Marxism since Marx has often lost sight of his theoretical project and its quintessentially political character. In particular, there has been a tendency to perpetuate the rigid conceptual separation of the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ which has served capitalist ideology so well ever since the classical economists discovered the ‘economy’ in the abstract and began emptying capitalism of its social and political content.

These conceptual devices do reflect, if only in a distorting mirror, a historical reality specific to capitalism, a real differentiation of the ‘economy’; and it may be possible to reformulate them so that they illuminate more than they obscure, by reexamining the historical conditions that made such conceptions possible and plausible. The purpose of this reexamination would not be to explain away the ‘fragmentation’ of social life in capitalism, but to understand exactly what it is in the historical nature of capitalism that appears as a differentiation of ‘spheres’, especially the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’.

This differentiation is, of course, not simply a theoretical but a practical problem. It has had a very immediate practical expression in the separation of economic and political struggles which has typified modern working-class movements. For many revolutionary socialists, this has represented nothing more than the product of a misguided, ‘underdeveloped’, or ‘false’ consciousness. If there were nothing more to it than that, it might be easier to overcome; but what has made working-class ‘economism’ so tenacious is that it does correspond to the realities of capitalism, to the ways in which capitalist appropriation and exploitation actually do divide the arenas of economic and political action, and actually do transform certain essential political issues – struggles over domination and exploitation which have in the past been inextricably bound up with political power – into distinctively ‘economic’ issues. This ‘structural’ separation may, indeed, be the most effective defence mechanism available to capital.

The point, then, is to explain how and in what sense capitalism has driven a wedge between the economic and the political – how and in what sense essentially political issues like the disposition of power to control production and appropriation, or the allocation of social labour and resources, have been cut off from the political arena and displaced to a separate sphere.

In volume I of Capital Marx works his way from the commodity form through surplus value to the ‘secret of primitive accumulation’, disclosing at last that the ‘starting point’ of capitalist production’ is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’,¹ a process of class struggle and coercive intervention by the state on behalf of the expropriating class. The very structure of the argument suggests that, for Marx, the ultimate secret of capitalist production is a political one. What distinguishes his analysis so radically from classical political economy is that it creates no sharp discontinuities between economic and political spheres; and he is able to trace the continuities because he treats the economy itself not as a network of disembodied forces but, like the political sphere, as a set of social relations.

This has not been equally true of Marxism since Marx. In one form or another and in varying degrees, Marxists have generally adopted modes of analysis which, explicitly or implicitly, treat the economic ‘base’ and the legal, political, and ideological ‘superstructures’ that ‘reflect’ or ‘correspond’ to it as qualitatively different, more or less enclosed and ‘regionally’ separated spheres. This is most obviously true of orthodox base-superstructure theories. It is also true of their variants which speak of economic, political and ideological ‘factors,’ ‘levels’ or ‘instances’, no matter how insistent they may be about the interaction of factors or instances, or about the remoteness of the ‘last instance’ in which the economic sphere finally determines the rest. If anything, these formulations merely reinforce the spatial separation of spheres.

Other schools of Marxism have maintained the abstraction and enclosure of spheres in other ways – for example, by abstracting the economy or the circuit of capital in order to construct a technically sophisticated alternative to bourgeois economics, meeting it on its own ground (and going significantly further than Marx himself in this respect, without grounding the economic abstractions in historical and sociological analysis as he did). The social relations in which this economic mechanism is embedded – which indeed constitute it – are treated as somehow external. At best, a spatially separate political power may intervene in the economy, but the economy itself is evacuated of social content and depoliticized. In these respects, Marxist theory has perpetuated the very ideological practices that Marx was attacking, those practices that confirmed to the bourgeoisie the naturalness and eternity of capitalist production relations.

Bourgeois political economy, according to Marx, universalizes capitalist relations of production by analysing production in abstraction from its specific social determinations. Marx’s approach differs from theirs in his insistence that a productive system is made up of its specific social determinations – specific social relations, modes of property and domination, legal and political forms. This does not mean simply that the economic ‘base’ is reflected in and maintained by certain ‘superstructural’ institutions, but that the productive base itself exists in the shape of social, juridical and political forms – in particular, forms of property and domination.

Bourgeois political economists are able to demonstrate ‘the eternity and harmoniousness of the existing social relations’ by divorcing the system of production from its specific social attributes. For Marx, production is ‘not only a particular production … it is always a certain social body, a social subject, which is active in a greater or sparser totality of branches of production’.² Bourgeois political economy, in contrast, achieves its ideological purpose by dealing with society in the abstract, treating production as ‘encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded. This is the more or less conscious purpose of the whole proceeding.’³ While bourgeois economists may recognize that certain legal and political forms facilitate production, they do not treat them as organic constituents of a productive system. Thus they bring things that are organically related ‘into an accidental relation, into a merely reflective connection’.⁴

The distinction between ‘organic’ and ‘merely reflective’ connections is especially significant. It suggests that any application of the base/superstructure metaphor that stresses the separation and enclosure of spheres – however much it may insist on the connection of one to the other, even the reflection of one by the other – reproduces the mystifications of bourgeois ideology because it fails to treat the productive sphere itself as defined by its social determinations and in effect deals with society ‘in the abstract’. The basic principle about the primacy of production, the very foundation of historical materialism, loses its critical edge and is assimilated to bourgeois ideology.

This is, of course, not to say that Marx saw no value in the approach of bourgeois political economy. On the contrary, he adopted its categories as his point of departure because they expressed, not a universal truth, but a historical reality in capitalist society, at least a ‘real appearance’. What he undertook was neither the reproduction nor the repudiation of bourgeois categories but their critical elaboration and transcendence.

The theoretical standpoint being proposed here is perhaps what has been called – pejoratively – ‘political Marxism’. This brand of Marxism, according to one Marxist critic, is a

The purpose of my argument here is to overcome the false dichotomy on which this characterization of ‘political Marxism’ is based, a dichotomy that permits some Marxists to accuse others of abandoning the ‘field of economic realities’ when they concern themselves with the political and social factors that constitute relations of production and exploitation. The premise here is that there is no such thing as a mode of production in opposition to ‘social factors’, and that Marx’s radical innovation on bourgeois political economy was precisely to define the mode of production and economic laws themselves in terms of ‘social factors’.

What does it mean to talk about a mode of production or an economy as if they were distinct from, even opposed to, ‘social factors’? What, for example, are ‘objective contingencies’ like the law of capitalist accumulation and its ‘mainspring’, the ‘mechanism’ of surplus value? The mechanism of surplus value is a particular social relation between appropriator and producer. It operates through a particular organization of production, distribution and exchange; and it is based on a particular class relation maintained by a particular configuration of power. What is the subjection of labour to capital, which is the essence of capitalist production, if not a social relation and the product of a class struggle? What, after all, did Marx mean when he insisted that capital is a social relation of production; that the category ‘capital’ had no meaning apart from its social determinations; that money or capital goods are not in themselves capital but become so only in the context of a particular social relation between appropriator and producer; that the so-called primitive accumulation of capital which is the pre-condition for capitalist production is nothing more than the process – i.e. the class struggle – whereby the direct producer is expropriated?, and so on. For that matter, why did the grand old man of bourgeois social science, Max Weber, insist on a ‘purely economic’ definition of capitalism without reference to extraneous social factors (like, for example, the exploitation of labour), evacuating the social meaning of capitalism in deliberate opposition to Marx?⁶

To raise these questions and to insist on the social constitution of the economy is not at all to say that there is no economy, that there are no economic ‘laws’, no mode of production, no ‘laws of development’ in a mode of production, no law of capitalist accumulation; nor is it to deny that the mode of production is the ‘most operative concept of historical materialism’. ‘Political Marxism’, as understood here, is no less convinced of the primacy of production than are the ‘economistic tendencies’ of Marxism. It does not define production out of existence or extend its boundaries to embrace indiscriminately all social activities. It simply takes seriously the principle that a mode of production is a social phenomenon.

Equally important – and this is the point of the whole exercise – relations of production are, from this theoretical standpoint, presented in their political aspect, that aspect in which they are actually contested, as relations of domination, as rights of property, as the power to organize and govern production and appropriation. In other words, the object of this theoretical stance is a practical one, to illuminate the terrain of struggle by viewing modes of production not...