This is an extended version of a critique of the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel that we posted a few days ago. Sohn-Rethel's book (Intellectual and Manual Labour) can be found here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/89422152/Sohn-Rethel-Intellectual-and-Manual-Labour
http://www.scribd.com/doc/89422152/Sohn-Rethel-Intellectual-and-Manual-Labour
1.
As
Marxists we were brought up to think that of all the contradictions inherent in
capitalism the one between the ever-increasing social dimension of social
production and private appropriation is the most fundamental. It expresses the
historical trend of the capitalist mode of production and asserts its transient
character. This teaching has gained enhanced relevance in monopoly capitalism.
With the introduction of flow production the social dimension assumed a
specific structural form of its own and henceforth increased in a conclusive
manner reaching in our days the size of the giant multi-national corporations….
[This] discrepancy creates problems which tend to exceed the controlling power
of private capital and requires supplementation by the social resources and
power of the State, (A. Sohn-Rethel, ‘I&M L’, pp.178-9).
As we saw in
our earlier critique of Habermas, classical Marxism reprises the “idealist
objectivism” of Hegel by emphasizing the dialectical
contradiction between the “instrumental” development of the forces of production and the
“interactive” backwardness of existing capitalist
social relations of production. It is this contra-diction between the
“objective” possibilities of human emancipation from capitalist “appropriation
of surplus value” and the “subjective” or voluntarist
imposition of obsolete capitalist
social relations that, in the eyes of classical Marxism, determines the crisis of capitalism. Yet even the mere
re-statement of this theory – that is, the “discrepancy” between the possibility of emancipation and the
obsolescence of capitalist categories of private appropriation – evinces its
implicit logical contra-diction: -
because it is impossible to see how the “objective” development of “forces” of
production can ever give rise to claims of “emancipation” that can clash
against “subjective” legal and social relations! Emancipation is a political
notion that is categorically different from
the kind of “social dimension of social production…that exceeds the controlling
power of private capital”. The very fact that “private capital” has always
exerted a “controlling power” over social production means that “social
production” cannot be distinguished from the “controlling power” that “private
capital” exerts over it! Consequently, it is impossible to distinguish, as
Sohn-Rethel attempts to do here, between the “social dimension of social
production” and the “private appropriation” of production by capitalists – as
if the first could be objectively
determined and the second were a mere subjective
appendage or appurtenance. Quite simply, Sohn-Rethel fails to see – as did
Marx who tended to relegate the State to the sphere of “superstructure” – that
capitalist society was never in a “competitive” stage that did not “require supplementation by the social
resources and power of the State” – for
the simple reason that the political coercion of State institutions, in their
various State-forms since the rise of
capitalism, has been essential to the reproduction and expansion of the wage
relation. To imagine that capitalism (the wage relation) would have been
possible without the political violence of the collective capitalist, the
State-form, is to indulge in sheer fantasy.
The Marxian
distinction between base and superstructure therefore has no basis in
reality because the wage relation, and not the commodity form or the law of
value, is what is at the centre of capitalist social relations of production,
and what makes these irreducibly antagonistic.
The reality of crisis is endemic to
the capitalist wage relation because the definition of capital is precisely the
command of the capitalist by means of dead objectified labor over living labor.
If we wish to understand what “reification” means we need not delve into the
foggy notions of “commodity fetishism” or of “crystallized labor time”, but
rather peer into the simple, naked violence that capitalists perpetrate against
workers through the coercion of wage labor.
The wage
relation, which occupied at first only a limited sphere within post-feudal
mercantilist societies, eventually became generalized to the extent that
capital became the predominant force until it transformed the societies within
which it originated into its own shape and form – into societies of capital. No “automatism”, then; no “self-regulating
market economy”; no “competitive capitalism” that is replaced eventually by
“monopoly capitalism”. Indeed, once we entertain the notion of a competitive capitalism, it becomes quite
simply impossible for us ever to be able to reach – both logically and
historically – the stage of monopoly capitalism
– again for the simple reason that the two notions are aporetic, contradictory in a practical historical sense. For it is
just as impossible for “competition” to subsist without turning into “monopoly”
as it is for “monopoly” to make any sense at all without the reality of competition! (Schumpeter, in CS&D, brilliantly captures this
point when he observes that even the strictest monopoly in capitalism lives in
fear for its life! One may also recall Schumpeter’s quip at those clever
economists who objected that “monopolies are in breach of the law of
competition” that in fact it is the law of competition that runs foul of monopolies!)
The upshot of
what we are arguing here is that “competition” and, by extension, “monopoly”
are meaningless concepts because once we look at capitalist “market
competition” we discover that it is dependent solely on the ability of capitalists to secure the command of dead
labor over living labor by means of the “exchange” of the two, as if living labor could be “objectified”
like dead labor! Sohn-Rethel is able to see the second point, the incommensurability of dead and living
labor, but he is unable to extend this point – as logically it must – to the impossibility of defining objectively
a specific form of quantitative
co-ordination of an “economy”, whether capitalist or other. Here is
Sohn-Rethel:
Thus the
commensuration of labor demanded by way of a ‘law of nature’ [Marx] for any
human society, presupposes a quantification of labor of different kinds or by
different individuals. And the fact is
that labour, as it occurs in society, is not itself quantifiable. It is not
directly quantifiable in terms of needs, nor needs in terms of labour, neither
is labour quantifiable in terms of labor time unless the labour were identical
in kind or the actual differences material or personal were disregarded.
Therefore to satisfy ‘the law of nature’ stated by Marx thereby making human
society possible, systems of social economy are needed to operate a
commensuration of labour based on a quantification of labour….
A most significant difference in
the modes of commensuration of labour rests upon whether it is brought about
indirectly by the exchange process, or directly by the labour process. (I&ML, p.168)
The logical contra-diction in Sohn-Rethel’s
argument is almost too obvious: in one and the same breath he claims in the
passage above that “the commensuration of labour presupposes the quantification
of labour of different kinds” and that “labour [whatever that is!] in society
is not itself quantifiable” – and so far he is entirely right. But then, contrary
to this correct assertion, he immediately adds that “the commensuration of
labour is what makes human society
possible” and that this “can be brought about indirectly by the exchange process or directly by the labour process”.
Now, we may
certainly agree with Sohn-Rethel that the labour process is what constitutes the social synthesis, if it
is understood in the broader sense of both the “technical” element as well as
its “reflexive” (or decision-making) component, which is what Habermas was
aiming at earlier (see our posts on him) and which we criticized for is artificial separation of these two
elements which for us are instead absolutely indivisible. For us, for the
society that we intend to substitute to capitalism, the technical labour
process and the decision-making process
that goes with it cannot be separated either intellectually or indeed
politically, so that the socialist society of the future will have to
re-establish the control of workers over their working activity – something
that capitalism separated violently.
But we cannot
agree with Sohn-Rethel or with Marx or with the vast majority of Marxists who
have fallen into the trap of believing (with Classical and Neoclassical
Political Economy!) that “the exchange process” or “the market mechanism” is
what brings about the social synthesis or “social co-ordination” – because, as
we have argued here repeatedly, no “social co-ordination” is possible under
capitalist industry without the direct
intervention and regulation of the capitalist economy by the collective
capitalist, the State-form, which has now become “the Crisis-State”.
2.
It is this “anti-nomy” that Nietzsche tackles and denies
most vigourously – this oxy-moronic concept of “necessary pre-supposition” of a
“free individuality” – whence comes Kant’s transcendental (necessary or
“intelligible”, required by Reason)
idealism (freedom of the will). Here we have a “cognition”, the very act of
knowing – the actus cognoscendi –
that forms the foundation of the ultimate Subject, the Will: cogito ergo sum. In other words, it is
Reason, the Ratio, that in its very “reasoning” requires an “ordering”, its
Logos, the Word, essence become existence, the unity of Being and beings. This
is the meaning of Kant’s “transcendental dialectic”. Equally, the Hobbesian
decision achieves its “value-lessness” purely in extremis, in point of death,
under “dire” necessity – and yet this necessity has no “organic”, historical or
physiological or ontological nexus with the “freedom”, the Freiheit of the
forum internum. Nietzsche instead firmly insists on “im-manence”, on the
“physio-logical” or material foundation and origin (fons et origo) of our
“cognition”, of knowledge as a living
activity – vivo ergo cogito!
Because Nietzsche sees life and the world within the horizon of time and place
– the hic et nunc – whereby “everything” happens here and now, the being of
beings can be understood only within this “extra-temporal” and “extra-mundane”
horizon of time and place – not (!) as an “object”, as a “sub-stratum” or
“essence” that can be “known”, “explored”, “de-fined”, even “measured”, but
rather as an intrinsic, constant becoming
– the “gi-gnomai” that turns into “gi-gnosco” (knowledge as “recognition”), and
therefore “gnosis” or “science” (scire) and into “noesis” (meaning), then into
“dia-noia” (in-tention, project) and finally “dynamai” (power). [Nietzschebuch,
Pt.2, p.34]
The
above quotation from our ‘Nietzschebuch’ is meant to highlight the dif-ference
between our approach to the question of “abstract labour”, which follows
closely on Nietzsche’s critique of Western prima
philosophia, and that taken by Sohn-Rethel. Specifically, and in essence,
the dif-ference concerns the fact that for us the “abstraction” of living
labour does not originate in the “distinction” or “division” of intellectual and manual labour, but rather in the “substantive practical” reason for
this distinction – that is, the command of
living labour by dead labour. Sohn-Rethel has mis-taken the reality of command (the Hobbesian “Power” that lies
behind “possession” and its “proprietary individuality”) and the simple
“formal” distinction between what may be perceived as “intellectual” and what
may be perceived as “manual” labour. To illustrate the mis-apprehension under
which Sohn-Rethel labors, let us quote him directly:
If the contradiction between the real abstraction in Marx
and the thought abstraction in the theory of knowledge is not brought to any
critical confrontation, one must acquiesce with the total lack of connection
between the scientific form of thought and the historical social process.
Mental and manual labour must remain divided. This means however that one must
also acquiesce with the persistence of social class division, even if this
assumes the form of socialist bureaucratic rule,” (I&ML, p.21).
There
are a few obvious non sequiturs in Sohn-Rethel’s reasoning here that leap
immediately to our attention. The first is that he assumes that the elimination
of the division between intellectual and manual labour is indispensable to the
formation of a classless society. Yet we all realize immediately that such a
pre-requisite is simply unattainable for the obvious reason that it is
impossible to distinguish between intellectual and manual labour in all but
perhaps the most extreme cases. All “intellectual” activity involves some
“manual” aspects and vice versa: the distinction is well-nigh impossible to draw.
Worse still, Sohn-Rethel is putting the cart before the horse by identifying
all “intellectual labour” with “commanding activity” and all “manual labour”
with “subaltern or commanded activity”. Neither of these propositions is valid.
Furthermore,
Sohn-Rethel is assuming, in line with Marx’s position, that there actually,
really exists such a thing as a “real abstraction” of human social labour in
such a manner that capitalists can achieve “the social synthesis” – that is,
the effective operation of market commodity exchange or the rule of “exchange
value” – through the “commodification” of human living labour. Again, just as
we showed earlier in our discussion of Habermas and Lukacs that no such
“necessary illusion” like “the fetishism of commodities” is possible, again we
must argue against Sohn-Rethel that “abstract labour”, its “monetization” or
exchange for dead labour and money, is purely, merely and simply the product,
the fruit, the result of nothing other than capitalist violence and nothing else!
In other words, there is and there cannot be anything like a “value” that is
“exchanged” in a capitalist economy through the operation of “the market” or
any other “competitive device”! Capitalism consists quite simply in the violent
“reduction” of living labour to an “exchange” with dead labour that is the
product, not of “the market” or of “competition”, but rather of sheer violence
organized and enforced institutionally. The idea that Marx and his followers to
date have formed – similar to the delusions of bourgeois economists whether
classical or neoclassical or Keynesian – that the capitalist economy operates
independently of direct political command on the part of specific institutions,
or that it operates “automatically” or, as Sohn-Rethel puts it citing from
Marx, “behind the backs of human beings” (p.20: “They do this without being
aware of it”) is a complete and utter fabrication! No such magic Eskamotage is
possible!
Indeed,
the very notion of “crisis” that we have sought to present in nearly all of our
work consists in the fact that the capitalist economy and society can never
operate “automatically”, in monetary or in any other terms, except for the fact
that the money wage constitutes the ultimate institutional “measure” of social
antagonism because it indicates how “available” or “willing” are workers to sell their living labour in exchange
for (!) the pro-ducts of social labour that are owned by capitalists and for
which they pay the workers in money wages. Quite clearly, it is simply impossible
for this “exchange” to have any “real basis” whatsoever except as violence, as
sheer coercion through the various “institutions” of capitalist society. And
therefore it is impossible for this “exchange” to form the basis of that
“social synthesis” that Marx and all Marxists to date have believed takes place
through “the market mechanism” (“self-regulating” for bourgeois economists and
“crisis-prone” for socialist “economists”, Keynes included).
Interestingly,
Sohn-Rethel himself seems to have his own misgivings about the Marxian notion
of “socially necessary labour time” as the basis of “the social synthesis” and
he does so after quoting a crucial passage from Marx:
“The
reason for this reduction [i.e. the social synthesis through the homologation
of “individual” labours] is that in the midst of the accidental and
ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour-time
socially necessary for their production asserts itself as a regulative law of
nature….The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore
a secret hidden under the apparent movements on the relative values of
commodities,” (at p.33).
Sensing
the non-sequitur involved in Marx’s reasoning – how can it follow that
“independent decisions” made by “independent producers” can ever, in a million
years, satisfy the requirements of a society? -, Sohn-Rethel objects to Marx:
“Surely
the exchange relations must have the formal ability to weave a web of social
coherence [!] among the mass of private individuals all acting independently of
one another [!] before, by the action of these exchange relations, their labour
spent on all the variety of products can be quantified proportionately to the
social needs,” (p.33).
Precisely,
Alfred! Except that “the formal ability of the exchange relations to weave a
web of social coherence” is not a
‘formal’ ability at all but is instead a ‘real’ and eminently ‘political’ one!
Instead
of realizing the im-possibility of this “formal ability”, Sohn-Rethel proceeds
to seek to prove the impossible!
“I
shall define the purely formal [!] capacity of the exchange abstraction and its
social function…This conviction of mine, that the ‘commodity form’, to use
Marx’s expression, can be analysed as a phenomenon of its own, in separation
from the economic issues, does mark a difference from the Marxian theory but
only in the sense that it adds to that theory. The formal analysis of the
commodity holds the key not only to the critique 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 that came into existence with
it,” (p.33).
In
other words, not only is Sohn-Rethel insisting on proving the impossible – that
is, that the social synthesis, the reproduction of capitalist society, can be
explained through the mere “form” of commodity exchange and its “real
abstraction” of social labour; but also
he pretends to be able to establish that this “real abstraction” which makes possible (just as Kant asked what makes
“knowledge” possible) the social synthesis is dependent on the division and
separation of intellectual from manual labour!
3.
In
light of our discussion of Nietzsche’s critique of epistemology quoted above,
let us now turn to how Sohn-Rethel seeks to set up this “confrontation” between
“real abstraction” and the critique of epistemology through the crucible of
commodity exchange. “The essence of commodity abstraction,” argues Sohn-Rethel,
“is that it is not thought-induced; it does not originate in men’s minds but in
their actions…. While the concepts of natural science are thought abstractions,
the economic concept of value is a real one. It exists nowhere but in the human
mind but it does not spring from it.” Yet, as Nietzsche showed conclusively
with his critique (see especially Part One of our ‘Nietzschebuch’, section on
‘Nietzsche’s Eristic Genealogy of Law and Political Economy’), this is quite
incorrect: in actual fact “the concepts of natural science” originate in the
actions of humans as much as “the economic concept of value”. Sohn-Rethel is
attempting to draw a line between “scientific concepts” that deal with a
“natural reality” and “economic concepts” that deal with “social reality”:
“[Economic value] is purely social in character, arising in the spatio-temporal
sphere of human inter-relations. It is not people who originate these
abstractions but their actions. ‘They do this without being aware of it.’”
(p.20).
In
other words, for Sohn-Rethel it is the very act of “exchange” between
human producers that leads to the “equiparation” of their individual activities
and there-fore to the “abstraction” of these individual activities into
“homogeneous labour” measurable by the category “value”. [Quote from Marx.] “[Commodities]
are equated by virtue of being exchanged,” claims Sohn-Rethel, “they are not
exchanged by virtue of any equality that they possess. In this way the
relationship between the exchanging persons…is expressed as equality between
these objects”. Individual workers know that their activities are materially
(spatio-temporally) incommensurable; but it is through the act of exchange that
these activities become “commensurable” without the awareness of the producers,
without their being aware of their performing this otherwise [!] impossible
task. We say “otherwise” because according to Sohn-Rethel and Marx this task of
“commensuration” or “equiparation” of human activities is “socially” possible –
through commodity exchange.
What
Sohn-Rethel is doing here is confusing simple “exchange” in the form of barter
or even gift (?) with the exchange of “commodities” which can take place only
in an inchoately formed capitalist system until it becomes generalized to the
entire reproduction of society as in advanced capitalism! But we say that this
task is impossible in any case! Because incommensurables cannot become
commensurable except through the “concerted” action of human beings, and not
through the mere act of “exchange by independent[!]
producers”! If “producers” were truly “independent”, then no amount of
“exchange” could ever be responsible or lead to the “commensuration” of their
“private individual labours”! It is only because there is no such thing as a
“private individual labour”, only because all human labour is part of “social
labour”, that the “social synthesis” is at all possible! Except that in
capitalism this synthesis occurs only on condition that producers are
“separated” from one another (from social labour) through their “separation”
from the means of production. The ‘Trennung’ therefore occasions two
separations for workers:- from the means of production first and consequently
from their collective activity, so that the productivity of social labour
appears as the property of the capitalist!
The
error that Sohn-Rethel has committed is to characterize all “exchange” as
commodity exchange! We can see yet again, then, that his insistence on the
“independence” of “commodity exchange”, despite his misgivings and reservations
on Marx’s “solution” to the problem by means of “socially necessary labour time”, leads to the hypostatization of social
labour and to the treatment of “commodity exchange” as an attribute of all (!)
“human inter-relations” rather than as a specific historical characteristic of
capitalism! Thus, the “real abstraction” becomes a “crystallization” of human
activity similar to the “forms” hypothesized in Georg Simmel’s neo-Kantian
social theory. Or indeed even in Nietzsche – except that the philosopher of
Rocken excoriated this as “the ontogeny of thought”, that is, as a fictitious
“con-vention” that serves to disguise the instincts of freedom, the Will to
Power, whereas Simmel treats these “forms” as ineluctable aspects of human
social existence. But so does Sohn-Rethel, because of his failure to indicate
correctly (!) how “exchange” arises historically – and thus incorrectly
attributing this to the division between intellectual and manual labour.
4.
As
we demonstrated earlier, the division of human activity into “intellectual” and
“manual” is quite simply untenable, for the evident reason that all human
activity involves both a “mental” and a “manual” element and to seek to
dichotomise it in the manner of Sohn-Rethel is palpably absurd. For
Sohn-Rethel, the coercive separation of intellectual from manual tasks is the
“real” source of the “abstraction” of concrete human labour – what Marx called
“real abstraction” which leads to the “commodification” of use values, that is,
their trans-formation into exchange values. At the intellectual level, however,
this very “separation” of mental and manual labours, this “real abstraction”,
engenders also the hypostatization and reification of the concepts of “natural
science” in the manner operated by Kant in his “critique” – which is why
Sohn-Rethel subtitles his work “Critique of Epistemology”: “Kant’s work does
not presuppose that it is in the nature of the human mind to perform its labour
in separation from manual labour, but it leads to that conclusion,” (p.36). At
p.34:
But I set out to argue that the abstraction operating in
exchange and reflected in value does nevertheless find an identical expression,
namely the ‘abstract intellect’, or the so-called ‘pure understanding’ – the
cognitive source of scientific knowledge.
And
again at p.57:
This real abstraction is the arsenal from which
intellectual labour throughout the eras of commodity exchange draws its
conceptual resources. It was the historical matrix of Greek philosophy and it
is still the matrix of the conceptual paradigms of science as we know it,
(p.57).
Quite
clearly, what Sohn-Rethel is attempting here is that unification of social and
natural science that Marx had prophesied but that he was unable to realize
because of his failure to supply “the critique of epistemology”:
The practical solipsism of commodity-exchanging owners is
nothing but the practice of private property as a basis of social relations.
And this is not by people’s choices but by the material necessity of the stage
of development of their productive forces – the umbilical cord that ties human
to natural history, (p.42).
The
problem with Sohn-Rethel’s account, however, is quite simply that “the abstract
intellect” is something that long pre-dates the arrival of “the exchange of
commodities” or indeed of “exchange value”. It is meaningless, for instance, to
speak of “commodity production” or exchange in Ancient Greece, because its
“commerce” was never based on “the real abstraction” of living labour. Even if
it were, however, the fact remains that “abstract labour” is not and cannot be
the result, the outcome of “exchange” unless and until that “exchange” has
become so “generalized” that it affects all aspects of the reproduction of a
society – which was certainly not the case in Ancient Greece. In any case, it is impossible at least for
Antiquity to distinguish between “simple exchange” and “commodity exchange” –
with the consequence that Sohn-Rethel runs the real risk of hypostatizing all
forms of human “exchange” as “the exchange of commodities”. And finally, why
does “exchange” have to lead to “the abstraction of labour” and why does this “real abstraction” have to
be the result of the distinction between “intellectual/mental” and “manual”
labour? Is it not better, instead, to follow Hegel (as did Marx) and focus
instead on the command of living
labour by some human beings either through sheer violence (as in slavery) or
through the (impossible) “exchange” (in fact a dif-ferent form of violence) with dead labour?