achieved, unfolding some kind of sustained
truth in a series of partial assertions. On the contrary, it’s a commitment
to open and expand the category of revolution with the perspective that
revolution is a contradictory process exposed to the traps of the demise of
history in the different syntheses of power, and that the constitutive sub-
jectivity of those syntheses for the left if found in the idea of an avant-­
garde, which presents the future as a fight for hegemony and the historical
totaling of time. The Zapatista expressions ‘A world where many worlds
fit’ and ‘Asking we walk’ are telling us about a different fighting experi-
ence, an experience where the image of the time does not refer to a social
relationship of domination/subjugation as a result of the process of total-
ing and subsumption of the concrete under the abstract.
Zapatismo rejects the image of time as hegemony, that is to say, the
image of time as a universal idea that is the denial of human self-­
determination, just as it is presented by the social experience determined
by the power of money in capitalism, or by vertical and coercive organiza-
tion of social labor from state bureaucracy in the experiences of ‘real social-
ism’.5 In that sense, the Zapatista experience is a radical criticism of the
universal as an abstraction and as a form of power which arises and breeds
from the denial of social self-determination and from the assertion of the
world as social and class antagonism. However, it is a paradoxical criticism.
The paradox is presented by the image of a revolutionary army which rose
up to deny itself, whose aspiration is to disappear and not planting firmly
as an expression of power. The struggle of the EZLN is a struggle to create
a political time-space where the armed organization is no longer necessary
in the fight for emancipation. It considers itself as a moment—not the
main moment—of this process.
This idea can be extended to the initiatives related to other anti-­capitalist
movements of the country. The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle
of June 2005 can be an example. In these initiatives, it is intended that the
struggles are not only reduced to participate with specific requests in a
324  S. TISCHLER

c­ ollective process that moves surpassing the institutional frame of Mexican

politics. The struggle is simultaneously the development of a process of
collective self-consciousness. It is going beyond what we are and creating
a we, which is not the non-critical addition of the struggles in a common
field, but which implies a movement of self-criticism oriented to the denial
of the mala praxis of which we are or can be carriers.
In that sense, zapatismo does not think of itself as an expression of
some kind of pure subject, denied by the power of capital and, that sense,
needing only to develop its own power to be able to change the world.
Everything indicates that they realize that we are traversed by power and
domination, and that the fight is also an inner fight of the subject. So that
the revolutionary practice would imply a double movement of denial: the
denial of capitalist relations such as material, objective relations and the
denial of the power subjectivity internalized in our minds.
This we is tense, distressing and, to some extent, it is uncertain. It is not
something given and defined beforehand; it is like the expression of a
hypothetical experience of full emancipation. From such a kind of experi-
ence, we only have historical glimmers, and we cannot be comforted by
theory for such an absence as it was once believed.6 To sum up, we are
talking about a we-in-process, in no way a we-fixed form7 as the fetished
categories of people and nation.8
Is the Zapatista-we a new way to understand revolution and class struggle?
We believe, in that sense, that the Zapatista experience allows for the
understanding of class struggle and revolution in an untotaling manner, as
we have stated it in previous essays (Tischler 2013).
What does this mean? What is its relation with the topic of the suppres-
sion of time as an objective abstraction and a relation of domination?

Time as Objective Abstraction and Domination

We owe to E.P. Thomson one of the best descriptions about the historical
process of time transformation into an objectified category.
‘In the Canterbury Tales, the cock still appears in its most important
role as nature’s clock’, he says. ‘Over the development of the 17th century,
the image of the clock mechanism is extended, and absorbed by the uni-
verse thanks to Newton’. And in the eighteenth century, it has already
entered intimate levels of everyday life (Thompson 1979: 239–241).
But it is in industrial capitalism when time becomes autonomous from
the natural immediate determinations and acquires the characteristics of
18  ZAPATISTA AUTONOMY: THE INVENTION OF TIME AS A DISCONTINUITY…  325

objectivity with the rationality of the merchandise form of the social

relations.
The contrast between ‘time in nature’ and ‘time in the clock’—which is
a symbol of the time of capitalism—is presented by Thompson explaining
a contrast between ‘task-oriented’ time and the time of the factory. As an
example of the first—he says—‘the patterning of social time in the seaport
follows upon the rhythms of the sea; and this appears to be natural and
comprehensible to fisher-men or seamen: the compulsion is nature’s own’.
‘In a similar way labour from dawn to dusk can appear to be’ natural ‘in a
farming community, especially in the harvest months: nature demands
that the grain be harvested before the thunderstorms set in’. In general
terms, we can say that:

The notation of time which arises in such contexts has been described as
task-orientation. It is perhaps the most effective orientation in peasant soci-
eties, and it remains important in village and domestic industries. (…) Three
points may be proposed about task-orientation. First, there is a sense in
which it is more humanly comprehensible than timed labour. The peasant or
labourer appears to attend upon what is an observed necessity. Second, a
community in which task-orientation is common appears to show least
demarcation between “labour” and “life”. Social intercourse and labour are
intermingled—the working-day lengthens or contracts according to the
task—and there is no great sense of conflict between labour and “passing the
time of day”. Third, to men accustomed to labour timed by the clock, this
attitude to labour appears to be wasteful and lacking in urgency. (Thompson
1979: 245)

On the contrary, at the factory, the ‘economy of time’ is pursued, and

it is achieved through a disciplinary system which tyrannically controls the
activity of the laborers so they don’t ‘waste time’ and are productive. ‘It
was exactly in those industries—the textile mills and the engineering work-
shops—where the new time-discipline was most rigorously imposed that
the contest over time became most intense’ (Idem: 278).
In those conditions, the struggle for time arises as one the significant
axes of the class struggle. ‘The first generation of factory workers were
taught by their masters the importance of time; the second generation
formed their short-time committees in the ten-hour movement; the third
generation struck for overtime or time-and-a-half’ (Idem: 279–280).
Thompson also detected how social change, in terms of development,
was the expression of time as an antithesis of social self-determination, that
326  S. TISCHLER

is, time as imposed and internalized discipline. ‘Without time-discipline

we could not have the insistent energies of industrial man; and whether
this discipline comes in the forms of Methodism, or of Stalinism, or of
nationalism, it will come to the developing world’ (Idem: 289).
E.P. Thompson’s historical analysis of time and discipline in capitalism
is a vivid and brilliant exposition of the matter from the non-orthodox
Marxist perspective and exceeds what we have recently exposed here.
Anyway, there are some aspects of the matter that the author does not
touch, and which are important for us. For instance, his version of time
can be understood in the sense of a disciplinary and instrumental form
used by capitalists: they control and rationalize time because ‘time is gold’.
For that reason, we think it is necessary to add to this argument the posi-
tion that capitalists are also controlled by time. Not because they are
exploited like the laborers, but because they are subject to a time they do
not control and which determines them. This leads us to the matter of
time as an abstraction and objectivity in capitalism, that is to say, the mat-
ter of time as a part of the value form of the social relations. In fact, it could
be said that Thompson makes a thorough and brilliant description of the
experience of time and its representation in capitalism, but he does not
enter directly into the analysis of the category in itself. This analysis is
found in Marx.
The matter of time in Marx, particularly in Capital, covers from the
initial chapter about commodities and the dual character of labor until he
reaches the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.9 As a punctual
analysis in the class struggle, the topic is present in the historical analysis
explained in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and The Civil war
in France. In this chapter, it is enough to state that time, as a social objec-
tive category, abstract and homogeneous, develops in capitalism, and that
this development is tied to a praxis determined by general labor or abstract
labor, which is a specific category of capital.
To broaden the argument a little bit, we are analyzing time as a part of
the form of value or the form of commodity of the social relations. Such a
form is the way of existence of an objectivity which is the result of an
abstraction produced in the material practice of social reproduction: ‘social
substance common to them all’ or general labor or abstract labor.
In the first chapter of Capital (Commodities), Marx presents the differ-
ence between their physical materiality (use value) and the strict social
objectivity (value) of the commodity in terms of the distinction between
concrete forms of labor and abstract forms of labor. He says:
18  ZAPATISTA AUTONOMY: THE INVENTION OF TIME AS A DISCONTINUITY…  327

As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as

exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do
not contain an atom of use value. (Marx 1975: 46)

And he continues:

If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they

have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But
even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we
make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time
from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we
see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its exis-
tence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be
regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner,
or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful
qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful
character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete
forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all;
all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the
abstract. (Marx 1975: 46–47)

Marx refers to abstract labor as a real abstraction, an abstraction in the

kingdom of things, in the object, which ‘escapes the thought of those who
make them’ (Sohn Rethel 2001: 35. Tr.). It produces behind the back of
those who make them because of the mercantile form where money works
as a social synthesizer (Sohn Rethel 2001: 28–50. Tr.). It is in that sense
that it is important to understand real abstraction as a living and moving
substance.
This ‘social substance common to them all’ represents unconscious uni-
versal mediation of the relations among the individuals. As Postone says:

it is a relation characterized by the universal form of commodities (…) an

individual does not purchase goods produced by others through manifest
social relations. Instead, labour itself—both directly and what is expressed
through the products—replaces those relations working as the “objective”
means by which other people’s products can be purchased. Labour in itself
is a social means in place of open social relations. (Postone 2006: 213. Tr.)
328  S. TISCHLER

Social mediation is produced because abstract labor, labor distilled as

time, acquires the characteristics of a totality, something that only occurs
in capitalist relations.
Totality is manifest in forms: commodity form, money-form, state form
(Holloway 2002). Among other things, this allows us to understand labor
as a category which goes further than economics and implies politics and
the state in a non-external way; that is to say, it must be understood that
the separation of economics from politics in capitalism is a relation medi-
ated by social relations.
In other words, abstract labor, a category which carries totality as a
characteristic, is a key concept to understand the unity of the diverse in
capitalism, in terms of an abstract universal which subdues and subsumes
the particular into a violent homogeneity (Adorno 1975. Tr.)—that time
is a moving totality, a living rationality, and expresses itself in particular
forms. This means that the forms of time in economics are forms of the
homogeneous time of totality; they are forms of a time ‘empty of material
realities which constitute its content in scope of use’ (Sohn Rethel 2001:
52. Tr.). Moreover, the time in politics and the time of the capitalist state
cannot be understood in critical terms outside of that kind of abstraction,
of that ‘empty’ time represented by the symbol of money.
Among other things, this explains how capitalism got firm as an ‘abstract
community’, meaning a community in denial of a ‘concrete community’
of human beings, since ‘money is immediately a community, as it is the
universal substance in everyone’s existence. But in money (…) the com-
munity is for the individual a mere abstraction, a mere external accidental
thing, and at the same time a simple means for his satisfaction as a private
individual’ (Marx 1971: 160–161. Tr). This implies, at the same time, that
what we think is individuality is the consequence of the internalization of
a great deal of violence.10
In such a way is praxis determined by abstract labor that it is objectified
in an abstract and homogeneous time, which is at the same time a domina-
tion category. This praxis has a material substrate the radical separation of
the subject from the object presented in the figure of the laborer as a
­vendor of working force, that is to say, as some kind of living abstraction.11
The phrase ‘time is money’ shows time as a thing and money as a uni-
versal god that rules the life of everything. In its identity with money, time
is presented with a life of its own, as a despotic ruler who sets the pace to
a humanity subsumed to a rational and incessant accumulation of abstract
wealth and the destruction of life. The violence in the comprehension of
18  ZAPATISTA AUTONOMY: THE INVENTION OF TIME AS A DISCONTINUITY…  329

time and space is part of this process.12 And the image which most pre-
cisely portraits this in terms of violence and social destruction is exposed
in the well-known Walter Benjamin’s Thesis IX on the Angel of History.
Against the idea of progress that represents time and history as a ‘chain of
events’, the Angel of History sees a ‘storm’ which throws ‘debris after
debris’ to his feet, writes Benjamin (2007: 29).
In any case, what we tried to explain in this section is the topic of the
homogeneous and abstract time of the form of value of social relations in
capitalism, in terms of antithesis and denial of time understood as an
expression of emancipated praxis. This is, that time as an abstract objectiv-
ity is the negation of the subject. The revolutions that led to ‘real social-
ism’ did not eliminate abstraction as a dominio relation or time as the
antithesis of social self-determination.

Classic Socialist Revolution, Time

and Political Abstraction

As stated previously, the theoretical novelty of the topic of time and eman-
cipation has a political character and is closely related to the historical
failure of the so-called real socialism; this fact brings with itself the ques-
tioning of the revolutionary theory which guided those revolutions and
states the question of why that concept of revolution failed as a project for
emancipation when realized as a political praxis.
A key aspect of this failure, speaking in general terms, is that political
abstraction and time as a part of such an abstraction/domination, far from
disappearing, were reconfigured in a new power constellation: domination
by means of market and law, whose central figure, the laborer as owner
and seller of working force and citizen, was replaced by the figure of the
state as a place of immediate identity between economics and politics,
expressed in the bureaucratic administration of world of work.
In capitalism, real abstraction and objective domination—which is pre-
sented as a dominion applied by the object, by things, and not in a direct
relation—negate the subject in the mercantile form of social relations, that
is, in labor as a dual category subsumed to the dominion of abstract labor.
Simultaneously, in the experience of ‘real socialism’, the subject is denied
in the category of labor organized by the socialist state as a vertical totality,
and the state unifies economics and politics in a bureaucratic and repres-
330  S. TISCHLER

sive manner, suppressing in the facts the individual and collective self-­
determination of laborers.
This process of concentration of power was defined as necessary by the
revolutionary avant-garde in a route of human emancipation, being the
condition for the rationalization of labor and the development of the pro-
ductive force of society, which are the keys for building an emancipated
society. From this process emerged an identity which asserted the relation
state-party-labor as an expression of the abolition of social domination and
the realization of the revolutionary subject, but in reality it was the nega-
tion of the self-determination of such subject and the assertion of abstrac-
tion as a dominio relation in the fetished figures of the state bureaucracy
and the party.
In both historical experiences (capitalism and real socialism), alienated
praxis is determined by social relations which presuppose abstraction as a
social process that separates the subject from the object, and the latter, the
object, acquires autonomy in the form of a system or a totality which is the
negation of the former, the subject.
In capitalism, the identity of the subject with the object is something
similar to a dream of a full and free society which in fact presupposes the
tyranny of homogeneity as a dominio category.13 It appears as the phantas-
magoric result of a material ideology which is settled in the kingdom of
commodities. On the other hand, in ‘real socialism’, the identity appears
in the fetishism which accompanies the reversion of the subject into the
image of the state machinery which secures labor as an organic totality,
that is, a bureaucratic rationalization of the praxis. Both are ways which
deny creative and self-determinative activity of the society.
On the other hand, in capitalism, the form of value implies a totality
and a systematic totaling of the social relations which occur in an uncon-
scious manner, that is, in the reproduction of the object in itself, and it
acquires the form of an autonomous rationality. On the contrary, in the
state-centered project of ‘real socialism’, totality is pursued in a conscious
manner, and the state/party is presented as the central subject of this
process.14
Nonetheless, pursuing totality implied the maintenance of a power
constellation based on a ‘high and a low’—as said in Zapatista language—
and the prolongation of a vertical temporality inscribed within the abstract
form of the state, that is, within a temporality that was the result of a new
way of separation and tearing of the subject from the object—to say in
18  ZAPATISTA AUTONOMY: THE INVENTION OF TIME AS A DISCONTINUITY…  331

Adorno’s words (1975)—fixed in the state as a form of a dominio relation

built on the denial of collective self-determination.
In any case, what is important to highlight is that the denial of social
time as an expression of collective self-determination is fundamental to
understand the failure of the state-centered emancipation projects, and it
is a fact that is in the center of much needed update of the concept of
revolution.

The Reinvention of Time as a Part

of the Anti-capitalist Struggle

Walter Benjamin was the revolutionary thinker who unveiled with great
theoretical audacity the profound class secret from the idea of progress
and the traps which that idée-force supposed for an authentic revolutionary
transformation. In his Theses on the concept of history,15 he pointed out that
the idea of progress has as a basic structure on a homogeneous, empty
time, and that such a time is a dominio relation which through a mystified
form is presented in the idea of progress as something neutral. We may say
that, in some way, in this criticism Benjamin moves Marx’s analysis of time
as a part of the form of value of the social relations, to the criticism of the
idea progress and the idea universal history that it carries. The mystifica-
tion which occurs in the form of commodity and the form of value of the
social relations is moved to the mystification of universal history in the
idea of homogeneous and lineal time.
Against the image of revolution as the ‘train engine’ of progress, both
in the reformist version and in Leninism, Benjamin explains that revolu-
tion understood in those terms brings a historical ruin.16 Revolution, on
the other hand, must cut the continuum of history and it must not be its
realization, since this continuum is the prolongation of the dominio rela-
tions, something that leads us to the antagonist images of time of the
avant-garde and the avant-gardes at the beginning of the Russian
Revolution exposed by Buck-Morss. With the perspective of skipping the
historical continuum, Benjamin suggests the idea of a ‘now time’ as an
antithesis of homogenous and empty time. This would be the authentic
time of emancipation, the time of human self-determination which skips
the historical continuum.
With the idea of revolution as a ‘hand brake’ of the train engine of
progress, Benjamin updates Marx’s criticism to capitalism and presents an
332  S. TISCHLER

alternative image of revolution, against the hegemonic image. If the hege-

monic image was linked to the idea of the realization of totality as a part
of the historical continuum and progress, the suggestion of a ‘now time’
opens up the possibility to understand the revolutionary change from an
untotaling perspective. In other words, class struggle opens time up
because the form of value of time contains a rebellious time which exists in
the ‘mode of being denied’ (Gunn 2005).
Being subsumed by the concept of a homogeneous time with reaction-
ary content as part of the form of the party and the form of the state, the
concept of denied time was not sufficiently developed as part of the con-
sciousness of revolutionary change. Maybe this was produced in a more or
less spontaneous manner, and it was not necessarily a phenomenon with a
clear theoretical consciousness, even though Lenin is already present in
relation with the vertical idea of the party as an avant-garde of the labor
movement in Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism (1977), just to name one of the
most significant ones.
The collapse of the so-called real socialism prepared the land for
Benjamin’s suggestions, which were like a bottle floating in the sea, to
reach some possible ports related to ‘its time’. (This leads us to think that
the relation between revolutionary theory and praxis is neither lineal nor
immediate and that a marginal idea on social change can have a larger
content of truth than the hegemonic idea on it.)
One of these possible ports is the Zapatista experience.
Not because the Benjamin’s abstract idea of ‘now time’ has been put
into practice by Zapatista politics as an expression of some unconscious
‘wit’ of history, or because the Zapatistas are some kind of Hegelian incar-
nation of a universal idea, which is absurd. It is fundamentally because the
Zapatistas have had to invent a horizontal time in their anti-capitalist
struggle, and that horizontal time implies a criticism of the abstract tem-
porality of the form of value and the form of state.
In other words, the port image to which we refer is that of the struggle
in the present, a struggle for the concept of revolution as well. This
­struggle of zapatismo has opened a threshold from which a link with the
past is forged, because the history of the anti-capitalist revolution forces us
to think in the point or points in which the victories were transform into
failures, that is, where the historical criticism was stopped and allowed an
opposite process. In this search, the revolutionary present meets a past
which needs to be reclaimed, having into account a theoretical dimen-
sion of it.
18  ZAPATISTA AUTONOMY: THE INVENTION OF TIME AS A DISCONTINUITY…  333

In this sense, we can see zapatismo as an open window to a revolution-

ary past. This window allows lights which were apparently off to enter the
room of the present struggle. By no means must this image be understood
in the sense of Zapatistas being the ‘agents’ of this process, but as a thresh-
old open for them. This threshold is a crevice in the capitalist wall, and it
opens the anti-capitalist history into the dialogue of many voices which
constitute an inclusive and clearly anti-avantgardist and anti-hegemonic of
the ‘high and low’ kind of ‘we’. If revolution has turned into a ruin, the
hard duty of zapatismo has been to grow a flower oriented toward another
direction and to transform with a lot of effort the dead time of the
ruin alive.
Many different works have been written on the Zapatista autonomy,
and they highlight general and particular aspects of the experience.17 One
of the most important systematic studies may be the one written by Jérome
Baschet (2015). Some key aspects of the autonomy phenomenon are
highlighted, such as territorial organization in the Junta de Buen Gobierno,
the characteristics of the autonomous government in the Caracoles, par-
ticularly the systematic rotation of the political positions and the party
involvement of women, as well as the collective economic characteristics,
etcetera. Tension and contradiction also occur, and the way to reach an
internal agreement in the process has to do, according to the author, with
replacing work with doing, in a clear reference to the general thoughts of
Holloway (2011) in the matter.
A central aspect of the process is the effort to delete specialized func-
tions in the political positions which could crystallize a hierarchic structure
of a ‘high’ over a ‘low’. This implies fundamental changes in the collective
and individual subjectivity with the Zaptista Autonomous Educational
System playing a strategic role for this. To sum up, the autonomy, which
is not only related to local politics, is understood as a making process of
horizontal relations tending to delete dominio relations, the ‘high’ and
‘low’ of social relations.
Nevertheless, it is still complicated to summarize in a few words the
revolutionary meaning of the Zapatista autonomy as an open process and
an unprecedented experience. To conclude, we only need to add the fol-
lowing, rather limited, approximations:

(a) The politics in Zapatista autonomy imply different temporal and

territorial levels and scales (local, national, international, rural and
urban), as shown by the most diverse political actions since the
334  S. TISCHLER

sudden appearance of the EZLN. Those levels and scales manifest

a multiform time of the politic dimension of horizontality. One of
the most significant initiatives has been the so-called Otra campaña
inspired in the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle of 2005.
(b) From a general perspective—not restricted to the local scale of the
Committees of Good Government—the autonomy is a kind of
anti-capitalist politics aimed to create horizontal time and space,
the “below and to the left” we, beginning at some kind of ‘mutual
recognition’18 which rejects the we as a dominio and hegemonic
category coming from the form of state.
(c) There exists a political entanglement between verticality and hori-
zontality. In no way is it possible to understand the autonomous
process as exclusively horizontal. In the Zapatista experience, the
vertical dimension occurs fundamentally to permit and detonate an
autonomous process with a majority of horizontal characteristics.19
However, it is a kind of ‘paradoxical strategy’: verticality, far from
aspiring to its consolidation, is aimed to its disappearance.
(d) Collective memory plays a key role in the critical development of
their own history, and it goes against the indigenous and commu-
nitarian qualities being materialized and mythicized. The strike
against the historical continuum is also directed to the processes of
internal domination. A clear example of this is women’s struggle
within the Zapatista communities.20
(e) The Zapatista autonomy is not a closed category. It may have to be
understood as a process-we which implies the struggle to transform
time into a category for collective and individual self-­determination.
That is to say, it is not the we-fixed form of the alienated time.

To conclude, it could be said in practical terms that, in the Zapatista

autonomy, there is a dialectical relation between verticality and horizontal-
ity which denies the synthesis as a way of producing a new totality. This is
because in the dialectics of the synthesis, verticality succeeds as a form of
power. On the contrary, it presents the dialectics to open the world, where
the struggle must aim to horizontality as a political axe and time must be
an experience of social self-determination, in both its collective and indi-
vidual expressions. In such an experience, time is presented as a disconti-
nuity and untotaling category. For discontinuity, we understand the
moment when the homogenous time of the domino of capital is broken,
and “untotaling” category means that criticism of homogeneous time and
the totality of the form of value.
18  ZAPATISTA AUTONOMY: THE INVENTION OF TIME AS A DISCONTINUITY…  335

Afterword
The classic figure of the Latin American guerrilla fighter can be under-
stood as an image of the coexistence of two souls, of two times: the rebel-
lious time and the vertical time of the organization, which is represented
as the seed of a new state, a new historical synthesis.
In relation to this, it can be suggested that in the guerrilla revolutionary
experience, there developed a subjectivity linked to the hegemony of that
time over the rebellious time.
In a different way, in zapatismo, we can see a history against that his-
tory. A classic one is the political manifestation of power dialectics, of
revolutionary power understood in classical terms; the other, the Zapatista
one, implies the dialectics of emancipation, a dialectics that is not sus-
pended in another form of power while making a fetish of it, but it goes
further instead, to the bottom of the criticism of dominio relations.
And that is a process to reinvent time and revolution.
This article was translated by Anahí Prucca.

Notes
1. This case, and the ones specified in the document, is a personal translation
from Spanish into English (T.N.).
2. The Cuban case deserves a special consideration which, to some extent,
leaves it out of the generalization we just made.
3. Regarding the state as a form of the social relations of capitalism, see
Holloway (2002).
4. The centrality of the political organization of the struggles is emphatically
explained by Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés. Regarding this, see
EZLN (2015).
5. In fact, time as a time of collective self-determination was never a key mat-
ter for the revolutionary avant-gardes: the classic model which supposed
that the identity of the state with the people gained by the takeover of
power would allow a time managed rationally, where the antagonistic con-
tradictions would not continue to be of importance in the social
dynamics.
6. In that sense, it can be said that our experience in social change is limited,
though there certainly were some moments of splendor. From this comes
the idea that the criticism of what already exists must not be restricted by
those limits, fetishizing them as if they were the ultimate historical direc-
tion, but it must open the horizon of a greater change instead.
7. On the category of form as a fixation of the social flow, see Holloway
(2002).
336  S. TISCHLER

8. Regarding this, see H-Zinn (1999).

9. For a systematic study of the categories of time in Marx’s Capital, see
Tombazos (2014).
10. Regarding this, F. Jameson writes: ‘I gloss here a fundamental notion of
Adorno’s, namely, that what we think of as individuality in the West, and
what seems to us somehow to trace the outlines of an essential human
nature, is little more than the marks and scars, the violent compressions,
resulting from the interiorization by so-called civilized human beings of
that instinct for self-preservation without which, in this fallen society or
history, we would all be destroyed as surely as those unfortunates who are
born without a tactile warning sense of hot and cold, or pain and pleasure,
in their secondary nervous systems’ (Jameson 2000: 92).
11. When the laborer is forced to sell his work force by the objective conditions
(possession, dispossession of the production media) of his existence, he is
already inscribed within labor as a social totality. The laborer does not sell
work but workforce, that is to say, ‘living labour’ or ‘purely subjective exis-
tence of labour’ (Marx 1971). Objectifying this ‘living labour’ is already
part of labor as an exploitation and dominio category, of labor in its dual
character. In such a way that objectified labor is presented as an alienated
and opposed to the laborer, as an antithesis between objectified labor and
living labor (Marx 1971: 261–262). It is to this to what we refer when we
talk about concept of living abstraction.
12. To analyze capitalist accumulation as a compression of time and social
spaces, see Harvey (1998).
13. Homogeneity is due to the tearing of the subject and the object (Adorno
1975).
14. Doubtlessly, theoretical exposition of this matter and its defense is found in
the brilliant essays of Georg Lukács (1969) History and class-consciousness.
15. We based this in Bolivar Echeverrías’s translation (2007) of Benjamin.
16. We consider that the image of progress as a storm that leaves debris after
debris exposed by Benjamin (2007: 29) in the Thesis IX on the Angel of
History is perfectly applicable to the revolutions of the twentieth century,
made in the name of progress. The image of the debris/ruin is fundamen-
tal to understand this process and its historical results.
17. Among the publications on autonomy, we can highlight the one coordi-
nated by B. Baronnet, M. Mora Bayo and R. Stahler-Sholk (2011).
18. In Gunn’s (2015) argumentation, ‘mutual recognition’ is Hegel’s most
radical concept in Phenomenology of the spirit, and it implies the dissolution
of the relations which imply the denial of the other. This is, in the manner
of ‘mutual recognition’ we can read communism.
19. ‘Two decades ago, the EZLN was organization, referent and authority in
the indigenous communities. Today it is them who govern us and we are
the ones who obey. Before we used to govern and order them, now our job
18  ZAPATISTA AUTONOMY: THE INVENTION OF TIME AS A DISCONTINUITY…  337

is to find a way to support their decisions. Before we used to go in front,

directing the way and destiny. Today we go at the back of our peoples,
sometimes running behind them trying to follow their pace’
(Subcomandante insurgente Galeano 2017).
20. On the subject, see the testimonies of Zapatista women in EZLN (2015).

References
Adorno, T. (1975). Dialéctica negativa. Madrid: Taurus. In English. Retrieved
from https://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/theodor-adorno-neg-
ative-dialectics.pdf.
Baronnet, B., Mora Bayo, M., & Stanhler-Sholk, R. (2011). Luchas “muy otras”.
Zapatismo y autonomía en las comunidades indígenas de Chiapas, Universidad
Autónoma Metropolitana, Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas, México, Centro
de Investigaciones y Estudios Superioresen Antropología Social (CIESAS).
Baschet, J. (2015). Adiós al capitalismo. Autonomía, sociedad del buen vivir y mul-
tiplicidad de mundos. Madrid: Ned Ediciones.
Benjamin, W. (2007). Sobre el concepto de historia. Tesis y fragmentos. Buenos Aires:
Piedras de Papel. In English. Retrieved from http://www.afoiceeomartelo.
com.br/posfsa/Autores/Benjamin,%20Walter/BENJAMIN,%20Walter%20
-%20On%20the%20Concept%20of%20History.pdf.
Bonefeld, W. (2013). El Estado y el capital: sobre la crítica de lo político. In
W.  Bonefeld (Ed.), La razón corrosiva. Una crítica al Estado y al capital.
Herramienta Ediciones: Buenos Aires.
Buck-Morss, S. (2004). Mundo soñado y catástrofe. La desaparición de la utopía de
masas en el Este y el Oeste. Madrid: La Balsa de la Medusa. In English. Retrieved
from https://monoskop.org/images/a/ae/BuckMorss_Susan_Dreamworld_
and_Catastrophe_The_Passing_of_Mass_Utopia_in_East_and_West.pdf.
EZLN. (2015). El pensamiento crítico frente a la hidra capitalista I. Participación
de la Comisión Sexta del EZLN, México.
Gunn, R. (2005). En contra del materialismo histórico: el marxismo como un
discurso de primer orden. In A.  Bonnet, J.  Holloway, & S.  Tischler (Eds.),
Marxismo abierto. Una versión europea y latinoamericana V. 1. Buenos Aires:
Ediciones Herramienta/Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. In English.
Retrieved from https://libcom.org/files/Bonefeld,%20Gunn%20and%20
Psychopedis%20-%20Open%20Marxism%20-%20Volume%202%20-%20
Theory%20and%20Practice.pdf.
Gunn, R. (2015). Lo que usted siempre quiso saber sobre Hegel y no se atrevió a pre-
guntar. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Herramienta/Benemérita Universidad
Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP).
Harvey, D. (1998). La condición de la posmodernidad. Investigación sobre los orí-
genes del cambio cultural. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores.
Holloway, J. (2002). Cambiar el mundo sin tomar el poder. El significado de la revo-
lución hoy. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Herramienta/Universidad Autónoma de
338  S. TISCHLER

Puebla. In English. Retrieved from https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/

uploads/readings/Holloway_Change_the_World.pdf.
Holloway, J. (2011). Agrietar el capitalismo. El hacer contra el trabajo. Buenos
Aires: Herramienta Ediciones/Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla
(BUAP). In English. Retrieved from https://libcom.org/files/Holloway%20
-%20Crack%20Capitalism.pdf.
Jameson, F. (2000). Utopía, modernismo y muerte. In F.  Jameson (Ed.), Las
semillas del tiempo. Madrid: Editorial Trotta.
Lukács, G. (1969). Historia y consciencia de clase. Estudios de dialéctica marxista.
México: Editorial Grijalbo.
Luxemburg, R. (1977). Problemas de organización de la Socialdemocracia rusa.
In R. Luxemburg (Ed.), Escritos políticos. Barcelona: Editorial Grijalbo.
Marx, K. (1971). Elementos fundamentales para la crítica de la economía política
(Grundrisse) 1857–1858 (Vol. 1). México: Siglo XXI Editores. In English.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/.
Marx, K. (1975). El Capital (Tomo I/Vol. 1). México: Siglo XXI Editores. In
English. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/
download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf.
Postone, Moishe. (2006). Tiempo, trabajo y dominación social. Una reinterpretación
de la teoriá crítica de Marx. Madrid: Marcial Pons.
Sohn Rethel, A. (2001). Trabajo manual y trabajo intelectual. Barcelona: El
Viejo Topo.
Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano. (2017). Lecciones de Geografía y Calendarios
Globalizados, 14 April 2017, Resource document. Retrieved June 15, 2018, from
http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2017/04/14/lecciones-de-geografia-
y-calendarios-globalizados/.
Thompson, E. P. (1979). Tradición, revuelta y consciencia de clase. Estudios sobre la
crisis de la sociedad preindustrial. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica.
Tischler, S. (2013). Revolución y destotalización. México: Editorial Grietas.
Tombazos, S. (2014). Time in Marx. The Categories of Time in Marx´s Capital.
Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Zinn, H. (1999). La otra historia de los Estados Unidos. México: Siglo XXI Ediciones.