As a social critique of contemporary reality, another non-dogmatic reading of Marx’s oeuvre may seem a barren and unsatisfactory endeavor. Even when Marxian thought—as well as Marxism, as a whole and through its different currents 150 years on—still provides the most robust analysis and the most radical critique of mercantile society and of the political forms of exploitation and domination that capital has deployed, the end of this second decade of the current century will see capitalism reign unchallenged across the world, fully globalized in its homogenizing ways of producing and reproducing social relations, and most important, with a huge capacity, in both qualitative and quantitative terms, for the creation of material wealth which, nonetheless, remains beyond the reach of three quarters of the world’s population.
The reasons why a political alternative to capitalism, with agency and visibility, was not deployed after the fall of the so-called actually existing socialism are beyond the scope of this introduction and of this volume. Nonetheless, we cannot dodge the very significant paradox that can be perceived since the beginning of this century. On the one hand, there is a capitalism increasingly ruthless in its irrational ways of assigning value to capital, which destroys life. On the other, we see the loss of theoretical and political references at an international scale required to restrain it in order to establish a society founded on bases other than wealth as value. This capitalism does not allow us to envision a hopeful future for the large majorities and pauperized peoples. Despite this, and in significant contrast, during these last three decades, the most fruitful and non-dogmatic rereadings of Marx’s oeuvre and, to a lesser extent, of Marxism as a whole have proliferated at a global scale, conforming for the first time since the late nineteenth century a true corpus of interpretations that begin to be connected to current non-conformist movements.
Regarding the analysis and interpretation of Marxian works, the different current rereadings, reinterpretations, and theoretical and political reconsiderations are, without a doubt, heterogeneous, but they all comprise three aspects which, in our consideration, unify them.
To begin with, new approaches, both collective and individual, to Marx’s oeuvre, have been forged from outside—and often stemmed from a devastating critique of—the main two Marxist currents of the twentieth century, that is, social democracy and Soviet-style Marxism–Leninism, which, even when they represented an alternative to capitalism, not only failed, but to a certain extent fostered the theoretical and practical sustainment of capitalist regimes. Notwithstanding the undeniable contribution of both currents to the reconstruction and dissemination of Marx’s ideas and, more prevalently, to the elaboration of political programs and interpretations within clearly revolutionary contexts, some of them successful, it is also undeniable that their partial and dogmatic approach to as well as religious canonization of Marxian works precluded the development of a true political alternative capable of overcoming capitalism. As a result, they have both stalled and fossilized since at least the 1970s.
In this sense, the aforementioned new contributions, freed from such dogmatism, have carried out novel rereadings of Marx’s oeuvre by addressing some of its most overlooked aspects and through the critical analysis of its better-known theoretical premises. At the same time, they have attempted to reconstruct Marx’s oeuvre, something significantly difficult, due not only to the vicissitudes of Marx’s writings after his death, but also to their constant mutilation and distortion by the aforementioned social–democratic and Marxist–Leninist currents of Marxian thought.
The most ambitious contemporary project to reconstruct Marx and Engel’s oeuvre is the Marx–Engels–Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), which aims at producing a new comprehensive edition of Marx’s and Engels’s complete works. It started in the 1970s and is still ongoing. Initially published by the Marxism–Leninism Institutes of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in Berlin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in Moscow, under the direction of Dietz Verlag (Berlin), MEGA includes all works published during the life of Marx and Engels and many previously unpublished manuscripts and letters. All texts in MEGA are in their original language: the majority in German, but with many in English and French. Being an academic, historical and critical edition, most of the volumes in MEGA include appendices that provide additional information about each text. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the publication of the MEGA project was transferred to the Internationale Marx–Engels–Stiftung (IMES) in Amsterdam, which is still working on it. So far, 65 MEGA volumes have been published, and the whole project is expected to comprise 114 volumes (Musto 2011; Fineschi 2013).
Secondly, the emphasis in the critique of Marx’s oeuvre, in our opinion, has conveniently moved from highlighting the most traditional aspects of the theory, such as exploitation in capitalist systems (the theory of surplus value and its developments) and the subjects who bear emancipating essences within a class structure (the working class, the proletariat), toward the production of several readings which focus on the critique of political economy and review the critique to the ideology of mercantile society. More specifically, these readings emphasize the validity of the theory of value-labor, the objective character of capital’s social domination through the abstract forms of value and the articulation between such abstract forms and Marx’s specific method of analyzing capitalism.
Precisely, beyond their heterogeneity, the emphasis of contemporary approaches has been on the specific character of each historical era and on readings that understand the forms assumed by social wealth through value in capitalism as non-transhistorical,1 as well as on the structural character of abstract and social labor as first-order determinations in the theory of value, and even the analytical method adopted by Marx when rereading Hegel. Furthermore, there has been a painstaking effort to delimit, mainly through the idea of crisis sketched by the different contributions to the critique of political economy, the possible ‘passages’ to societies not governed by class divisions and not determined by the forms of wealth based on value-labor (Kurz 2000; Jappe 2003).2
Thirdly, with different degrees of accuracy and adherence to Marx’s oeuvre, Marxist scholarship of the last 30 years has become increasingly more transnational, something which so far has not received enough consideration. The possibilities of global access to Marx’s oeuvre and the emergence of technologies that enable work beyond strict national boundaries have allowed production and knowledge which are not rooted, as during most of the twentieth century, at a national (or international) scale. On the contrary, breaking political and linguistic barriers, they produce collaborative projects with contributions from the six continents. We can now state that there is a ‘Marxology’ with different study centers devoted to the transversal socialization of knowledge and to the connection of those theoretical achievements to possible social practices for anti-capitalist transformation (Elbe 2013; Musto 2015: 7–40).
Out of the debates emerged from the review of Marxian thought and the contemporary reconstruction of Marx’s oeuvre, Marxian scholars have highlighted the doubts generated by the interpretations of the Marx’s analysis of the capitalist system which make use of categories which were not explicitly stated by Marx. For instance, it is worth mentioning that the concept of ‘capitalism’ is not in itself present in Marx’s oeuvre and that he used the historical ideas of ‘commodity-producing society’ or ‘mercantile society’ to name the historical period he was analyzing. Nonetheless, the word ‘capitalism’ applied to the time period in which capital is still dominant as a social form, which governs all relations, is used frequently enough and with such theoretical rigor to occupy a clearly interpretative place within Marxian analytical categories. When examining the controversy between ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ analysis, in our opinion, a specific distinction is pertinent. We believe that one thing is the critique to the imposition of concepts and categories from outside of Marxian theory which attributes to it theoretical developments that Marx would not have formulated and are sometimes directly opposed to his thought as a whole, for example the metaphysical ontology of the proletariat. A very different thing is that the social critique based on Marx’s thought (as a starting point for a critique of capitalism) has not been able and may not be able in the future to develop new categories for new realities. Therefore, an orthodox following avant la lettre of his writings, namely a merely philological study of the oeuvre, will tend to preclude any fruitful initiative or even updates and new readings not only of Marx’s oeuvre itself (and of its most faithful reconstruction possible), but also of the social reality to which a social critique must necessarily refer.
The theoretical problem of real abstraction belongs within this area of constructive inference from an analysis of Marxian thought, although it was never explicitly formulated by Marx as a concept. The concept of real abstraction was coined by Alfred Sohn-Rethel in the 1950s, but he only developed it fully in his Geistige und Körperliche Arbeit (Intellectual and Manual Labor), published in 1970, at the same time as new readings of Marx focused mainly on the importance of the theory of value. Sohn-Rethel’s field of analysis, his concern with understanding the genesis of social forms of thought, and his knowledge of the main problems in political economy led him to think, through a critique of Kantian apriorism, that in societies where commodities are exchanged there are operations of objective abstraction which, unconscious to the subjects who perform them, determine, as general forms of social praxis, the forms of abstract thought that allow us to know such societies. In summary, the abstractions for knowing are preceded and determined by the practices of real abstraction at the core of economic operations in mercantile societies.
Sohn-Rethel analyzes the fact that, in exchanges, people do not consciously abstract the use values of the commodities they exchange. Commodities are abstracted as a pure quantity and as a universally impervious substance. Even when the people participating in the exchange are not conscious of the abstraction of the commodity’s use value, the abstraction is still an objective characteristic of their actions. In this sense, the abstraction is real by opposition, because it is only performed as a thought process. According to Sohn-Rethel, this phenomenon has fundamental philosophical relevance, to the extent to which mercantile exchanges become a generalized practice in a society and impose a specific world view upon the members of such society. If we observe where the author locates the practical operations of abstraction, we must agree that they belong in the plane of social relations, the same practical field and the same path of determinations where Marx places determinations of value. The insistence in locating practical operations of human abstractions/commodities at the moment of exchange led Sohn-Rethel to explore the origins of money. He suspected that such abstractions were present as phenomena of social praxis in ancient societies, like ancient Greece, which had developed a tight relation between the social deployment of commodity exchanges and their philosophical capacity of generating abstract thought.
Thus, Sohn-Rethel’s intuitions were articulated in the 1970s as a two-way path, which enriched analysis. On the one hand, they supported, in general terms, the theoretical problems postulated in the 1940s by members of the Frankfurt School like Adorno and Horkheimer, who, from different perspectives, presented a negative critique of the irrationality of capitalist objectivity beyond the capacity of reason to apprehend the real. On the other hand, there were new readings of Marxism that, as we have seen, reread the Marx of the critique of political economy and, more specifically, the qualitative analysis of value which, through the simple form of the commodity and its unfolding into use value and value, are presented as objective forms of exchange products.3
Since then, many theoretical problems have derived from Sohn-Rethel’s thesis. This volume attempts to trace them throughout the debates of the last few decades which are regarded as central to Marxian thought.
First, Sohn-Rethel’s theoretical position regarding the transhistorical character of real abstraction differ from the way it was conceived by the mature Marx. When Sohn-Rethel restricts the synthetic operations of abstraction to the transactional moment of exchange, making even the conversion of human labor into abstract labor, he removes the convergence of practical determinations that Marx establishes to explain the set of abstract forms—from the simplest ones, led by the genesis of value in commodities, to the more concrete ones, like the production of the form of capital—which make up mercantile production in contemporary societies. In this sense, the transhistorical character of the concept restricts abstract social relations to the synthetic field of the market, excluding the phenomenic character where exchanges appear in capitalist societies. In this manner, the determinant character of abstract human labor as labor time, considered as the substance of the value of commodities, is blurred as the determination of the abstract character of commodities. Thus, in Sohn-Rethel we see a true inversion of the determinations presented by Marx already in the Grundrisse of 1857. The best recent productions about real abstraction, some of them included in this volume, resume a critique of Sohn-Rethel, recovering perspectives such as those found in Isaak Rubin’s groundbreaking Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (1973) by or in Hans Georg Backhaus’s classic Dialektik der Wertform (1997). They adopt the Marxian analysis of abstract labor and socially mediated labor in capitalism as key and historically determined concepts, fundamental to understanding social forms abstracted at the moment of exchange.
Second, Sohn-Rethel establishes an identity and an unmistakable kinship between abstract processes occurring in the conformation of practical relations between people in exchanges and cognitive faculties resulting from said practical relations, something fundamental to delimit the problem. Attempting to enlighten the epistemic differences between the conceptual elements in Kantian philosophy and in a Marxian materialistic approach, Sohn-Rethel sets out to demonstrate that the relation between formal elements in social synthesis and formal components of knowledge is not a simple analogy, but a true identity, and that the verification of this identity would result in a demonstration that the conceptual basis of knowledge is conditioned by ‘the basic structure of the social synthesis in each era’ (Sohn-Rethel 2001: 16). From this aporia in Sohn-Rethel derive a wide range of problems about the ways in which social relations as phenomenically present in society, the corresponding conceptual tools for their cognitive apprehension, and the method that would order such tools are related. These results make necessary a more intense analysis on the epistemological plane of Marx’s theory. One of the most important elements is the open debate on whether the concept of real abstraction in Marx can be stated only in the plane of the Darstellung (the form of expression of knowledge of the real) or it is part of the same analyzed object as manifested in social relations. To any extent, the identity of the Darstellung and reality itself places us fully within the debate—already established by a contemporary critique of the theory of value—about the depth of the relation between Marx and Hegel or, in other words, about the degree to which Marx’s expository method follows Hegel on the emergence of the real from its abstracted forms presented by the phenomenic. The problem of real abstraction, and thus the significance of Sohn-Rethel’s intuition, assumes the existence of abstractive operations, very close to the forms of the human unconscious that objectivize the social relations which determine and dominate the women and men who perform them, irrespective of the cognitive method that they use to comprehend them, but also conditioning it. Therefore, conceptualization would seem to be a phenomenon independent from the epistemological strength of the Marxian method, as it occurs in social praxis, that is in the real.
The problem expands, because it is not possible to verify the phenomenon in reality by means of empirical methods. The conscious abandonment of any empiric verification of phenomena as they were present in the apparent social reality led Marx back to Hegel and to establish his Logic as a pillar of the expository presentation of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859 and, of course, Capital.4 Regardless of the weight we attribute to the adoption of a Hegelian method in the critique of political economy, the reach of the practices of abstraction in the social reality of capitalism and especially the form adopted by these practices of abstraction in the human mind for the comprehension of such reality were not sufficiently explained by Sohn-Rethel, even though this problem constituted the center of his approach.
If real abstraction, as a theoretical problem in contemporary societies, transcends the methodological aspects adopted by Marx, and if real abstraction is constituted by operations that determine the forms of knowing but are objectivized in reality, what kind of relational operations are they? Are they contradictions, inversions, abstractions, separations, that operate in social formations to reproduce mercantile society? In which sequence and under which historical and material conditions? How does this problem appear specifically in Marxian works? These questions circulate in the volume that we now present, and are articulated with other questions of the same significance: What connections can we establish, for i...