A history in which we can intervene
Rupture, encounter, and class struggle
[Mixed media by
]In my previous couple of essays, I’ve been describing the merits and limitations of three different interpretations of Marx’s Capital—dialectical, analytical, and historical materialist—and the way in which the philosopher and social theorist Jacques Bidet ultimately synthesizes them in his essay, “New Interpretations of Capital.” Here, I want to cap the series by briefly elaborating on one of the Bidet passages I included in the last essay, where Bidet describes Marx’s theory as operating within the context of “a natural history.”
As critics of capitalism, we’re bound to recoil at any use of the word “natural” in the context of a discussion of capitalism, as we’re used to its defenders trying to naturalize this socio-economic system.
Hence, I feel compelled to return to and clarify one passage I quoted in the last essay wherein Bidet describes Marx’s theory as operating within the context of “a natural history that escapes the grasp of any dialectic.”
Bidet describes a subordinated role of Hegelian dialectical logic in Capital, wherein the “dialectical element” is relevant but not at the broad scale of Marx theory of history:
The dialectical element is […] to be understood in the non-dialectical context of a history in which we can intervene, even though it remains, beyond our projects, a natural history that escapes the grasp of any dialectic. Contrary to the dialectical materialism of the old orthodoxy, the dialectical element is subordinated to the regime of historical materialism.[1]
What exactly does Bidet mean by the use of the terms “natural history” here, and in what sense is it one that “escapes the grasp of any dialectic”?
Rupture, encounter and class struggle
Capitalism was not born as from an egg in the belly of feudalism; rather, it was formed on the basis of elements that emerged in the conditions of feudalism’s dissolution.
In the final part of Capital: Volume One,[2] Marx presents a series of chapters which essentially describe the transition from feudalism to capitalism as it took place in England.
First, a couple of chapters which mark the radical breakdown of feudalism:
“Expropriation of the agricultural population from the land.”
“Bloody legislation against the expropriated since the end of the Fifteenth Century” including the “forcing down of wages by act of parliament.”
Then, the subsequent emergence of the relatively independent productive elements which come to form the capitalist economy:
“Genesis of the capitalist farmer.”
“Impact of the agricultural revolution on industry,” including the “creation of a home market for industrial capital.”
“Genesis of the industrial capitalist.”
Étienne Balibar, a philosopher of the French historical materialist current, describes this transition to the capitalist mode of production from the feudalist mode as a rupture in the correspondence between the relations of production and productive forces, setting free the elements that would form the encounter between labor and capital, the relation between which forms the social composition of the capitalist economy.[3] The object of Marx’s analysis, as Balibar explains, is the successive development of productive forces.[4]
This is consistent with the analytical Marxist view of the philosopher G.A. Cohen according to whom the nature of the productive forces at a given level of development determines how the social relations of production will be composed.
Thus, both historical materialist and analytical Marxist traditions understand epochal change—such as that between feudalism and capitalism—by focusing our analysis on the development of productive forces and the relations of social production.
We’re within the realm of natural history, of relations of domination between organisms, where the nature of the productive forces and of the social relations formed around them are paramount, and where the general, and in that sense natural, laws of the market are unavoidable for any form of market economy; capitalist production is as much subject to the abstract economic laws of a market economy, as formulated by Marx in the opening section of Capital Vol. One, as any other form of market economy.
It is particularly within the vein of historical materialism—of transition via rupture and encounter—that Bidet describes history as “beyond the grasp of any dialectic." In other words, the moments of epochal transition are not graspable by some dialectical teleology, where history has a preformed purpose so much as a series of causes and effects.
Relations of domination over productive forces are not guaranteed to go one way or another toward ever-more progress. Even though capitalism creates the organizational and productive conditions for it, socialism is not a predestined conclusion of history.
Capitalism cannot go on forever, but socialism is not the only alternative to capitalism on the table: there’s also the option of returning to some form of aristocratic master-slave society, for example. And many of those on the other side of the current class struggle would no doubt prefer that alternative over socialism.
It’s up to us, humans with a limited amount of agency, to ensure we work toward the better of those options. That’s why winning the class struggle is essential.
Hence, this is a history in which we not only can but must intervene if we want a freer, more equal form of society.
Notes
[1]. Jacques Bidet (2009) “New Interpretations of Capital,” in Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 383.
[2]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 877–931.
[3]. Étienne Balibar, (2015 [1970]) ‘On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism’, in Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière, Reading Capital (London: Verso), 448–9.
[4]. Ibid, 414.