The task of the capitalist is to accumulate capital, which can be done
only through “the theft of labour time” from the worker - which, in turn, can be
achieved only through the forced separation (Trennung) of the worker
from his entitlement to the means of production and to the product. But the
separation of the worker from his objectified labour – this alienation in the
double sense, of the worker from his work, and of the worker’s product by the
capitalist – leads to the intensification and homogenization of the labour
process to the point where there can be an “exact calculation” of the labour
time and therefore of the value produced for the capitalist. When generalized
to most social interactions, this alienation leads to the widespread
mis-perception of living labour’s temporal experience into labour power as a
spatialized quantifiable entity.
This is the reification that Lukacs denounces: it is this universal
distancing of human beings in the objectification of their living activity, in
their work, from the process and the product of their work – this reduction of
concrete labour to abstract labour removes the activity of the worker to mere
contemplation, to his abstraction (separation and removal) from his living
activity. Deprived of their intimate connection with the object of their living
labour, human beings are drawn, are encircled by and imprisoned, within their
“subjectivity” whereby the “object” is not only separated from them in a
sensuous dimension, but also becomes utterly in-com-prehensible,
un-graspable by them as a separate reality “standing against” them. The tragedy
of Western philosophy is encompassed by and encapsulated within this simple and
devastating insight. The ubiquitous transcendentalism and idealism of Western
philosophy – its fatidic chorismos from Plato to Kant - is all here. For
Lukacs, it is the separation of human living labour, living activity, from the
object of this activity that is the real historical source of the “dilemma…of
bourgeois rationalism”:
This dilemma can be seen most clearly in
the strange significance for Kant’s system of his concept of the
thing-in-itself…[According to Kant] “the sensuous faculty of intuition…is in
reality only a receptive quality…The non-sensuous cause of these ideas
[received by intuition] is wholly unknown to us and we are therefore unable to
intuit it as an object”…[Thus, t]here is, firstly, the problem of matter…and
there is secondly the problem of totality and the ultimate substance of
knowledge…(p.115)
If, indeed, the object of our knowledge is impenetrable and inscrutable –
if it is a qualitas occulta (Schopenhauer), a thing in itself, incapable
of being known to us except as “mere appearance” – then it is clear that “we”,
the Subject, will never be able to reconcile rationally these appearances in a “totality”
that can unifythe various branches of science as “substantial knowledge”, as
properly-called science rather than mere opinion or empeiria (empiricism).
Through this “separation” of human intuition from the real source of the ideas
that constitute our knowledge, Kant makes human knowledge entirely
static or “immediate”, and thereby also stultifies its undeniably historical-metabolic
character born of the real human interaction with the “object”, with the
life-world.
We know that in the Critique of Pure Reason
it is emphatically denied that [questions concerning the totality of knowledge]
can be answered…[and Kant even suggests in the Transcendental Dialectic that]
they are falsely put, and [seeks] to eliminate them from science. (p.115)
It is this transcendental schism in human knowledge between purely
subjective human science and the absolute knowledge that only the penetration
of the thing-in-itself could afford us that led to Schopenhauer’s trenchant
critique of the separation between thing-in-itself and “mere appearances”.
Schopenhauer demolishes Kant’s crucial distinction of the two, of noumena and
phenomena, by pitilessly exposing the futility of the “thing-in-itself”. If
indeed such a “thing” existed, the very fact that it is wholly unknowable and
imperceptible to us means that it is utterly redundant! In reality, given that
human knowledge is necessarily based entirely on “mere appearances”, then there
is no need to distinguish these “appearances” – which Schopenhauer calls now “representations”
(Vorstellungen) - from the entirety of our “reality”! It is the appearances –
the representations -, not the unknowable “Thing”, that are our reality! Full
stop! In other words, there is no separation between Subject and Object because
human beings are the Subject-Object of the world. Clear is the debt, then, that
Lukacs’s critique of “the antinomies of bourgeois thought” - which he
exemplifies with Kant’s idealism – owes to the author of The World as Will
and Representation. Even more important, Lukacs inherited from Schopenhauer
the notion of “individual subject-object of history” which, to his mind, was
embodied by the proletariat as the true carrier (Trager) of that historical Marxian-Hegelian
Totalitat that alone could ultimately lead to the abolition of the
Trennung – of the separation of living labour from its object – and to the abolition
of alienation and reification and therefore to the complete emancipation of
humanity.
**********
There are a few conclusions to be drawn from our critical analysis of
the Lukacsian notion of reification. First of all, reification is a purely
socio-psychological phenomenon that cannot give rise to any form of
“measurement” in economic terms, that is, in terms of the quantification of
human living labour. Second, the only quantification possible for human living
labour is as “labour-power”, as a marketable commodity that can be given a
purely monetary measurement (a price) on the labour market – where
market is understood not as an objective self-regulating mechanism but
as a specific political institution based on political coercion.
Third, as Weber himself establishes in the very locus quoted by Lukacs (the
lecture Politik als Beruf ), the separation of worker from means of
production is almost a constant in history in all areas of social activity; it
is not specific to capitalism; it is not its discrimen or differentia
specifica. Fourth, the mere fact that workers produce products by means of
their living labour does not in the least establish (a) that they create
the product, and least of all (b) that the product belongs to them or
that the capitalist employers engage in “theft of labour time” (Marx).
We have established in our Schumpeter-buch
that Marx never took account of the environmental effects of capitalist
industry, in part because he presumed that environmental inputs (water, air
quality, for instance) were so plentiful as to have no exchange value (although
they certainly had use value for all classical political economists). All
economic theories of value and of development have either taken the metabolism
of human production with the environment as being exogenous to economic
theories, or else they have made allowances for environmental degradation as
“externalities” (Alec Pigou, The Economics of Welfare) notably in
neoclassical economic theory – that is, as costs that are “external” to
economic theory and therefore irrelevant to it. For all foregoing
economic theory, classical and neoclassical, economics concerns exchanges
between human beings inter se (between or amongst themselves); it is
entirely irrelevant to the phylogenetic interaction of humanity as a species with
its environment. Our book on Schumpeter sought to establish instead that human
interaction with the environment is metabolic and is therefore essential
to the economic analysis of human productive activity.
Yet another aspect of Marx’s critique that contained an insurmountable
contradiction concerned the very notion of “exploitation”. In Marx, this notion
is tied to the difference between the surplus value produced by
workers and the value of the labour-power “embodied” in the goods paid to
workers as real wages – both of which are determined by “the socially
necessary labour time” needed for the reproduction of capitalist society which,
in turn, is determined by the technological level of the society. Of course,
quite apart from the fact that (as we saw earlier) it is impossible to
determine what “socially necessary labour time” is, this surplus value for Marx
is the entire substance of capitalist “profits” (in other words, profits are
the monetary expression of surplus value), and thus the
difference between surplus value and the value embodied in commodities produced
represents the “theft of labour time” that is the basis of capitalist profits
and accumulation.
The evident contradiction in this proposition lies in the fact that,
given that for Marx, as for Rousseau and Proudhon, all property is theft
(see, among other works, his The Poverty of Philosophy ), the notion of
exploitation has no possible relation to the factual or scientific finding that
workers receive in wages less than what they produce. Even if we were to
concede the validity of Marx’s propositions and analysis, there is no intrinsic
connection between the notion of “theft”, which is a legal notion, and
therefore of “exploitation”, and the difference between surplus value
and the value paid in wages to workers which is a quantitative notion.
The insuperable difficulty with Marx’s critique of capitalism lies precisely in
this – that Marx saw his theory both as a politico-ethical or practical
critique and as a scientific analysis based on objective value-neutral
findings. To put it in his own words, Marx sought to judge the economic base on
which the legal, political and ideological superstructure depended – on the basis
of this very “superstructure” that could be the only source of any “judgement”
whatsoever!
This could be possible only on the ground of a “scientific”
inconsistency between the scientific foundations of the forces of production
and the politico-ethical nature of the social relations of production.
Yet, even assuming that such an inconsistency or “contradiction” exists, it is
still impossible to judge the “social relations of production” or superstructure
on the ground that it is doomed to be superseded by “the forces of production”
or economic base – because then this entire “supersession” would imply
an ethical value judgement based on the teleological (Hegel) and historical or
biological (Darwinian) “inevitability”
of the development of the forces of production! But an “inevitable” process, eo
ipso, by its very “scientific necessity”, negates the very value-based
assessment of its “inevitability”! “Inevitability” is a value judgement – a
prediction, a prophecy - that contradicts our “consciousness” or “awareness” of
it because no human being is capable of foretelling the future as a “destiny”.
And if indeed there could be any absolute certainty about such a destiny, not
only would any moral judgement in its regard be superfluous and irrelevant, but
also and above all else we could have no “awareness” or “knowledge” of it!
Awareness and knowledge necessarily imply not just contingency and possibility,
but also, as reflection and conscience (con-scientia), also the
possibility of averting what would be otherwise an inexorable fate. The notion
of destiny is incompatible with the aleatory character of human action, of
human history.
It follows quite demonstrably that Marx’s entire dissection of human
social history into a dialectical interaction between economic base and political
superstructure amounts to nothing more than an eschatology. Essentially,
as a true post-Hegelian and fervent admirer of Darwin (to whom he intended to
dedicate Das Kapital), Marx wished to turn history (Ge-schichte)
into destiny (Schick-sal). But destiny, unlike history, does not
allow for value judgements. Nor does it allow for free will. Marx suggests that
“men make history, but not through their will” (in the famous “Preface to A
Contribution”). This may be valid for individuals, - because they are
constrained by society (coercion) and by the environment (necessity); but it
cannot be true for society as a whole where coercion itself is a political
constraint, and therefore open to our collective will (cf. Rousseau’s volonte’
generale), and necessity is only an external, extrinsic constraint on the
will that in no guise can be said to negate its freedom to initiate action. Once
again, as we established earlier (following Hannah Arendt) the opposite of
freedom is coercion, not necessity. In the event, Marx managed only to dress up
a moral condemnation of capitalism as a scientifically inevitable evolution. Of
course, Schopenhauer’s absurd suggestion (in On the Freedom of the Will,
seconded by Spinoza in the Tractatus, and recently re-affirmed by
Cacciari) that even our will is not free because we cannot be certain that our
“choices” are not the effect of prior causes is just a pitiful false infinite
(an argumentum ad infinitum).
If we accept the conclusions arising from our foregoing study, what do
they comport for the understanding and critique of capitalist industry and
society? Put bluntly, if we accept these conclusions which undermine much of
the Marxian critique of capitalism, what then can we say is “wrong” with
capitalism and how can we say it? In other words, why should we discard this
system and with what may we hope to replace it?
The first overall determination we may make from the set of conclusions
outlined above is that we cannot adopt Marx’s theory of exploitation, from a
material point of view, or that of reification, from a socio-psychological one,
as the ultimate bases for our critique of capitalism. This is so for the
overriding reason that Marx’s theory of exploitation – the difference between
“surplus value” and “real wages” or between profits and money wages – is
unfounded because it is quite impossible, categorically impossible, to
determine what is “socially necessary labour time” without going into a definition
of human needs. But any definition of human needs, as Marx himself
averred (notably in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
) must involve – by definition! - social and cultural elements that are
“materially” impossible to determine quantitatively in terms of “labour time”,
that is, the time needed to produce the goods needed to satisfy those needs
even allowing for an accepted fixed technological level of production. Once
this is accepted, and given that there is no strict unique or necessary
link between (a) reification and capitalist production and, (b) reification as
a social and cultural phenomenon and material production of goods – given these
premises, neither the Marxian theory of exploitation nor that of reification
offer sufficient foundations for the phylogenetic critique of
capitalism (at the level of the human species) - although they are necessary
for its ontogenetic critique (at the individual level).
Where, then, should we look for these foundations of a critique of
capitalist industry and society? It is obvious that we can no longer rely solely
on the notion of exploitation because, first, this is confined to workers taken
as individuals - or, even if taken as a class (the working class or the
proletariat), as an entity whose exploitation can be quantified in individual
terms, or worse still as an entity that is extremely hard to define in any
precise sociological terms. Indeed, it is possible to argue that in a
capitalist society even capitalists are workers (managers and entrepreneurs,
for instance, excluding financiers and rentiers) and even workers can be
capitalists (as shareholders or small business owners). Because Marx’s critique
of capitalism is founded almost exclusively either on the “injustice” of
distribution of production (of “wealth” or “income”) and on the psychological
effects of alienation, it fails to address the phylogenetic impact of human
interaction with the environment, our metabolism with nature itself. As we
argued above, the notion of exploitation is strictly a moral one because it is
based on the premise of equal exchange or equal deserts – what are known
otherwise as commutative and distributive justice. Furthermore, as we also
argued earlier, we cannot rely on the notions of alienation and reification
because these are sociological descriptions that are not unique to capitalism
and that have psychological and cultural aspects that are impossible to
attribute to a particular system of production.
What is needed for the critique of capitalism, then, is first a theory
that identifies the specific difference, the essential characteristics of
capitalist production that distinguish it from other modes of production; and
second, a demonstration of how the specific essence of capitalism entails and
engenders the destruction of the environment, which is to say the
unsustainability of human social reproduction on earth. The merit of this novel
way of assessing capitalism is that it is no longer based on commutative and
distributive justice – equal exchange and equitable distribution of human
production – but rather on human interests – on the needs of being human, the
highest of which must be the sustainable reproduction of society. (On the
matter of human needs and interests, see J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human
Interests, and A. Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx.)
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