Karl Carlile
An Examination of Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)
Notwithstanding the positive developments featuring in the EPM in its inchoate critique of classical political economy Marx had still a long way to go in his development of that critique and the accompanying materialist conception of history In the following chapter this is clearly demonstrated. It is only by highlighting both the positive and negative features of the EPM that it can be put in context in terms both of Marx’s theoretical and political development.
Productive Forces
At the time of writing Capital Karl Marx had well established the concept of the productive forces and their role in determining social development. Even as far back as 1846 the theory of historical materialism had been distinctly formulated as is illustrated in the following excerpt:
The productive forces are therefore the result of practically applied human energy; but this energy is itself conditioned by the circumstances in which men find themselves, by the productive forces already acquired, by the social forms which exists before they exist, which they do not create, which is the product of the proceeding generation. Because of this simple fact that every succeeding finds itself in possession of the productive forces acquired by the previous generation, and that they serve it as the raw material for new production, a coherence arises in human history, a history of humanity takes shape which becomes all the more a history of humanity the more the productive forces of man and therefore their social relations develop. Hence it necessarily follows that the social history of men is always the history of their individual development, whether they-are conscious of it or not. Their material relations are the basis of all their relations. These material relations are only the necessary forms in which their material and individual activity are realized.
The above passage makes clear that even then the primacy of the productive forces had been definitely established. By productive forces Marx means the instruments of production, raw materials and labour power. The concept of the forces of production aptly summarizes these individual forms. But it is also a conceptual expression of the basic unity that these individual components shared: through the material activity of labour mutually necessary relations are established between them. The significant absence of the concept of the productive forces from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts clearly demonstrates, besides else, failure to comprehend the essential unity that exists between the instruments of production and labour power: that necessary material action. Since the productive forces determine both the material production process and the valorization process that produces the specific social relations of production (bourgeois production relations), the manuscripts must fail to adequately consider the social relations particularly with reference to their origin, development and limitations. Consequently underscoring the manuscripts are presuppositions which prescind from a correct and comprehensive conceptualisation of the character of the bourgeois system of production.
Marx informs us that:
An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the worker interposes between himself and the object of his labour and which serves as a conductor, directing his activity onto that object..2
Clearly then, the specific character of labouring activity is shaped by the specific nature of the instruments. "The productive forces," Marx remarks, "are therefore the result of practically applied energy; but the energy is itself conditioned by the circumstances in which men find themselves by the productive forces already acquired..."3 He also informs us that "instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but they also indicate the social relation within which men work."4 But this specific human material activity shapes the character of the productive forces. Clearly then there exists a mutual conditioning of both labour and the productive forces in the context of the overall progression of the labour process. Despite this mutuality, it still stands that labouring activity constitutes the basis underlying the productive force's progression. This is why Marx remarked that the "productive forces are therefore the result of practically applied human energy."5 Motion (human material motion) is fundamental, in this context, to the individual constituents and their corresponding material relations that, as a totality, form the labour process. There cannot be a labour process without labour!
Contrary to what the EPM suggests, there can be no, Feuerbach like, immediate relation between men and 'nature.' Indeed, in them, no consideration is given to the forces of production and the corresponding production relations. Instead we are subjected to a simplistic and confused discussion of the hypothetical non-mediated relation between man and nature. The production of objects through labour is naively presented as a simple anthropological exercise:
The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material in which his labour realizes itself, in which it is active and from which and by means of which it produces.6
The natural relation between man and nature is, by no means, immediate. This metabolism between man and nature is regulated and controlled by labour which is a process between man and nature:7
Labour is first of all a process between man and ,nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature."
And Marx informs us that:
The simple elements of the 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.'9
And since, too:
An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the worker interposes between himself and the object of his labour and which serves as a conductor directing his activity onto that object. He makes use of the mechanical, physical and chemical properties of some substance in order to set them to work on other substances as instruments of his power and in accordance with his purposes.10
It follows, therefore, that the Feuerbachian concept of an immediate anthropological relation between man and nature is an humanist illusion. Labour is a process that regulates this "natural relation" which means that "purposeful activity" performed on nature is mediated by the instruments of that work. It is also mediated by the material production relations. As Marx correctly remarks:
The material relations are the basis of all their relations. These material relations are only the necessary forms in which their material and individual activity is realized."
Furthermore the metabolism between men and nature is mediated by social relations of production. And this I discuss under the next heading.
Social Relations of Production
Under the capitalist system of production men's material activity on nature is inextricably bound up with men's social activity. These two forms of activity are inseparably connected in the form of a contradictory unity." Just as the commodity itself is a unity formed of use-values and value, so the process of production must be a unity, composed of the labour process and the process of creating value [Wertbildungsprozess]. In the production process both material products and bourgeois social production relations are produced as a unity in the socio-historical form of commodities. "The production process... considered as the unity of the labour process and the process of valorisation, it is the capitalist process of production, or the capitalist form of the production of commodities." The valorization process is grounded in the labour process, the condition of its existence. The labour process is the means by which valorization is realized." Use values are produced by capitalists only because and in so far as they form the material substratum of exchange value."13 Clearly the development of the productive forces is promoted in the interests of capital accumulation.
Due to the way in which the capitalist system of production presents itself, it has been inferred that the bourgeois production relations are the source of material progress and indeed society as a whole. This standpoint represents a theoretical reversal of the causal relation between the productive forces and corresponding production relations"14. Basically it constitutes a form of bourgeois ideology in which social reality is accepted uncritically as it appears. Parekh Bhiku observes:
Like the empiricist appeal to experience, the positivist appeal to facts seems objective and unbiased, but is not. The facts of an ideologically constituted social, world are inherently ideological. Besides, as we saw, the facts may be illusory or merely apparent as, for Marx, they generally are in the capitalist society. No natural scientist accepts the 'facts' of experience without critical examination; he does not accept the fact that the sun seems to go round the earth or that the air seems simple in constitution. For Marx the social facts are not very different, as they too can deceive and mislead.
Now since the labour process is indispensable to the valorization process it follows that the labour process is endowed with a property that determines whether valorization is possible. This being so it is clear that the hidden key to the valorization process is grounded in matter: the labour process and thereby the forces of production. The totality of bourgeois production relations is the social form through which the productive forces are mediated. Under capitalist society the relationship between the forces and their corresponding social forms assumes a contradictory character. The form --the totality of social relations of production-- appears as form. Thereby form appears as causal determinant of content. Bourgeois ideology uncritically accepts this inversion as a conceptual assumption from which its theories proceed.
We shall now pause to briefly reflect on the independence of the bourgeois production relations from the producers, the latter's existence as things in the form of abstractions: abstractions form the workers. Through the extensive use of excerpts from the corpus of Marx we will create a picture of this reality. To begin with, the commodity, that elementary form, constitutes a social relation of production independent of the human producers: an object in the form of an abstraction that determines their production. This is why Marx can justifiably remark that under commodity production it "is nothing but the definite social relations between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things."15 And concerning this same theme he also explains that the "mysterious character of the commodity form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristic of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves as the social natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relations of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers.16 These excerpts having emphatically demonstrated that Marx held to a conception of the commodity-form as a relation of production independent of the producers, as abstractions, we now adduce another quotation as evidence that Marx understood that the form of abstractions from the workers, besides its independence, determined and dominated the producers and production:
These magnitudes vary continually, independently of the will, fore-knowledge and actions of the exchangers. Their own movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, for from being under their control, in fact control them.17
Concerning money as a social relation of production Marx explains:
The special difficulty in grasping money in its fully developed character as money...is that a social relation, a definite relation between individuals, here appears as a metal, a store, as a purely physical external thing which can be found, as such, in nature, and which is indistinguishable in its form from its natural existence.18
This reveals that Marx also recognized that money formed an independent social relation. But since money may function as capital the latter, as a social relation, must be both independent and abstract in the relations posited between itself and the producers. In this connection, Capital explains:
In simple circulation the value of commodities obtained at the most a form independent of their use values, i.e. the form of money. But now in the circulation M-C-M, value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own and for which commodities and money are both mere forms. But there is more to come: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself, as it were.19
Furthermore, industrial capital, the capitalist production process itself is understood by Marx to be an abstract independent production relation as is evinced by the following citation from the Grundrisse:
The material on which it works is alien material; the instrument is likewise an alien instrument, its labour appears as a mere accessory to their substance and hence objectifies itself in things not belonging to it. Indeed, living labour itself appears as alien vis-à-vis living labour capacity, whose labour it is, whose own life’s expression [Lebensausserung] it is, for it has been surrendered to capital in exchange for objectified labour, for the product of labour itself. Labour capacity relates to its labour as to an alien, and if capital were willing to pay it without making it labour it would enter the bargain with pleasure. The labour capacity's own labour is as alien to it [and it really is, as regards its character etc.] as are material and instrument.20
Overall bourgeois production relations constitute abstractions in the form of things independent of the producers but, in a sense, determining they and production itself. As Marx remarks in Capital:
On closer inspection it becomes evident that capital itself regulates this production of labour- power, the production of the mass of men it intends to exploit in accordance with its own needs. Hence capital not only produces capital, it produces a growing mass of men, the material through which it alone can function as addition of capital. Therefore it is not only true to say that labour produces on a constantly increasing scale the conditions of labour in opposition to itself in the form of capital, but equally capital produces on a steadily increasing scale the productive wage-labourers it requires. Labour produces the conditions of its production in the form of capital and capital produces labour i.e. as wage labour, as the means towards its own realization.21
In connection with all this and in view of what has already been said it is the human producers, the productive forces that essentially produce and determine their specific production relations as independent abstractions and not the inverse. The relation between the political state and civil society, within capitalism, offers a parallel and is indeed indissoluble linked with the above mentioned relation.
It is not, as Hegel misconceived it, the political state as an independent abstraction that determines the existence of civil society but the inverse. It is just this latter theme that forms a motif running through the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State(1843). Concerning this Lucio Colletti observes:
In 'civil society' [which for Hegel as for Adam Smith and Ricardo was a 'market society': individuals are divided from and independent of each other. Under such conditions, just as each person is independent of all others so does the real nexus of mutual dependence [the bond of social unity] become in turn independent of all individuals. This common interest, or universal interest renders itself independent of all interested parties and assumes a separate existence; and such social unity established in separation from its members is precisely the hypostatized modern state.22
Without the productive forces having attained to a certain level, the emergence of bourgeois production relations is impossible. "For capitalist relations to establish themselves at all presupposes that a certain historical level of social production has been attained. Even within the framework of an earlier mode of production certain needs and certain means of communication and production must have developed which go beyond the old relations of production and coerce them into the capitalist mould."23
As has already been indicated, the bourgeoisie by uncritically reflecting capitalist society in consciousness, as it appears, present a misleading picture in which the abstract social relations of production are posited as the determining force that leads to the growth in the productive forces. They erroneously posit the form through which the productive forces as the causal factor underlying the accumulation of wealth: form determines content. And it therefore comes as no surprise that the bourgeoisie perceive themselves as society's creator. But this is to leave out of the picture the origin of these capitalist relations: genetics is omitted. The bourgeoisie invest capital with a metaphysical essence. They lend it an ontological status that transcends history. This is why the classical economists constitute the Spinozists of political economy. By positing capital as production relation, as being independent of history and by identifying the productive forces in general with capital, they deify the productive forces.24 They invest it with a metaphysical essence a spirit, that determines both their existence and character. We can see then the grounds for the philosophical belief that identifies "alienation" with objectification instead of its identification with a specific historical society. Existentialism then is merely the melancholy side of classical political economy. It is the bourgeois form of thought which sees no solution: it reeks with despair. While the classical political economists were optimistically confident concerning capitalism’s prospects, the existentialists express pessimism and see no real future just an eternal present. One sees the positive aspects of capitalism while the other sees its negative aspects.
Classical political economy introduced ontology into "economics." And it was to be Marx’s task to de-ontologise it, to make it dualistically materialist. We shall see later on in this paper the theoretical affinity that is present between the conceptual underpinnings of Ricardo’s thought and that of Feuerbach and the Marx of the EPM.
Since bourgeois production relations are viewed as natural rather than as historical it follows that the particular is assigned a universal nature. As Bhiku remarks: The idealist, then, universalises the ideas and experiences of his own class, society or historical epoch."25
Classical political economy by positing capital as a thing rather than as a social relation defines it not in terms of form but as content: the universal as opposed to the particular. By this manner of theorising, capital is invested with a universal form. In this regard Bhiku informs us that:
In the course of his investigations into the ideological [idealist] writings, Marx discovered that they were all apologetic in character. They had a universal form, but a particular social content, and did little more than articulate the experiences, modes of thought, values and interests of a particular group or society in abstract or universal language.26
Presented as thing, capital can be made to appear to prevail under each historical system of reproduction. Since the bourgeoisie mistakenly views the growth in the productive forces as both its doing and responsibility, it can quite comfortably suggest that capital is the productive forces whereby capital is posited as the natural property of a thing. This is tantamount to suggesting that the independent abstraction, capital assumes the form of productive forces [abstraction determinate concrete], a conception akin to Hegelianism. What is not explained, of course, is why the abstraction of capital must assume this form. And, since this assumption is made it is not unjustifiable to draw the conclusion that the productive forces are but a form of themselves. In this context, the identification of capital with the productive forces suggest that the forces cannot break through capitalist relations, replacing them with more suitable ones.27 Obviously a specific system of historical production relations are invested with a universal character. The perception of the bourgeoisie lends their particular and transitory class interests a universal dimension. The relation of capital constrains and imprisons their consciousness within narrow mental horizons. so that their vision sees no real future. History is forced into the Procrustean bed of capital causing for the dehistoricization of history.28 The capitalist class endows the world with its own particularity, the exclusive identification of the general with the particular. The perpetuation of capitalism is promoted by such ideological forms. In this connection Bhiku’s apt comment makes sense: "According to the philosophers, when a form of inquiry rests on assumptions, its perception and interpretation of the world is necessarily mediated by them, and therefore inherently limited and distorted."29 But this ideological distortion receives popular appeal since its uncritical description is just as capitalist social reality presents itself. The particular class interests of the bourgeoisie are presented as the interests of all. Its concepts are fixed and the real world is made to conform with them.30 Presenting social relations of production as things may conceal the fetishised nature of social relations of production under capitalism together with the contradictory limits that this reification throws up.
As was made evident capitalist production relations are concrete abstractions [things in the form of abstractions such as commodity capital] which are uncritically translated into conceptual form. Since capitalist relations are abstractions their corresponding conceptual form must be abstract.31 Indeed since the totality of production relations is posited as determinant, the corresponding conceptual forms must constitute the intellectual basis and determinant of bourgeois consciousness. The character of reason is abstract. as are value relations: that is not to declare that bourgeois thought as a historical phenomenon has not played a revolutionary role. As with value relations under capitalism these conceptual abstractions are presented as determining man's knowledge and indeed within specific historical limits they constitute forms for the development of human knowledge.32 Outside these limits they hinder its progress. Like the value relations that are presented as independent [conceptual] abstractions that promote human knowledge[mystically] independently of men's concrete activity on nature. Consequently knowledge assumes a mystical significance [e.g., Hegel]. We see that the inversion presented by capitalist social reality finds its conceptual counterpart; men's social existence determines their existence33. We adduce remarks from Marx’s much quoted letter to Annenkov in support of the above thesis:
He has not perceived that economic categories are only abstract expressions of these actually existing relations and only remain true while these relations exist. He therefore falls into the error of the bourgeois economists, who regard these economic categories as eternal laws and not as historical laws which are valid only for a particular historical development, for a definite development of the productive forces. Instead, therefore, of regarding the politico-economic categories as abstract expressions of the real, transitory, historic social relations, Mr Proudhon, owing to a mystic inversion, regards real relations merely as reifications of these abstractions. These abstractions themselves are formulas which have been slumbering in the bosom of God the Father since the beginning of the world.34
Hegelianism constitutes the classical distillation of the inversion. Under Hegel’s thought the basic abstract concepts are demonstrated to form the ultimate essence of what is concrete reality: these abstractions determine concrete reality.35 In The Holy Family Marx elucidates this matter:
If from real apples, pears, strawberries and almonds I form the general idea "Fruit," if I go further and that my abstract idea "Fruit," derived from real fruit, is an entity existing outside me, is indeed the true essence of the pear, the apple, etc., then [in the language of speculative philosophy] I am declaring that "Fruit" is the "Substance" of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. I am saying, therefore, that to be a pear is not essential to the pear, that to be an apple is not essential, that what is essential to these things is not their real existence perceptible to the senses, but the essence that I have abstracted from them and then foisted on them, the essence of my idea: "Fruit." I therefore declare apples, pears, almonds etc., to be mere forms of existence, modes, of "Fruit."36
Hegel shares this manner of theorizing with the classical political economists. Since the system of bourgeois relations of production are historically limited their development is only possible within specific limits. Having reached their limits they acquire an explicitly fixed form. This being so the underlying conceptually determining system of bourgeois consciousness acquires an equally fixed aspect. This means that the employment of these fixed concepts in the acquisition of knowledge of social reality produces distorted knowledge since the very object of this knowledge is in motion: fluid not static. Dialectically fluid social reality is forced into a fixed conceptual framework. Since the conceptual structure is parasitic on bourgeois relations, its application produces a conceptual picture of the social world that satisfactorily corresponds with the nature of capitalist relations. This ideologically constituted world prescinds from contradictions and the real character of conflict: elements that threaten the capitalist system of production relations. Concerning this Herbert Marcuse’s penetrating insight deserves to be cited:37
Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behaviour in which ideas, aspirations and objectives that by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe. They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of its quantitative existence.38
Standing in opposition is the critical method, a form of comprehension which embraces social reality in its movement by means of a critical examination of social phenomena. It constitutes a method whereby the movement of history determines its conceptual expression rather than the reverse relation wherein the fixed conceptual system posits historical development within ahistorical dimensions that gives us an ideologically constituted world. Under these theoretical conditions any new historical development that constitute new qualitative differences may find expressions as new conceptual forms thus investing intellectual progress with an historical character. In contradistinction to this the non-critical procedure obstructs the emergence of new and richer concepts thereby impeding the advancement of knowledge and thus the qualitative development of Social reality.39
To be sure in the earlier stages, while the capitalist system bore a progressive aspect, the nature of its thought more reliably reflected reality. Indeed, to a certain extent, bourgeois thought was conceptually fluid in the interests of capital accumulation since the latter could not proceed in the absence of a reasonably accurate comprehension of the constitution of the productive forces together with corresponding production relations: in a sense capital accumulation is