In the spirit of historical materialism, Part 1
Learning from different interpretations of “Capital”
Let’s say, you’re somewhat new to Marxist literature.
You’re reading from different writers and come across
defending analytical Marxism from a critique by David Harvey in his Companion to Marx’s Capital, where Harvey states the need for a “dialectical” reading of Capital. Next you see a video of talking about reading Hegel through Marx and Marx through Hegel. Then, by chance, you come across a piece by me talking about Marx in relation to Spinoza and drawing on a milieu of French philosophers that formed in the ‘60s.Maybe you’re actually a seasoned reader of Marx, but like most of us, you’re mainly invested in one general tradition of interpretation.
To be sure, I’m mentioning Burgis, Harvey, and Zizek here because 1) I’ve been a fan of each of them and their works for a long time; and 2) because, as the spirit of this essay is about, I have an ongoing interest in reading and learning from varying interpretations of Marx’s Capital.
But to what extent, for example, is our understanding of Marx’s Capital helped or hindered by reference to the dialectical logic of the philosopher Hegel—according to which, to put it simply, the history of thought precedes by changes driven via contradictions internal to the form of thought itself?
Marx was influenced by Hegel, especially in his younger years, but he also might have been Hegel’s most important critic. Moreover, Marx’s latest, most advanced work, Capital, exhibits a major reduction in Hegelian influence compared to his earlier works. How might such a consideration fit within our broader understanding of the text?
Some readers think a Hegelian interpretation of Capital is essential, while others emphasize the need to show how Capital demonstrates a “break” from the Hegelian influence more evident in Marx’s earlier works. Others ignore the Hegelian influence entirely.
How do you make sense of these varying interpretations from a philosophical perspective? Are they beyond reconciliation?
The philosopher, social theorist and co-editor of the Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism Jacques Bidet has made a project of combining such varying interpretations: “At least, this is the project I have developed in the spirit of historical materialism.”[1]
In his essay “New Interpretations of Capital,” Jacques Bidet describes and compares three general philosophical “orientations” of reading Marx’s Capital which emerged in the latter half of the 20th Century, each of which marked a “distancing from the more or less official Marxism of the period and its philosophy of history.”
“The continuation of the Hegelian tradition” (Grundrisse-style exegesis of Capital).
“The tradition of historical materialism” (an anti-Hegelian French current which emphasizes an epistemological break in Capital from the more “dialectical resorts” of the earlier works).
“The intervention of analytical Marxism” (another non-dialectical approach).
Here, I’ll briefly summarize and elaborate on Bidet’s essay, introducing some of the merits and limitations he describes regarding these interpretations of Capital.
Then, I’ll follow this essay with a Part 2 about how Bidet goes about ultimately reconciling them in a way that coherently draws upon each of their strengths, for a better understanding of the text and of the capitalist world in which we live.
The Hegelian tradition and the “dialectical element”
The dialectical interpretation relies heavily on Marx’s Grundrisse (translated as “Foundations”), which was a first draft of Capital, an outline that wasn’t published until 1939-41, and in which, as Bidet explains, “Marx develops his programme of a ‘critique of political economy’ by constant recourse to the categories of Hegel's logic.”[2]
However, as Marx developed successive drafts toward the publication of the first edition of Capital Vol. One, and furthermore in three successive editions of the text, the Hegelian philosophical system was increasingly marginalized. Hence, the Hegelian tradition of interpreting Capital operates by reference to the Grundrisse and to the first edition of Capital.[3]
As Hegel’s logic is oriented to analysis of contradictions, these readers of Capital tend to home in on as the starting point for their analysis a distinction Marx described in the first edition in terms of a “contradiction” between commodities’ use-value and exchange-value. This interpretation emphasizes the contradiction between the way in which the market presents itself and the way in which it actually operates, as an “alienated social relationship:”
It was stressed that the intention of Marx’s exposition was to demonstrate that the market, far from being what it presents itself as – a space of interaction between rational individuals – constitutes an alienated social relationship, where use-value is imprisoned in the abstract objectivity of value, with labour becoming indifferent to its content. [4]
These readings emphasize Marx's theory as a theory of value-form—that is, a theory of “value as a social form”—and from the basis of which they sometimes critique the labor theory of value for being “substantialist.”[5]
Side note: I’ll save my longer tangent on this for a footnote,[6] but as a Spinozist and historical materialist, I don't see “substantialism”—generally taken to mean that substances underlie phenomena—as a thing to be rejected; on the other hand, if substantialism is a problem for you, I’m not sure how you make sense of much of anything in Capital. Apparently, some do not make much sense of it, as Bidet mentions one Hegelian interpreter who outright rejects Marx’s Capital in favor of the Grundrisse.[7]
What Marx calls commodity fetishism—the way in which social relations of production are represented as social relations among things on the market—is by the Hegelian reading of Capital a fundamental condition of modern life:
It endows commodity fetishism with a potent realistic meaning: what is involved is not merely an intellectual phenomenon, but the very condition of modern humanity, in the circumstances of capitalism as a society governed outside its control by the market.[8]
Limitations of this reading
Bidet raises several issues around this reading:
First, the reading which restores the level of Hegelianism found in the Grundrisse, or even the first edition of Capital for that matter, doesn’t recognize the final copy as the more advanced version according to Marx (and it leads to “utterly divergent, mutually exclusive interpretations – something that tends to render the project as such problematic”).[9] This reading doesn’t consider whether or to what extent Marx had good reasons for marginalizing that philosophy. As Bidet writes:
One ignores the fact that when Marx wrote a new version on the same subject, it was in order to correct the previous one. One also tends to neglect the fact that what occurs in his case is what happens to every genuine researcher: he discovered something other than what he was looking for.[10]
Bidet explains how the “Hegelian instrumentarium” was useful to Marx in developing and experimenting in his critical, theoretical project. Hence, all the more reason to consider whether Marx had good reasons for letting go of much of that toolbox as he proceeded:
both for his general plans and his particular analyzes, he draws at each step on the Hegelian instrumentarium, with a view to recognizing the new theoretical spaces it glimpses and formulating the theoretical questions that gradually appear to him. Such is the role of experimentation in theoretical research. Thus, when, as is regularly apparent from one draft to the next, Marx abandons a certain number of concepts, distinctions and sequences inspired by Hegelian logic, we must always ask whether he did not have good grounds for so doing.[11]
This kind of inquiry about the differences between drafts also highlights a sharp distinction, “a decisive alteration,” as Bidet describes it, between the exposition of the Grundrisse and that of Capital. Whereas the Grundrisse opens with a section on simple circulation before analyzing the specific system of capitalist production, Capital opens with a section on commodity production, a general, abstract conception of a market economy. There, Marx sets up a problem that was not apparent for him in the Grundrisse: “the relationship between commodity production, with its juridico-political conditions, and specifically capitalist production.”
In different ways, this distinction and development between the original draft and Capital is essential to the other two interpretations Bidet describes.
The current of historical materialism and the “epistemological break”
What Bidet refers to as “the current of historical materialism” is an interpretation that arose in France in the 1960s but which inherits a tradition of materialism which dates back to the Enlightenment and especially the philosopher Spinoza.
Emphasizing an epistemological distinction or “break” between the Grundrisse and Capital, these historical materialist readers are characterized by an “anti-Hegelian” reaction to the Grundrisse-style, dialectical readings of Capital.
What Althusser [the lead thinker among the group] challenged was the [Hegelian] representation of a society as a totality expressive of itself in each of its moments, which is realized in a fantastical dialectic of history.[12]
In addition to the concept of epistemological break, these readers brought to contemporary Marxist discourse a range of themes, including structure, reproduction, and unconscious, creating combinations which as Bidet explains “establish[ed] new, fertile philosophical links between Marxism and the social sciences.”[13]
This current is also known for taking a more distanced, holistic and experimental engagement with the text, opening space for understanding it as a work in progress, both in Marx’s own exposition and via the readers who might make necessary revisions[14]:
As regards Capital, Althusser in fact inaugurated a more distanced way of posing questions about this work, privileging discontinuities, trial and error, ruptures. He encouraged people to register the difference between philosophical categories and ‘scientific’ categories – a necessary condition for analysis of the relationship between these modes of rationality. […] Althusser encouraged a transition from the interpretation of Capital to the question of the requisite revisions of it.[15]
Limitations of this reading
Just as the dialectal analysis can be problematically overdone, the rather anti-Hegelian stance might lead to an overly rigid conception of “epistemological break,” as even Althusser would admit that Marx was influenced by Hegel and that this influence haunts Capital and is evident in the preface to the first edition.[16]
As Bidet explains, the Hegelian influence is ever-present, in the sense that both underlying and explicit “dialectical forms” appear throughout the text; hence, “[s]uch [dialectical] philosophical exegesis therefore illuminates a number of facets of Marxist theorization.”[17]
Analytical Marxism and analysis in terms of “rational individualism”
Originating with the Canadian analytical philosopher G.A. Cohen, the analytical Marxist interpretation of Capital assesses Marx’s different “forms of explanation” in terms of functional, causal, and intentional, and prioritizes two basic premises about the productive forces and the relations of production:
The first is the ‘primacy of the productive forces’: at each level of their development, their specific nature is said to explain which relations of production are required for their employment. The second thesis is the ‘correspondence’ between these two terms: the relations of production that are established are those which function positively for the development of the productive forces.[18]
From this view, the nature of the productive forces at a given level of development determines how social relations of production will be composed. For example, when from the dissolution of the feudal system emerged the productive forces of a class of people with nothing but their labor to sell as well as what Marx describes in terms of the “genesis” of the capitalist farmer and industrial capitalist, the social relation between capital and labor is the one that was best suited to function on the basis of the development of those productive forces.
Emphasizing “the necessity of analysis in terms of rational individualism,” Cohen connects the first premise about the primacy of the productive forces relative to the relations of production to the question of human rationality and the rationality of social relations broadly.[19]
Bidet explains that this analytical intervention involving the lens of rational individualism helped to clarify certain debates, such as “the explanation of major epochal challenges, like that of the ongoing globalization, and more broadly on the relations between intentional and the unintentional, on the share of human initiative in historical processes,” putting back onto the agenda questions concerning class and exploitation.[20]
Limitations of this reading
Despite the contributions that this intervention brought to the discussion, this “non-dialectical” approach involving methodological individualism, according to Bidet, doesn’t allow for a full embrace of Marx’s program; for example, by excluding the dialectical elements which remain in the text.[21]
The merits of these interpretations and limitations they expose in each other, as briefly touched on here, serve to outline the way in which Bidet proceeds to synthesize them—which will be the subject of Part 2 of this essay.
I think this approach can function as an outline for learning from these varying interpretations, as well as offering correctives for each individual current of interpretation to carry forward.
[1]. Jacques Bidet (2009) “New Interpretations of Capital,” in Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 380.
[2]. Ibid, 372.
[3]. Ibid.
[4]. Ibid, 373.
[5]. Ibid.
[6]. The rejection of the labor theory of value (LTV) on the basis of substantialism raises other questions: what do these critics think of other parts of Capital like Marx's connecting his analysis of division of labor—which is no doubt central to the entire project and which I think for Marx supersedes the Hegelian idea of alientation—to “industrial pathologies” described in the medical journals of his day? Marx describes “the suppression of a whole world of drives and inclinations” via division of labor in manufacture, which only becomes intensified in factory production. This also is insightful: I've seen Zizek say, no surprise, that he doesn't believe in the Spinozist idea of “essence” as defined by relations, and also that he once asked David Harvey what he thought about the LTV, and that Harvey replied something like, “I’m not sure,” as if this is some profound evidence against the theory. To be sure, I don’t think it's entirely negligible that Harvey responded that way, given he has spent so much time reading, writing about and teaching Capital. However, if doubting the LTV is a fairly common characteristic of the Hegelian tradition, then perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising that Harvey would doubt it or that Zizek would find Harvey’s doubt to be compelling evidence against it, given both are from among the Hegelian tradition in one way or another. After all, Marx didn't get the LTV through philosophy but rather from the Political Economists.
[7]. Ibid, 375.
[8]. Ibid, 374.
[9]. Ibid, 375-6
[10]. Ibid, 376.
[11]. Ibid.
[12]. Ibid, 378.
[13]. Ibid.
[14]. Ibid, 379.
[15]. Ibid.
[16]. Panagioti Sotiris (2020) A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 34-5.
[17]. Bidet, 375.
[18]. Ibid, 379.
[19]. Ibid, 379-80.
[20]. Ibid, 380.
[21]. Ibid.