Historical Materialism and the repudiation of subjectivism
Paul Cockshott
I am an engineer, so I was naturally pleased when the leading materialist
philosopher of today, Daniel Dennet came out in defence of the significance
of the engineering viewpoint to philosophy1 . In what follows I will
present some observations on the Materialism of Marx, from an engineers
viewpoint - the materialism of a Watt, Shannon and Turing.
The leitmotif of these observations, is an antagonism to subjectivism and
the idealist concept of the subject. The concept of the subject and of the
will, have, I believe no place in the materialist world-view. Those
familiar with the current state of penetration of idealism into `Marxism',
will doubtless be able to identify the schools against whom I am arguing.
Is value the `subject' of Capital?
In Capital, the idea of the circuits of money and of capital play an
important roles. In both c-m-c and m-c-m', value in a sense plays the role
of subject. It is tempting to see the whole of the argument in Capital as
an investigation into the selfdevelopment of capital/subject. My grasp of
Hegel is not sure enogh for me to say if this view of things is actually
hegelian, but whether or not this is the case, it does suffer from
drawbacks. One of them is philosophical, the other is historical.
If we see capital as a subject, then the real material subjects of the
system of production are not adequately represented, or, if represented at
all, appear just as instanciations of the ideal subject.
By the real material subjects, I mean abstract legal personalities or
subjects of right2 . Under capitalist systems of law, some of these legal
sujects correspond to human bodies, others to bodies corporate. It is these
juridical subjects that buy and sell commodities, and, reproduce themselves
in the process. In this reproduction process, they are reproduced both as
proprietors, and as physical processes ( human metabolisms, active oil
refineries, ... ).
>From the standpoint of the self development of capital/subject, material
subjects, firms, are thought of as `capitals', instanciations of CAPITAL.
This way of looking at things is an idealist inversion.
The second problem, is that the notion of capital as a subject is tied up
with the idea of capital as self expanding value. This is what the formula
m-c-m' is all about. Where gold is money, the formula is realistic. But
even as it was written this was historically obsolete. Commercial
transactions were not, carried out using gold. Capitalist trade is a
balancing of accounts, either, in Marx's day, through the circulation of
bills of exchange, or through the clearance of cheques.
If commerce occurs through cheque clearance, then there is no longer a
circuit of value through the forms m-c-m'. An account with a bank, unlike a
hoard, has no value. It is instead a record of entitlement to value. I
think, therefore, that the use of the circuit m-c-m' by Marx must be seen
as a pedagogic device, presenting what goes on in a simple to understand
but basically anachronistic form.
When one is steeped in an old litterature, one's mind become inhabited by
dead social relations. Christians, today think in categories like Christ
the Lord, Christ the Redeemer, concepts of a slave society with the
institution of manumission, without on the modern world. We Marxists have
our thoughts about money shaped by a prsentation, intuitive to workers in
Victoria's day, to whom money was gold, without correlates in a world of
debit cards.
Focus instead on material subjects and their conditions of reproduction,
then money appears clearly in the form in which Smith presents it - power
to command the labour of others. A bank balance is power over labour. Focus
not on the self evolution of sums of value, but on how juridical subjects,
firms, reproduce their despotism over labour.
Is capital the `subject' of Capital?
Is Marx's Capital about the self development of the subject `capital', or
is it about capitalism. My immediate bias is to say it is about capitalism,
since to say that capital was the object of investigation might imply a
hegelian presumption that from the concept of capital all the concrete
features of capitalism could be deduced - something which I feel to be
mistaken.
Then the issue arises of whether there is one or many laws of motion of
modern society, which is clearly related to the above. My first thought is
that one requires several laws to have motion and dynamics - in mechanics
one assumes several conservation laws plus the force laws. This would then
reinforce the objection to a hegelian deduction of the development of
capitalism from a concept of capital. Then it struck me that work in
cellular automata theory has demonstrated that one can derive highly
complex laws of motion from a single evolution function of a cell and its
neighbours. In fact as I think Margoulis has shown one can, given a
universe of this type set up a configuration that is Turing machine
equivalent3 .
This indicates that it is not philosophically absurd that one law may be a
sufficient foundation for the motion of a very complex system. But although
this law may be a foundation for the motion of the whole system, there are
other preconditions before you get something of Turing equivalent
complexity: set of boundary conditions. These initial configurations are
guaranteed a certain stability by the underlying cellular evolution law,
but in their turn impose other constraints on the future evolution of the
system and these constraints become higher level laws.
Thus the simple law may allow a multiplicity of different configurations to
evolve and some of these different configurations would have their own,
higher level laws of motion - which would not necessarily all be equivalent.
Did Marx ever clearly state THE ECONOMIC LAW OF MOTION OF MODERN SOCIETY?
I think that we have to say no, not as a single clearly defined law. Can
say then, that the law of value is this foundational law. We then have the
problem that he never stated this explicitly as a law either, i.e. in the
sense of Hooks law or the laws of thermodynamics. I think however, one can
reconstruct the concept of law that he had beneath the texts on value.
At the level of explanation in volume 1 the law would state that 'In the
exchange of commodities, abstract socially necessary labour time is
conserved.'
Although he does not state this explicitly, I think that it is clearly a
logical presupposition of much of his argument. I would agree that he does
not establish the correctness of this law, but that does not mean that it
may not both be a valid law empirically, and one whose assumption allows
one to model or simulate the important features of capitalism. There is now
a growing body of evidence that the law actually applies, but it would be
true to say that we do not know why it applies.
But one could, using the same law of value, hypothesise other systems than
capitalism. If we made the auxilliary hypothesis that there was a tendancy
for the value of labour power to be equal to the value created by labour,
then you would not get capitalism but some other social system, perhaps a
system of workers co-operatives.
The assumption that the value of labour power is systematically below the
value creating power of labour is, it seems to me, a boundary condition
that is specifically reproduced by capitalism. In this sense, although the
law of value is the underlying law of motion of modern society, it is
abstractly the law of motion of more than one possible sort of modern
society.
This incidentally raises the question of what we mean by abstraction.
Abstraction and abstract labour
Is it only in the process of exchange that labour become abstract?
There is a confusion here between the role of abstraction in science and
the partial way in which the abstract categories discoved by science become
apparent to quotidien perception.
Science must always seek the general behind the concrete, the abstract
behind the particular. Thus in the development of thermodynamics one has
the formation of the abstract concept of heat, which is distinguished from
the forms in which it becomes apparent as warmth, temperature or thermal
radiation. To measure heat, one needs to co- ordinate several distinct
observations and data. If you want to measure the number of calories
released by by burning 10 grams of sugar under a bombe calorimeter, one
must know the starting temperature of the calorimeter, the volume of water
it contains, the final temperature, the specific heat of water, etc.
Prior to the development of a coherent theory of heat, and data on the
specific heat of water one might come up with regularities like ' other
things being equal, the rise in temperature was proportional to the sugar
burnt', but this is not a meaure of abstract heat.
The similarity to exchange is clear, a capitalist can observe that, other
things being equal his turnover is roughly proportional to the number of
workers in his employ, but this proportionality does not yet give him a
measure of abstract necessary labour time. The fact that such
proportionalities exist is an indication that there is an underlying
material cause for them, just as the proportionality between temperature
rise and fuel burned indicates a similar abstract cause.
A scientific measurement of abstract labour needs the analogue of
adjustments for different specific heats and calorimeter volumes, the fact
that in a given factory the techniques of production are worse than
average, will indicate that the measure of actual expended labour has to be
corrected to arrive at a measure of abstract labour.
The existence of objective material causes underlying the phenomenal forms
to which they give rise, is one of the basic postulates of philosophical
materialism. That these causes not only exist bur are discoverable and
measurable is a further necessary postulate for scientific materialism.
This, it seems to me is one of the fundamental distinctions between Marxism
and Hayekism, and more generally between materialism and empiricism. For
Hayek, the worth of things is in principle un-knowable outside of market
exchange. Thus the Marxist programme of a communist society in which
economic calculation transcends the market, is hopelessly utopian,
scientism, the engineering fallacy etc.
I think, therefore, that it is a fundamental philosophical error, and one
which, moreover can be exploited by our enemies, to say that it is only
through market exchanges that abstract labour can be measured. This may be
the only form in which it becomes apparent to the practical concerns of
bourgois society, but that does not exhaust the matter.
One must distinguish the scientific abstraction, abstract labour as the
expression on a polymorphous human potential, from the empirical
abstraction performed by the market.
An analogous polymorphous potential, one regularly used in industry is the
computing machine cycle. One costs algorithms in terms of the number of
machine cycles they cost. A computer is a universal machine, its
computation power can be expressed in a vast variety of concrete forms, so
there are different sequences of machine cycles with different concrete
effects. But when one uses machine cycles as a metric of algorithmic costs,
one abstracts from what these cycles are - adds, subtracts, moves etc, and
reduces them to the abstract measure of an almost infinitely plastic
potential. The abstraction over labour is analogous.
We can not use wages to measure abstract labour, although for certain
purposes they may be a useful statistical surrogate where other data are
lacking. If we measure wages we are measuring the price of labour power not
the amount of abstract labour time necessary to manufacture a use value.
To measure the latter, it has obviously to be done in natural units of
time, which as such, already abstracts from the concrete form of the
labour. As such its study starts with Babbage in his Economy of Machinery,
proceeds with Taylor in the machine shop of the Midvale Steel Company and
his successors like Charles Bedaux, whose unit of abstract labour the B was
defined as ' A "B" is a fraction of a minuit of work plus a fraction of a
minuit of rest, always aggregating to unity, but varying in proportion
according to the nature of the strain'.
There is nothing impossible in principle about such measurement, indeed,
the science of systematic exploitation had depended on it for years. But
within the capitalist social order such computations are restricted to the
factory, the comparative statistics necessary for a social calculus of
labour time do not exist. But this is not to say that they could never be
produced under some future social order.
James Watt, and the concept of Labour Power
At about the same time as one Adam Smith was professor of Moral Philosophy
here, and was setting out a coherent formulation of the labour theory of
value, Dr Black of the department of Natural Philosophy along with a
technician, one James Watt, were laying the foundations for a proper
understanding of heat and temperature. These two exercises have more in
common than might be imagined. Reflection upon it, brings out how concepts
from engineering science, from the practice of material production,
parallel and become the foundation for materialist political economy.
One might, if one were a bourgeois economist, argue that values can not be
measured independently of market prices just as temperature can not be
measured independently of the height of mercury on a thermomenter. I think
that this is basically a fair comparison. But if we rest our analysis at
this level, whether in political economy or in natural philosophy, we have
a pre-Smithian political economy and a pre-Watt understanding of heat.
What Smith did, ( drawing on others ) was to show that behind relative
prices there was an underlying objective cause - the labour required to
produce things ``The real price of every thing, what every thing really
costs to the man who wants to aquire it, is the toil or trouble of
acquiring it."We will leave out for the moment that one can also measure
the temperature of a body by analysing its black body radiation spectrum,
and concentrate on the analogy between temperature and price. This was a
great scientific advance since it related the immediately visible
phenomenon - price measured in money to something behind the scenes -
labour time. Both of the entities involved in the causal theory are
independently observable and measurable. This contrasts with the notions of
`utility' in vulgar economics which are not objectively observable, but
have to be deduced from the observed prices.
The parallel advance by Black and Watt, was the introduction of the notion
of heat as something independent of temperature. A necessary component of
this theory was the notions of specific and latent heats. Thus, by
experiment, they were able to establish that the change in temperature of a
body was proportional to the heat input divided by the specific heat of the
substance concerned. This again related the observed measurement -
temperature to something behind the scenes - heat. Like labour, heat was
independently measurable, for instance in terms of the amount of coal
burned. Later with Carnot the equation between heat and work is made. Not
only does this make the analogy with value and labour even closer in terms
of the then existing conceptual framework, but it opens up the way for more
accurate objective measures of heat energy. By use of a dissipative
calorimeter, Carnot could show that the work of a given weight falling a
known distance would produce a definite rise in temperature of water. This
then gives a fixed and external measure of heat energy.
Let me construct table of analogy between terms in the two domains of Moral
and Natural Philosophy, with a subject matter befiting the Scottish
Enlightenment.
Moral Philosophy Natural Philosophy
1.Price in gold
Temperature on an
guineas of whisky alcohol thermometer
of whisky
2.Specific labour
Specific heat of
content of gold whisky
3.Value of whisky
Heat content of
the whisky
4.Labour required to
Thermal energy of
distill whisky hot whisky.
measured in hours measured in foot
pounds or horse-
power seconds
5.Ability to work or Ability to work or
labouring power of horse-power of the
distillery workers distillery engine
( raising barrels ? )
Thus the two schools of philosophy reduce the phenomena they are concerned
with to indirect manifestations of work done, Smith taking human labour as
his standard, Watt taking the labour of horses.
However, in compiling this table I have shown 5 rows. Smith and Watt would
probably only have recognised 3 ( Smith 1,2,4) Watt (1,2,3). If, however we
take Smith enhanced by Marx and Watt by Carnot, we get the 5 rows. Now the
interesting thing about rows 3, 4,5 is that in each case they are different
ways of considering the same thing. One may measure heat in calories, but
it is the same thing as energy in terms of joules, Watt, ergs, foot-pounds,
horsepower hours etc. Similarly value is the same thing as labour time.
But value is not price, nor is heat temperature. To obtain a price from a
value we need the intervention of gold with its own specific labour/value
content per ounce. To obtain a temperature from the heat one needs the
specific heat of the subtstance being heated.
The polemical status of Labour Power
I am using labour in the sense of labour hours, which, to use Watt's
terminology is Work done ( horse-power hours ). I think that it is pretty
clear that the concept of labour-power could not have been formulated until
the genius of Watt had made the concept of horse-power, or power in general
part of the universal inheritance of the industrial age.
My chief concern is to defend the scientific superiority of the laour
theory of value vis-a-vis bourgeois subjectivist ones. What makes thelabour
theory scientific and the others unscientific is that there is no way that
one can determine whether prices do exchange in proportion to marginal
utility, since utility has no independent measure. Labour time, by
contrast, is susceptible to measurement. Its mearurement, just like that of
temperature, presupposed a definite technolgy. Measurement of temperature
depended on the invention of the thermometer, measurement of labour time
depended upon the invention, with Galileo, of the pendulum escapement
mechanism. In using a clock to determine the time taken to perform a task,
on must of course average ones measures over a large number of runs and a
large number of individual to obtain the average necessary time taken.
If labour-power is ability to perform work, then its dimension must be
work-performable/per hour. Clearly if the working day is lengthened with
the daily wage being the same, the wage rate per hour has declined. Whether
the value of labour power has similarly declined or has remained the same
is indeterminate, since we have no means of measuring the value of labour
power other than the price paid for it.
I would thus argue that the concept 'value of labour power' has no
scientiic explanatory power and its presence in Capital must be understood
as deriving from Marx's intention to perform a critique of poliical economy
using its own categories. He thus assumes the exchange of equivalents, and
assumes that workers, like other sellers get a fair price for their
commodity. This necessitates that a value be imputed to labour power.
Ironic answers to a Marxist idealist
I was recently asked, what objective force led me to write a particular
polemic against subjectivism. Was it not an expression of my will and thus
a living reproof to my anti-subjectivist world-view?
That such questions could be raised, and raised by a Marxist, indicates a
retreat towards idealism.
Force is an important concept. As a mechanical process, a depression of
keys, my writing certainly involved forces exerted by muscle on bone. But
the concept of force is quite limited, it relates to the ability to impart
motion, to overcome mechanical inertia. Its compass does not extend to
explaining the creation of a complex information structure like an article.
Here we need to explain how this particular sequence of characters was
generated. This page is so astronomically improbable, its probability of
arising by chance being of the order of 1 in 10 raised to the power of
4000, that its particularity demands explanation. Force, the mere
overcoming of momentum, can not explain such order. So what is left?
The will and its creativity, suggests the humanist.
But is this really an explanation?
I would suggest that it is not an explanation but a place-holder, a
linguistic token demanded by a set of possible sentences. This may seem a
little obscure, but to illustrate the sort of thing that I am refering to,
consider the sentences:
``It is raining."
``Paul is writing."
What is the it that rains? There is obviously no real it that does the
raining, but English grammar demands a subject for the sentence,
structurally equivalent to the Paul who writes. The it is a placeholder
demanded by the sentence form. We gain no understanding of the weather
pattern that led to the rain by using it, but it is impermissible for us to
say simply ``Is raining".
The question ``what led me to write", demands an answer of the form ``x led
me to write", with some linguistic subject x. Grammar allows the
substitution of a proper name for x, as in ``William led me to write",
or``my Will led me to write". Instead the abstract noun `will' can be used:
``my will led me to write".
The word `will' is then a placeholding subject, analogous to the it
responsible for the bad weather this last week. The `will' is
philosophically more sophisticated, than it, being one of the conventional
tokens that idealist philosophy uses to translate a non-terminal symbol of
a grammar into a constituent category of reality. The will is the symbolic
grammatical subject in philosophical garb, the linguistic subject becomes
The Subject.
An explanation of what is causing rain to fall, would go something along
the lines of``an updraft of warm moist air is causing condensation as
pressure falls, and this precipitates as rain". Here, instead of a
placemarker, we have a description, albeit abstract, of a physical process.
One can give a highly abstract description of my writing in terms of my
brain being a probabalistic state machine that undergoes state transitions
whose probability amplitudes are functions of it current state and its
current input symbols, and whose output symbols are a lagged function of
current state. For my article the relevant input symbol would have been the
argument that I was replying to, and my current state would be the
cartesian product of the states of my individual neurones.
It may be objected that this hopelessly abstract, as abstract almost, as
talking about will. But there is an important difference. The approach of
treating the brain as an automaton has engendered a productive research
program. One can, as Chomsky did in the 50s ask what class of automaton is
required to recognise languages with different classes of grammars, and
show that some features of natural language imply automata that are at
least Turing equivalent. One can begin to look at how it is that things
like visual perception can occur, as neurophysiology has done over the last
30 years, etc. In contrast, `will' will take us nowhere. It closes of
discussion.
Putting aside the question of nature, who transforms the world if not
individuals, acting individually and as parts of social classes and groups?
I have a 3 year old daughter, and today as we sat down to supper, she
pointed to the pie in the middle of the table, and asked us 'who is that?'.
We explained that this was the wrong question, she should have asked 'what
is that'. A who question, demands a person as an answer.
"who transforms the world?"
Why, the Great Helmsman, il Duce, those supermen who bestride history like
colossi.
Ask instead, what tranforms the world, and other answers spring up: maize,
smallpox, gunpowder, the automobile, capitalism.
What role do individuals have in history?
To suffer and glorify God, for who else could have written the play and
assigned them roles?
Are individuals merely unconscious actors in a historical process?
Ask me instead whether the laws of history are knowable, whether political
parties can make calculated attempts to exploit this knowledge, and I would
answer yes.
Ask me instead whether people can be made to believe that their actions
contribute to diverting the river of history, and again I answer yes.
Are their beliefs born out by events?
For those on the winning side, yes.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Footnotes:
1 Dennet, Darwins Dangerous Idea, Chap 8
2 A good materialist theory of the subject ofright was presented by
Pashukanis, in hisAllgemaine Rechtslehre und Marxismus 1929,translated
asGeneral theory of law and Marxism, and published byInk Links, London, 1978.
3 and hence capable of modeling anysystem of laws of motion
"If insurrection is an art, its main content is to know how to give the
struggle the form appropriate to the political situation."
-Vo Nguyen Giap
"Rather than seeking comparabilities in statistical terms among what are
all too often superficial features of different situations, comparabilities
must be sought at the level of determinate mechanisms, at the level of
processes that are generally hidden from easy view."
-Eleanor Burke Leacock
"Every day one has to struggle that this love to a living humanity
transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as
motivation."
-Ernesto "Che" Guevara
"Mask no difficulties."
-Amilcar Cabral
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