Althusser's later writings

[Paul Cockshott]

Just Started to read Althusser's Philosophy of the Encounter with an introduction by a guy called Goshgarian. So far I have only read a large part of his long intro situating it with respect to Althusser's earlier work going back to his book on Montesquieu in the late 50s. It is about what is termed aleatory materialism. I hate that translation of aleatoir as aleatory which is not a proper English word. Anyone with a scientific background would translate it as something like random. Anyway it looks absolutely fascinating and it would be of great inetrest to compare Althusser's materialisme aleatoire to Kauffman's ideas in the 'Origins of Order'. I suspect that the policitcal conclusions of Althussers book are of the utmost importance to the current European conjuncture.

The introduction has a very provocative analysis of Althussers theory of the nature of the state and its role in his critique of Eurocommunism. I suspect that it may provide a strong critique of the approach of the CPGB which, from this theoretical framework, seems a continuation of the theoretical assumptions of Eurocommunism.

[Paul Cockshott]

Cross posting from another dicussion

Joanne Telfer You're obviously on a different track here Paul. Isn't Althuser's main proposition a rejection of Hegel in interpreting the mature works of Matrx whereas say Zizek does the opposite? Personally I think the misinterpretation might have been with Plekhanov, getting carried away with the extension of materialist dialectic into nature by Engels.
yes rejection of the Hegelian content of Marx was a key point of Althussers writings in the 60s. If Goshgarians introduction is anything to go by he continues to reject Hegelianism in the 80s but says that Marx had not completely broken from Hegelian idealism even in writing Capital. He apparently claims that this still contains both a Hegelian strand and an underground materialist or Epicurean strand. I have not read much of the book yet, but |I must say that I am a-priori sympathetic to this. The Hegelian elements are quite evident in Capital, and the poverty of the Hegelian presumption is sumarised by Chaitin's aphorism that you can not get two kilos of theorems from one kilo of axioms. New content requires new information, and new information - if Shannon is right - is random hence in Althusser's terminology aleatoire.

[Mr. Natural]

This is a potentially fascinating discussion, and I'll carefully re-enter it tomorrow when I find what comrades are thinking. I'm not that familiar with Althusser, but what I know of him is very negative. I would perhaps inaccurately term him as a conservative and a counter-revolutionary who takes the life and revolution out of Marxism.

But Althusser and Stuart Kauffman's Origins of Order mentioned in the same sentence? You rock, Paul Cockshott! Kauffman is one of my main new sciences/Santa Fe Institute interpreters of the organization of life, and I can't imagine the relation to Althusser that I am hoping you will further unpack and explain.

I couldn't be more opposed to suggestions raised by Althusser that there was an "epistemological break" between a young Hegelian Marx and a mature Marx who dispensed with dialectics. The Hegelian philosophy of internal relations and its dialectical categories brought nature and society to life in Marx's mind as the organic, systemic processes they definitely are, and this internalization of nature and society as living process was integral to Marx and his Marxism. It doesn't matter that much that Hegelian dialectics are so clumsy, partial, and practically unusable in their present form: they served to bring Marx's mind and his view of society to life!!!

In any case, Paul Cockshott, we haven't crossed paths in awhile, and we have never crossed swords. I remain mightily impressed by our last contact when I showed you that Anti-Duhring was a joint project of Marx and Engels, and you accepted the information. This is so rare! So few comrades have minds that are open to information that challenges their established beliefs. I am.

So I sure as hell am interested in learning more about your Althusser/Kauffman pairing, and I promise to bring an open mind to the discussion.

And I really, really would like to see some discussion on Kauffman. I have effectively accepted his pre-biotic evolutionary scenario wherein organic molecules in Earth's primordial atmosphere autocatalyzed (self-organized) into protocells that were then able to evove in chemical steps into the first true living system--a bacterium. All living systems on Earth have since followed the pattern of organization established by this founding protocell, although with an astounding variety of forms, and this universal pattern of organization of living systems and viable human social systems is modeled by what I call "Capra's Triangle" and is therefore now available to popular, revolutionary employment.

So I bring some fish to this fish fry, but promise not to try to take over the grill. I want to learn more about Althusser/Kauffman. My red-green best.

[Paul Cockshott]

I have now made more progress with the book and could not recomend it more strongly than I do. It is the work of a marxist philosopher of tremendous intellectual rigour and insight. It really makes you think carefully about things that you may have taken for granted before.

In these works, dating from the late 70s and early 80s he somewhat modifies his position on the epistemological break. He now says that there were relict Hegelian idealist strands in Marx as late as Capital. There is an interesting discussion of why Marx structured Capital the way he did with an progression from the abstract to the concrete - starting with the the commodity and value and then progressing via surplus value etc.
He goes into the the isssue of the contrast between the Hegelian mode of exposition of these chapters and the concrete historical accounts of the process of primitive accumulation.

His basic point is that the actual generation of capitalism is something contingent, something produced by an actual material history described in the chapters on primitive accumulation.

Where is the connection to Kaufmann?

It is because Kaufmann and Althusser are both dealing with the same problem - the origin of ordered systems or ordered structures. Kaufmann is concerned with autocatalytic nets and the process of creating cells for the first time as a result of pre-biotic evolution. Althusser is concerned with the process of formation of modes of production - another structured self reproducing system. There is the same problem - once the system exists it self reproduces but the components that constitute part of the self reproducing system - the new mode of production, have to arise as a contingent effect of prior history where the self reproducing mechanism is not there.

The great thing about Kaufmann, and of course Darwin before him is that teleological explanations are ruled out. Unfortunately for too many marxists that is not the case. They as Althusser puts it see the past in the 'future anterior' tense. So they see the mercantile bourgeoisie of the 16th century as a nascent modern bourgeoisie with a historical 'role' to play. One only has to see how often this terminology of 'roles' is used by some marxist writers. But that mode of thought only makes sense within the Hegelian / theist conceptual structure, for who but the imortal gods can have scripted such 'roles'. A materialist theory of causality according to Althusser has to obey the arrow of time and see what happens at time t1 as a result of the state of the system at time t0 not as a stage on the achievement of a goal at time t2.

[Mr. Natural]

Paul Cockshott, I haven't gone away. I appreciate the opportunity to engage you, for you seem to have one of those open but critical minds so rare on the left these days. So I've been researching a bit on Althusser, and look forward to learning more from you. The books I was able to pull from my little library that include some discussion on Althusser include Helena Sheehan's Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, Eric Hobsbawm's Revolutionaries, Sebastiano Timpanaro's On Materialism, John Rees' Algebra of Revolution, and Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic.

But Stuart Kauffman and the new sciences of organization he champions are my area of "expertise." My obsessive focus has been on the organization that underlies the "things" of life, and if you haven't already run into my insistence that Marxists historically haven't known how to organize viable revolutionary processes, you just did.

And from there I will insist that what I call "Capra's Triangle," taken from the new scientific understanding of the organizational relations of life, both simply and accurately models life's universal pattern of organization--the pattern of organization established by Kauffman's pre-biotic autocatalytic (self-organizing) nets (systems). This triangle potentially enables regular human beings to sit down and design radical forms of community and grassroots revolutionary processes that lead out of capitalism into realized, communal forms of human being.

However, I'm not trying to introduce Capra's Triangle here, but to take a look at Althusser's structuralism and its "origins of order" and compare it with Kauffman's presentation of biological order. I want to look at the organization of life in my firm conviction that the manner by which matter orginally self-organized (autocatalyzed) into a living system has been maintained ever since as the life process (and evolutionary history) and is the organization humans must apply to our socio-economic systems.

Unfortunately, I don't have Kauffman's Origins of Order, although I have his At Home in the Universe and notes on Investigations.

The radical nub of what I refer to as "a red-green theory" is that matter has self-organized into material living systems on Earth, and that humans are living material systems that must consciously employ life's organizational rules--rules that have been unknown until the last half-century. And now we have that unprecedented, transcendently revolutionary mental tool: Capra's Triangle.

Back to Althusser. Perhaps I can expose the deadly flaw I see in Althusser's dead structures. You wrote that Kauffman and Althusser are both dealing with the origin of ordered systems or ordered structures, and that Kauffman is concerned with autocatalytic networks and the process of creating cells in a pre-biotic evolutionary process. You continued, "Althusser is concerned with the process of formation of modes of production--another structured self-reproducing system. There is the same problem--once the system exists it self-reproduces but the components that constitute part of the self-reproducing system--the new mode of production, have to arise as a contingent effect of prior history where the self-reproducing mechanism is not there."

Ah, but the self-reproducing mechanism IS there, Paul, and "it" is the organization and not the stuff. Life's organization is always there, although the stuff changes. Life's simple, universal pattern of organization gives rise to an infinity of forms from bacteria to brains. Think of the many materials that can be organized to serve as a chair, for instance. Or ponder Nobel laureate and founder of the Santa Fe Institute, Murray Gell-Mann's aphorism, "Life is surface complexity arising out of deep simplicity."

I engage that deep organizational simplicity in order to bring it to the minds of others so we can get organized. Althusser, in my still vague understanding of him, seems to leave human beings trapped within structures they do not recognize or understand. Marx, on the other hand, while recognizing the problem, was adamant that humans create their lives, albeit usually unconsciously within the structures into which they are born. Marx thus leaves open the opportunity to understand our situation and radically change it, and Marxism is all about providing the materials necessary to revolutionary transformation and human realization.

Well, your post has gotten me thinking, and I'm going to take it on my afternoon hike to think some more about the orgins of biological and socio-economic order. It's my contention they must employ the same organization. Where was Althusser on organization? Did he ever address it? Aren't people generally blind to organization? Am I getting off base on Althusser?

And what do you think of my contention that, as natural material beings, humans must learn to consciously apply the same organizational laws and relations the rest of life automatically employs? This is way, way radical, but is it wrong?

My red-green best.

[blake 3:17]

I'm curious about this book. I find Althusser's thought very perplexing and have enjoyed some of what I believe are his later writings on Pascal.

Some of the breaks with Hegel are perhaps overstated. I've been reading an essay on Deleuze and Hegel which has been quite stimulating.

The theoretical necessity for Marxists is an absolute break with any kind of teleology. I was very influenced by Hegelian Western Marxism, as well as Trotsky, and have come to reject any final project.

BTW, I just learnt that Kojeve was an architect of the European Common Market. Ouch!

Edited to add: It's been years since I read it, but I was very impressed by Poulantzas' The Crisis of the Dictatorships: Portugal, Greece, Spain which talks about the overthrow of fascism without leading to socialism.

[Grenzer]

Blake, what exactly constitutes "Hegelian Marxism"? I've heard this phrase in several different places, but I've never seen anyone actually connect it with concrete names and theories.

[Rafiq]

Blake, what exactly constitutes "Hegelian Marxism"? I've heard this phrase in several different places, but I've never seen anyone actually connect it with concrete names and theories.

I think most people associate it with Young Marx's idealism and his influence from Hegelian dialectics.

One of the greatest theoretical victories for Marxism was this radical break with Hegel in which Marx turned Hegel on his head. However, as Althusser pointed out, there are still existing remnants of Hegelianism even from capital.

For Marxists, we should continue to uphold Dialectical thought in the sense that nothing is static, and history is not linear and abolish teleolgy. We should still recognize things as not static states of being, but constant processes, but we should refrain from superimposing Dialectics upon nature, as Engels warned. Instead, perhaps, we can draw dialectical conclusions from the analyzation of nature.

[Mr. Natural]

I've spent some hours rummaging through my Althusser and Kauffman materials to get a better handle on this thread's potentially fertile pairing of them. I'll further explore Paul's remarks in my next post, but first:

Rafiq wrote, "we should refrain from superimposing Dialectics upon nature as Engels warned. Instead, perhaps, we can draw dialectical conclusions from the analysis of nature." Yes!!!

I'm guessing you are aware, Rafiq, of Engels' statement of his means of approaching "natural dialectics," which echoes your statement: "there could be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it." (Anti-Duhring)

And now Kauffman, the Santa Fe Institute, Ilya Prigogine (self-organization), Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (autopoiesis), Fritjof Capra (living systems theory), et al, have made great strides in revealing nature's "laws."

And then, in what my little brain understands as the most radical, profoundly revolutionary scientific discovery in history, Fritjof Capra has created a simple, usable model of life's organizational relations. This model that I have been relentlessly researching for 13 years serves to fully embody the materialist dialectics' loose, partial relations, motions, and developments, and a living portrayal of life's universal pattern of organization emerges.

This is a profoundly revolutionary development, and that I have so far been unable to bring it to the mind of revolutionaries is my daily disgruntlement.

But then, these revolutionaries need to admit to themselves the obvious: they and Marxism and the human species are presently stuck in capitalism's place, and capitalism is rapidly cashing us all in. In such a situation, revolutionaries need to be open to new, radical information, if it is available. And it is. This isn't an invitation to tilt at windmills, as has been suggested, but to dive deep into life's communal organization and apply it to the organization of human community and revolutionary processes.

I invite radical minds to engage the following: If all life consists of self-organizing material systems existing in dynamic interdependence with each other, and human beings are self-organizing material systems who must live in dynamic interdependence (community) with each other and their environment, wouldn't life's pattern of organization apply to human beings? Aren't humans living systems who must consciously employ life's laws, and aren't these humans all living by global capitalism's laws now?

Althusser seems to take the self-organization, the human agency, out of his structuralism. I could be wrong. Am I?

Well, are we not natural beings? Are we not life? Are we not self-organizing material systems, as is the rest of life, and do we not then have to consciously learn to organize in life's pattern?

And we aren't stuck, but our thinking is. My red-green best.

[Paul Cockshott]

You need to read Althusser in the original. He is very political all his writings are interventions from the left in the politics of the Communist Parties. I suggest you start with 'Lenin and Philosophy'.

[Hit The North]

I think most people associate it with Young Marx's idealism and his influence from Hegelian dialectics.


There are no substantial works of Marx's that could be attributed to some idealist, Hegelian stage in his thinking, given that by 1843 he and Engels had already made the break towards a materialist view, so what are you referring to?

The "epistemological break" is pretty much an invention of Althusser's.

[Paul Cockshott]

If all life consists of self-organizing material systems existing in dynamic interdependence with each other, and human beings are self-organizing material systems who must live in dynamic interdependence (community) with each other and their environment, wouldn't life's pattern of organization apply to human beings? Aren't humans living systems who must consciously employ life's laws, and aren't these humans all living by global capitalism's laws now?

Althusser seems to take the self-organization, the human agency, out of his structuralism. I could be wrong. Am I?

You have to think of the specific form of self organisation of societies based on exploitation. The question here is how do they reproduce themselves and how does the state function to ensure that reproduction which is the same time a reproduction of relations of domination and subordination.

[Paul Cockshott]

There are no substantial works of Marx's that could be attributed to some idealist, Hegelian stage in his thinking, given that by 1843 he and Engels had already made the break towards a materialist view, so what are you referring to?
Their break was towards Feurbach whose materialism was not yet a causal one, and retained strong idealist themes, in particular the Fuerbachian theory of alienation.

[Hit The North]

Their break was towards Feurbach whose materialism was not yet a causal one, and retained strong idealist themes, in particular the Fuerbachian theory of alienation.

And quickly this was overcome by the time of The German Ideology. Alienation was recast as the alienation of the direct producers from the fruits of their labour and creative capacity and into the notion of commodity fetishism. So I disagree with your attempt to rid Marxism of a theory of alienation so that you can present a model of socialism that does not necessitate the democratic control of society by the direct producers themselves as the vital prerequisite.

[Rafiq]

And quickly this was overcome by the time of The German Ideology. Alienation was recast as the alienation of the direct producers from the fruits of their labour and creative capacity and into the notion of commodity fetishism. So I disagree with your attempt to rid Marxism of a theory of alienation so that you can present a model of socialism that does not necessitate the democratic control of society by the direct producers themselves as the vital prerequisite.

Nonsense. That was simply Marx's style of writing, his attempt at irony. It is clear in the German Ideology, Marx breaks with both humanism and alienation.

[Hit The North]

Nonsense. That was simply Marx's style of writing, his attempt at irony. It is clear in the German Ideology, Marx breaks with both humanism and alienation.

Sorry, are you seriously arguing that commodity fetishism is an ironic trope and not a serious part of Marx's critique of capitalism? Are you arguing that Marx was not being serious when he emphasised the alienation of the worker from his own labour as a key characteristic of capitalist social relations of production and that, therefore, socialism as the negation of capitalism must be the overcoming of such a state of alienation?

Also, show me where Marx makes this clear break with 'humanism' and alienation. There must be some explicit quotes you can refer to.

[blake 3:17]

Blake, what exactly constitutes "Hegelian Marxism"? I've heard this phrase in several different places, but I've never seen anyone actually connect it with concrete names and theories.

The most prominent Hegelian Marxists would be Lukacs and Marcuse.

[Mr. Natural]

I'm delighted to see my favorite spam crier has engaged this thread and is supplying important, valid correctives to attempts being made to divorce Marx, Engels, and Marxism from their humanist roots and their resulting revolutionary project to end human social and material alienation. For those not in on the little joke, FTC has recently been infracted for "spam crying," a RevLeft first and surely a backhanded recognition of his excellence.

This post doesn't come from the Frankfurt School's and New Left's emphasis on cultural and spiritual matters in isolation from the material, nor from Althusser's response of a cold structural materialism that seems to exclude human themes. Marx and Engels married the social and the material, and so do I. I'm a human being, and that's what we do.

I don't know why comrades are burrowing into Althusser. Other than a good mental workout, what does Althusser offer? Has anything revolutionary ever been developed from what appears to be a hyper-structuralist approach to human existence? What do comrades see as possible to develop from Althusser?

In addressing the Althusser from the 70s and 80s, we are dealing with his "Maoist period," as some refer to it. What was this "Maoism," and how did it differ from the early Althusser?

But why are comrades abandoning Marx to run to Althusser? There was no "epistemological break." Marx and Engels were revolutionaries because they perceived a miserable human condition under capitalism and determined to change it. Modern Marxists, though, have gotten way off track whether they advocate a "materialist" Marxism sans humanism & deep concerns about alienation, or an idealist Marxism that ignores material conditions. And an abandonment of the materialist dialectic is an abandonment of Marx and Engels and Marxism and their view of life and society as organic, living, systemic processes.

So I'd like to congenially have it out here with comrades who are of revolutionary inclination but who are excluding Marx's and Engels' lifelong concerns and beliefs from Marxism and are thereby foreclosing the development of a viable revolutionary theory.

Paul Cockshott outlined Althusser's anti-teleological historical process thusly: "A material theory of causality according to Althusser has to obey they arrow of time to see what happens at time t1, as a result of the state of the system at time t0 not as a stage on the achievement of a goal at time t2." Okay, this opposes teleology, but what of its apparent resort to a mechanistic process that rigidly advances from its founding conditions? Isn't this where Althusser leaves humanity-- imprisoned within those original structural conditions?

Paul Cockshott wrote, "You have to think of the specific form of self-organization of societies based on exploitation. The question here is how do they reproduce themselves and how does the state function to ensure the reproduction which is at the same time a reproduction of relations of domination and subordination."

Well, I believe Marxism has covered this question of capitalism's socio-economic-state relations quite well. The critical remaining question to be answered is: how do we organize our way out of this mess? Marxism has had no viable answer to this question, and I insist the answer lies in the new sciences of organization.

In the meantime, isn't Althusser an example of philosophers who interpret the world (inaccurately in his case) but do not change it (because they interpret it incorrectly)?

My red-green best.

[Rafiq]

Sorry, are you seriously arguing that commodity fetishism is an ironic trope and not a serious part of Marx's critique of capitalism? Are you arguing that Marx was not being serious when he emphasised the alienation of the worker from his own labour as a key characteristic of capitalist social relations of production and that, therefore, socialism as the negation of capitalism must be the overcoming of such a state of alienation?

Also, show me where Marx makes this clear break with 'humanism' and alienation. There must be some explicit quotes you can refer to.

Don't be a fool. Commodity fetishism doesn't amount to a "worker being alienated the fruits of his labor". That's one of the greatest simplistic bastardizations of Marx's theoretical genius I have come across to date. My point was that Marx's attempt to express and formulate his theory of commodity fetishism was done so ironically, i.e. Using his older theory of alienation for an analogy, in the same way dialectics was utilized in capital. If you don't recognize Marx's most obvious style of writing, the usage of irony, then you have not read Marx.

[Paul Cockshott]

:
Originally Posted by Hit The North
Sorry, are you seriously arguing that commodity fetishism is an ironic trope and not a serious part of Marx's critique of capitalism? Are you arguing that Marx was not being serious when he emphasised the alienation of the worker from his own labour as a key characteristic of capitalist social relations of production and that, therefore, socialism as the negation of capitalism must be the overcoming of such a state of alienation?

Also, show me where Marx makes this clear break with 'humanism' and alienation. There must be some explicit quotes you can refer to.

Don't be a fool. Commodity fetishism doesn't amount to a "worker being alienated the fruits of his labor". That's one of the greatest simplistic bastardizations of Marx's theoretical genius I have come across to date. My point was that Marx's attempt to express and formulate his theory of commodity fetishism was done so ironically, i.e. Using his older theory of alienation for an analogy, in the same way dialectics was utilized in capital. If you don't recognize Marx's most obvious style of writing, the usage of irony, then you have not read Marx.
The suggestion that the use of the theory of commodity fetishism was an ironic use of the theory of alienation is an interesting one. Of course it could not have been intended as an ironic reference to what Marx himself had deployed as a theory of alienation in what were posthumously published as the 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts', because he had regarded these as early explorations not worth publishing. So if it was an ironic reference to his theory of alienation, nobody would have got the irony until, long after his death these early documents were published. We must remember that Marx did not publish any theory of alienation.

If it was an ironic reference, it was an ironic reference to Feurbachs theory of religion in which man's real activity gets an alienated expression in the life of the gods and saints up in the clouds. Feurbach's theory was very well known and the reference to it would have been picked up by educated German readers - hence the explicit use of a term from the critical analysis of religion - fetish, and the explicit statement:
" In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world."
So he is being pretty explicit that he is ironically applying Feurbachs theory of religion here.


Now the problem according to Althusser, is that this theory of fetishism, which is derived from Feurbach is not up to the job that Marx wants to use if for : explaining the illusions of the policitcal economists.

If for example a mercantilist economist sees gold as the inate substance of value then at first sight this will pass as an example of commodity fetishism. But the weakness of this is tha the illusions of the mercantilists did not arise from the economic relations that Marx has so far analysed in Chapter 1 of capital. To understand the mercantilists this is far from enough. You have to approach these ideas as class ideologies expressing definite class interests arising from a definite mode of appropriation of a surplus product - via international trade. All of these are much more complex relations than are being presented in Chapter 1. They are indeed, relations even more complex than anything analysed in the whole of Capital - since the book has no theory of international trade.

More generally in his last writings Althusser was concerned to point out the limits of Marx's thought that we now had to go beyond if Marxism was to escape from the crisis that he saw engulfing it. These limits of marxist thought hithertoo were particularly at the level of the theorisation of the state and of ideology, inadequate theorisations of which were being used to justify the reformist course of the Communist Parties. In these writings he touches on the limitations of the theory of commodity fetishism but he is more generally concerned with how to :

construct a theory of ideology as it relates to the class struggle. It is easy to see that there is a relation here, but how does it operate - how are class specific ideologies produced, and how do these ideologies control people. In particular he is very critical of attempts to see these ideologies as operating just in the domain of ideas, emphasising the existence of state ideological machinery that ideologises people.
how to theorise the nature of the state machine and its role in the reproduction of bourgeois domination

What he is concerned to point out is not that Marx and Lenin are wrong, but that all they give us is a few terms and ideas which have not been worked into a coherent theory of how the state operates in the class struggle. This theoretical inadequacy means that their successors are unable to adequately theorise the conditions of class struggle either in the Soviet State or in states like France or Italy. He implies that Lenin and Marx had intuitions about this which went further than they explicitly explained, and is concerned to tease out why Lenin and Marx were so definite in calling the state a 'machine'. What does this mean in the context of Marx's analysis of what machines are for example ( the analysis presented in Capital on modern industrial mechanisation).

Mr Natural, you really have to get to grips with what an author like Althusser actually writes rather than relying on second or third hand accounts.

[Hit The North]

Firstly, apologies to Paul for slightly derailing this thread. But I have taken comrade Rafiq's advice and read Marx. So let's see where this has led me.


Don't be a fool. Commodity fetishism doesn't amount to a "worker being alienated the fruits of his labor". That's one of the greatest simplistic bastardizations of Marx's theoretical genius I have come across to date.

Firstly, I didn't write that "Commodity fetishism amounts to a "worker being alienated the fruits of his labor"". What I wrote was this:


Are you arguing that Marx was not being serious when he emphasised the alienation of the worker from his own labour as a key characteristic of capitalist social relations of production and that, therefore, socialism as the negation of capitalism must be the overcoming of such a state of alienation?
Perhaps you had difficulty in understanding this. Well, here is Marx saying it more simply:


Originally written by Marx
This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.
Source (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4)

The "foregoing analysis" Marx refers to is his analysis of the social relations of production that underlies the production of commodities. Perhaps you want to (ironically?) charge Marx with bastardising his own theoretical genius?

Here is Marx, expressing the idea in a more complex manner, this time not in Capital but in The Grundrisse:


Originally written by Marx
It no longer seems here, as it still did in the first examination of the production process, as if capital, for its part, brought with it any value whatever from circulation. Rather, the objective conditions of labour now appear as labour's product -- both to the extent that they are value in general, and as use values for production. But while capital thus appears as the product of labour, so does the product of labour likewise appear as capital -- no longer as a simple product, nor as an exchangeable commodity, but as capital; objectified labour as mastery, command over living labour. The product of labour appears as alien property, as a mode of existence confronting living labour as independent, as value in its being for itself; the product of labour, objectified labour, has been endowed by living labour with a soul of its own, and establishes itself opposite living labour as an alien power: both these situations are themselves the product of labour. Living labour therefore now appears from its own standpoint as acting within the production process in such a way that, as it realizes itself in the objective conditions, it simultaneously repulses this realization from itself as an alien reality, and hence posits itself as insubstantial, as mere penurious labour capacity in face of this reality alienated [entfremdet] from it, belonging not to it but to others; that it posits its own reality not as a being for it, but merely as a being for others, and hence also as mere other-being [Anderssein], or being of another opposite itself. This realization process is at the same time the de-realization process of labour. It posits itself objectively, but it posits this, its objectivity, as its own not-being or as the being of its not-being -- of capital. It returns back into itself as the mere possibility of value-creation or realization [Verwertung]; because the whole of real wealth, the world of real value and likewise the real conditions of its own realization [Verwirklichung] are posited opposite it as independent existences. As a consequence of the production process, the possibilities resting in living labour's own womb exist outside it as realities -- but as realities alien to it, which form wealth in opposition to it. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm

Comrades who wish to explore Marx's views on this matter further can read them in the following extracts:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02b.htm#490
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#p46
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm

Having read these passages it might appear that comrade Rafiq wants to preserve the genius of Marx's analysis by divesting it of its originality!


My point was that Marx's attempt to express and formulate his theory of commodity fetishism was done so ironically, i.e. Using his older theory of alienation for an analogy, in the same way dialectics was utilized in capital. If you don't recognize Marx's most obvious style of writing, the usage of irony, then you have not read Marx.


Yes, that was your point and yet you have not offered a single shred of evidence to back it up. One might be tempted to believe that you are merely mouthing off from a point of view of ignorance. So before you accuse others of being fools you should perhaps take your own advice and read Marx himself.

[Paul Cockshott]

The 'foregoing analysis' mentioned by marx is the analysis of the commodity, it is not specifically an analysis of capitalist production. Up until then he is using ideas that apply to all forms of commodity production and the examples of types of labour he choses are as much artisanal as industrial. As such it does not touch on the issues that he tried to analyse some yearse earlier in his working notes in terms of alienation. But note that the Grundrisse and the EPM are unpublished manuscripts. Unpublished because Marx knew their analysis was not adequate. They were part of his thought process as he struggled towards science. They are much more marked by idealism than his later work - though even in Capital he is still using Hegels conceit that it is possible to deduce the concrete from the abstract.

[Rafiq]

[QUOTE]Firstly, I didn't write that "Commodity fetishism amounts to a "worker being alienated the fruits of his labor"". What I wrote was this:

Perhaps you had difficulty in understanding this. Well, here is Marx saying it more simply:

Source (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4)


You asserted that I stated "commodity fetishism was just irony". This was clearly not what I was posted.


The "foregoing analysis" Marx refers to is his analysis of the social relations of production that underlies the production of commodities. Perhaps you want to (ironically?) charge Marx with bastardising his own theoretical genius?


Here you are, caught in your own trap. You really pressupose that Marx's conception of capitalist social relations is some moralist fantasy, i.e. "Alienation"? An objective analysis regarding the social relations to production that 'underlies the production of commodities' has absolutely nothing to do with alienation. You're pathetic. "HA! Take that! Marx clearly states there that the fetishism of commodities has it's origin in the peculiar social character of the labor that produces them" yet this tells us nothing regarding it's relation to his earlier theory of alienation. In capital, Marx's explicit formulation of a conception of capitalist social relations, the relations existent between the bourgeois class and the proletariat, or the proletariat and capital, is quite exceedingly extensive and is objectively scientific. It cannot be reduced to the ideological wet dream that is the "theory of alienation".


Here is Marx, expressing the idea in a more complex manner, this time not in Capital but in The Grundrisse:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm


Addressed by cockshott.


Comrades who wish to explore Marx's views on this matter further can read them in the following extracts:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02b.htm#490
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#p46
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm


Perhaps you should take a second look.

I read all of these, but my post regarding them was destroyed as when I was finished with the second one, skimming through, I accidently deleted the page for revleft, rather than the page I was reading (I was editing the post). None the less, most of these were either written before his epistemological break, written in the grundessie, or were used for "ironic purposes" (this is a really awful word to use, but I cannot explain it in any other way). He uses older terms of which he dissasociated with to an extent, and utilizes them to make a larger point, in something of an analogy. Here is an example, from your fifth link:


This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.


So again, take a second look at what you link, lest you make a jackass out of yourself.


Yes, that was your point and yet you have not offered a single shred of evidence to back it up. One might be tempted to believe that you are merely mouthing off from a point of view of ignorance. So before you accuse others of being fools you should perhaps take your own advice and read Marx himself.


If you are unfamiliar with Marx's style of writing than you have not read Marx, as I have said before. I can look through the German Ideology, etc. and waste my time, looking for something of which I already know exists. It's not something I can "prove" with a single passage. It is a consistent tendency he demonstrates in his writings. But I did find something of that nature in your own fifth link. How pathetic.

[Hit The North]

The 'foregoing analysis' mentioned by marx is the analysis of the commodity, it is not specifically an analysis of capitalist production.

Well I took the 'foregoing analysis' to be the paragraph that precedes the statement which involves the social relations of production:


Originally written by Marx:
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.


Meanwhile I'd suggest that it would be mistaken to see the properties of the commodity as being divorced from the social relations of their production - the major constituent element being the alienation of the worker within the production process.


But note that the Grundrisse and the EPM are unpublished manuscripts. Unpublished because Marx knew their analysis was not adequate. They were part of his thought process as he struggled towards science. They are much more marked by idealism than his later work


They were not published because they were preliminary sketches and workings out, as you argue. However, this does not mean that Marx saw the ideas themselves as inadequate and I'd like to see where Marx contradicts them in his published work. Meanwhile, which part of the quotation I provide from the Grundrisse is idealist in your view?


though even in Capital he is still using Hegels conceit that it is possible to deduce the concrete from the abstract.

Yes, and the passage on commodity fetishism is in Capital and thus a part of Marx's "science". So it seems that, according to your position, we do not have a single work of Marx that is free from idealism.

By the way, I disagree that Marx claims in Capital that the concrete can be deduced from the abstract, merely that abstraction is a necessary stage in the movement towards grasping the concrete in its many-sided determinations. Although I won't pretend that there are difficulties in understanding how Marx applies this method.

[blake 3:17]

@Mr. Natural -- you are engaging with a caricature of Althusser's thought. His "anti-humanism" was a correction to certain overemphases on the individual in French Marxist theory -- specifically Sartre.


There is the possibility that Althusser is primarily a good mental workout. I don't think that is bad in itself. We often stress theory or philosophy as a simple source for Truth. The contemplative dimension of philosophy is often portrayed in a negative light.

I have very serious reservations about Althusser's thought, but much of the OP is trying to discuss is of interest.

[Hit The North]

Rafiq argues:


Here you are, caught in your own trap. You really pressupose that Marx's conception of capitalist social relations is some moralist fantasy, i.e. "Alienation"? An objective analysis regarding the social relations to production that 'underlies the production of commodities' has absolutely nothing to do with alienation... It cannot be reduced to the ideological wet dream that is the "theory of alienation".


Proving that he has absolutely no understanding of the Marxist theory of alienation as being located within the material relations of production. It has fuck all to do with morality or with ideology.


I can look through the German Ideology, etc. and waste my time, looking for something of which I already know exists.
How very scientific of you! I guess we will have to be satisfied with your theological revelation. No proof required here! Rafiq just "knows" it exists.Useless demagoguery to the bitter end.

[Rafiq]

Rafiq argues:



Proving that he has absolutely no understanding of the Marxist theory of alienation as being located within the material relations of production. It has fuck all to do with morality or with ideology.

Fuck off. If you're going to take my post out of context then you're yet again not worth my time. Alienation is inherently an ideological and a moralist "theory". it is not located within the material relations of production and all the "evidence" you posted in regards was garbage.


How very scientific of you! I guess we will have to be satisfied with your theological revelation. No proof required here! Rafiq just "knows" it exists.Useless demagoguery to the bitter end.


Shut the fuck up, take a couple of deep breaths, and listen very carefully. I have read the German ideology and several of other of Marx's texts, all of which are available to everyone who is curious as to see whether I am wrong or not. It is not as if I am asserting the existence of an falsifiable entity, this is something which is very verifiable. My point was, you are not worth my time, I don't need to prove it to myself because I already know that objectively, this style is consistent in his writings. I did point out an example though, and you have unsurprisingly demonstrated you are incapable of confronting it.

Some users here just love to sling shit under the guise of an actual response, it is almost as if you had been saving that insult, and you were looking for any opportunity to use it.

[Rafiq]

They were not published because they were preliminary sketches and workings out, as you argue. However, this does not mean that Marx saw the ideas themselves as inadequate and I'd like to see where Marx contradicts them in his published work. Meanwhile, which part of the quotation I provide from the Grundrisse is idealist in your view?


You have yet again demonstrated that you are not only incapable of understanding Marx's theoretical foundations, you have no conception whatsoever of the function of ideology. Firstly, the very fact that alienation was not a "theory" which was taken seriously in his later works, such as capital, to such an extent. Yes, there do exist remnants of his older thought, but we must be reminded this are no more than remnants. This alone verifies he viewed a great bulk of what was in the grundrisse was inadequate.

Secondly, you have no conception of the function of ideology. There is no "abrupt" phase we could fish out that embodies his idealism, it is something that is of a reoccurring nature that slips through some of his works in a very dynamic and inexact form.

[Hit The North]

Fuck off. If you're going to take my post out of context then you're yet again not worth my time.


How is out of context? It is what you wrote and I quoted it in full and without amendment. It is not my fault that you are unable to support your own assertions or that your assertions betray an incorrect understanding of Marx. Suck it up, moron.


Alienation is inherently an ideological and a moralist "theory". it is not located within the material relations of production and all the "evidence" you posted in regards was garbage.
Says you. Marx disagrees as the quotes I posted prove - the quotes you have decided are "garbage". But I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and pretend that you are ready to seriously engage with what Marx wrote and I'm even going to make it easy for you by quoting extensively from the young Marx's 1844 manuscript:


We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labor, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land – likewise division of labor, competition, the concept of exchange value, etc. On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and propertyless workers. Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws – i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy throws no light on the cause of the division between labor and capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause, i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain. Similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently accidental circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how exchange itself appears to it as an accidental fact. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed, and the war amongst the greedy – competition.

Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of the guild, the doctrine of the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate – for competition, freedom of the crafts and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only as accidental, premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, of the guild system, and of feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and natural consequences.

Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labor, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. – the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system.

Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing; it merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. The economist assumes in the form of a fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce – namely, the necessary relationship between two things – between, for example, division of labor and exchange. Thus the theologian explains the origin of evil by the fall of Man – that is, he assumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained.
We proceed from an actual economic fact.

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers[18] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/footnote.htm#fn18); objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. Source (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm)

Even from this early sketch it seems apparent to me that Marx is arguing that alienation is a consequence of the material relations of production. Feel free to show where my interpretation is wrong or where Marx himself is in error. More importantly to your own argument, demonstrate where Marx's discussion strays into ideology and moralism - if you can.


Shut the fuck up, take a couple of deep breaths, and listen very carefully. I have read the German ideology and several of other of Marx's texts, all of which are available to everyone who is curious as to see whether I am wrong or not. It is not as if I am asserting the existence of an falsifiable entity, this is something which is very verifiable.Except that you seem unable or unwilling to verify any of your assertions. You could certainly teach Marx a thing or two about irony :lol:.


My point was, you are not worth my time, I don't need to prove it to myself because I already know that objectively, this style is consistent in his writings.Except this is a public forum and one would assume that you should at least follow the rules of open debate - offering proof, etc. But I guess as the self-appointed Pope of mechanical crude materialism you must be exempt. And I note that whilst you don't think I'm worth your time, you have no reservations about wasting my time with your vague and unsupported argumentation.


I did point out an example though, and you have unsurprisingly demonstrated you are incapable of confronting it.
I was being polite in not confronting the poverty of your example:


This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers)I mean, "Wow!" this aside really supports all your arguments:rolleyes: - a bit like the air supports a lead balloon!


Some users here just love to sling shit under the guise of an actual response, it is almost as if you had been saving that insult, and you were looking for any opportunity to use it.
Baby, you have certainly slung your fair share. Can't take it? Don't dish it out.


You have yet again demonstrated that you are not only incapable of understanding Marx's theoretical foundations, you have no conception whatsoever of the function of ideology.
Maybe so, but I aimed the question at Paul who is an intelligent and respectful debater. It's a waste of time asking you as you are only interested in puffing out your chest and shouting your way through debates - and this is the only thing you've proved so far in this thread.

[Paul Cockshott]

Well I took the 'foregoing analysis' to be the paragraph that precedes the statement which involves the social relations of production:



Meanwhile I'd suggest that it would be mistaken to see the properties of the commodity as being divorced from the social relations of their production - the major constituent element being the alienation of the worker within the production process.
My point is that you are confused about which social relations he is refering to. The social relations he refers to in the section on commodity fetishism are those that are common to all commodity producing systems including petty commodity production.

In these the labourer alienates his product in the sense spoke of by Smith - ie the idea deriving from commercial law to refer to the sale of property. But this sense is rather different from the meaning that Entfremdung has by the time it arrives in the Grundrisse. There it has gone from being a Scots commercial law term used by Adam Smith, to being given an idealist philosophical gloss in Hegel after his reading of Smith, and then becoming used by Feurbach in his theory of religion, to being applied by Marx in his first attempt to understand capitalist exploitation.

By the time Capital is written he has a scientific theory of exploitation - the theory of surplus labour time and does not rely on the concept of alienation since this is open to confusion between exploitative and non exploitative relations. An independent shoemaker alienates the shoes he sews in return for silver, but this is an equivalent exchange in which there is no exploitation. The fact that the value of shoes in terms of silver is indirectly caused by the relative quantities of labour in the two commodities is hidden from the participants in the exchange. The worth of the two commodities now seems something inherent in them rather than being a projection onto them of the division of social labour.
This is what Marx labels fetishism. The social relation that gives rise to it is the existence of a multiplicity of independent units of production engaged in a social division of labour. The same obscurity exists whether these units of production are slave latifundia in Brazil, the private peasant farms of Massachusetts, or Manchester cotton factories. These are three different economic forms with quite different class relations.





They were not published because they were preliminary sketches and workings out, as you argue. However, this does not mean that Marx saw the ideas themselves as inadequate and I'd like to see where Marx contradicts them in his published work. Meanwhile, which part of the quotation I provide from the Grundrisse is idealist in your view?



Yes, and the passage on commodity fetishism is in Capital and thus a part of Marx's "science". So it seems that, according to your position, we do not have a single work of Marx that is free from idealism.

By the way, I disagree that Marx claims in Capital that the concrete can be deduced from the abstract, merely that abstraction is a necessary stage in the movement towards grasping the concrete in its many-sided determinations. Although I won't pretend that there are difficulties in understanding how Marx applies this method.
will reply to this later

[Paul Cockshott]

There is no "abrupt" phase we could fish out that embodies his idealism, it is something that is of a reoccurring nature that slips through some of his works in a very dynamic and inexact form.

This is an important point. Having looked at the latest Althusser and his idea of materialisme aleatoire it occured to me that instead of relying on old Lucretius's second hand account of Epicurus's now lost works, Althusser would have been better to rely on the modern Atomists. Yesterday I got out Heisenberg's Physics and Philosopy. In the 2nd chapter of this he gives an account of the historical birth of the quantum theory and the long period that elapsed between Planck's initial work on the black body radiation in 1895 through Einsteins introduction of the idea of the photon in 1905 to the matrix and wave mechanics of the mid 20s up to the synthesis of these in the late 20s. We are talking here of a 30 year period for the epistemological break between classical and quantum mechanics during which a half dozen or so of the brightest minds in the world worked on the problem collectively. Heisenberg recounts that in the early 20s they had hybrid ideas mixing a bit of quantum with a bit of the classical continuum, which were still a scientific advance but were far from being fully worked out.

The Bohr atom with electrons in actual orbits, was an advance, but it retained Newtonian forms of thought - electrons as planets the nucleus as a sun. It could not account for the great stability of atoms under collision. Two solar systems approaching one another would be completely disrupted but atoms bounce off one another unharmed.

It is a mistake to expect Marx, working without the active collaboration of other theorists, to have completely worked out a consistent framework in his own life. What you were bound to get is a gradual process in which things became more and more worked out as time went on.

[Hit The North]

My point is that you are confused about which social relations he is refering to. The social relations he refers to in the section on commodity fetishism are those that are common to all commodity producing systems including petty commodity production.

In these the labourer alienates his product in the sense spoke of by Smith - ie the idea deriving from commercial law to refer to the sale of property. But this sense is rather different from the meaning that Entfremdung has by the time it arrives in the Grundrisse. There it has gone from being a Scots commercial law term used by Adam Smith, to being given an idealist philosophical gloss in Hegel after his reading of Smith, and then becoming used by Feurbach in his theory of religion, to being applied by Marx in his first attempt to understand capitalist exploitation.

By the time Capital is written he has a scientific theory of exploitation - the theory of surplus labour time and does not rely on the concept of alienation since this is open to confusion between exploitative and non exploitative relations. An independent shoemaker alienates the shoes he sews in return for silver, but this is an equivalent exchange in which there is no exploitation. The fact that the value of shoes in terms of silver is indirectly caused by the relative quantities of labour in the two commodities is hidden from the participants in the exchange. The worth of the two commodities now seems something inherent in them rather than being a projection onto them of the division of social labour.
This is what Marx labels fetishism.

At this point I will bow to your greater knowledge and provisionally concede that my confusion is an obstacle to my understanding. However, who could blame me for being confused? Because Marx doesn’t only make the claims you attribute to the notion of commodity fetishism. He also claims this:


There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. [italics added for emphasis] In other words he is making a larger claim in addition to yours. He is making a claim about the effect of this fetish - not only that commodities appear obscure in the passive contemplation of the social agents but that they take on an independent life and dominate over the producers.

Crucially, I would contest that the theory of surplus value performs the same explanatory function as alienation/commodity fetishism. The former performs the function of explaining the expansion of capital through the exploitation of labour power; whereas the latter also explains why capital dominates over the minds of the exploited and the exploiters alike and takes the form of a natural relation. I think that you want to limit the role of commodity fetishism to a mere epiphenomenon of commodity production, whereas I think Marx was illustrating its wider consequence for the society dominated by the capitalist mode of production.

Rafiq has bandied the word ‘ideology’ around in his usual blustery manner, but I fail to see how we can develop a theory of ideology without recourse to the concept of commodity fetishism – at least a theory of ideology that does not collapse into a crude ‘propaganda of vested interests’ idea.


The social relation that gives rise to it is the existence of a multiplicity of independent units of production engaged in a social division of labour. The same obscurity exists whether these units of production are slave latifundia in Brazil, the private peasant farms of Massachusetts, or Manchester cotton factories. These are three different economic forms with quite different class relations.


I’m not sure I grasp the significance of the point you are making. It seems to me that Marx is arguing that “the mystical appearance” of commodities originates “not in their use value” but in their exchange value. Therefore this “fetishism which attaches itself to the commodity” is an effect of any system based on production for exchange (exchange being the necessary factor that determines whether a material good is a commodity). But so what? How does this prevent commodity fetishism being Marx’s materialist representation of the earlier concept of alienation which is all I’ve been arguing? How does it prevent commodity fetishism from being a real effect of the capitalist mode of production? In fact, the difference between your first two examples of commodity production and the third, is that the third exists within a mode of production that is a system of generalised commodity production. Therefore, the effects of commodity fetishism are also generalised and become the prevailing condition of capitalist society.


It is a mistake to expect Marx, working without the active collaboration of other theorists, to have completely worked out a consistent framework in his own life. What you were bound to get is a gradual process in which things became more and more worked out as time went on.

Yes, exactly. So doesn’t this make the notion of an epistemological break somewhere between Grundrisse and Capital somewhat contentious? Isn’t it really as you say, “things becoming more worked out as time went on”? Remember that an epistemological break necessitates a complete rethink of what constitutes valid knowledge of the real world. If there is any evidence of such a break, it is indicated and partly accomplished in the 1844 Manuscripts, or whenever it is that Marx breaks with the radical critique of Left Hegelianism in favour of the empirical science of political economy (which he also criticises for its one-sidedness).

The problem with the notion of an epistemological break is that is demands a scenario where Marx experienced a volte face and jettisoned as erroneous a whole bunch of concepts and changed his methodological approach - but there is no sense in the correspondence about Capital or commentaries on Capital by either Marx or Engels, to support this. If anything, the preoccupation was with finding an adequate means of expressing the ideas which had dominated and persisted through their intellectual lives.

Whether there should have been an epistemological break is another question.

I think an important question is whether the use of commodity fetishism as an explanatory concept helps us to understand the mode of life under modern capitalism and particularly the state of the working class. I think it does, partially. The acquiescence of the modern working class to the prevailing order is a result of two main factors: economic compulsion and an ideological acceptance (perhaps grudgingly) of the inevitability of capitalism or its proven superiority to all other economic systems. Both of these factors contribute to the working class's feelings of powerlessness and both originate in the same place: the alienation, or estrangement, or divorce, or whatever word you are comfortable with, from control over their own means of production. Overcoming this separation is the only way out.

[Paul Cockshott]

In other words he is making a larger claim in addition to yours. He is making a claim about the effect of this fetish - not only that commodities appear obscure in the passive contemplation of the social agents but that they take on an independent life and dominate over the producers.

If you read the passage in Capital that you quoted then you will see that he does not say that they take on an independent life. What he says is that commodities appear to take on an independent life.



Crucially, I would contest that the theory of surplus value performs the same explanatory function as alienation/commodity fetishism. The former performs the function of explaining the expansion of capital through the exploitation of labour power; whereas the latter also explains why capital dominates over the minds of the exploited and the exploiters alike and takes the form of a natural relation. I think that you want to limit the role of commodity fetishism to a mere epiphenomenon of commodity production, whereas I think Marx was illustrating its wider consequence for the society dominated by the capitalist mode of production.

Well you may infer that, but in the logic of the development of Capital, it comes in the section on commodities before the very possibility of exploitation has been discussed. Althusser's point is that this is the wrong point at which to try to introduce a theory of economic ideology since the material basis for the ideology - in class conflict has yet to be introduced.




Rafiq has bandied the word ‘ideology’ around in his usual blustery manner, but I fail to see how we can develop a theory of ideology without recourse to the concept of commodity fetishism – at least a theory of ideology that does not collapse into a crude ‘propaganda of vested interests’ idea.

Well the really detailed examination of bourgeois economic ideology is not the few remarks on commodity fetishism but the 3 volumes of the Theories of Surplus Value. In this he is pretty explicit that the post Ricardo Political Economists are carrying out crude propaganda for vested interests, and are rejecting the insights of Smith and Ricardo because they are afraid of the class implications of this. He attributes the difference to Smith writing at a time when the class struggle of the proletariat was not yet a threat to the propertied classes.



[FONT=Verdana]I’m not sure I grasp the significance of the point you are making. It seems to me that Marx is arguing that “the mystical appearance” of commodities originates “not in their use value” but in their exchange value. Therefore this “fetishism which attaches itself to the commodity” is an effect of any system based on production for exchange (exchange being the necessary factor that determines whether a material good is a commodity). But so what?

Althusser's point is that the theory of commodity fetishism is far too slender
a basis to support a theory about bourgeois economic ideology. It only says things about what is confusing about all commodity production in general - the difficulty of discerning the real cause of exchange value. It was not until Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century that labour was identified as the source of value.

But by the early stages of industrial capitalism the labour theory of value was well known and started to be used by advocates of the workers movement. At this point the bourgeois economists took fright and abandoned their previous scientific insights.




Yes, exactly. So doesn’t this make the notion of an epistemological break somewhere between Grundrisse and Capital somewhat contentious? Isn’t it really as you say, “things becoming more worked out as time went on”? Remember that an epistemological break necessitates a complete rethink of what constitutes valid knowledge of the real world. If there is any evidence of such a break, it is indicated and partly accomplished in the 1844 Manuscripts, or whenever it is that Marx breaks with the radical critique of Left Hegelianism in favour of the empirical science of political economy (which he also criticises for its one-sidedness).

The problem with the notion of an epistemological break is that is demands a scenario where Marx experienced a volte face and jettisoned as erroneous a whole bunch of concepts and changed his methodological approach - but there is no sense in the correspondence about Capital or commentaries on Capital by either Marx or Engels, to support this. If anything, the preoccupation was with finding an adequate means of expressing the ideas which had dominated and persisted through their intellectual lives.
There was no change in allegiance between the 1840s and the 1860s but there was the gradual development of a new theory - one which applies not just to capitalism but to all exploitative modes of production. The new theory is that the class system is always based on the extraction of surplus labour from the exploited classes. There is thus a movement from a philosophical criticism of capitalism to the outlines of theory that can explain class society in general and which allows Marx to uncover 'laws of motion' of capitalist society.

Epistemological breaks are not sharp at first. Darwin's Origin of the Species was the marker for the epistemological break that established a scientific biology. It is based on the selection of inherited characteristics. But read the Descent of Man or the Expression of the Emotions, and you will find that in places Darwin still explains things in terms of aquired characteristics - the old Lamarkian model.



I think an important question is whether the use of commodity fetishism as an explanatory concept helps us to understand the mode of life under modern capitalism and particularly the state of the working class. I think it does, partially. The acquiescence of the modern working class to the prevailing order is a result of two main factors: economic compulsion and an ideological acceptance (perhaps grudgingly) of the inevitability of capitalism or its proven superiority to all other economic systems. Both of these factors contribute to the working class's feelings of powerlessness and both originate in the same place: the alienation, or estrangement, or divorce, or whatever word you are comfortable with, from control over their own means of production. Overcoming this separation is the only way out.

I would suggest to you that it is not commodity fetishism but the nature of the labour contract which appears to be the purchase of labour that is the real source of obscurity about the reality of capitalist relations.

There is a conspicuous absence on the left of simple and clear propaganda explaining how many hours people are really getting back in wages. When even the left does not explain this, is it any wonder that it is not generally understood.

[Paul Cockshott]

I have posted a review of the Philosophy of the Encounter here

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/althusserreview.pdf

[blake 3:17]

Thanks Paul C! I just took a very quick look at the paper. I acquired a copy of the Althusser book and want to read it first before getting in to more discussion.

One thing though -- I'm familiar with the term aleatory through radical art and aesthetics of the 50s and 60s (John Cage, William Burroughs, Situationism, Jean Tinguely) and in philosophy Deleuze and Guattari. Is it possible that Althusser was influenced by these currents?

[Paul Cockshott]

My understanding of it is that the term aleatoire is commonly used in French for what we in English would call random, and what in scientific literature is often called stochastic.

[blake 3:17]

My understanding of it is that the term aleatoire is commonly used in French for what we in English would call random, and what in scientific literature is often called stochastic.


Would stochastic be the better translation? "Random materialism" seems to lend itself to very confused readings.

Edited to add: @Paul C -- is there a translation of Lucretius you'd recommend?

[Paul Cockshott]

Would stochastic be the better translation? "Random materialism" seems to lend itself to very confused readings.

Edited to add: @Paul C -- is there a translation of Lucretius you'd recommend?

I agree, stochastic materialism is the best translation, that is what another friend, expert in quantum computing said as well. I like the Leonard translation of Lucretius myself, but that may just be because that was the first version I read.

[Hit The North]

I'm probably missing something here, but what is the point of a non-deterministic and sporadic materialism? What does it even mean?

[GoddessCleoLover]

Didn't Althusser's reputation plummet as a result of the tragic events that occurred in the late 70s? Did he publish anything of note after his incarceration/hospitalization?

[Paul Cockshott]

I'm probably missing something here, but what is the point of a non-deterministic and sporadic materialism? What does it even mean?

Not sporadic, stochastic. That is to say probabalistic. The point is that 20th century physics shows that the laws of nature are probabalistic in nature - thermodynamics, quantum theory, information theory all areas of science now reason in this way.

[Paul Cockshott]

Didn't Althusser's reputation plummet as a result of the tragic events that occurred in the late 70s? Did he publish anything of note after his incarceration/hospitalization?

I agree, killing your wife does not improve your reputation, even if it is judged to be because you were mad at the time - that in itself is not helpful to the reputation of a philosopher. It is almost as if he was the romantic caricature of the mad genius.

[blake 3:17]

This discussion provoked me into looking at some issues around randomness. While vaguely familiar with the idea of the Butterfly Effect, I found this very very interesting:


In 1961, Lorenz was using a numerical computer model to rerun a weather prediction, when, as a shortcut on a number in the sequence, he entered the decimal .506 instead of entering the full .506127. The result was a completely different weather scenario.[2] In 1963 Lorenz published a theoretical study of this effect in a well-known paper called Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow.[3] Elsewhere he said[citation needed] that "One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings could change the course of weather forever." Following suggestions from colleagues, in later speeches and papers Lorenz used the more poetic butterfly.

So for all our rather sure of ourselves talk about Scientific Socialism, the actual science is waaaaaaaaaaay more complicated.

I've often looked to Pascal's Wager for my belief in the possibility of socialist democracy. What I hadn't realized was that Pascal was an actual gambler turned mathematician turned Christian.

Thanks again, Paul C!

I think I came across Althusser on Pascal in The New Spinoza: http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-new-spinoza

[Zederbaum]

Not sporadic, stochastic. That is to say probabalistic. The point is that 20th century physics shows that the laws of nature are probabalistic in nature - thermodynamics, quantum theory, information theory all areas of science now reason in this way. Kautsky makes a similar point about the probabilistic nature of natural laws in The Materialist Conception of History:

In reality, every natural law manifests itself only as a tendency...Every phenomenon is governed by different laws that sometimes support and often thwart, deflect, or hinder each other. Therefore, every natural law can be completely grasped only if in its investigation all interfering factors are artificially eliminated or if they are disregarded by means of abstraction from them. That is true for even such a general law as that of gravity.

[Paul Cockshott]

Kautsky makes a similar point about the probabilistic nature of natural laws in The Materialist Conception of History:

In reality, every natural law manifests itself only as a tendency...Every phenomenon is governed by different laws that sometimes support and often thwart, deflect, or hinder each other. Therefore, every natural law can be completely grasped only if in its investigation all interfering factors are artificially eliminated or if they are disregarded by means of abstraction from them. That is true for even such a general law as that of gravity.

That is not a stochastic idea. A completely deterministic Newtonian mechanics would accept that - the acceleration of a falling body on the earth is affected by air resistance as well as gravity for example. Kautsky was writing before the general acceptance of Boltzmann's atomism and before Heisenberg.