Alfred Sohn-Rethel - Intellectual and Manual labour; A critique
of Epistemology
The book is concerned to develop
an understanding and a critique of epistemology through the parallel analysis
to Marx’s critique of political economy.Sohn Rethel seeks to argue that there
is a formal identity between bourgeois epistemology and the social form of
exchange in that both involve an abstraction. If he can prove this, he believes
he can show that in the abstraction of exchange we can see something like
the transcendental subject. By doing this Rethel hopes to show that it is
in the historical separation of exchange and use (making much of Marx's distinction
between the two in the opening pages of Das Kapital) that grounds the possibility
of abstract thought - both in ancient Greek and modern societies. As the origin
of the social synthesis, commodity exchanging society conditions the possiblity
of all of its thought forms. Exchange is abstract and social in a manner that
is contrasted explicitly with the private experience of use. Like Marx, it
is this abstract quality secondary social nature of the commodity relation
that concerns our author.
Rethel seeks to link the categories
of pure reason with the exchange abstract which is increasingly taking the
form of a purely mathematical characterisation despite its historical and
social origins. Part of this is due to the fact that commodity production
pushes exchange to empty time and endless space. There is no real significant
temporality to the principles of exchange.(56)
Primary and secondary
nature of commodity
‘Erste Natur’ – physical body of the commodity, concrete, material
‘zweite Natur’ – social and
abstract, commodities qua object of exchange, man made and synthetic. (p 57)
‘primary nature is created by
human labour, second nature is ruled by relations of property.’
(must not forget that the
first nature is synthetic too – i.e. still transformed and made by socialised
productive and synthetic activity of men.) This distinction is typical and
based on Marx’s critique of political economy – it relates to the separation between
use value and exchange value and the respective concrete and abstract labour
that goes into their production (the two-fold character of labour in Das
Kapital).
Hegel and Kant
Describes the whole as the
social synthesis (p 4-5). Reads Kantian a priori as something that
needs to be shown to exist but as formed socially. I.e. we do inherit prior
conceptions of how reality is and how to process it, but these are given by
society itself, rather than an inherent property of mind. (p 8)
Hegel does not really elaborate
further than Kant, and can logic the principle of the dialectic because he
sidesteps the Kantian problem of epistemology. True, Hegel inaugurates the
dialectic, but his own understanding of it is an attempt to work through the
contradictions of a presupposition that only appears as a necessity of truth,
that makes mind identical with being. With Hegel speculative idealist thinking
has reached its apex but it does not go substantially beyond the Kantian problematic.
Rethel thinks that both Smith and Kant are better representatives of Bourgoeis
thought, being spokesman of political economy and epistemology in their pure
normalcy. Rethel compares Kant’s critique of pure reason and Adam Smith’s
wealth of nations, as both being attempts to understand systems in their pure
and unproblematic form – whereas Hegel’s science of logic (and logic of everything)
and Ricardo’s project are allready attempts to understand the contradictions
of systems. Stuff on ‘real abstractions’ here that is quite good. I.e. abstraction
is not purely a conceptual activity of mind but has a real basis in societies
that exchange commodities.
The secondary nature of socially
synthetic exchange activity is in total separation from nature. The social
interconnections between the private spheres of production, consumption and
reproduction now exist in and through commodity exchange. This is rightly
pointed to as purely social forms of interconnection, though it must be said,
I am not sure if Rethel would agree, that as a total social activity it is
still in relation to nature, as man still works with and inside nature. (60-61)
“what defines the character
of intellectual labour in its full-fledged division from all manual labour
is the use of non-empirical form-abstractions which may be represented by
nothing other than non-empirical, ‘pure’ concepts.” (pp 66). The basis for
this is the real abstraction of commodity exchange. This is a basic and correct
I believe materialist point (real abstraction of exchange cuts out empirical
content (67)).[ look at how this might be seen in spinozist terms?}
Commodity exchange as
abstract follows normative rules, such as non spatio-temporal element and
commodity not changing its form, thus it is postulated rather than factual. Yet
reasoning that it allows follows own normative logic that is the dialectic.
These properties of abstraction seen to relate to nature not to money – coined
money being the economic reality that allows for the abstraction to take form –
it is the ‘functional intermediary of the social synthesis’ (pp70)
Here, my supposition that
commodity exchange as the social nexus that unites diverse private spheres is a
way of getting out of a labour ontology, or a knowledge of nature gained
through manual work seems confirmed on (pp73. + pp 75)
Separation of intellectual
labour in this way, allows Rethel to argue that basic categories of abstract
thinking can apply to nature too, though their a priori character is
social in origin.
“The basic categories of
intellectual labour…are replicas of the elements of the real abstraction” (76).
This is quite dodgy for why would intellectual labour be then able to apprehend
nature, if their categorisation is social. Are natural laws the same as social
ones in a vulgar Marxian\ Engelsian formulation of a positivism? Continues much
in the same vein. Development of mathematics and increasingly abstract ways of
thinking from Egyptian rope stretching to Greek geometry and later medieval and
Renaissance developments in science.
- yes but we have
increasingly understood nature in a ‘scientific’ way by increased socialisation
of labour and its operative divisions. Natural science is only possible as a
social form.
Sohn-Rethel insists that the
rise of automation in dev of manufacturing ‘presents itself as a feature of
technology. But it does not spring from technology but arises from the capitalist
production relations and is inherent in the capital control over production.’
(pp 121) And further; “The postulate of automatism as a condition for the
capital control over production is even more vital than its economic
profitability – it is fundamental to capitalism from the outset.”!!!(122)
So: “The stages in the
development of capitalism can be seen as so many steps in the pursuit of that
postulate, and it is from this angle that we can understand the historical
necessity of modern science as well as the peculiarity of its logical and
methodological formation.” (122)
Capitalist could not handle
the workers having the knowledge that makes production work. Descartes and
Hobbes functionalism of self operating mechanisms, is ideological materialism
that accompanies this manufacturing epoch (123).
So, and this addresses the social nature of scientific knowledge
and where its structure comes from; “…the rise of modern science is not only outwardly coincident but
inherently connected with the rise of modern capitalism.”
Galileo’s principle of
inertia said to derive from the exchange abstraction! Seems a bit deterministic
(this is what I thought while reading it)
“…it derives from the pattern
of motion contained in the real abstraction of commodity exchange. This motion
has the reality in time and space of the commodity movements in the market, and
thus of the circulation of money and of capital. The pattern is absolutely
abstract, in the sense of bearing no shred of perceptible qualities, and was
defined as: abstract linear movement through abstract, empty, continuous and
homogeneous space and time of abstract substances which thereby suffer no material change, the movement being
amenable to no other than mathematical treatment. Although continually
occurring in our economic life the movement in this description is not
perceivable to our private minds. When it does indeed strike our minds it is in
a pure conceptual form whose source is no longer recognisable; nor is the
mechanism to which it owes its abstractness.” (128)
Then quotes Marx’s positivist
analogies: After-word to Second ed of Capital and First preface; social
movement as natural history independent of human will and determining it. (129)
This explains some of the Kantian
allusions in Sohn-Rethel? Arguably fails to appreciate the manifold social
mediations that give science a relative degree of autonomy, as developing,
non-economically determined standards of criteria for evaluation of natural
world. But then again Sohn – Rethel argues; “It is the exact truth of exact
science that it is knowledge of nature in commodity form” (pp 132)
The rise of the social power
of capital is based on outgrowing of the direct producer – (relate this to
Bauman, Andre Gorz, ). (pp 130) How does this changing composition of producer
change social form. Negri?