In the spirit of historical materialism, Part 2
Synthesizing different interpretations of "Capital"
[Mixed media by
]Dialectical, analytical, historical materialist—are the philosophical differences between these readings of Marx’s Capital beyond reconciliation?
In Part 1 of this essay, I briefly summarized and elaborated on an essay by Jacques Bidet titled “New Interpretations of Capital,” wherein Bidet describes and compares three general philosophical[1] “orientations” of reading Marx’s Capital:
“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 “dialectical resorts” found in the earlier drafts of the text).
“The intervention of analytical Marxism” (another non-dialectical approach).
As promised, here, in Part 2 of my essay, I’ll explain how Bidet goes about ultimately synthesizing these orientations in a way that draws upon each of their strengths.
Focusing on the key points of intersection which Bidet draws between these interpretations, I’ll reference a relevant passage from the opening section of Capital to help illuminate his account.
The differences Bidet outlines, as discussed in Part 1 of my essay, largely center on the interpretations of the relation between the opening section of Capital in relation to the rest of the book in terms of structure, as the opening section focuses on more general laws of a market economy before entering the analysis of the capitalist economy in particular.
In a couple of previous essays, for example, I elaborated on how one general law of a market economy which Marx outlines in Chapter 3 about changes in value applies later in his analysis of the capitalist economy in particular.
In this sense, Bidet’s own project of synthesizing the three “orientations” operates on a level of engagement encouraged especially by the French historical materialist current: “a more distanced way of posing questions about this work.” Indeed, Bidet himself describes his project as one performed “in the spirit of historical materialism,”[2] and his synthesis begins with reaffirming the idea of epistemological distinction or “break” between the Grundrisse and Capital.
As a reminder, the Grundrisse is understood as a first draft of Capital, one that wasn’t published for more than half a century after Marx’s death but which the Hegelian tradition of interpretation typically references as it displays a level dialectical influence which Marx had increasingly marginalized in subsequent drafts of Capital.
The concept of the ‘epistemological break’ must be applied
In Part 1 of my essay, I introduced a key distinction which Bidet draws between the Grundrisse and 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, as Bidet explains, 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.”[3]
In applying the idea of the epistemological break established by the historical materialist current, we read the opening section of Capital with the rigor of analytical Marxism, wherein the terms of rational individualism are relevant. As Bidet writes,
The concept of the ‘epistemological break’ must be applied to the relationship between the Grundrisse and Capital. This results in reading Part One of Capital Volume One with all the rigor of analytical Marxism and construing it (as do consistent Marxist economists) as the exposition of the abstract model of rational production in a market – on the basis of private property, hence in conditions of competition.[4]
Indeed, in the opening section of Capital, we find “the exposition of the abstract model of rational production in a market,” a place where free-equal-rational exchanging producers come together.
In Chapter 2, for example, Marx describes the necessity of a judicial relation as existing on top of the economic relation between owners of commodities: a “judicial relation, whose form is the contract,” which “is itself determined by the economic relation:”
Commodities are things, and therefore lack the power to resist man. If they are unwilling [as in the case of livestock, for example], he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them. In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other and alienate his own except through an act, to which both parties consent. The guardians must therefore recognize each other as owners of private property. This judicial relation, whose form is the contract, whether as part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills which mirrors the economic relation. The content of this traditional relation (or relation of two wills) is itself determined by the economic relation. Here the persons exist for one another merely as representatives and hence owners, of commodities. […] the characters who appear on the economic stage are merely the personifications of economic relations; it is as the bearers of these economic relations that they come into contact with each other.[5]
Marx explains here that in order for there to be a situation in which “objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities,” there must be a contractual legal relation, “whether as part of a developed legal system or not,” whereby the commodity owners “recognize each other as owners of private property.” This implies a level of freedom, equality, and rationality on the part of the commodity owners—as well as an economic understanding, for in the economic relation, “the persons exist for one another merely as representatives and hence owners, of commodities,” as characters personifying the economic relations.
Later in the text, in analyzing the capitalist economy in particular, Marx describes the capitalist—who is “capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will”—as “a rational miser,” whereas the miser is “merely a capitalist gone mad.”[6]
Echoing analytical Marxists, Bidet explains that Marx finds presupposed in the abstract formulation of a market economy “the liberty-equality-rationality of exchanging producers: in other words, a presupposition of (juridico-political) reason […] as much as of (economic) understanding.”
However, this kind of figure which a market economy presupposes—this free-equal-rational exchanging producer—is met in reality by its opposite, their being subject to the laws of the market. As Bidet explains, “such partners cannot be considered free-equal-rational if they acknowledge themselves to be subject to a natural common law – that of the market.”[7]
Moreover, the Political Economic narrative of this kind of universal social form being the historical starting point of capitalism—what Marx describes as the “‘Eden of the rights of man and the citizen’”—is posited against the backdrop of a reality of the capitalist economy in which property relations are always already unequally distributed: “conditions that reproduce the asymmetry between those who possess nothing but their labor-power and those who share in property and the employment of capital.”
Hence, both the commodity owner as a figure of the abstract market economy, which confronts its opposite in its being subjected to the laws of the market, and the story of such a universal social form being at the historical starting point of capitalism, which confronts its opposite in the actual organization of capitalism, are, according to Bidet, dialectically developed ideas, only coherent as such: “Such is the dialectical relationship that obtains between the structure of capitalism, understood as a class structure, and its presupposition.”[8]
Thus, it’s in these ways, drawing on insights from each of the three “lines of research” or interpretive “orientations,” that we can understand Marx’s theory of class in capitalist society:
[a theory] according to which the peculiarity of the modern form of class consists in the fact that it is founded on a rational-reasonable social relationship – the market – by turning it into its opposite sense: the exploited and oppressed worker being declared to be inscribed in a relationship of free, equal and rational exchange; being ‘posited’ as such.[9]
A history in which we can intervene
While Bidet highlights dialectical aspects of Marx’s exposition, he does so in a rather precise manner by starting with the premise of the “epistemological break” and proceeding with the rigor of analytical Marxists. For Bidet, the dialectical element does not operate in Capital at the grand scale of a philosophy of history; rather, it is relegated as a conceptual tool for thinking about how a system as asymmetrical and exploitative as capitalism could be represented as arising from a market system of freedom, equality and rationality.
The dialectical element is therefore 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.[10]
To be clear, this is not to say that capitalism is “natural,” but rather that markets are subject to general, unavoidable laws which Marx establishes in the opening section of Capital Vol. One. asymetrical but rather, echoing the analytical Marxist premise I touched on in Part 1 of this essay, that the nature of the productive forces at a given level of development
After all, while Hegel was useful to Marx in his theoretical research, the process by which a scientific theory is initially developed is not the same as the process of its exposition. In the course of developing subsequent drafts of Capital beyond the Grundrisse, I think Marx was comfortable parting with the Hegelian philosophical system where it was no longer useful to him because he had the insight to realize what Christoph Henning explains in his book Philosophy After Marx:
One does not need Hegel's Logic to distinguish between ‘essence and appearance’. Simple examples suffice to show that many scientific disciplines operate on the basis of this distinction: we see the Sun rise every morning, and yet we know that in fact the Earth revolves around the Sun. One does not need to be a Hegelian to acknowledge this fact.[11]
The Hegelian tradition often carries with it a “logico-historical, teleological bias” which “mars the exposition of Capital.” However, by acknowledging the epistemological break which occurs between the first and last drafts of Capital, we can read the text with all the rigor of analytical Marxism and see how Marx exposes the conditions for a revolutionary transition—not simply as some inevitability which we can merely philosophize in retrospect, but as a possibility which requires our informed intervention:
The writing strategy of Volume One in effect locates the market at the logical commencement of the exposition and culminates in the organization as its historical result, fruit of the gradual concentration of capital, leading to great oligopolies which, with a working class educated and organized by the very process of production, form the prelude to the revolutionary transition to the universally devised organization. This perspective, which presses the democratic organization of the whole of social existence against the multiform domination of the capitalist market, is a strong point in the Marxian legacy. Yet it must not lead us to forget that market and organization, which are the two complementary forms of the rational co-ordination of social production, constitute – converted into their opposites – the two intersected factors of class in the modern form of society. This forms the basis for more productive relations with the work of Marxist economists, with contemporary political philosophies and sociologies […] and with the whole of the movement that seeks the revolutionary transformation of modern society.[12]
Notes
[1]. Bidet starts by acknowledging the important contributions these philosophers keep in mind when broaching Capital made by Marxist economists, sociologists and historians, “each in their own domain, have also reinterpreted this theory by applying it to new situations, reworking its concepts, or taking up its classical problems.” Jacques Bidet (2009) “New Interpretations of Capital,” in Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 370.
[2]. Bidet, 379.
[3]. Ibid, 377.
[4]. Ibid, 380.
[5]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 178-9.
[6]. Ibid, 254.
[7]. Bidet, 381.
[8]. Ibid, 382.
[9]. Ibid, 381.
[10]. Ibid, 383.
[11]. Christoph Henning (2015) Philosophy After Marx: 100 Years of Misreadings and the Normative Turn in Political Philosophy, (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 26-7.
[12]. Bidet, 383.