Each of these short posts on Marx's Capital I and Hegel Science of Logic should not be read as summaries but precisely as the title suggests as a way of 'reading dialectically' through a series of arguments that are canonical to the Hegel-Marx event, which should, all humour aside, have its own geological timestamp. What I am attempting to trace here are short arguments between these thinkers that produce a convergent series: that basically produce a pure relata which negates the terms of the relation, on which the second chapter of the Science of Logic will produce a similar short engagement, later on, on this blog.
By 'reading' here I mean the most basic act of reading a landscape, as much as reading a book, that is the act of carving out a territory of thought. One can even take dialectics in the most basic way, through Marx, to mean 'a tradition of argumentation'. Consider for example a religious text. Drawn apart from its tradition of argumentation, it is fetishized, it appears to be a a commodity, comparable only to other commodities, apart that is, from its network of use-value, and most of all from the network of Value itself, constructed by the intellectual labour of generations of argumentation, which as Benjamin might like to say are not parts of a whole, but individual, incomplete universes. The same problem exists with the modern argument for 'genius'. Fortunately whatever Marx and Hegel's private beliefs on the matter might have been their methodlogy does not tolerate it. It is thus methodlogically that we must give up arguments for 'origin'- 'original thought' , 'original text', if we are to characterize thinking in a dialectical tradition as intellectual labour, that is in the most direct sense as having Value. David Gaeber's comments on the matter in his article, which lies now lost in the 'origin soup' of modern academic practice, called 'Value brings Universes into Being' are pertinent.
Hegel, in fact does not tolerate claims for any attachment between thought and a thinker. Marx of course would not go so far, at least not all the time. In fact as I review in my concurrent blogpost on the introduction to the 'Science of Logic' it would seem quite apparent that Hegel is close to insusceptible to a so called inversion; as I will show Althusser confirms in his crucial piece 'Contradiction and Overdetermination'. This is not to say that Hegel is the proverbial sand escaping from your hands, but rather that he comes the closest to creating a philosophy without metholdogical presuppositions, at least in the Science of Logic. Most of Marx's most keen insights to my mind, remain indebted to this. It is in 'letting' Capital develope its own thought, that Marx reaches his most characteristic and fecund insights about this system.
Finally by way of concluding this introduction, I would like to say that this will be an atonal reading of both Hegel and Marx. In fact I would certainly here subscribe to the Marxist insight that it is impossible to read a text from a centre. Any bifurcation can only be read from one position on that bifurcation. Would you for example read the bifurcation (read split rather than binary categorization) between the wordly and other-worldly from the first or latter point of view. It is with this in mind that within my larger theoritical ouvre I suggest that Social Scientific thought and Public discourse today is largely split at the highest level of abstraction (sadly) between the notion of ontological difference and historical universality. The latter simply implying that rather than there being a sheer Transcendental Universality there are only claims to be made to this status, and at that not claims at the level of Being (as it is usually concineved in the Cartesian way as the existence of an 'I'), but at the level of a knowledge of knowledge. That is we might argue that the claim a minoritarian people make is not a 'culture' because of an originary essence, but rather because of an actual historical claim they make to Historical (and not transcendental) universality. They are claimants to knowledge of knowledge (from a Sociological point of view, a theory of a theory of practice), and there is nothing higher or more abstract than the claim itself. I subscribe to this latter view, and I do not see any mediation possible between these two radically polarized claims. We are divided between Hegemony and Counter Culture, and there seems to be no space here for mediation. That is you cannot claim here to take a centrist view somehow dividing Hegemony and Counter Culture by a common denominator to arrive at an average. You can only think Hegemony-Counter Culture from the point of view of Hegemony or Counter-Culture.
Nor are Hegel or Marx thinkers of mediation, if there is anything Hegel rejects it is specifically 'essence' i.e mediation (centrism), which comes only after the inseparability of being and thought itself. Dialectics is not the monkey tricking the two cats by eating the loaf of bread.
Not All Commodities have ValueLater-Marx too does not subsribe to a view of material essentialism. As I will make clear in posts on later sections of Capital, this is exactly the view that he attacks, in the thought of Utilitarian thinkers like Ricardo and Smith, and it is also why the counter-attack to Marx is made by the Austrian Economists (Von Mises, Hayek and Schumpeter), who also are base materialists.
I. Use Value and Value
It is precisely for this reason that Marx does not create a simple bifurcating division between use and exchange value. Use-Value as Marx argues on the first page of his first chapter is literal materiality. But it itself is cut across by Social Labour Value.
'The usefullness of a thing makes its use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of a commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter. It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself, for instance iron, corn, a diamond, which is the use-value of a useful thing. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful quality.' (Pg 126)
That is, materiality is already split on the second page of the actual text of Capital. And it is precisely for this reason that we have not just Use Value (UV) and Exchange Value (EV) in Marx but also Value itself. It is for this reason that we have a 'Law of Value' and so many traditions of reading this theory since (for example the one described by Graeber in the article mentioned above). That is from the beginning Marx sees the thought of Capital as being encompassed or contained in a split. This is the the praxis of Hegelian dialectics. Although its so much easier to write about through Marx than while writing Hegel, precisely because Hegel produced his thought 'in language' through a treatment of language and a separation from Ordianry Language, which at no point implies it is not for 'people' although it is certainly 'in itself'. That is unlike, say Spinoza, he does not systematize language, but manouvers it in a singular way, which remains I have heard exceptionally amenable to both theft and translation, despite his fondness for puns and wordplay as a way to undermine the self-apparent nature of the relation between thought, langauge and the 'I'.
It is also for this reason (that Marx does not have an 'essential' materiality that he has a procivlity to think appearance). Appearnce to my in the opening pages of Capital (as an analysis of the abstraction of Use Value by Exchange Value) is not a question of an everyday morality ('commodities are bad' which is a 'bad conscience' or 'beautiful soul' argument ) but rather a question of occupying a space within the everyday which is a crowd of commodities, which is mostly a question of what one consumes, evacuating one's 'reading' of the world from this contact. Another deeply Hegelian form of praxis. One does not retreat to essence, but towards a suspension of essence in favour of the split in Being/Thought.
I would argue that it is for this reason that the fourth section of Chapter 1 in Capital, on Commodity Fetishism, has generated such exquisite thought. Taussig, Benjamin and Zizek (in sublime object) at the very least have taken this question of fetishising the fetish, very seriously, of reaching a negative point of nearness in relation to the object, a kind of 'mimetic (copy of a copy of a copy) soul' of the object. It would seem quite sensible thus that the larger point of critique of academic thought be directed against Kantian systematizaiton, which assumes objectivity, a kind of zero-level human perception, which is precisely what makes it possible to harbour a thought of ontological difference: many sub-human perceptions that are 'oringially different'. It is in Kant that we get the Universal as Transcendental. Which is preciely why the ire of late 20th century French Philosophy towards Hegel seems quite random, and largely caused by simplistic misreadings of his Phenomelogy of Spirit.
It is for this reason that I suggest that if you enter Hegel, you are compelled abdicate the simple formula thesis-antithesis=synthesis. It might be useful to abdicate synthesis itself, to renounce this question of whether 'absolute knowing' means some kind of totality as a simplistic, 'looks like a circle' mode of critique. Hegel does not produce categories of thought, things lakin to categories think in Hegelian texts, an increasing reason for my respect for Derrida and Spivak from that tradition of 20th Century 'French' Social Philosophy. That is it is not surprising that the Hegelian Preface to POS is a refrain in 'Grammatology'.
One gets much more mileage out of thinking Marx's method as involving a critique of objectivity and how one 'thinks a thing' (and not how one is a 'thinking thing') rather than as some kind of clownish 'inversion of dialectics'. These statements are simply ideological moments in Marx.
II. Footnote on Dialectical Causality
It is too simplistic to say that dialectics means a suspension of uni-directional causality, nor is it a kind of spread causality (only effects of effects thought from any point along nodes on a network).
I will now summarize from Althusser's prescient reading of the matter. In his article 'Contradiction and Overdetermination' Althusser begins with the same reservations I have already expressed here:
'In an article devoted to the Young Marx, I have already stressed the ambiguity of the idea of ‘inverting Hegel’. It seemed to me that strictly speaking this expression suited Feuerbach perfectly; the latter did, indeed, ‘turn speculative philosophy back on to its feet’, but the only result was to arrive with implacable logic at an idealist anthropology. But the expression cannot be applied to Marx, at least not to the Marx who had grown out of this ‘anthropological’ phase.
I could go further, and suggest that in the well-known passage: ‘With (Hegel, the dialectic) is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’, this ‘turning right side up again’ is merely gestural, even metaphorical, and it raises as many questions as it answers.'
I will forgo an explanation here of Marx's early 'phase' which should be known and understood by any serious intelelctual labour as such, and look to simply summarize the rest of the article here, focussing more on the term 'overdetermination' which is a Hegelian discovery (to be marked here that I do not use the word invention). It is often exceptionally stimulating to Read Althusserian readings of Marx, precisely for their clarity of critique. Here he asks quite simply how it is even possible to let go of the so called 'speculative exterior' of hegelian thinking while retaining a 'dialectical kernel'. That is how is it possible to apply dialectics to 'real life', rather than the Idea, and claim to have changed it (dialectics) at all. That is quite simpy how can you claim to find pre-suppositions to a methodologically pre-suppositionless thought. Althusser suggests that a large part of the blame for thinking of Hegel as an apparent pedler of essence is to be taken by Engles, since this distinction between essence and appearance has nothing to do with Hegelian thinking or as Althusser calls it Hegelian 'structure'. Althusser makes the point that the problem with Engel's reading of Hegel is that he reads Hegel as having a methodology rather than a 'system'. I would repectfully claim the opposite, and my disagreement with this idea has already been sufficiently ranted out on previous posts. For now it should be sufficient to simply to ride passenger with Althusser to reach one refractive corner of dialectical causality. I will simply say that considering it as a system is precisely what leads us to terms like 'interior' and 'exterior'( a very relevant question but not related to Hegelian thinking) , which might be relevant to so called post-structuralist thought, but are entirely irrelevant in at least the Science of Logic. This text must be read as a method of treating the sentence. Hegel here does not produce a dialectical structure but a means of producing a 'dialectical sentence', which as I will point out in my first post on the Science of Logic, is stressed by Hegel himself.
In any case, to return to the matter at hand.
Of course it would hardly be sufficient to say that Dialectical Causality is contained within the term 'overdetermination'. No, contradiction and overdetermination to follow Althusser's rendition can be read as a 'structure of the dialectic'. We must, Althusser insists, be concerned more with the 'transformation of structures' of the dialectic.
i. Contradiction
Althusser begins with a startlingly dialectical reading of history proceeding with Lenin's description of revolution proceeding from the 'weakest link', a characteristic Marxist thought, the thought of contradiction. It is this that one points to when one says 'contradictions within capital', that is quite simply tactical contracitions between Labour and Capital. Russia succeeded in producing revolution precisely because of the vast differences between the elite and the proletariat. It is useful also to quote however Althusser's comparative consideration of Germany through the succeeding periods and its so called 'nationalist-socialist' 'communitarian/cultural' 'revolution':
'What else did Marx and Engels mean when they declared that history always progresses by its bad side? This obviously means the worse side for the rulers, but without stretching the sense unduly we can interpret the bad side as the bad side for those who expect history from another side! For example, the German Social-Democrats at the end of the nineteenth century imagined that they would shortly be promoted to socialist triumph by virtue of belonging to the most powerful capitalist State, then undergoing rapid economic growth, just as they were experiencing rapid electoral growth (such coincidences do occur . . .). They obviously saw History as progressing by the other side, the ‘good’ side, the side with the greatest economic development, the greatest growth, with its contradiction reduced to the purest form (the contradiction between Capital and Labour), so they forgot that all this was taking place in a Germany armed with a powerful State machine, endowed with a bourgeoisie which had long ago given up ‘its’ political revolution in exchange for Bismarck’s (and later Wilhelm’s) military, bureaucratic and police protection, in exchange for the super-profits of capitalist and colonialist exploitation, endowed, too, with a chauvinist and reactionary petty bourgeoisie. They forgot that, in fact, this simple quintessence of contradiction was quite simply abstract: the real contradiction was so much one with its ‘circumstances’ that it was only discernible, identifiable and manipulable through them and in them.'
A useful strategic consideration to apply to the current global-political scenario, which should apply quite clearly to the rise of 21st century authoritarianism, particularly within the academy.
Here Althusser is clear, revolution also follows Hegelian 'lassen' or 'letting'. Like Hegelian thought the materiality of revolution, the pushing of capital to its limits, the simultaneous emergece of proletarian and bourgeosie revolution, are only possible through dialectical progress from the so called 'bad side'. It is not instantiated, it come into existence, through contradiction, which as Althusser finally concludes is what he seems consistently to be calling the 'essence' of dialectics.
That is revolution as a set is 'overdetermined' by events, by 'instances', as Althusser calls it. Or to put it in Tarde-ian terms, revolution is when the first serf refuses to raise his hat to a landlord, it follows principles quite simply of diffusion and mimesis, which is precisely why certain gestures, phrases or places are so crucial to revolutionary force. (This simple idea can easily be seen in the borrowings between Arab Springs and Occupy Wall Street which I explicated in my MPhil thesis as a form of virality or mimesis between urban spaces and revolutionary images.)
ii. Overdetermination
Althusser produces a very specific version of overdetermination here, which has extraordinary tactical yield. Quite simply he crosscuts Hegel's dialectics with the Marxist thought for Global revolution, since it is quite apparent that arguing from a Hegelian point of view one is unlikely to reach this particular goal.
Althusser adds a term here to the Marx-Hegel revolutionary crossing: Overdetermined Contradiction. He suggests leading from his previous discussion of contradiction, what we get in global history are fragments of the whole, that is precisely not events adding up to a totality, but events as totalities in themselves, exceptions that overdetermine the rule. This strictly speaking is also the basis of Hegelian theory of overdetermination. Althusser goes on to suggest however that a revolutionary science or intellectual labour would begin to classify or separate global fragments, or events, into hegemonic and counter-cultural events.
That is following his own extraordinary line of analysis, Althusser argues that superstructure cannot be separated from ecnomics, precisely because no revolution can be achieved simply through a suppuration of economic crises (we could even simply read Amartya Sen on this):
'Surely, with the overdetermination of any contradiction and of any constitutive element of a society, which means: (1) that a revolution in the structure does not ipso facto modify the existing superstructures and particularly the ideologies at one blow (as it would if the economic was the sole determinant factor), for they have sufficient of their own consistency to survive beyond their immediate life context, even to recreate, to ‘secrete’ substitute conditions of existence temporarily; (2) that the new society produced by the Revolution may itself ensure the survival, that is, the reactivation of older elements through both the forms of its new superstructures and specific (national and international) ‘circumstances’. Such a reactivation would be totally inconceivable for a dialectic deprived of overdetermination.'
That is quite simply, we cannot think revolution outside of thought. Hegel's notion of overdetermination, a rivulet of the larger eco-system of Hegelian thinking, stemming from a whole genealogy of thought that he borrows from the Spinozist phrase that becomes his motto: 'Determination is Negation'.
( Althought it might be worthwile to stress here that Hegel hardly rejects Greek Stoic/Early-extra-religious Christian Mystical thought, which argued that certain forms of experience remain incompeltely articulated in thought, really the line of thinking that makes Nietzsche's and Foucault's thought possible. Which is precisely why Hyppolite's tradition of critisizing dialectical thought and Deleuze's later indoctrination into this project seem frankly gratuitous. )
Overdetemination is not the outside of thought, it is the event itself as the exception to the rule, which is the rule itself, and Althusser asks us to separate the event as (government imposed) 'emergency rule' (which Agamben makes famous as the 'state of exception' and his descriptive genealogy of the Camp) from the event as 'revolution'.
III. The representation of Value
So where does this long detour leave us with the first chapter of Marx?
As we move along through these sections in the first part of Capital, we will be drawn I feel again and again to this sense of determination and overdetermination. But let us conclude here on the first section with some thoughts on 'Value'. The simplest stand point on Value within the Sociological discipline of course is the question of whether there can be a 'value-free' representation of facts. Usually, to my limited disciplinary experiece, the simplest sociological intervention to any field of knowledge is to show that things that are taken to be facts in fact have value bases to them. Good economists will usually sweep vast stretches of data, representing historical events, repeating this move across the board. Consider again Amartya Sen and his 'Poverty and Famines', which makes a series of simple maneouvers to counteract the seemingly 'pure factual' claim that the Begnal Famine of 1943 was caused entirely by material deficits of crops, favouring instead his 'Entitlement theory' which argues that the problem was a distribution problem, based on the spread across a geographical space of social access to government distribution of grains based on social capital. He goes on to reverse many typical Economic, quasi-quantiative givens, like poverty being measurable outside of subjective markers of taste etc.
This is the foundational level of understanding Value.
We can then extend this to a general problematic of including the Social in all economic considerations, which as has already been rehearsed in the previous section, is necessary to produce an actually functioning theory of revolution. It is also necessary to understand Marx. As we will see in the coming posts, what Schumpeter, in particular seemingly criticizes Marx the most for are his inclusions of Social Variables in economic analysis like 'The Law of Value', which is often mistakenly glossed as 'The Labour Theory of Value'.
It is similar for example with the concept of 'labour time'. This concept belongs to Ricardo, but is taken as a kind generalization of labour, as a unit of Value in the production process. Marx instead introduces 'Socially Necessary Labour Time' as his unit of Value. And as E.P Thompson demonstrates, this general 'Law of Value' can be used to elaborate intricate socio-historical processes, like the historically universal entry into 'industrial time' or we might even say, playing on words a little 'disciplinary time', or quite simply the generalization of 'clock time'. My general point about the Value is that while it is certainly true that there are societies that are not so heavily based on industrial clock time, the imperative to look on agrarian societies as somehow Ontologically Particular, that is having altogether separate 'time-space', in themselves, because of some sort of cultural origin seems untenable. Particularity cannot be an Ontological claim, it can only be at best a quasi-discursive claim, that is a simultaneously political and existential claim. It has nothing to do with a community as such, or its mythic past. Instead a quasi-discursive claim can be made to an evental history, to a specific history produced by an event.
Capital as Marx goes on to demonstrate using, literal and not inverted Hegelian sublation, is not to be thought of as dead mechanical repetition, that is not simply a kind of, unthinking structure. Nor is it as the Austrians would go on to claim, 'Spontaneous Order', but a kind of barbaric eruption in the gap between these two possiblities. It is precisely this that makes the transition from Money to Capital, C-C, C-M-C, M-C-M, M-CM' etc. virtually impossible to contain.
It is this historically universal form of capital that abstracts value as socially necessary labour time. Abstraction implies, that the value of average labour time fluctuates based on the social necessity for a kind/amount of labour, as we will later see in relation to fixed capital. Labour is thus not just inherently alienating, as he argues much later on the first page of Chapter 7 on Surplus Value, Man's being is tied to labour in a distinctive way, through the imagination, which distinguishes it as Marx says, from that of the Spider or the Bee. What is abstracted is this kind of what Mauss would perhaps describe as Human Social Excess over the purely material-economic. Man's species-being is an overdetermination to species-being as such. Or as he will finally argue in the final (Part 8) on Primitive Accumulation, nearly 40 years before Weber's theory: theories of spread of capital based on some kind of principle of virtue, are inherently bizzare. Capital is not created by a shift in how a few religious communities organize their profits, as much as it is not created as the Austrians would have it by some kind of enterpreneurial zeal, that feeds a sheer synthetic intelligence.
Primtive Accumulation is not a revolution. It is a state of excception.
It is in fact constructed on a kind of repeated systemic point. A historic juncture that repeats itself endlessly as the system expands. The original sin of capital, primitive accumulation, which is a progrom: mass violent labour migration, which as it moves fullfills not a kind of destiny of a semi-sentient system, but a means of the accumlation of wealth. In Marx capital is the negation of a social relation, not a pure economic derivative. This is exactly why it is a progrom, because it is not conducted by a 'smooth' 'natural' process, but by the extraction of surplus, and the dessimation of the association between labour and imagination (perhaps Hegel would say 'the Idea') which is at least for Marx, is a uniquely human faculty.
References:
Marx, Karl. 1876. Capital. Trans, Ben Fowkes. Penguin Classics. Pg 127-131.
Althusser, Louis. 1962. 'Contradiction and Overdetermination', in Notes for an Investigation, For Marx. Marxists.org.
Graeber, David. 'Value brings universes into being'. HAU: Journal of ethnographi theory. 3(2), 219-243.
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