reification and the consciousness of the proletariat
And as, despite this, the need to grasp the whole-at least cognitively-cannot die out, we find that science, which is likewise based on specialisation and thus caught up in the same immediacy, is criticised for having torn the real world into shreds and having lost its vision of the whole. [29] Now, however, it appears as the ineluctable consequence of known, knowable, rational systems of laws, as a necessity which cannot ultimately and wholly be grasped, as was indeed recognised by the critical philosophers, unlike their dogmatic predecessors. It has often been pointed consciiousness these pages and elsewhere-that the problem that forms the ultimate barrier to the economic thought of the bourgeoisie is the crisis. When true knowledge does away with the false separation of objects (and the even falser connections established by unmediated abstractions) it does much more than merely correct a false or inadequate scientific method or substitute a superior hypothesis for a defective one. The instant that this consciousness arises and goes beyond what is immediately given we find in concentrated form the basic issue of the class struggle: the problem of force. What is relevant to our problem here is the statement that the subject of knowledge, the ego-principle, is known as to its content and, hence, can be taken as a starting-point and as a guide to method. Marx: Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The simple “repetition or continuity imbues the process with quite novel characteristics or rather causes the disappearance of some apparent characteristics which it possessed as an isolated discontinuous process.” For “quite apart from all accumulation, the mere continuity of the process of production, in other words simple reproduction, sooner or later, and of necessity, converts every capital into accumulated capital, or capitalised surplus-value. It is once again in Kant that this tendency finds its clearest expression. Parallel to this conception whose development out of the economic structures of capitalism has been shown repeatedly, there is another conception of nature, a value concept, wholly different from the first one and embracing a wholly different cluster of meanings. 50. Even his thoughts and feelings become reified. In moments of crisis the qualitative existence of the ‘things’ that lead their lives beyond the purview of economics as misunderstood and neglected things-in-themselves, as use-values, suddenly becomes the decisive factor. And by selling this, his only commodity, he integrates it (and himself: for his commodity is inseparable from his physical existence) into a specialised process that has been rationalised and mechanised, a process that he discovers already existing, complete and able to function without him and in which he is no more than a cipher reduced to an abstract quantity, a mechanised and rationalised tool. The commodity character of the commodity, the abstract, quantitative mode of calculability shows itself here in its purest form: the reified mind necessarily sees it as the form in which its own authentic immediacy becomes manifest and - as reified consciousness - does not even attempt to transcend it. Nevertheless, we must emphasise that all formal, rationalist concepts exhibit this same reified impenetrability. 1. It becomes a property of money to generate value and yield interest, much as it is an attribute of pear trees to bear pears. It will be our task in the next section to explain why it was unable to discover this concrete subject of genesis, the methodologically indispensable subject-object. Obviously the great classical philosophers were much too perceptive and critical to overlook the empirically existing duality of subject and object. That is to say, in nature and in the ‘external world’ laws still operate with inexorable necessity [22], while freedom and the autonomy that is supposed to result from the discovery of the ethical world are reduced to a mere point of view from which to judge internal events. It only shows the strength of the dialectical antagonism controlling the phenomena of capitalist society. To return to our main argument, it is evident from all this that the attempt at a solution represented by the turn taken by critical philosophy towards the practical, does not succeed in resolving the antinomies we have noted. to which such thought necessarily led. On the gradual ascendancy of the principle of economic calculation, see also A. Weber, Standort der Industrien, especially p. 216. On the one hand, it acquires increasing control over the details of its social existence, subjecting them to its needs. For it depends on the emergence of the ‘free’ worker who is freely able to take his labour-power to market and offer it for sale as a commodity ‘belonging’ to him, a thing that he ‘possesses’. However, even when commodities have this impact on the internal structure of a society, this does not suffice to make them constitutive of that society. 46. And the money-lender sells his money as just such an interest-bearing thing. ‘In the first instance’ nothing at all. 22 "Now nature is in the common view the existence of things subject to laws." However, this view transforms the process by which law comes into being and passes away into something as incomprehensible to the jurist as crises had been to the political economist. 22 If we do not emphasise the class character of the state in this context, this is because our aim is to understand reification as a general phenomenon constitutive of the whole of bourgeois society. At the same time this takes place in a milieu where the problems can only appear on an intellectual and philosophical plane. Their abolition, if it is to be a true abolition, cannot simply be the result of thought alone, it must also amount to their practical abolition as the actual forms of social life. For this reason the concept of 'rationalism' must not be employed as an unhistorical abstraction, but it is always necessary precisely to determine the object (or sphere of life) to which it is to be related, and above all to define the objects to which it is not related. At any rate it is advisable to consider the interaction between these two aspects. In its parts, however – within the radius in which men live – it can increasingly be penetrated, calculated and predicted. 22. But they must not be governed by a law in the sense in which ‘laws’ govern individual phenomena; they must not under any circumstances be rationally organised through and through. It is doubtless true that Hegel whose realistic genius neither could nor would disguise the truth about the nature of history as he found it did nevertheless seek to provide an explanation of it in terms of “the ruse of reason”. the Phenomenology of Mind, Preface, Werke II, p. 20; and also ibid., pp. From this it follows that the powers that are beyond man’s control assume quite a different character. about the difference between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions are wholly in line with this. This consequence follows with such inevitability that Tugan-Baranovsky, for example, attempts in his theory to draw. Later on, while preserving the same structure, it became the principle for conserving (bourgeois) reality. But neither condition can be fulfilled. The problem is then no longer – as it was for Spinoza – to create an objective system of reality on the model of geometry. Above all, as far as labour-time is concerned, it becomes abundantly clear that quantification is a reified and reifying cloak spread over the true essence of the objects and can only be regarded as an objective form of reality inasmuch as the subject is uninterested in the essence of the object to which it stands in a contemplative or (seemingly) practical relationship. It becomes a property of money to generate value and yield interest, much as it is an attribute of pear trees to bear pears. The specific type of bureaucratic ‘conscientiousness’ and impartiality, the individual bureaucrat’s inevitable total subjection to a system of relations between the things to which he is exposed, the idea that it is precisely his ‘honour’ and his ‘sense of responsibility’ that exact this total submission [23] all this points to the fact that the division of labour which in the case of Taylorism invaded the psyche, here invades the realm of ethics. Our intention here is to base ourselves on Marx’s economic analyses and to proceed from there to a discussion of the problems growing out of the fetish character of commodities, both as an objective form and also as a subjective stance corresponding to it. This necessarily means that even in the more mundane and properly historical spheres, history must find its fulfilment in the restored Prussian state. And as it is the nature of the dialectical method constantly to produce and reproduce its own essential aspects, as its very being constitutes the denial of any smooth, linear development of ideas, the proletariat finds itself repeatedly confronted with the problem of its own point of departure both in its efforts to increase its theoretical grasp of reality and to initiate practical historical measures. So that the pretence that society is regulated by ‘eternal, iron’ laws which branch off into the different special laws applying to particular areas is finally revealed for what it is: a pretence. . But the attempt to eliminate every element of content and of the irrational affects not only the object but also, and to an increasing extent, the subject. Only in this context can the problem of modern bureaucracy be properly understood. It could easily appear at this point that the whole process is nothing more than the ‘inevitable’ consequence of concentrating masses of workers in large factories, of mechanising and standardising the processes of work and levelling down the standard of living. . For we are not concerned to present a history of modern philosophy, not even in crude outline. And likewise, every decisive turn of events in the production process must more or less reveal that the true categorical structure of capitalism has been turned completely upside down. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the central importance of this problem for economics itself. Lukács explains how this works on both objective and subjective levels in capitalist society: 'objectively in so far as the commodity form facilitates the equal exchange of qualitatively different objects….subjectively, this formal equality of human labour in the abstract…becomes the real p… what is said on the ‘post festum’ nature of the consciousness of the bourgeoisie in the essays “The Changing Function of Historical Materialism” and “What is Orthodox Marxism?”. Or it may radically question the value of formal knowledge for a ‘living life’ (see irrationalist philosophies from Hamann to Bergson). “Didn’t the Moloch of the Ancients hold sway? The divorce of the phenomena of reification from their economic bases and from the vantage point from which alone they can be understood, is facilitated by the fact that the [capitalist] process of transformation must embrace every manifestation of the life of society if the preconditions for the complete self-realisation of capitalist production are to be fulfilled. [20]. 128-9. As Marx says: “Labour ... is no longer grown together with the individual into one particular determination” [32] once the false manifestations of this unmediated existence are abolished, the true existence of the proletariat as a class will begin. It must be attempted. Cf. That is to say, its premise is that things should be shown to be aspects of processes. a law of mutually interacting ‘coincidences’ rather than one of truly rational organisation. But the formal abstraction of these ‘laws’ transforms economics into a closed partial system. The law maintains its close relationship with the ‘eternal values’. And in order to achieve this, the faithful reflection of economic conditions suffers increasingly. At the same time, they become commodities only within the limits of being direct use-values distributed at opposite poles, so that the commodities to be exchanged by their possessors must be use-values to both - each commodity to its non-possessor. For the reduction to quantitative terms must affect not only the basic elements of the process but also its individual stages, and the fact that this procedure makes it appear as if a gradual transition were taking place, goes unobserved. Thought relapses into the contemplative duality of subject and object. As soon as the new division of labour which creates professional lawyers becomes necessary, another new and independent sphere is opened up which, for all its essential dependence on production and trade, still has also a special capacity for reacting upon these spheres. “To them, their own social action”, says Marx, “takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.”, 1. These categories are then applied not to the real material substratum (even that of the particular science) but to an ‘intelligible’ subject matter. What is important is to recognise clearly that all human relations (viewed as the objects of social activity) assume increasingly the objective forms of the abstract elements of the conceptual systems of natural science and of the abstract substrata of the laws of nature. Special objective character of things as things on which is to say of this starting-point depending on is! 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