"The Right and the Righteous": Required Reading in a Time of (Toxic) Righteousness

Shannon Hoff's essay "The Right and the Righteous: Hegel on Confession, Forgiveness, and the Necessary Imperfection of Political Action", published in Phenomenology and Forgiveness, ed. Marguerite La Caze, is a necessary read, as profound in what kind of human beings, what kind of ethical and political being to enact in the world, as J. M. Bernstein's Dignity and Torture.

In the essay, Hoff works through the contemporary practical, moral and political importance of Hegel's final chapter of the section Spirit, "Conscience. The beautiful soul, evil and its forgiveness".  She takes up the notions of moral action, judgment, forgiveness and their implications for moral and political action, without which political and moral ideas are mere abstractions, but which are always, inevitably, one-sided, invested, imperfect.

In a contemporary moment in which righteousness predominates, Hoff encourages us to see both the necessity and imperfection of action and the necessity and imperfection of criticism.  In this context, we require both action and criticism, but action and criticism which are themselves open to being criticized in turn, that is, to communication and forgiveness.

I will not work through the entire essay, as it is not only important to work through Hoff's arguments for oneself, but I cannot in a brief note do justice to her engaging and elegant exposition of the ideas developed herein.  It is enough to quote a paragraph that epitomizes the intellectual and ethical depth of the essay:

"The criticism that supplements and completes action, then, is not a matter of condemnation that distances the critic from the actor, but a matter of establishing solidarity through communication—it is precisely forgiveness.  As we saw earlier, our actions, as necessarily one-sided and specific, do not unambiguously manifest the principle to which they aim to answer, and so they do not “speak for themselves” but require instead communication as a supplement. And communication, insofar as it is oriented toward revealing the principle that motivates action, can precisely lead to unexpected forms of identification. The “act” of an action can never, on its own, reveal the motivation of the agent, of which it is an expression. It is through struggling to understand the action on the agent’s own terms—struggling to appreciate the action and recognize the agent—that we get into a position in which meaningful criticism—criticism that would actually be meaningful to the agent and to what the agent was doing—becomes possible. Such an understanding, however, in as much as it is precisely a matter of “sympathizing” with the agent, simultaneously fosters an identification with the agent: it involves a recognition, in other words, that the agent’s actions make sense to us. Forgiveness is precisely this intertwining of criticism and identification." (p. 15)

Hegel's "the rational is real and the real is rational"

Hegel's famous quote from the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, "was vernünftig ist das ist wirklich und was wirklich ist das ist vernünftig", typically translated as "the rational is real and the real is rational" ought to be considered one of the most misunderstood phrases among his generally misunderstood work.

For example, the Wikipedia page on Hegel says the following:

"Hegelianism is the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel which can be summed up by the dictum that "the rational alone is real", which means that all reality is capable of being expressed in rational categories. His goal was to reduce reality to a more synthetic unity within the system of absolute idealism."

What, however, if this is mistaken? On the one hand, for Hegel, following from the Science of Logic, his attempt to begin without presuppositions, to think Being without any presuppositions, from an immediate, unmediated, sheer Being that itself turns out to immediately vanish into Nothing, leads him to the conclusion that the categories of Thought are also the categories of Being, not because we dogmatically assert, that is, assume, this is so, but through a lengthy logical working out. That is, if Thought can think Being without imposing its own presuppositions on it, then, contra the contemporary Pragmatist-influenced reading of Hegel's logic as non-ontological, Hegel's logic is an onto-logic. Following both Slavoj Zizek (Absolute Zero) and Stephen Houlgate (The Opening of Hegel's Logic), both of whom approach Hegel's thought in otherwise quite different ways, I would argue that Hegel proposes a non-dogmatic beginning to philosophy, unlike the modern metaphysics of Leibnitz, Spinoza, and Hegel's own contemporaries, that nonetheless takes seriously the critique of metaphysics pace Kant. To put the matter bluntly, Hegel is making claims about Being in a manner that does not correspond with deflationary notions of truth as argued by Robert Pippin in "Back to Hegel?" in the journal Mediations.

Hegel takes Kant's critique of prior metaphysics seriously insofar as he accepts that metaphysics made assertions about Being that presupposed what had to be proved, but at the same time Kant still presupposes certain things about Being, that is, what could and could not be said about Being, but further Kant simply takes the categories of thought without justification from traditional metaphysics, hence his putting forward of the twelve categories. The result in Hegel's work is the Science of Logic and the attempt to engage the questions metaphysics proposed while keeping Kant's own critique of pure reason in mind.

The end result, and one I would suggest is maintained by Marx, is that the categories of Thought are the categories of Being because the categories of Being can be thought adequately without importation of unjustified concepts by working through Being itself. The dilemmas of philosophical realism, which take for granted and defend the dualistic separation of Thought and Being whether in a (neo-)Kantian mode or an empirical-positivist mode (Trent Schroyer's book The Critique of Domination lays out the distinction between the two reasonably clearly), are fundamentally non-problems from the Hegelian and Marxian perspective. In the case of the latter, this is of course frequently not grasped and so you see nonsense like the split between Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism or Subjective Dialectic versus Objective Dialectic and various other dualisms which uncritically reproduce the aporias of dogmatic thought.

Simultaneously, the categories of thought are also not simply imported by Hegel wholesale from prior philosophy, but themselves come into being and disappear and then reappear in different ways. Not all social formations of humanity have access to the same categories of thought and they don't even necessarily think those categories in the same way. This does not mean that all categories of thought are social constructions as if they had no objectivity of their own, since if they are also categories of being they cannot be simply subjective. Nor do "older" categories necessarily have the same character as if they were immutable. This is fairly clear in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which takes us through many shapes of consciousness, in which many categories appear repeatedly in different shapes of consciousness with differing degrees of determination and concretion.

However, there is a more important sense in which the reading of the original quote from Hegel is horribly mistaken, and that has to do with what Hegel means by "real" or "actual". Most commentators confuse the real with what exists. Of course if this was the case, then Hegel's point would be conservative at best, and really simply a wholesale justification of "things as they are".

Something is real in Hegel in a speculative sense, that is, not because it is materially there or because it is coherent, but because it has possibility. The real and what exists for Hegel are by no means the same thing at all.

Here I just want to end with a practical example of the speculative dimension of Hegel's statement.

Two people are in a long-term intimate relationship and they are nominally committed to spending the rest of their lives together. However, one of them then finds out that the other person has been having sex with their best friend for years. As it turns out, though the relationship existed, it was not real. Of course, the relationship is also then not rational exactly because an intimate relationship between two people involves honesty, trust, and so on between the two people and instead the foundation of the relationship was dishonesty and distrust; essentially a lie. Thus the relationship, which fully existed, turned out not to be real or rational.

We might then say that Hegel's statement is, at its heart, how we ought to read Marx's oft-quoted, always misunderstood:

"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."

Communism is the real that is rational within capital. Marx does not praise capital in The Communist Manifesto because it is itself great or rational, but because it's potential is communism, which is the rational outcome and inner dynamic of capital (all inner dynamics, if I may use that phrase, for Hegel are those of negation and so a rational outcome is also a self-negation), and therefore the real movement.

Christian Thorne • Commonplace Book

Very interesting site recently brought to my attention.  Between articles and the new translation work on Adorno'sNegative Dialectics, very worthwhile.

Christian Thorne • Commonplace Book

I do not exactly agree with his points about Marx's relation to ontology, as I do not think Marx is a deflationary thinker and hence we cannot replace the word "materialism" with "pragmatism" without accepting the Kantian transcendental move.

His point that Marx is close to Pyrrhonic skepticism is spot on, but Hegel was also an admirer and supporter of the same Pyrrhonic skepticism, as is evident from his reading of it in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy.  However, this is important in part because that skepticism does not throw out truth in the post-Kantian manner or in a way similar to the skepticism of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Some Notes on Things I've Been Reading

Reclaiming Work, Andre Gorz, 1999

This is an exceptionally interesting little book which affirms my conviction that Andre Gorz remains one of the most overlooked radical thinkers of the late 20th century.  I will post some notes on here as soon as I can transcribe them.


Interview with Anselm Jappe at the Brooklyn Rail

"Value cannot be created by decree, only by a real labor process—and it has to be “productive labor” in the capitalist sense (that means that it does not only consume capital but helps to reproduce it). Money can be created by decree—but when it does not correspond to the real amount of labor that it is supposed to “represent,” it has no “substance” and loses its value through some form of inflation (although for decades now the explosion of massive inflation has been deferred by parking large sums of fictitious capital in stock markets, real estate markets, and so on). Here the Critique of Value finds itself in sharp contrast to nearly all left-wing economists, who are generally just neo-Keynesians."

The point I put in italics is really what I find interesting vis-a-vis the notion of productive labor.  This is the clearest, most succinct reasoning as to why military production is unproductive, since military commodities cannot be used to reproduce constant or variable capital.  This is also why production of luxury goods for non-laborers is unproductive, unlike "luxury" goods consumed by potential laborers which goes toward the reproduction of labor power.

What’s the deal with Marx’s Capital?

What’s the deal with Marx’s Capital? That's the question I was asked to try and answer.

I think this is a very important starting point for the discussions we have been having, and it sums up neatly a point made repeatedly:

Brown (2003) argues that what is distinctive about the political rationality of neoliberalism as opposed to classic liberalism is the extension of the "entrepreneurial logic" to all human activities. "Whereas classic liberalism articulated a distinction, and at times even a tension, among the criteria for individual moral, associational, and economic actions (hence the striking differences in tone subject matter and even prescription between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and his Theory of Moral Sentiments), neo-liberalism normatively constructs and interpolates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life." (footnote 5, p. 292, "The Genetic Reinscription of Race", Nadia Abu El-Haj, Annual Review of Anthropology vol. 36, 2007.

That is, this is a look at the way in which capitalist in the present "constructs and interpolates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life."

This however is a moment a very long way down the road of categorial development from what capital is in its most fundamental sense, as the generalization of the commodity-form (the particular social form of the products of production), the labor-form (the particular social form of wealth-producing human activity), the value-form (the particular social form of wealth), the money-form (the particular social form of value), until we reach the total circuit in the capital-form, as self-valorizing, self-expanding, self-reproducing value.  The exploitation of living labor in order to produce a surplus in the form of value is not the social form as such, but its content.

To attempt to conceptualize this in terms of Marx’s Capital, it helps to have some sense of what Marx is and isn’t doing, especially in the first volume, since there is a great deal of confusion.  I just want to note here that I owe a great deal of my reading of Volume 1 to Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor and Social Domination, Werner Bonefeld’s work on primitive accumulation as succinctly expressed in Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy, and Nicole Pepperell’s as-yet unpublished PhD dissertation.

Capital is, as its subtitle says, a critique of political economy and this has several implications.  Firstly, Marx is not trying to explain capital or capitalist society as a rational, coherent, consistent system.  Secondly, he is not abstracting from capital’s actual functioning in order to produce a model.  Finally, he is not trying to provide a more accurate theory that fixes the limitations of classical political economy associated with Smith, Ricardo, Petty, Quesnay, etc.  As a critique of political economy, Marx produced a book that treats even classical political economy as a necessarily failed attempt to provide a rational, consistent, coherent account of a system and a society that in his view is fundamentally irrational, inconsistent and incoherent.  Marxists, generally a confused lot more interested in the workers’ movement than in the critique of political economy, take Marx’s work to be a proof of the necessary collapse of capital and a critique of capital by labor.  In that story, capital and the capitalist class are evil and labor and the working class are good.  Capital ends up being a book about the good guys and the bad guys in the class struggle.  However, this point of view has a lot of problems, not the least of which is that Marx’s own notion of life beyond capital, beyond class society, is a life not determined by labor, but determined by freely disposable time.  Marx’s critique of political economy is therefore a critique of all of its elements, of capital and labor, of money and the means of production.

This does not mean that Marx does not engage with political economy on its own terms.  Marx is not offering a criticism of capital or of political economy, that is, an attack from an external, superior standpoint, from better first principles.  Such a criticism would have to justify its first principles, a move that inevitably leads to either vicious circularity (a rose is a rose because it is a rose) or infinite regress (the first principle has to be justified by another preceding principle, which has to be justified by another even more prior first principle and so on.)  The problem of such criticism was recognized as far back as Aristotle in his Metaphysics and Sextus Empiricus in his Outline of Pyrrhonism and Outlines of Skepticism.  Marx therefore takes political economy at it’s word and accepts its categories as the terms of the discussion.  He then proceeds, much as Hegel does in his Phenomenology of Spirit, by allowing those categories to express their own failure, and by watching where each failure leads, takes us on a journey from the categories of capital and capitalist society as underdetermined and abstract to their more complete, complexly determined, and therefore concrete, expression.  This is not a historical trip, however, as the logical development of these categories does not follow their historical path.  In fact, commodity, labor, value, etc. as Marx first posits them in Chapter 1, are only able to be seen in their genesis at the very end of the book, where the historical production of the categories comes in only after their logical development.  This is why constituted classes do not appear in Capital until the third book and why the phrase “class struggle” cannot be found in volume 1.

Since this is an presentation of the movement of the first volume, I am not going to try and reproduce the movement of the work as such.  Rather than a phenomenological development, such as Marx uses, this is a more severe style of presentation.  If you want the full working up and a more step-by-step analysis, you will have to read Capital and the commentaries I have mentioned.  There is no way around that.  This presentation is meant as a clarification and a statement of how I understand Capital and therefore is closer to Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy than the Phenomenology or the Logic.

The most succinct expression of capital as a movement is M-C-M', that is, money which makes itself into more money through the transformation of money into commodities that are then exchanged for a greater sum of money.  In this movement, the material forms change repeatedly, and different activities produce different changes, time is even transformed into space and space back into time, but all of this destruction and creation preserves the social form of wealth (value) and even expands it.  Each form is necessarily a vanishing moment, but a moment which must be passed through each time in order to reproduce and preserve capital as such, and this reproduction and preservation requires its self-expansion with each cycle.

How the cycle goes from M-M’ is a point of much debate.  In classical political economy and traditional Marxist Political Economy, M is spent on C, where C is means of production, raw materials and labor power.  C is then transformed in the production process ...p… and the outcome of which is C’, that is, a set of commodities with more value than what was purchased with M.  Thus when C’ is sold (we are assuming that it sells at its value, not above or below as it would in actuality), we now have M’, the original M+S, our surplus value.  

From this perspective, new value, surplus-value, has to originate in production.  Many people believe that Marx makes an argument for living labor as the only source of new value in the first chapters of Capital, but he does not.  The one point Marx makes about the production of value is that it cannot originate in exchange, in the idea that one buys low and sells high (chapter 2).  Robbing Peter to pay Paul on the total scale of the economy would not result in the production of value, but a zero-sum game.  I pay x+1 for a, but now I have to sell b for x+1 as well, passing on the cost all along the way.  Marx thus makes the point that new wealth in the form of increased value, has to come from outside of exchange.  

However, the idea that only living labor power produces new value, as opposed to machinery and raw materials, that is, dead or already expended labor turned into things, or even living labor in the forms of animals, causes a great deal of confusion. After all, machines and raw materials produce material wealth all the time.  Why don’t they produce value?  After all, value in Marx is objective.  It isn’t a produced in exchange nor is it determined by what people are willing to pay.  What makes human labor so special?  And if it is a question of living labor, why not the labor of animals? Marx is even skeptical of the value-producing capability of non-wage labor.

The first few chapters are thus hard to comprehend if you are looking for an argument there that Marx is not making.

The most common mistake is to think that Marx is in fact trying to put forward a coherent concept of value in Chapter 1.  What Marx is actually doing is akin to what Hegel does in the first three chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit.  Marx is taking the most common conceptions of the basic forms and production of wealth in capitalist society and working them out in their self-contradiction.  Marx’s work, like Hegel’s, is concerned with the aporias of social forms and their concepts.  First comes the commodity which is a use-value and an exchange-value, the empiricist understanding of the form of wealth that a commodity is a thing that is a use-value to the buyer and an exchange-value to the owner.  The first use-value that is an exchange-value that concerns Marx is, albeit in a passing joke about tanning and hides, labor power itself, whose use-value is always first and foremost its capacity to produce exchange-values.  

This leads us to the second way of considering wealth, the rationalist analysis of the inner content of the commodity as embodied labor, of the split between concrete and abstract labor, that is, labor as the substance of value.  What becomes clear however is that the substance of exchange-value is not labor embodied in the commodity, as if labor were a chemical property of the commodity (and as if commodities could only be things), but the socially necessary labor-time.  Thus, the value of the commodity, a spatial object at this point, is temporal.  (In his unpublished manuscripts published posthumously as Theories of Surplus-Value, Marx makes it clear that commodities need not be things, even, as the labor of a clown is value-producing if the clown has sold his capacity for labor, his capacity for clowning in this case, to a capitalist who sells his services to someone, and who presumably also provides the clown suits, and other materials, thus investing in variable and constant capital.)  This is also the point in chapter 1 where Marx’s engages with measure and magnitude of value and where people believe Marx makes an argument for embodied labor as the substance of value.  

The final way of considering the form of wealth is its absolute idealist (one might say Hegelian) form, as the form of value, or as exchange-value qua money, which includes a logical-genetic account of the value-form.  Marx begins with the relative form of value where two commodities face each other, one as the commodity and the other as the measure of the value of the commodity.  He moves on to the equivalent form of value where one commodity, still some manner of use-value, stands as the measure of all other values, much like cigarettes in a prison.  Marx then develops the account of the general equivalent, a commodity that largely has no other use-value than being the equivalent measure of value for all other commodities, and this is where Marx introduces the use of malleable precious metals such as copper, silver, and gold.  Marx ends with the final form, the money-form as the most perfect, empty and meaningless form of value.  With money, it is no longer necessary that money be present as a commodity as such, but stands in for value.  There is much discussion even today as to whether or not money has to be backed by a commodity of some sort, that is whether you need a gold backing or whether fiat money is actual money.  However, that is a question that requires the full development of interest and finance, which does not happen until Volume 3.  It would be a mistake to think Marx is in a position to answer that question at this very low level of development of money.  Here socially-necessary labor time as the substance and magnitude of value either exists as money, that is, is expressed in an other that everyone recognizes as its universally valid other, or it doesn't exist at all.  After all, a commodity that cannot be expressed as, exchanged for, money, isn’t valid as value, it is just a thing or an activity.  Marx thus works through all of the various conceptions of value and wealth in classical political economy, without so far presenting his own.  This is the second source of confusion.

Only with the fetishistic character of the commodity do we begin to get to Marx's notion of wealth in capitalist society, and this is because only here do we begin to get to the various moments of the commodity form not merely as a variety of binary distinctions that allow shape, measure, and transformation, but as the self-reproduction of the social forms themselves as forms of social domination.  Reification is a moment of this, but fetishism is more than that, it is our self-alienated activity, in the form of labor, as an objective form of domination that appears as freedom.  So while reification captures one aspect of fetishism, reification by itself does not automatically entail domination.  The full concept of fetishism requires that the reified product of our labor and that the labor itself constitutes that which dominates us.

It is very important to note at this point that if Marx has laid out contradictory, inadequate concepts of wealth and the form of wealth in the first chapter, this does not mean that the categories he develops there are simply false.  Much like sense-certainty, perception and understanding in the Phenomenology of Spirit, these categories as deployed by classical political economy are too abstract and underdetermined; they are not yet concrete in the sense of the outcome of many determinations.  After all, we know nothing of production, the labor process, circulation, or even profit, interest, and rent.  We only know value, labor, commodity, and money, but they will remain essential for Marx's entire work, but as these more and more actualized, determined forms.

As I have noted above, chapter 2 is really where Marx makes the point that value is not produced in the act of exchange.  He also spends a fair amount of time showing that the commodity, to truly be a commodity, must be produced for someone else, as an exchange-value, that it must be exchanged for money, for its other.  Something produced to be consumed, rather than exchanged for money, is not a commodity.  Something produced as a commodity is valueless if it is not sold, that is, value is only value as long as it is valorized, that is, value is only potential in production, but it must be actualized, realized, in exchange.

In chapter 3 Marx begins his deeper analysis of money's forms or modes of existence.  Key to this is the way in which money both represents and preserves value so that in the metamorphosis of the capital cycle, even when a commodity loses its body, its spirit is retained in the form of money and may go and seek a new body.

Only at this point do we come across capital proper, in Part II, "The Transformation of Money into Capital".  Now we see that capital is the self-valorization of value, as self-expanding wealth.   The end of capital, its telos, is not new commodities, but the endless expansion of abstract, infinite value qua money.  M' is ever the goal of capital proper.  Since money is pure quantity, this is a bad infinity, an infinite seeking for “one dollar more”.  Any and all C (raw materials, machinery, labor, finished goods) are merely means to an ever-expanding M'.  As such, the goal of production is not reproducing individuals (the reproduction of individuals in fact falls outside of the capital cycle and has its own, unwaged labor), but the reproduction of surplus-value qua money that can be reinvested to effect the expanded reproduction of capital on a continuously higher plain.  The dream of a perpetual motion machine is the dream of the perfect production of surplus-value without a breakdown.  And just as the perpetual motion machine is a fantasy, so too is capital as a perpetual motion machine, but that is a discussion for another time.

Nowhere up to this point does Marx really make an argument for why only living labor, and specifically wage-labor, produces new value.  Nor could he because that is a question that requires a degree of concrete development of the concept of labor that we had not yet reached.  However, now we can venture some ideas on this, beginning with Chapter 7 and this will take up a large portion of the middle section of Capital, as Marx concerns himself with the absolute and relative surplus-value for 11 chapters.  Only in this discussion, of the first real mention of surplus-value and constant and variable capital can we start understanding the importance of human labor, and waged-labor in particular.

By this point in Capital, we know that when a capitalist buys a machine and raw materials, they are paid for in advance (the issue of buying on credit is irrelevant here because credit does not change that the capitalist must pay the full value of the machine; what it does introduce is a complication that we can’t approach adequately yet, the problem of interest), and once paid for lose value whether they are used or not.  In order to use them up for maximum valorization, capital thus must operate the machinery and use the raw materials as efficiently as possible, as close to 24 hours a day as possible in many cases, so that the value “stored” (embodied in the money spent in their purchase) in those machines is consumed and transferred as close to completely as possible in the commodities produced for exchange in order to make M'.  Also, a machine can only do what it is told to do, what it is designed for.  It's wear and tear can be delayed and mitigated by efficient operations and repairs (whether fixing a worn cog wheel or a bug in the program), but used up it will be.  Further, the competition between capitals to capture market share leads to a constant improvement in the productivity of labor and the need to surpass the efficiency of the existing machine or program.  This pressure to develop better machines and better programs makes the older machine or older program lose value (depreciate) even more quickly.  The ways in which additional surplus-value are squeezed out of labor forms the thread that runs through the distinction between absolute and relative surplus-value that Marx will develop in the middle section of the book.

Human labor power within the capital cycle, however, is novel.  As waged-labor, it is only paid for the time it is active.  Workers may also be thrown into and out of production.  The employer does not lose money if they lay people off, but they do if machines and raw materials lie idle.  The former is the problem of the free worker, the latter is the problem of the capitalist.  An interesting take on how this differs from slave labor is presented in the movie Burn.  Within the paid time of production, there is also variability as a worker produces more or less in a given time, but their wage does not generally change in that time.  Even in piece work, the form merely disguises the wage so that the surplus-value is already built into every piece.  Let’s stop and compare an hourly wage to a piece-wage in an 8 hours day.  In an hourly wage, a worker appears to be paid for every hour of labor, and this is true.  However, the wage is not the equivalent of the total value produced.  If it was, there would be no surplus-value.  And what is more important, it is not like the first 6 hours of labor produce the wage and the last two the surplus.  This is an illusion of the wage, however.  If the worker only works six hours, assuming the ratio of wages to surplus being the same (¾ to ¼), then in 6 hours, 4.5 hours would go to wages and 1.5 to surplus.  This is because every commodity is a unit of value and when it is sold, it will, as a unit, realize both value spent on wages and surplus.  So too with the piece wage, where a worker is paid per piece, the individual piece completed is also sold as a whole value.  The variability of the worker is also evident in changes in the pace of production.  Faster rates of production will use up the machinery and raw materials more quickly, but they don’t change the wage of the worker: the hourly wage or the piece rate remain what they are.  Increasing the rate of the worker is an increase in productivity of the labor, but it doesn’t increase the productivity of the machine or raw materials.  To do that, you have invest in different, more advanced machinery or discover and make use of more cheaply produced raw materials.  Finally, unlike a machine, a waged worker is both a seller of a commodity, and a buyer of commodities, that is, they are not merely object, but subjects of the capital cycle.

These appear, deceptively, as technical reasons, but there is a significant theoretical point to be made.  What wage-labor does, as being also the seller and buyer of commodities, is reproduce the capital relation itself.  In selling their labor and in buying commodities as their only means of acquiring their existence, the waged laborer reproduces capital as a self-produced form of domination.  Machines and raw materials are a means to an end in this process, but they cannot of themselves reproduce a social relation.  They don't have a "social relation".  The beginning of this point is certainly in the earlier chapters, but it really begins to come to light starting in chapter 7.  This is how I take Marx  when he says:

"We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be." (italics mine- CDW)

From first to last, this paragraph not only distinguishes human from animal labor, but also implicitly from machines.  This is especially evident in the last sentence, where the implication is that the more labor is performed for an end that is not our own, the more close his attention is forced to be.  That is, where the will and intellect belongs to another, so too the force applied to our attention belongs to another.  None of this applies to a machine or raw materials, but only to human labor.

Thus waged-labor is also different from unwaged labor in several key respects.

Waged-labor is itself a commodity, which is purchased by a capital for the purpose of the production of other commodities whose first use-value is that they are exchange-values (the doubled nature of use-value, as its use for the producer of the commodity as an exchange-value and the use of the commodity for the buyer which makes is exchange-worthy, is generally ignored in the Marxist literature as much as in classical political economy), to be sold in order to make more money that will be reinvested as expanded capital.  Waged-labor is performed exactly for a wage, that is, in return for money.  If waged-labor sees its activity as C-M-C, from the point of view of capital waged-labor is either a part of valorization of value or it is a cost of production.

Waged labor is also free in the doubled, capitalist sense: free to be sold to any buyer, for a specific duration, for which it is paid an equivalent (hence a relation of equality as an exchange of equivalents between equally contracting parties, therefore a relation not merely of law, but constituting law); free from any property, any commodity, that might be used to reproduce its owner, except the commodity labor power, i.e. the capacity for labor.  The wage-laborer is thus also a buyer of commodities.  Unwaged laborers have to get means of subsistence in some other manner, generally a relation of some kind of dependence on someone who has money (wage-laborer, land owner, capitalist.)

Nothing precludes reproduction in the broad sense from being commodified.  The distinction is not per se between reproductive labor and productive labor, but between unwaged, private labor and waged, public labor.  That reproductive labor was once primarily household labor that was private and unwaged does not mean that it has to remain primarily so.  Reproductive labor can certainly be commodified and thus waged, public labor with its product produced as a commodity.  This was the case from fairly early on, as food stuffs, clothing, housing, etc. were bought and rented, but their maintenance and preparation, as well as a whole host of other aspects like childcare and entertainment, were not.  The only restriction on the commodification of most elements of reproduction is that at some point, the cheapness of goods and services depends on the relatively low wages of those producing those goods and services.  The specific situation in the U.S. in the present depends on the Wal-Martization of commodities, that is, the production of extremely cheap goods that drive primary producers to extremely small rates of profit.  This does not tend to make the laborers in these enterprises into consumers, and it hurts the accumulation of capital by the producing capital.  For example, if I am a Chinese manufacturing company making dog food to Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart is able to control the access to the market so tightly that it can dictate acceptable costs of production.  The company is forced to maximize both the squeezing of the workers’ wages and their other costs of production, and even then their rates of profit can be terribly low (Cornered by Barry C. Lynn has an excellent discussion of this.)  Now, while the workers are making a wage that may expand buying power marginally, between the low wage and low profit, this kind of production tends to make the development of an internal market that allows for economic expansion rather limited.  This creates its own tensions between the various capitals and in term of development.  It has also gone hand-in-hand with a general extension of debt, which allows consumption to continue through the perpetual promise to pay Tuesday for a hamburger purchased today.  Thus the tendency for reproductive labor to be private, unwaged labor doesn't simply go away.  Nor does unwaged, private labor magically become commodity-producing labor that is part of the cycle of capital's self-valorization of value.

Oddly enough, the aspect of reproduction that is least easily commodifiable, at least in a general sense, is reproduction itself, that is, having children.  Is it any wonder then that the most brutal struggle being fought over the control of women’s bodies today would be reproductive rights and sexual control?  Here I think it is the moment that appears the most biologically-restricted that is the most highly socially mediated.  The control of women’s bodies in reference to having children is about the control of future labor power in the most embodied sense, that is, literally over the supply of future labor on the one side, and over the future inheritors of wealth on the other.  The case of Purvi Patel is instructive, if terrifying, in the lengths to which the state will go to assert that as not merely the bearer of a child, but as the possible bearer of a child, a woman has no rights that cannot be sacrificed to future capital.

My argument is two-fold: that waged, public labor cannot exist without unwaged, private labor, and that unwaged, private labor was predominantly the labor of reproduction and is the key to the gendering of human beings in capitalist society.  As reproductive labor is increasingly commodified and wage-labor is increasingly reproductive and personal service-providing labor in Department 2, due to the extensive increase in the organic composition of capital in Department 1 in particular and thus the shrinking number of workers in the production of means of production and raw materials, labor is increasingly feminized, that is, the very values of affective, emotive, interpersonal engagement that were previously disparaged against masculine values, are now prized.  We are living through a crisis of gender that on the one hand has a politics of liberation of woman as a positive, particular identity and a politics of ressentiment at its limitations, and on the other hand, a politics of the revelation of masculinity as merely an identity, as particular and not universal, and thus a politics of ressentiment at the increasing loss of its value and worth.  Neither is grasped as a crisis of capitalist social forms tied to a crisis of accumulation and of value itself.

This crisis does not entail that value is no longer produced.  Waged-labor has not ceased to exist.  Money is more, not less, essential to the procurement of the means of life, the goal of economic activity is more than ever profit.  In fact, to return to the paragraph with which I opened this letter, the present moment of capitalist society, which many call neo-liberalism, "normatively constructs and interpolates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life."

The problem is that while this interpolation may turn everyone into a little capitalist in outlook, but it doesn't resolve the crisis of the valorization of value, which has translated into a shrinking number of workers in value-producing labor.  What happens when more of the population is engaged in labor that is purchased as a service rather than as value-producing labor?  Keeping in mind that as more and more labor is not value-producing, but is itself service labor that provides surrogate private labor functions, the purchasers of that commodified reproductive labor have to make enough money so that it is cheaper to buy the service as a commodity than to perform the labor oneself.  This is a dilemma, as the more people perform service jobs, the less value labor produces, the less likely the mass of laborers are to have the money to buy waged reproductive services.  The state provides a certain relief, but in the U.S. this is also maintained by debt and the Wal-Mart-ization of the economy, predicated on the dramatic lowering of global wages thanks to the entry of India and China’s massive populations into the global market as producers of commodities for Department Two.  It seems unlikely that the commodification of private, non-value producing labor can be maintained alongside stagnant or decreasing rates of wages and a decreasing mass of wages in value-producing industries.  Between high-value labor in production areas with a very high organic composition of capital, where the mass of value produced is increasingly more important than the rate of value, and service production that is nonetheless value-producing, but with low-value labor, a lower organic composition of capital, low value per unit, and relatively low productivity, the rate of surplus value is relatively high, but the mass of surplus value is considerably smaller.  In short, wages and income not generated from value-producing spheres of production are a deduction from the total social value produced.  If the income and wages from value-producing spheres decreases, this puts a limit on the amount of services that can be monetized.  In fact, the present period is exactly like this, but under conditions in which all of life is monetized.

The question of unfree, unwaged labor in relation to capital is certainly not easy either.  This is labor that is in many respects treated like means of production, that is, is bought and paid for in full.  And yet, the unfree, unwaged laborer is still human.  They can still reproduce themselves, they can perform a surplus and a variety of activities that allow a difference between the price paid for their labor and what they produce.  Also, whether or not the means of subsistence are bought by the owner of the laborer or is a relative pittance of a wage whose options of expenditure are significantly curtailed by the threat of violence, the means of subsistence are nonetheless purchased as commodities.  Thus even unfree, unwaged labor that produces commodities finds itself in the general cycle of capital.  This is what I hope to develop later.

If we consider the relationship of free to unfree labor in commodity production, we can think of it as a relation of contingency and necessity.  

Notes on Chris O'Kane's "Fetishism and Social Domination in Marx, Lukacs, Adorno and Lefebvre", Part 4

Section 2: Lukacs

91-2
"The reason that this point is crucial is because Lukács conceives of the dialectical method as being constructive of history and capitalist social totality. He refers to this in Hegelian terminology as the ‘dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process.’  This means that the dialectical method grasps historical development. As a consequence, Lukács grasps capitalism’s operation through a Hegelian prism as a dialectical totality that consists in the objectified
separation between subject and object."

Arguably even Lukacs' treatment of Marxism as a method already succumbs to a certain kind of metaphysics, one which is not Hegel's at all, much less Marx's.  Method in the sense Lukacs employs already smells of methodology derived from neo-Kantianism, and critiqued by Richard Gunn rather effectively in his "Marxism and Philosophy" in Capital & Class #35(?).

For example, I would argue that neither Hegel's Logic nor the Phenomenology of Spirit are historical or historicist texts.  Neither is about the 'dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process' (History and Class Consciousness, 1972, p. 3), at least not in any temporally linear or simply historically referential sense.  History in Hegel does not provide a "general logic" or methodology in the way it seems to do in Lukacs, leading to his teleology and his replacement of Spirit with the Proletariat in a particularly un-Hegelian manner.

I would also point out how infrequently Hegel uses the term "dialectic" and even less frequently the term "dialectical", and typically in constructions that speak of a "dialectic of X", that is, a dialectic of the object, rather than to some manner of generic "dialectical" process or method.

I don't think that one can talk of "a dialectical totality that consists in the objectified separation between subject and object" as Hegelian, either.  It does use a certain "Hegelian terminology" in the same manner that crude Marxisms use a "Marxian terminology", without it being much related to Marx.

Here, while I am partially indebted to Gillian Rose's Hegel Contra Sociology, the larger part of my reasoning relies on my own more than a decade-long close reading and engagement with Hegel's Phenomenology.

As such, I am less criticizing any particulars about the verity of O'Kane's critique Lukacs' views, than taking issue with what counts as "Hegelian" because it has definite philosophical commitments that impact conceptual development, interpretation and analysis.

93

Methodological fetishism

“In this account, the scientific method is engendered by the fetishistic and fragmented outward appearance of capitalism constituted by the objectification – ‘the reification of all human relations’ – and fragmentation of totality: ‘the constant expansion and extension of the division of labour.’268 This appearance harmonises with specialisation and becomes the basis of scientific methodology. As a result, the objectified aspects of totality are conceived as ‘things’ that are independent of totality.269”

94

“In Lukács’s Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s theory of fetishism, everyday conceptions of capitalism rest on the latter’s immediate appearances, and fail to grasp the material substratum of the class relation that constitutes this objectified, thingified appearance. The Marxist method, however, for Lukács, by virtue of its dialectical apprehension of totality, can grasp this substratum.”

95

“In a further instance of Lukács’s Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s theory of fetishism, the naturalisation of capitalism is shown to occur because people’s everyday perceptions do not grasp how or why capitalism functions as a dialectical social totality. As a result, the thingified appearance of capitalist society generates the conception that it is natural: ‘With the totality out of the way, the fetishistic relations [Erscheinen] of the isolated parts appear as a timeless law valid for every human society.’277 The Marxist theoretical method de-naturalises these trans-historical assumptions. Capital’s fetishistic forms of objectivity are derived from its immediate appearances and they generate the assumption that capitalism is in some sense ‘natural’; yet the dialectical method links these immediate forms of appearance together, and reveals their basis within the historically rooted substratum that they serve to veil.”

97-8

“Rather than providing a fully explicated theory of social constitution, this ‘method’ tends to: (a) presuppose that capitalism functions as a dialectical social totality without offering a detailed explication of how it actually functions in that regard; (b) defines the basis of the constitution of this totality by resorting to the Marxian terminology of relations between people and class relations, but without a detailed explanation of what these relations are, or indeed of how they constitute totality; (c) tends to fall back on a ‘Hegelian’ conception of the historical evolution of society as the interaction between subject and object, and on an account of objectification as the ground for a conception of social dynamics…

Instead of consisting in an aspect of a theory of the constitution of abstract social domination that explains the role that personified things play in the social constitution and reproduction of capitalist social production, Lukács’s conception of fetishism in his theory of social domination is thus concerned with objectification per se [Bold mine – CDW].283 In the above examples, theoretical instances of fetishism are consequently conceived as forms of thingified false objectivity that is characteristic of scientific and everyday forms of understanding.”

This seems quite correct.  Well put.

“…conceives fetishism as a naturalisation fallacy, and thus as an epistemological illusion of thingification that serves to veil the underlying class relations of capitalist totality.”

It will be interesting to see where this goes.  After all, O’Kane seemed to reject the idea that fetishism applies to most people, as opposed to “ideologists” for want of a better term at the moment.  

And yet, the consciousness produced by capital certainly invokes a naturalization fallacy, though it cannot be reduced to it, nor does awareness of the fallacy necessarily entail any actual overcoming of it, even in any day-to-day sense, since the problem is not consciousness, but one of social practice.  To be more precise, the self-consciousness of individuals in capitalist society is both true and false insofar as it is a consciousness conditioned by the contradictions of this society, but it also allows individuals to function more or less objectively within the society.  The consciousness is false insofar as the society is false, and this would be so for all classes, though not necessarily for all individuals (because social being is not a closed, seamless circle but "flawed"), and that self-consciousness would only change on a social level as a part of the development of practical oppositions indicative of a more generalized crisis of the limits of capital.

100

O’Kane notes Lukacs’ notion of fetishism in ‘Class Consciousness and the Proletariat’ as follows:

“This is done in Lukács’s definition of the commodity form, in which we can see (1) his Hegelian-Marxian conception of fetishism as the autonomous thingified false objectivity of ‘phantom objectivity’; (2) his Simmelian and Weberian conception of reification as autonomy, which is premised on a formal rationality that cannot grasp its own content; (3) that he bases the constitution and the constituent properties of these two facets on the mode of objectification that takes place within a social relation between people that takes on the character of a thing, and which thereby veils the social relations that constitute it. Thus:

The essence of commodity-form [translation amended] has often been pointed out. Its

basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus

acquires a 'phantom objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all embracing

as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between

people.290”

Maybe I am wrong here, but I am reading the notion of fetishism in point 1 as reification (autonomous thingified false objectivity). (see fn 289)

If reification is “the autonomous thingified false objectivity of ‘phantom objectivity’”, then we can read point 2 as “the autonomous thingified false objectivity of ‘phantom objectivity’” [reification] “as autonomy, which is premised on a formal rationality that cannot grasp its own content”, so that the premise of fetishism is actually “a formal rationality that cannot grasp its own content”.

103

“In order to demonstrate how abstract labour attains and exerts this influence, Lukács moves to production in the factory. Here, Lukács can be seen to draw on the Simmelian and Weberian aspects of his definition of the commodity form in his ‘strictly rational and all-embracing’ analysis of the object-forms of reification that are constitutive of the pervasive rationalisation of human activity in reified totality. As was the case in his earlier work, this Simmelian and Weberian conception of reification is premised on: (a) his conflation of alienation and objectification and (b) an opposition between the pernicious effects of the quantified and fragmented rationalisation of the division of labour and a qualitative notion of wholeness.”

109-12

The objection to workers’ consciousness suffering from commodity fetishism in Lukacs certainly seems tied to his mixing of Hegelian-Marxian and Simmelian-Weberian elements, which depend on conflating alienation and objectification and fragmented rationality of the parts in relation to a whole that is irrational but which should be rational in socialism.

I see no contradiction in objecting to Lukacs’ conception without drawing the conclusion that only the consciousness of the ideologists and/or capitalists is mystified, however.

112-13

“Proletarians are commodities that produce…”

Does Lukacs see proletarians as commodities or as the owners of a commodity?  Big difference.

It strikes me that part of the problem in Lukacs is his positive conception of Totality.  “The Truth is the Whole”.  The comprehension of Totality is possible and it leads to Truth.  Fragmentation and rationalization of fragments is bad and it makes correct comprehension impossible unless it is somehow superseded.

117-18

Conclusion to the Lukacs section.

“Marx’s theory of the fetish characteristic forms is part of his larger theory of the means by which the particular social form of capitalist social production distributes labour through personifying things as the bearers of value.  This theory of fetish-characteristic forms is therefore a central part of Marx’s theory of value, which attempts to explain the perverted and inverted social constitution, reproduction and distribution of the social character of capitalist labour as it occurs in terms of the relation between things.” 

This continues to bother me.  I have to get at why I don’t much care for it. 

1)    Is Marx’s “larger theory” a theory of “the means by which the particular social form of capitalist social production distributes labour”? 

2)    Or does he mean that “the fetish characteristic forms” are a piece of a piece, a part of a part… the whole of which is the critique of political economy and of capital as a whole, of which “the means by which [it]… distributes labour” is a part and the fetish characteristic forms are relegated to the distribution of labor?

Put this way, I think neither one can be satisfying. 

Further, why is the focus “capitalist labour”?  Why not “social production”?  Is there a fixation on labour, in what feels like a kind of ontological commitment to capital, for lack of a better term at the moment, ‘corrupting’ or ‘perverting’ labour as the central theme?  This is a difficult issue.  It has to be addressed, but I am not certain that the references to the actually quite limited comments by Postone in TLSD is adequate.  There are two lengthier and more focused essays on Lukacs by Postone that strike me as more substantive.  I will take those two essays up in a separate post.

In one sense, both are merely technical and would seem to ignore Marx’s own confidence that he had done two new things:

"Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within this form. 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 measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product. These forms, which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, appear to the political economists’ bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labour itself." Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW35), pp.91-2 (translation amended by Endnotes Journal).

118

Very important claim about what Marx’s work entails:

“1 It is also a central part of Marx’s account of how this process of social constitution consists of a mode of social domination, in which the personified character of these things compels and determines individual actions. 2 It is not a theory of illusory false consciousness in which things veil underlying relations but it rather describes how social categories are embedded in things, and the social characteristics that these things possess. 3 Furthermore, it is not a theory of dehumanisation per se, but articulates a theory of how individual actions are structured and dominated by the social imperatives they collectively constitute.” [numbering mine]

Lukacs’ account cannot deal with these aspects.

“As I have shown, Lukács’s conception of fetishism substitutes the Simmelian and Hegelian notion of social objectification for Marx’s account of the social constitution of the autonomous and personified fetish-characteristics of things. As a result, this account of fetishism and the ensuing theory of social domination that he develops from it, rely upon perceiving fetishism as thingification (the objectification of human activity into things that possess false objectivity and which veil real processes) rather than on offering an explanation of how these things possess abstract, autonomous and personified properties, relate to each other as bearers of value by virtue of these real processes, and dominate and compel individual actions.”

Not clear that what O’Kane identifies as Hegelian is from Hegel per se, but from a Hegelianized neo-Kantianism (this is Gillian Rose's specific claim, that Lukacs receives his Hegel and his Marx from Simmel, among others.)  I don’t think that Hegel’s notion of “social objectification” is much like Lukacs’ and in fact in the introduction to the English translation of Hyppolite’s book on the Phenomenology of Spirit, the translator notes that Hyppolite feels that it is Marx who conflates objectification and alienation, a distinction drawn first by Hegel.  Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Jean Hyppolite, xxxviii-xxxvix

That said, there is no problem with arguing as O’Kane does in fn 348, as long as one recognizes that Lukacs’ appropriation of Hegelianism (more than Hegel) and neo-Kantian informed sociology (Simmel and Weber in fact both do their work with an eye to overcoming some of the dilemmas of neo-Kantianism) should not allow for an original sin reduction of Lukacs’ dilemmas to this or that philosophical position.  His position is its own even as it is the appropriation of elements from both.  Further, in her critique of sociology (Hegel Contra Sociology) Rose will argue that Lukacs actually arrives at a kind of Fichtean point and is thus not simply another neo-Kantian, unlike say Habermas or Althusser. (30-31, see her comment on the Proletariat as social subject qua Fichtean subject.  She cites Adorno's original critique of Lukacs in exactly these terms as well.)

119

Fn 349

Rose is quite insistent not merely that Lukacs left out elements of the development of Marx’s theory of value, but that Lukacs abandons Marx’s development in Capital as a whole in order to approach Marx methodologically.  "As a result, 'reification' and 'mediation' become a kind of shorthand instead of a sustained theory."  This last sentence to the paragraph quote indicates that Rose has much more in mind than the end of chapter 1 or 2 or 3.

The result is that one would have to follow Marx’s development and construct the further work, e.g. the State and the Market would have to be outcomes of that development, hence Vol. 4 of Capital is volume 4 and is work to be done, work Lukacs certainly thought he was doing that surpassed 'base-superstructure' antinomies.  Modern bureaucratization would also require analysis of the transformations of the labor process and the state, and thus a working up of these aspects of the sort taken up in various ways by Hans-Dieter Bahr, Negt and Kluge, Serge Mallet, Andre Gorz, etc.

Also, as a matter of form, you should not bring up Postone and Elbe as having the same basic critique and then only critique Postone.  Either the mention of Elbe is irrelevant and then should be dropped or it is meaningfully different from Postone and that would have to be contrasted with Postone.  There should also be clearer references to Lukacs when one is citing whole books, especially when making a claim about such a specific point.  For example, this point seems rather obscure:
"However, Postone seems to assume that grounding this theory of constitution on the opposition between concrete and abstract labour might account for the Simmelian and Weberian strands of Lukács’ thought. I see no reason for such confidence."

120

Fn 351

This is not very curious at all.  Abstraction is a common thread in any serious Marxists work.  Autonomy?  This is a very common term across many different strands of Marxism, from operaismo and autonomia to Andre Gorz.  Personification is a whole different issue, as Postone is very distrustful of personification and certainly does not use it in a manner like Lukacs.  I don’t see the intellectual basis of the poke at Postone, though maybe I am missing some combination of graduate school staking out of uniqueness and inter-Marxist churlishness involved.  In any case, it reads rather poorly because it contributes to the treatment of Postone in the thesis as a whole as both boogeyman and straw man.

122

No real disagreement with many of the criticisms of Lukacs, but on another level it ends up being hard to see why Lukacs should have been so influential if he is so impoverished.  At the very least, one has to recognize that Lukacs addressed things that traditional Marxism either could not or could only do so in a way that was often embarrassingly naïve and beneath the level of Weber, Simmel, and Durkheim, rarely exceeding the level of a sociology based on 18^th century French materialism (see Engels’ Dialectics of Nature or The Family, Private Property and the State or Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism or Imperialism or State and Revolution, keeping in mind that these are by no means the worst, as one could cite all manner of works by Plekhanov, Kautsky, etc.)  The importance of Lukacs’ intervention at a moment of intensive social crisis, not to mention his long-standing influence, feels under-explored and under-developed.