Sum
mmary: Was
W the birtth of philossophy in A
Ancient Greeece a refleex and
pro
ojection off the generiic forms off capitalist exploitatioon, such ass
excchange-vallue, money
y and the commodityy-form? Didd commoddity
fetiishism and
d reification
n exist in Antiquity
A
oor are they historicallly specific
to capitalism?
c
? If the enttire history
y of philosoophy is braanded withh classexp
ploitation, is the Heg
gelian dialeectic redunndant in crittical theoryy? David
Blaack, introd
ducing one of the them
mes of his forthcominng book, T
The
Philosophica
al Roots off Anti-Capittalism, evaaluates Alffred Sohn-R
Rethel's
“an
nti-philosophical” criitique of caapitalism–E
Editor
Contrra So
ohn-R
Rethhel: O
On tthe
Ph
hilossoph
hical Rooots oof AnntiCapitaalism
m
Dav
vid Blacck
Feb
bruary 17
7, 2013
”So
ohn-Reth
hel’s exceptionallly radicaal view – paralleels can bbe
foun
nd, if at all, in Lukács’
L
‘Reificattion’ essaay, in Blloch’s
Tho
omas Mü
ünzer and
d in som
me passagges in Benjaminn –
Inte
ernational Marxist‐Humanistt Organization
Email: arise@in
E
nternationalmarxisthumanistt.org | Web: w
umanist.org www.internationalmarxisthu
theorises a capitalist order which is primordial vis-à-vis
knowledge and being, an order that cannot be shown as a
subject-matter, topic, theme or problem of philosophy
because it is philosophy itself.”i
Gaspar Miklos Tamás
'Real Abstraction'
Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1899-1990) spent his formative years
in Germany amongst the radical intellectuals who were to
found the Institute of Social Research (later known as the
“Frankfurt School”), notably Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer, In 1937, he fled Germany, where he had been
active in the anti-Nazi underground and took up residence in
England. Despite his originality as a Marxist theoretician,
Sohn-Rethel found his works rejected for publication by
Horkheimer, then by the British Communist Party and
finally by the British academic presses. His major work,
Intellectual and Manual Labour: a Critique of
Epistemology, was eventually published in the nineteenseventies, when “New Left” students of the Frankfurt
School recognized its importance.
In Intellectual and Manual Labor, Sohn-Rethel comments
on Marx’s speculation in the Critique of the Gotha Program
about the vanishing of the antithesis between mental and
2 physical labor in the higher phase of a future
socialist/communist society: “But before understanding how
this antithesis can be removed it is necessary to understand
why it arose in the first place.” ii
Sohn-Rethel grounds the emergence of Western philosophy
and scientific thought in an “autonomous intellect,” which
became separated from manual labor in the Mediterranean
civilizations of Antiquity. Ancient Egypt developed
geometry and symbolic forms in writing as means for
appropriating the surplus product of a subservient class. In
Greece mathematics, science and philosophy were further
developed, and in a more systematic manner. These
civilizations are formulated by Sohn-Rethel as “societies of
appropriation” which displace communal and classless
“societies of production.” In a society of production, the
communal order is derived directly from social labor and
there is no appropriation of surplus product by any class of
non-producers. In a society of appropriation, the
appropriation operates either unilaterally, as in Ancient
Egypt and medieval feudalism, or reciprocally, as in the
exchange of commodities through money, which began in
Greece and eventually became universalized in modern
capitalism. In Greek Antiquity, abstract thought was
actualized when the social nexus of exchange relations was
3 facilitated by gold and silver coinage. This “real
abstraction“ produced, for the first time in history, the
cosmology of pure abstractions – the One, the Many, Being,
Becoming, etc. -- that we find in the pre-Socratic
philosophies of Parmenides and Heraclitus. Sohn-Rethel
argues that the fundamental unity of the being of things,
which philosophers attempted to establish as an ontological
or transcendental character of reality, is really a mode of
exploitative relations. Thus the nexus of real abstraction is
seen as having two sides which reflect one another: the
commodity-form of exchange-value mediated by money;
and the norm of “timeless” and “objectively deceptive”
universal logic. Sohn-Rethel proceeds to argue that all
concepts in the history of philosophy – including the
transcendental categories of Kant’s pure reason and the
absolutes of Hegel’s dialectic – are marked by this idealist
timelessness, which also happens to characterize the status
of the commodity in the process of exchange
In Kant’s transcendental unity of consciousness the
possibility of knowledge and experience is grounded in a
priori forms and categories. Sohn-Rethel's materialist
“critique of epistemology” seeks to overturn this Kantian
synthetic unity by means of a “methodological postulate.”
His move is is not however, entirely at odds with neo-
4 Kantian scientific method. For in neo-Kantian sociology the
objective validity of the sphere of facts and values is
conferred by the power of society or culture. For Emile
Durkheim, the social conditions for the possibility of
knowledge and experience in human communities are
actualized by the moral or coercive force of the “collective
being,” acting as a sui generis, ”transcendent objectivity.”
But a sociological a priori, unlike Kant's “transcendental
unity of apperception,” is external to the mind, and therefore
has an object-like, causal relationship to thinking. Because,
in neo-Kantian thought, the nature of the precondition
(social being) is nevertheless transcendent and underivable,
it cannot be a “fact” itself; therefore it is – like God or
Freedom in Kant's practical reason –– a postulate
introduced to make values intelligible. But, as Gillian Rose
points out, once a social origin of the categories is admitted
it becomes impossible to explain the relation between the
unconditioned and conditioned without using the very
categories of the conditioned (such as cause) which need to
be justified by the precondition.iii
Sohn-Rethel seems to think that he can avoid this dilemma
through recourse to “materialism.” This is not to say that
Sohn-Rethel subscribes to a vulgar dialectical materialist
orthodoxy. He asserts that the reality Marx opposes to forms
5 of consciousness is not “matter” but social existence; in
order to derive consciousness historically from social being,
we must presuppose “a process of abstraction which is part
of this being.”iv Sohn-Rethel and his co-thinkers, George
Thomson (1903-87) and Benjamin Farrington (1891-1974),
argue that in Greek Antiquity, the ideology of philosophical
idealism emerged in “class struggle.” The “idealism” of the
ruling class was pitted against a “materialism”
representative of the artisans of the “lower orders,” whose
“practical,” “scientific” outlook had already established the
categories of analysis, such as cause. But this
methodological postulate of a putative pre-Socratic
materialism, rendered dormant until its renovation by
Marxian materialism, rests on questionable historical
validation. According to Farrington, the atomistic
philosophy of Epicurus was scientifically true and
“Anaximander was saying the same kind of things that an
up-to-date writer puts forward to-day in a scientific
handbook of the universe,” with conclusions drawn from
observation and reflection. These claims were challenged
at the outset by Thomson's former tutor at Cambridge,
Francis Macdonald Cornford (1874-1943), in a forgotten
essay entitled “The Marxist View of Ancient Philosophy”:
6 “What sort of observation could have taught Anaximander
that the earth is a cylindrical drum, three times as broad as it
is high; or that the fixed stars, the moon, and the sun, in that
order, are respectively distant from the earth by 9, 18, and
27 times the diameter of the earth?”
Thomson claims that following the Peloponnesian War,
Athenian thought was divided between those who supported
the city-state (who were rich, such as Plato) and those who
were prepared to see it fall (who were not rich). Cornford
comments, “The implication that the abolition of the citystate would have entailed the abolition of social inequalities,
including slavery, is hard to justify in the light of history.”v
Kant and Hegel on Form and Content
Sohn-Rethel says that the capitalist logic of appropriation
cannot change into a socialist logic of production until
desocialized labor is resocialized and “people create their
own society as producers.”vi The problem is that he thinks
the only thing preventing social labor from becoming
directly socialized is the exchange relation; a society is
potentially classless when it acquires the form of its
synthesis “directly through the process of production and
not through exchange-mediated appropriation.”vii SohnRethel was doubtless highly critical of the divisions and
7 inequalities in Russian communism between mental and
manual workers. Note his insistence that, “to the conditions
of a classless society we must add, in agreement with Marx,
the unity of mental and manual labor, or as he puts it, the
disappearance of their division.” But this goal is
ungrounded in Sohn-Rethel’s critique. His statement that
the struggle against the division between intellectual and
manual labor formed “a central issue in the construction of
socialism in China since the victory of the proletarian
cultural revolution” betrays a Kantian dualism between
“ought” and “is,” if not a lapse into Maoist voluntarism.viii
Sohn-Rethel tries to circumvent the relation between
Hegel's “idealism” and Marx's “materialism” by insisting
that Kantian dualism reflects the realities of capitalism more
faithfully than Hegel’s anti-epistemological approach,
which Sohn-Rethel sees as an attempt to draw all of the
social antinomies and contradictions into the “immanency”
of absolute spirit. George Lukács seems to concur, in saying
that the Kantian critical philosophy springs from the reified
structure of consciousness in the modern world. He adds
however, that the problems and solutions of the Ancient
Greek philosophy, embedded in a society wholly different
from capitalism, were qualitatively different from those of
modern philosophy: “Greek philosophy was no stranger to
8 certain aspects of reification, without having experienced
them, however, as universal forms of existence.”ix
Although commodities and money existed in the trading
periphery of Greek Antiquity, the commodity-form as
described by Marx in Capital was is no sense the active
social mediation. Sohn-Rethel misses Hegel's critique of
major errors in Kantian thinking; a critique which provides
Marxism with some crucial arguments against political
economy. To take just one, Hegel argues, contra Kant, that
form is by no means external in relation to content. For in
the opposition of form and content, the content is not
formless. As Isaac Rubin observes:
“From the standpoint of Hegelian philosophy… the content
itself in its development gives birth to this form, which was
contained within this content in concealed form…. From
this standpoint, the form of value also must arise of
necessity from the substance of value, and consequently we
must view abstract labor as the substance of value, in all the
fullness of its social features which are characteristic for
commodity production.”x
Raya Dunayevskaya’s 1949 essay, “Notes on Chapter One
of Marx’s Capital in relation to Hegel’s Logic,” seems to
concur with Rubin on the issue of form and content: the
9 “illusory” nature of the commodity fetish cannot be
overcome by simply counterposing essence to form i.e.,
opposing concrete, “useful” labor, conceived as the source
of all value, to the phenomenal form and phantasmagoria of
exchange-values. For to do so would fail to comprehend
their interpenetration and opposition in a single commodity
acting as an equivalent. Use-value becomes the phenomenal
form of its opposite, value. Concrete labor becomes the
mere matter of the form under which abstract labor
manifests itself. Private labors are “socialized” by the
general value-form which allows for, and requires, the
existence of the money-form.xi The general value-form
reduces all actual labor to expenditure of labor-power – in a
bad infinity of unlimited “growth” and accumulation of
capital. Under the thumb of capital, labor is substance, not
subject. Labor is not actualized as subject in a conflict
between “good” use-value and “bad” exchange-value.
“Labor,” as the proletariat, only becomes a “subject” in its
self-abolition and uprooting of value-production. Marx says
that the life-process of society does not strip off its mystical
veil until it is consciously regulated by freely associated
producers according to a settled plan.
Praxis in Aristotle, Hegel and Marx
According to Sohn-Rethel and Thomson, the fetishism of
1
0 commodities – which they see as ”false consciousness,”
rather than an objective structuring power of capital -existed in Greek Antiquity.xii But this view of fetishism, as a
transhistorical phenomenon stemming from the ”illusions”
in acts of exchange, is hard to square with Marx's position
that his investigation of the commodity – the “simplest
social form in which the product of labor in contemporary
society manifests itself” – is “historically specific.”xiii This
might help to explain why Marx, in Capital Volume Three,
says that the polis of Greek Antiquity had more in common
with “primitive communism,” than with capitalism and
feudalism. For in both the polis and primitive communism,
it was the “actual community” that presented itself as the
basis of production, and it was the reproduction of this
community that was production’s “final purpose.”xiv
Aristotle conceived of a social hierarchy of (in top-down
order) Theoria (Theory and Philosophy), Praxis (Activity or
Action) and Techné (Production). Whilst philosophy and
praxis – which together comprise the Realm of Freedom –
have no ends outside themselves, production, performed
largely by slaves, has its ends outside of itself. Hegel, in his
philosophic conception of the modern (post-French
Revolution) world, attempted to dissolve the barrier
Aristotle put between freedom (as praxis) and unfreedom
(as production) and make them the two sides of spirit’s
1
1 historical self-objectification, united in the concept of free
labor. Marx, like Aristotle, conceived of a society with no
end outside itself. But whereas for Aristotle the selfsufficient community of the polis was a community of free
men ruling over slaves and women, for Marx,
socialism/communism would be a self-sufficient entity of
“human power as its own end”; that is, in the words of
August Blanqui (whom he much admired), “a republic
without helots.” And whereas in Hegel’s philosophy of
history, the dialectic is one of self-consciousness and
consciousness, for Marx it is that of laboring humanity.
Hegel was unable to see the commodity fetishism in
industrial production which the class struggles of the
nineteenth century were to illuminate for Marx. Therefore it
is hardly surprising that Hegel conflated modern abstract
labor with labor as praxis.
Rosa Luxemburg says that at the moment the Greeks
entered history, their situation was that of a disintegrated
primitive communism.xv Was it, then, any accident that
“communism” made its first appearance in philosophy
amongst the elite of Plato’s Republic, at the very time it was
being extinguished, in its “primitive” forms, throughout the
Greek world? Richard Seaford, in Money and the Early
Greek Mind, argues that the western metaphysical tradition
1
2 developed under the influence, not only of money, but also
of the social forms and practices which preceded monetized
society, however remote. Although philosophy involves
unconscious cosmological projection of the abstract
substance of money, it does not, as Sohn-Rethel supposes,
consist of it.xvi
Even granted that Hegel’s Logic represents the logic of
capital it does not necessarily follow that Hegel’s
philosophy represents the value-form. Just as the internal
duality of Hegel's Logic is expressed in the contradiction
between the Theoretical and Practical Idea in the Absolute,
so capitalism is riven with an internal instability that
intimates a realm beyond capital wherein “human power is
its own end.”
1
3 i Gaspar Miklos Tamas, “The Uniqueness of Capitalism and
the Normative Content of a Socialist Political Philosophy”
(2008) http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/society/events
ii Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A
Critique of Epistemology (London: Macmillan, 1976), p.
57.Sohn-Rethel, IML, p. 57.
iii Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, (London:
Continuum, 2000), pp. 15-17.
iv Sohn-Rethel., p. 57.
v F.M. Cornford, The Unwritten Philosophy, pp. 120-26.
Benjamin Farrington, Science and Politics in the Ancient
World (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965). George Thomson,
Aeschylus and Athens (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1973),
vi Sohn-Rethel, p. 83.
vii Sohn-Rethel, p. 139.
viii Sohn-Rethel, p. 169.
ix George Lukács, History and Class Consciousness,
(London: Merlin 1971), p. 111.
1
4 x I.I. Rubin, “Abstract Labour and Value in Marx's System,”
Capital and Class, No. 5, Summer 1978
http://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/abstract-labour.htm
xi Raya Dunayeskaya, “Notes on Chapter One of Marx’s
Capital and its Relation to Hegel’s Logic” (1949), The
Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism (Chicago:
News and Letters Publications, 1992), pp. 89-94.
xii
Alfred Sohn‐Rethel, “The Historical Materialist Theory of Knowledge” (in four parts). Marxism Today, (March, April, May and June 1965). xiii Marx, “Notes on Adolph Wagner” in Karl Marx Texts
and Method, ed. T. Carver (Oxford University Press: 1975).
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01/wagn
er.htm
xiv
Marx, Capital Vol. III. (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 970.
xv Rosa Luxemburg, “Slavery,” The Rosa Luxemburg
Reader, eds, K.B. Anderson and P. Hudis (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2004), p. 114.
1
5 xvi Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind
(Cambridge University Press: 2004), pp. 188-89.
1
6