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Stuart Hall
MARX'S NOTES ON METHOD: A 'READING' OE THE '1857 INTRODUOTION'

Prefatory note
This is a shortened version of a paper on .Marx's 1857 Introduction presented to and discussed in a series of C cntre seminars. It has heen sotncvvhat revised in the light of those discu.^sions, though I have not heen able to take account of some further, more substantive criticisms aenerously offered by John Mepham, among others. Tbe 1 857 Introduction is Marx's most substantial text on 'method', thotigb even here many of bis formulations remain extremely condensed and provisional. Since the Introduction presents such enormous problems of interpretation. I have largely confined myself to a 'reading' of the text, [he positions taken by Marx in the Introduction run counter to many received ideas as to bis 'method'. Properly arasped and imaginatively applied as tbey were in the larger corpus of the Grundrisse to which they constantly refer they seem to me to offer quite striking, original and seminal points of departure for the 'problems of method' which heset our field of study, though I have not heen able to establish this connection within the limits of the paper. I see the paper, however, as contributing to this on-going work oj theoretical and methodological clarification, rather than as simply a piece of textual explication. I bope tbis conjuncture will not he lost in the detail of tbe exposition.

The ISS? Introduction is one ot the most pivotal of Marx's texts (I). It is also one of his most difficult, compressed and 'illegible'. In bis excellent Foreword to the Grundrisse, Nicolaus warns that Marx's Nolebot^ks are hazardous lo quote, 'since the ctjntext, the grammar and the verv \()cabulary raise doubts as to w hat Marx "reallv" meant in a given passage'. Vilar observes that the 1857 Introduction is one of those texts 'from yvhich everyone takes whate\'er suits him' (2). Wilh the groyving interest in Marx's method and epistemology, tbe Introduction occupies an increasingly central ptisition in the studv ot Marx's work, t share tbis sense ot its significance, while (littering often from boyv many of Marx's explicators have read its meaning. My aim, then, is to inaugurate a 'reatiing' t f this 18)7 text. It is, ot ct>urse, not a > reading tabula rasa, not a reading 'withtjut presuppositions'. It reflects my own problematic, inevitablv. I hope it also throws some undistorted light on Marx's.

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In a famous letter ot January 14, 1858, Marx wrote to Engels: I am getting some nice developments. For instance, I have thrown o\ er the whole doctrine of proBt as it has existed up to now. In the metht>d of treatment the fact that, by mere accident, I ha\e glanced tbrougb Hegel's Eogic bas been o! great service to im' Freiligarth found some volumes t)f Flegel which oi"iginallv belonged to Baktitiin and sent them to me as a present. II there shoultl e\er be used for such work again, I should greallv like to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence in tw ci or three printer's sheets, what is rational in the inelht)d which Hegel clisco\ered but at the same time enveloped in mysticism. It yvas not the only time Marx made expi-essed [sic] that hope. In 1S43, Marx made notes for a substantial critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Tbe Critique of Hegel's Philosophy As A Wbole, usually printetl togetber yvith the other 1844 Manuscripts, also aimed al an exptjsition and critique of Hegel's dialectic, noyv in relation to the Pbenotnenolo^j)' anti the Eogic, though. In the tlnal event, largelv confined to the former. As late as 1876, he wrote to Dielzgen: When I have shaken oft the burden of mv economic labours, I shall write a dialectic. The correct layvs of tbe tiialectic are alreatly included in I legel, albeit in a mystical form. Il is necessary to strip it of this form. (3) These hopes were not to be tulfilled, tbe burtlen of ihe econtjmics ne\ei- laid aside. Thus, yve do not have, trom the mature Marx, either the systematic delineaticjn of the 'rational kernel', nor the methoti ot its transformaticm, nor an exposition of the results of that transformaticjn: the Marxian dialec^tic. Tbe 18^7 Introduction, and tbe compressed 1 859 Preface to the Critique, together yvith other scattered asides, have therefore to do duty tor the unlultllled parts of Marx's project. The IS'}7 Introduction in particular represents his tullest methodological antl theoretical summary text. Decisi\e, hoyvever, as this text is, we must not handle it as if it were something other than it is. It was written as an Introduction to the Notebooks, themselves enormously comprehensive in scope, digressive and complex in structure; and quite unfinishetl 'rough drafts'. Rosclolsky remarked that the (irundrisse 'intrt)duces us, so to speak, into Marx's economic laboratory and lays bare all the refinements, all the bypaths of his melht}dt>logv' The Introduction was thus conceived as a rc^sumc'' and guide, to 'problems t)r methoti' conci'elely and more expansivelv applied in the Notebooks themselves. It was not, therefore, intentled to stanti wholK- in its own right. Mcjreover, the tentative character of the text was signitied by Marx's decision in the end twt to publish it. The Introduction was re|iiaced by the terser Preface: and some ot tbe central propositions ot the Introduction are modified, or at least suspended, in the later Preface. An immetliate contrast ot the Introduction

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wilh the Preface (yvhere a classical conciseness is eyerywhere in plav, quite tiitlerent tVom the linguistic playfulness and conceit of the Introduction) reminds us that, despite its dense argumentation, the 1S']7 Introduction remains, even yvith respect to Marx's methtxl, prt>yisional. In the Introduction, Marx proceetls via a critique of the ideological presupposition ot political economy. The first section deals wilh Production. The object ot the inquiry is 'material protluction'. Smith and Ricarcit) begin with 'the individual and isolated hunter or fisherman'. Marx, hoyvever, begins with 'socially determinate' individuals, and hence 'socially determined individual production'. Figbteentb-century theorists, up to and including Rousseau, tind a general point of departure 'the individual' producer. Smith antl Ricardt) found their theories upon this ideological projection. Yet 'the individual' cannot be the point of departure, but onl\' the resuh. Rousseau's 'natural man' appears as a stripping away ot the ctintingent complexities of modern life, a rediscoverv ot the natural, universal human-individual core beneath. Actually, the whcjle development ot 'civil society' is subsumed in this aesthetic conct^it. It is nt>t until labour has been freed ot the tlepenclent torms of feudal society, and subjecl tt) the re\(jlutionary development il undergt>es under early capitalism, that the modern concept of 'the indiyiclual' could appear at all. A whole historical and ideological deyelopment, then, is already presu]jposed in but hidden w ithin the notitin of the Natural Indi\iclual and of universal 'human nature'. This is an absolutely cbaracteristic movement of thought in the Introduction. It takes up the 'given' points of departure in Political Econt)my. It shoyvs by a critique tbat these are not, in fact, starting points but points of arrival. In them, a whtjle historical development is already 'summed up'. In short: what appears [.sic] as the most concrete, common-sense, simple, constituent starting-points for a theory of Political Economy, turn out, on inspection, to be the sum ai' many, prior, determinations. Production outside society is as absurd as language w itbout individuals living anti talking together. It takes a gigantic social development to produce 'the isolated intlividual' producer as a concept: only a highly elabtiratetl form of develo])ed social ct>nnectedness can appear as - lake the 'phenomenal t~orm' men pursuing theii" egoistic interests as 'indifferent', isolated, individuals in a 'free' market tirganized by an 'invisible hand'. In fact, of ct)urse, even this individualism is an 'all sided dependence' which appears as mutual indifference: 'The reciprocal and ali-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another ttjrms their social connection. The social bond is expressed in
exchange value' (4).

This concept that the capitalist mode of protluction depends on social connection assuming the 'ideological' form of an individual dis-connectit>n - is one oi the great, substantive themes of the Grundrisse as a whole. But its working-out also has consequences for the problems of method. For tbe displacement of real relations via their ideological representations requires - for

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its critique, its unmasking - a method \vhicb reveals the 'essential relations' bebinci the necessary but mystifying inversitjns assumed by their 'surface forms'. This metbod - which, latei-, Mai'x itientifies a.s tbe core of what is seientific in his dialectic forms the master metbodtjiogical procetiure, not only of the Notebooks, but of Capital itself. Tbis 'methodological' procedure liecomes, in its turn, a theoretical disco\ery t)f the utmt)st importance: in its exj>anded ftirm (there are several jjrovisional attempts to tormulate it in the Grundrisse) it constitutes the basis of the pivotal section in Capital I, on 'The Fetishism ol Commodities' (5). The Introduction, then, opens witb a methtxlological argument: the critique of 'normal' types of logical abstraction. 'Political Economy' operate.s as a theory thrt)ugh its categories. I low are these categories tbrmecl? The normal method is tt) isolate anti analyse a category by abstracting those elements that remain 'common' tt) it through all ejiochs and all types of social formation. This attempt It) idenlilv, bv means of tbe logic of abstraction, wbich remains the core ot a concept stable tbrougb bistory is really a lyjie t)f 'essentialism'. Many types t>l tbeorizing fall prev to it. Hegel, the summit of classical German philosophy, developeti a mode of tbtJUght thai was tbe very opposite tif static: his grasp ol movement antl of contradiction is yvliat raised his logic abt)\e all otber types of logical theorizing, in Marx's eyes. Yet, because the mo\ement ol Hegel's dialectic yvas cast in an ideali-st form, his tht)ught alst) retained the nt)tion ol an 'essential core' that survived all the motit)ns of mind. It was the perpetuatit>n t>l this 'essential core' \yithin the concept which, Marx belieyeci, constituted tbe secret guarantee within Hegel's ciialectic of the ultimate harmonit)usness of existing social relations (e.g. The Prussian State). Classical Political Ectmomy also speaks t)f 'bourgeois' production and of private property as if these were the 'essence' of the ct)ncepts, 'production' and 'property' and exhaust their historical ct>ntent. In this way. Political Economy tt)o presented the capitali.st mode of prt)ductitm, not as a histtirical structure, but as the natural and inevitable slate of things. At ibis level, even classical Political Economy retained an itieological iiresup]5t)sition at its 'scienlitic' heart: it reduces, by abstraction, specific historical relations to theii- lowest ctjmmon, trans-historical es.sence. Its ideology is inscribed in its method. On the contrary, Marx argues, ihere is nt> 'production-in-generar: only distinct forms of productitm, spedfic tt) lime anti ct)nditit)ns. One t)i those distinct forms is rather ct)ntusingly 'general production': protluction baseti on a type of labour, which is not specific to a particular branch of prt)ductit)n, but which has been 'gcnerali/ed': 'abstract labour'. (But we shall come to that in a moment.) Since any mode of production depends upt)n 'determinate ct)nditlons', there can be no guarantee that thtise ct)nditi(>ns will always be fullilled, or remain constant or 'the same' through time. Vov example: except in the most common-sense way, there is no scientific ft)rm in which the concept, 'i)rotluction', reterring to the capitalist mt)de, and entailing as one of its requirc-d

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conditions, 'free labour', can be saitl to have an 'immediate identity' (to be 'essentially the same as') production in, say, slave, clan or communal society. (Eater, in Capital, Marx remintls us that this transformation ot feudal bondsmen into 'free labtmr', which is assumed here as a 'natural' precondition for capitalism, has, indeed, a specific history: 'the history of . . . expropriation . . . yvritten in the annals of mankind in letters of blot)d and fire' (6).) This is one of the key points-t)t-tieparture of historical materialism as a method of thought and practice. Nothing in whal Marx subsequently wrote allows us tt) tall bebind it. It is yvhat Korsch called Marx's principle oi 'historical specification' (7). The 'unity' which Marx's method is intended to produce is not weak identity achieved by abstracting away everything of any historical specificity until we are left with an essential core, witbout differentiation or specification. Tbe Introduction thus opens, as Nicolaus remarks, as the prt)visional, extended answer to an unyvritten question: Political Economy is our starting point, but, bowever yalid are some of its theories, it has nt)t ftjrmulated scientifically the laws of the inner structure of the mode of production whose categories it expresses and theoretically retlects. It 'sticks', despite evervthing, inside its 'bourgeois skin' (Capital I, p. 542). This is because, within it, historical relations have 'already acquiretl the stabilitv of natural, seit-understood forms of st>cial life', (p.75). Its categories, then, (in contrast vyith vulgai^ Pt>litical Fcononn) 'A'"'-' torms ot thought expressing with social validity the condilit)ns and relatit)ns t)f a definite, bistorically determined mode of production' (8). But it presents tbese relations as 'a self-evident necessity impt)sed bv Nature as productive labour itself". Tbus, tbough classical Political Economy has 'discovered yvhat ties beneatb these torms', it has not asked certain key questions (such as the origin of commodity-production based in labour-power: 'the form under which value becomes exchange-value') yvhich are peculiar to specific historical conditions (the forms and conditions of commoditv-production). These 'errors' are not incidental. They are already present in its presuppositions, its method, its starting points. But, if Political Economy is itself to be transcended, how? Where to begin?

The answer is, with 'production by social individuals', 'production al a definite stage of social development'. Political Economy tends to etherealize, universalize and de-historicize the relations of bourget)is production. Bui what follows if, as Marx does, we insist on starting with a principle of historical specifications Do we then, nevertheless, assume that there is some common, universal practice - 'production-in-general' - wbich has ahvays existed, wbicb has then been subject to an evolutionary bistorical development which can be steadily traced through: a practice which, therefore, we can reduce to its common-sense content and employ as the t)bvious, uncontested starting-point for anaK'sis? The answer is, no. Whatever tjther kind of 'historicist' Marx mav have been, he was detinitiyely not a histtjrical eyoiutionist. Everv child knt)ws, he once remarked, that production cannot cease for a moment. So, there must

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be something 'in common', so to speak, which correspontLs to the itlea of 'pi t)duclion-in-generar: all societies must reprt)duce the ct)nditions of their ow n existence. This is the type of abstraction, however, which sifts out the lowest common characteristics t)f a concept and identities this unprobiematic core with Its scientific content. Il is a motie t)t theorizing that o[x-rates al a very low theoretical threshold intleed. it is, at best, a useful time-saver. But, to penetrate a structure as dense and t)verlaid w itb false representations as tbe capitalist motle ot protiuction, we need concepts more fundamentally dialectical in character. Ctjncc'pts that allow us tt) fui-ther I'ellne, sc^gmenl, split and recombine anv genei-al catego]-y: w hich all(n\ us tt) see those features which permittetl it to piav a certain role in this epoch, other features which were developed under the specitic ct)ntiitit)ns t)f ibat e|K)ch, tlistinctions which sht)w why certain relations appear only in the most ancient and the mt)st developed forms of society and in none in het ween, etc. Such concepts are theoretically far in advance of those which unite under one chaotic general heading the quite ditVerent things which have appeared, at t)ne lime or another, under the category, 'production-in-gcneral': conceptions which differentiate in the very moment that they reveal hidden connections. In much the same way, Marx observ es that concepts which differentiate out what makes possible the specific development t)f tiitlerent languages are more significant than 'abstracting' a tew , simple, basic, commt)n 'language universals'. We must observe - it is a commt)n strategy tbroughoul tbe Introduction that Marx establishes bis difference here- both innn the method of Pt)litical Econt)my and trom Flegel. 'Fhe Introduction is thus, simultaneously, a critique of both. It is useful, in tbis context, tt) recall Marx's earlier procetiure in the famous Chapter on 'The Metaphysics of Pt)litical Fconomy', in The Poverty of Philosophy, wbere he, again, simultaneously t)IVers a critique t)f 'Flegelianiscnl Pt)litical Economy' via an attack on Proudhon. The terms t)f tbis critique of Proudhon are parlicularly germane to this argument against 'abstraction', tor they remind us tbat sometbing more than a methodological quibble is in\t)lved, namely the exaltation of mental operations over the content of reai, contingent historical relations; it was nol sui-prisiiig that it yt)u let drop little by littk' all that ct)nstitutes the intli\ iduality t)f a house-, leaving oul first ot all the matei-iais ot w hith it was ctjniposed, ihen the form that distinguishes il, you end up with nothing but a botly; thai if you lea\'e t)ut of account the limits t)f this bocU, vou s()t)n ha\e notbiiig init a s])a(.e that is, finally, vou leave out of acct)unt tiie dimensit)ns oi' this space, there is absolutely nothing left but the quantity, the logical category. It we atistracl thus IVOTII every subject ail tbe alleged acfidents, animate or inanimale, men oi- things, we are right in saying that in the final abstractitjn, ibe only substance left is tbe logical categtjries . . . If all tbat exists, all that lives on land and under water can be reduced by

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abstraction to a logical categorv if the yyhole world can be droyvned thus in a world of abstractions, in the world of logical categtjries - who need be astonished at it? Apply this method to the categories t)f pt)liticai economy, Marx argues: and you have the logic and metaphysics of political economy . . . the categories that everybody knows, translated into a little-known language which makes them lot)k as if they had newly blossomed fcjrth in an intellect ot pure reason . . . Up to now we ha\e expounded only the dialectics of Hegel. We shall see later how M. Proutlhon has succeeded in reducing it to the meanest propt)rtit:)ns. Thus for Hegel, all that has happenetl and is still happening is only just what is happening in his own mind . . . There is no longer a history acctirtling to the order t)f time', there is t)nly the 'sequence ot ideas in the understanding', (9) Marx had long ago noted (10) Hegel's 'outstanding achievement': his recognition that the ditterent categories t)f the world 'private right, morality, the tamily, civil st)ciety, the state, c^tc' - had 'no validity in isolation', but 'dissolve and engender one another. They have become "moments" of the movement'. However, as we knoyv, Marx radically criticized Hegel for conceiving this 'mobile natui-e' ot the categories as a form of 'self-genesis': Hegel 'conceives them only in their thought form'. Thus 'The yvhole movement . . . ends in absolute knoyvledge' ( I I ) . In Hegel, the constitution of the real wcjrld becomes 'merely the appearance, the cloai<., the ext)teric form' of movement and c:ontradic:tion, which, in the speculative conception, never really deserts the ground of thought. 'The whole history of alienation tind ol the retraction of alienation is therefore only the history of the prt)duc:tion of abstract thought, i.e. of absolute, Itjgicai, speculative thought. This was certainly not the simple, transhistorical, external ct)nnections established by vulgar forms of Political Economy, but an equally unacceptable alternative: the ultimate identity of Mind with itself'only in . . . thought form'. Marx added, 'this means that what Hegel cioes is to put in place of these fixed abstractions the act of abstraction which reyolves in its own circle'. He put the same pt)int even more clearly in
t he hloly Eamilv:

Tile Phenomenology . . . entis by putting in place of ail human existence 'absoiute knowledge' . . . Instead of treating self-consciousness as the seifconsciousness of reai men, living in a reai oiijective worid and conditioned by it, Hegel transforms men intt) an attribute of seif-consciousness. He turns the worid upsicte doyvn.
.And in the Poverty of Philosophy:

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He thinks he is constructing the world by the movement of thought, whereas he is merely reconstructing systematically antl c-lassilying by tbe absolute nietbotl tbe tht)ughts which are in the minds ot ali. The core of these earlier critic|ues is retained b\ Marx here in the 18S7 Introduction. Hegel did Linderstand 'prt)duction', he did uncierstand 'labour': but ultimately, it was what Marx cailed, 'iabour of the mintl, labour ol thinking antl knowing' (12). Hoyyever dialectical its movement, the historical prt)ductit>n of the world remains, tbr Flegel, 'moments' of the realizatit)n t)t the idea, the 'external appearances' of thougiit - stations of the cross in the path ot Mind toyvards Abstjiute Knoyviecige. The method yvhich Marx proposes in the Introduction is not of this kind: it is nt)t mereiy a mentai operation. It is tt) be disct)\ered in real, concrete reiations: it is a method which groups, not a simple 'essence' behind the difTerent historicai forms, but preciseiy the many determinatit)ns in which 'essential diffeix-nces' are preserved. Marx entIs this argument yvith an illustration. Economists like Mill start trom l)t)urgecMs relations of production, and extrapoiate tht-m as 'inviolable natural laws'. All productitin, tbey assert, despite historic differences, can be subsumeci uncier universai iaws. Twt) sucb 'iaws' are (a) production requires private property, (b) prociuctitjn requires tbe prt)lectit)n t)f properly by tbe ct)urts and police. Actually, Marx argues, private prt)perty is neither the only nor the earliest form of property: bistorically, it is predated by conununai property. And the presence of modern, bourget)is iegal relatit)ns and ihe police, far trom indexing tbe universaiity of the system, shows how each mode ot production requires, anci produces, its own legal-juridicai and poiiticai structures and relations. What is 'common' to production, then, as produced by tbe process of mentally abstracting its 'common' attributes, cannot provide a method wbich enabies us to grasp, concreteiy, any singie, 'reai historicai stage of protiuction'. Ht)w then, are we to conceptualize the relations between the different phases of protiuction - prociuction, distriliution, exchange, consumption? Can we conceive them 'as organicaily coherent factors'? Or simply as 'brougbt into haphazard relation witb one another, i.e. into a simple refiex connectit)n'? How, in short, are we to analyse tbe relations iietween tiie parts ol a 'complexly structured wht)le'? "I brt)Ugbout his later work, Mai'x insists that the superiority of the dialectical metht)d lies in its ability to trace oul the 'inner connection' hetyveen the ditTerent elements in a mode of production, as against their haphazard, and extrinsic 'mere juxtapt)sition'. The method wbicb mereiy sets opjjosites togetber in an externai way, which assumes that, because things are neigiibours, they must therefore be related, but yvbich cannot move from oppositions to contradictions, is 'diaiecticai' oniy in its surtace form. The syilogism is one of the iogical ft)rms of an argument by externai juxlapositit)n. Poiiticai Economy 'thinks' prt)duction, consumption etc., in this .syllt)gislic

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form: production produces goods; distriiiutitm aiiocates tiiem; exc:hange makes the generai ciistribution of goods specific to particular individuals; llnaily, tbe individual consumes tbem. This can also be interpreted as almt>st a classical Hegelian syilogism (13). There are many ways in which Marx may be said to have remained a Hegelian; but the use of Hegelian triads (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) and syllogisms (generai, particular, singuiar) is not one of them. The coherence such syliogisms suggest remains conceptuaily extremeiy shailoyv. Even the critics ot this position, Marx adds, have not taken their critique far enough. The critics assume that the syiiogism is wrong because it contains a iogicai error a textbook mistake. For Marx, the errt)r consists in a taking o\er intt) thought of the mystifications which exist in tiie reai reiations of bt)ur!Tet)is protiuction, where production, tlistribution and consumptit)n do intieeci, appear 'phenomenaliy' as 'inciepentient, autonomous neighbours', but where this appearance is talse, an ideoiogicai inversion. Conceptuai mi.stakes cannt)t be ciarifietl by a theoretical practice alt)ne, 'yviioilv within tht)Ught'. In The Critique of Hegel's Dialectic, Marx haci remarkeci that, in Hegel, the supercession ot one categt)ry by another appears to be a 'transcentling of the thought entity'. Ht>yvever, in Hegel, thought treats even the objeclivelv-created moments as 'moments' of itself 'because the object has become for it a moment of thought, thought takes it in its reality to be a self-confirmation of itself. Tbus, 'this superceding in thought, which leaves its object standing in the real worid, believes that it has reaily t)vercome it'. There is no true 'profane history' here, no 'acttiai reaiization for man of man's essence and of his essence as something reai' (14). Thus, 'The history of man is transformed into the history of an abstraction' (15). The movement of thought therefore remains ultimately contined within its own circle: I legel has iockeci up ail these fixed mentai torms together in his Logic laying hoid ot each ot them first as negation - that is, as an aiienation of human thought - antl then as negatit)n of tbe negation that is, as a superceding t)f that aiienation, as a reai expression of human thought. But as even tiiis stiii lakes piace within the contlnes of the estrangement, this negation of the negatitin is in part the restoring of these fixed torms in their estrangement. (t6) Tbus, 'The act of abstractit)n . . . revoives witbin its own circie'. The ianguage here remains beatiily Hegelian-Feuerbachean . . . Hoyv much cieaner the blow is in the ISS7 text: 'as if the task were the diaiecticai baianeing of concepts, and not tbe grasping of reai reiations'. 'As if this rupture had made its way not from reaiity into the textbooks, but ralber from tbe textbooks into reality' (17). Thus, neither the functional tiisconnectedness of Poiiticai Fconomy nor the formai supercessions of the Hegeiian Eogic will serve to reveai tbe inner

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ctjnnection between processes and reiations in society, wbich form 'a unity' of a tiistinct type, but which must be grasped as real, difterentiateti processes in tbe reai yvt)riti, nol mereiy the formal mo\ement t)t the act t)t abstraclit)n itseit. It is iiecause, in the 'real relations' ot capitalist production, the tiifterent parts of the process appear, simply, as independent, autt)nomous 'neigbbours' that they appear, in the textbot>ks, as linked by an accidental ct)nnectit)n: not vice \ersa. But, bow tben to think the relations of identity, simiiaritv, mediateness and difference which could produce, at the conceptuai ievei, in thougiil, a 'thoughtconcrete' adequate in its ct)mpiexity to the compiexity of the 'reai reiations' which is its object? The mtjst compresseci and tiifficuit pages ot the Iniroduciion, wiiich immeciiateiy follow, provide an answer to this question. Tbis sectit)n deals with tbe reiations between protluction, distributit)n, consumption and excbange. Start with productitin. In production, individuals 'consume' their abilities, they 'use up' raw materials. In tiiis sense, there is a kind of consumption inside prociuction: production and consuniptit)n are here 'tiirectly coincicient'. Marx seems to have tiicjughl tiiis exampie of 'immc'diate itic'ntily' 'right enough', tht)ugh as he says earliei- and later t)f other tt^rmulations (i8) 'ti-ite antl obvious', or 'tautt)lc)gcnis'; true at a rathei^ simple level, but otlerJng only a 'cbat)tic ct)ncej)tion', and thus requii-ing 'further determinations', greater anaiyticai <ievelt)pment. The general inatiequacy oi' this type ol 'immediate identity' is clearly signalled by Marx's reterence here to Spintiza, who showetl ibat an 'unditferentiatei! identity cannot sup]X)rt the introduction of more retlned "particular determinations'. However, in so far as 'immediate identities' reign, at this simple ie\ei, itienticai propositions can be reversed: if A = B, then B = A. Marx, then, reverses the propositicin. If, there is a consumption-inside-production, there is also, 'immediately', protiuctitjn-inside-consumption. The consumption ot tooti, tt)r example, is tbe means whereby the individuai produces, or reproduces iiis physicai existence. Now Poiiticai Fcont)my recognizes tbese ciistinctions but simply in order to separate out the consumptive aspects ot production (e.g. the consumption of raw materiais) from prt)duction proper. Prt)duction, as a distinct category, remains. The 'immediate identitv' thus iea\es tiieir 'tiuaiity intact'. (This type of icientit)' is thus open to the criticism which Marx originaliy tleli\ ered t)n Hegel in the 1 844 fragment t>n the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy As A Whole: 'this supercetling in thought v\hich leaves its object stanciing in tiie reai wt)rlci, believes it bas really overcome it'.) Marx now adds a second type of relation: tbat t)t tnediation: the reiation of 'mutuai dejjentience'. Prt>ciuction and ct)nsumption also iiietliate tine another. Bv 'mediate' here, Marx means that each cannot exist, complete its passage and achieve its result, w ithtjut the other. Fach is the other's ctjmplelion. Hach provides within itself the otiier's object. Thus, prt)(iuftit)n's prociuct is what consumption consumes. Consumptitm's 'needs' are what protluction is aimed to satisfy. Tbe mediation bere is 'teieoiogicai'. Each process tinds its entl in the

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other. In this metliating movement, Marx iater oi^serves (19), each side is 'inciispensabie' to the otber; but tiiey are not identicai - they remain necessary but 'externai to each other'. Marx ntjw expands on how this meciiation works. Consumption 'prt)duces' production in two yvays. First, production's object the product - is oniy finaliy 'realized' when it is consumed (20). It is in the passage of the forms, from productive activity to objectified product, that the first mediating movement betyveen production and consumption is accompiisheci. Second, consumption produces production by creating tbe need t~or 'new. protluction'. It is crucial, for the later discussion oi' the ticterminacy of production in the process as a yvhoie, that what consumption noyv tloes, strictly speaking, is to provide the 'icieai, internaiiy impeiling cause', tbe 'motive', 'internal image', 'cirive' 'purpose' for re-prt)duction. Marx stresses 'DCM- prt)duc'tion'; strictly speaking, antl significantly, il is the need lo rc-])roduce tor which consumption is matle mediateiv res]}onsibie. 'Ct)rrespondingly' production 'produces' consumption. Marx notes three senses in which this is true. First, productit)n furnishes ccmsumjjtion with its 'object'. Second, produetitjn specifies the mode in which that object is consumeci, but, tbird, prt)duction prociuces tbe need which its object satisfies. This is a tliiticult concept to grasp, for we normally think of consumption's needs and modes as the property of the consumer (that is, belonging to 'ct)nsumption'), separate from the object whicb, so to speak, satisfies. But as eariy as 1844 Marx bad pointeci to the way in which needs are the product of an objective bistoricai develt)pment, not the trans-historical subjective property of intliviciuais: The manner in which they (objects) become his depends on the nature of the objects and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to it: for it is precisely the determinate nature of tbis relationship which shapes the particular, real mt)de ot affirniatit)n. To the eye an object is another oiiject than the object of the ear. If consumption of the object produces the subjective impulse to protluce anew, tbe production of tbe object creates, in the consume]-, specific, historically distinct antl developed modes of'appropriatit)n', and, simultaneously, develops the 'need' which the oiiject satisfies. 'Music aione awakens in man the sense of music'. Thus the 'torming ot the senses' is the subjective side of an objective iabour, the protiuct of 'the entire bistt)ry of the yvorid down to the present' (21) .'The production of new needs in the first historical act', he observed in The German Ideology. Here, 'tbe object of art . . . creates a public which is sensitive to art' (22). Production, then, Jorm.v t)bjectively tbe modes of appropriation of the consumer, just as consumption reproduces production as a subjectively experienced impulse, tirive t)r moti\e. Tbe complex shifts between objective and

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subjective dimensions which are tersely accomplished in this passage seem incomprehensible without the gloss from the !S44 MSS, even if, here, the language <if 'species heing' has altogether vanished. The general argument is now resumed (23), There are three kinds of identity relation. First, inimeJiatc identity where production and consumption are 'immediatelv' one another. Second, mutual dependence - where each is 'indispensable' to the other, and cannot be completed without it, hut where production and consumption remain 'external' to one an<jther. Thirdly, a relation, which has no precise title, but which is clearly that of an incernal connection between two sides, linked by the passage of forms, by real processes through historical time. Here, in contrast with relation (2), production not only proceeds to its own completion, but is itself reproduced again through consumption, in this third type of relation, each 'creates tbe other in completing itself and creates iLself as the other'. Here we find not only what distinguishes the third type ol relation frcmi the second; but also, what jiermits Marx, on the succeeding page, to give a final detcrminacy to production over consumption. Production, he argues, initiates the cycle: in its 'first act', it lorms the object, the mode and the nvcd to consume: what consumption can then tlo is to 'raise tbe inclination developed in the first act of production through the need for repetition to its finished form'. Production, then, requires tbe passage tbrough consumption lo commence its work anew; hut in jjroviding 'the act through which the whole process again runs its course', production retains a primary dett-rmination over tlie circuit as a whole. Some of Marx's most crucial and sophisticated distinctions, developed later in Capital ,such as those between simple and expanded reproduction acbieve a gnomic, philosophic, first-f(M-niulation in this elliptical passage. In this third relation, production and consumpti(m are no longer external to eacb other: nor do they 'immediately' merge. Rather, they are linked hy an 'inner connection'. Yet this 'inner connection' is not a simple identity, wbieh requires only the reversal or inversion ofthe terms ofthe syllogism into one another. The inner connection bere passes through a distinct process. It requires wbat Marx, in his earlier critique of Hegel, called a 'profane' history: a process in tbe real world, a process through historical time, each moment ol \\ hich requires its ow n determinate conditions, is subject to its own inner laws, an<l yet is inc(jmplete without the other. Why is relation 3 not an 'immediate identity' ofthe Hegelian type? Marx gives three reasons. First, an immediate identitv would assume that production and consumption had a single subject. This identity ofthe 'suhject' tbrough all its successive 'moments' of realization a pivotal aspect of Hegel's 'essentialism' allowed Hegel to conceive the historical world as, ultimately, a harmonious circuit. In the real historical world, however, tbe 'subject' of production and consumption are not one. Capitalists produce: workers consume. The production process links them: bat they are not 'immediate'. Second, these are not Hes^elian 'moments' of a single act, temporary realizations ofthe march ol

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World Spirit, These are the circuits ofa process, with 'real points of di'parture': a process with specific lorms through which value is prescribed to pass 'for its realization', Tbird, whereas Hegel's identities lorm a self-engendering, selfsustaining circuit, in which no one moment has priority, Marx insists that the historical process through which production and consumption pass has its breaks, its moment of determinacy. Production, not consumption, initiates the circuit. Consumption, the necessary condition for value's 'realization', cannot destroy tbe 'over determinacy' of the moment from which realization departs. The significance of tbese distinctions is deliyered in the closing paragraph the distinction between a Marxian and a Hegelian analysis ofthe forms of capitalist production (24). Capitalism tends to reproduce itself in expanded form as if it were a self-equilibrating and self-sustaining system, Tbe so-called 'laws of equivalence' are the necessary 'phenomenal foi-ms' of tbis self-generating aspect ol the system: 'tliis is precisely the beauty and greatness of it: this spontaneous interconnection, this material and mental metabolism which is independent of the knowing and yyilling of individuals' (25). But this constant tendency to equilihrium of the various spheres of production is exercised only in the shape ofa reaction against the constant upsetting of tbis equilibrium (26). iiach 'moment' has its determinate conditions - eacb is suhject to its own social laws: indeed, each is linked to the otber in the circuit hy quite distinct, determinate, forms - processes. Thus, tbere is no guarantee to the producer the capitalist that \ybat he produces will return again to him: he cannot appropriate it 'immediately', Fhe circuits of capital 'depend on his relation to other indi\iduals'. Indeed, a whole, intermediate or 'mediating movement' now intervenes 'steps between' producers and products - determining, i>ut again 'in accordance with social laws', what will return to the producer as his share in the augmented
world ol produetion. Nothing except the maintenance of these determinate conditions can Ljuaruntce the eonrinuity of this mode of production over time.

just as the exchange value ofthe commodity leads a double existence, as the particular commoditv and as money, so <loes the act of exchange split into two mutually independent acts: exchange of commodities for money, exchange of money for commodities; purchase and sale. Since tbese have now achieved a spatiallj- and temporally separate and mutually indifferent lorm ol existence, their immediate identity ceases. They may correspond or not; they may balance or not; they may enter into disproportion with one another. They will, of coui-se, always attempt to equalize one another; hut in tbe place ofthe earlier immediate equality tbere now stands the constant movement of equalisation, vybich evidently presupposes constant non-equivalence. It is now entirely possible that consonance may be reached only by passing tbrough tbe most extreme dissonance. (27)

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It is, in short, a finite historical system, a system capable of breaks, discontinuitie,^, contradictions, interruptions: a system with limits, within historical time. It is a system indee*.!, which rests on the mediating movement of otber processes not vet named: for example ilistribution: production - (distribution) consumption. Is distribution, tlien, 'immediate with' production and consumption? h it inside or outside produttion? Is it an autonomous or a determinate sphere? In tbe first section (28), Marx examined the cou|jlet production/consumption in terms of an immediate Hegelian unity: opposites/identical. He then dismantled the production/consumption (X)uplet by the terms ol a Marxian transformation: opposites mediated-niutually dependent ditlerentiated unity (not identical). In part, this is accomplished by wresting from apparently equivalent relations a moment of determinacy: produetion. In tbe second section (p. 94) the second couplet production/distribution is dismantled by means ol a different transformation: determined-determining-determinate, ln Political Economy, Mai'x wrote, everything appears twice. Capital is a factor of production: but also a form cjf tlistrihution, (interest + profits). Wages are a factor of production, but also a form of distribution. Rent is a lorm ot tlistributi(jn: hut also a factor of production (landed property), Facb element ajjpears as botb determining and determined. What breaks this seamless circle of determinations? It can onlv be tiecijjhered hy reading back irom the apparent identity ofthe categories to their differentiated presuppositions (detei'minate conditions). 1 lei'e, once again, Marx is conc:erne<.l to estahlish the moments (J1 break, ol determinaey, in the self-sustaining circuits of capital. Vulgar Economy assumed a perfect fit betyveen tbe social processes of capital. This was expressed in the Trinitarian formula. Each factor of production was returned its just rewards in distribution: Capital - profits; Land - ground rent; Lahotn- - wages. Thus each bit 'appeared twice', by grace ofa secret assumetl 'natural harmony' or compact with its identical opposite. Distribution appears to be, in c<3mmon sense, the prime mover of tbis system. Yet, Marx suggests, behind the ob\ious lorms ol distribution, (wages, rent, interest) lie, not simply economic categories, but real, historic relations, which stem from tbe movement and formation ot capital under specific contlitions. Thus, wages presuppose, not labour, but labour in a specifie form: wage-labour (slave labour has no wages), Ciroun<l rent presupposes large-scale landed pr<5perty (tbere is no ground rent in communal society). Interest and profit presuppose capital in its modern form. Wage-labour, landed property and capital are not independent forms of distribution hut 'moments' ofthe organization ofthe capitalist mode of production: they initiate the distributi\e forms (wages, rent, profits), not yice versa. In tbis sense, distriluition, which is, of course, a tlifferentiated system, is ne\ertbeless 'over-determined' bv the structures of jiroduction. Before distribution by wages, rent, prolits can take place a prior kind of 'distribution' must occur: the distribution ol the means

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ol production between expropriators and expropriated, and the distrihution of the memhers ol society, the classes, into the different branches of production. This prior distribution - of tbe means and of the agents of production into tbe social relations of production - belongs to production: tbe distribution of its products, its results, in tbe form of wages or rent, cannot be its starting point. Once this distribution of instruments and agents has heen made, they form the starting conditions for tbe realization of value within tbe mode; this realization process generates its own distributive forms. This second type of distribution, however, is clearly subordinate to production in tbis wider, mode-specific sense, and must he considered as over-determined bv it. In the third section, on exchange, the demonstration is even hriefer (30), Exchange, too, is an 'aspect of production'. It mediates hetween production and consumption, hut, again, as its presupposition, it requires ileterminate conditions which can only he established within pi-oduction: the di\ision of labour, production in its private exchange form, exchanges hetween town and countrv, etc. This argument leads, almost at once, to a conclusion it is a conclusion, not simply to the section on exchange, hut to the whole problem posed on p.88. Production, distribution, consumption and exchange are not adequately conceptualized as immediate identities, unfolding, within the cssentialist Hegelian dialectic, to their monistic categorical resolution. Essentially, we must 'think' tbe relations between the different processes of material production as 'members of a totality, distinctions within a unity'. That is, as a complexly structured differentiated totality, in which distinctions are not obliterated but preserved - the unity of its 'necessary complexity' precisely requinng this differentiation. Hegel, of course, knew that the two terms ofa relation would not he the same. But he looked lor the identity of opposites - for 'immediate identities' behind tbe differences. Marx dt>es not altogether abandon the level at yvhich, superficially, opposite things can ajipear to have an 'essential' underlying similarity. But tbis is not the principal form ofa Marxian relation. For Marx, two ditterent terms or relations or moyeinents oi" circuits remain specific and different: yet tbey form a 'complex unity', Howe\er tbis is always a 'unity' lormed by and requiring tbem to preserve their difference: a difference which does not disappear, which cannot be abolished by a simple movement of mind or a lornial tw ist ofthe dialectic, which is not subsumed into some 'higher' but more 'essential', synthesis involving the loss of concrete specificity. This latter type of 'non-immediacy' is what Marx calls a differentiated unjy. Like the notion to which it is intimately Hnked - the notion of tbe concrete as tbe unity of 'many determinations and relations' - the concept of a 'chfferentiated unitv' is a metliodological and theoretical key to this text, and to Marx's metbtxl as a whole. This means that, in the examination of any phenomenon or relation, we must comprehend both its internal structure - what it is in its differentiatedness as well as tho,se other structures to which it is coupled and w ith which Jt forms

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some more inclusi\e totality. Both tbe specificities and tbe connections tbe complex unities of structures have to be tiemonstrated by tbe concix-te analy,sis of concrete relations and conjunctions. If relations are mutually articulated, hut remain ,specilied hy their difference, this articulation, and the determinate conditions on which it rests, has to be demonstrated. It cannot be conjured out of thin air according to some essentialist dialectical law, Diflerentiated unities are also therefore, in the Marxian sense, concrete. Tbe method thus retains the concrete empirical reference as a privileged and undissolved 'moment' within a theoretical analysis without thereby making it 'empiricist': the concrete analysis of concrete situations, Marx gives an 'over-determinacy' to production. But how does production determine? Production specifies 'the different relations between dillerent moments' ((jur italics). It determines theform of those combinations out ot yvhicb complex unities aix- formed, it is the principle ofthe formal articulations ofa mode. In the Althusserean sense, production not only 'determines' in tbe last instance, hut determines the form ofthe combination of forces and relations which make a mode of production a complex structure. Formally, production specifies the system of similarities and differences, the points ot conjuncture, between all the instances of the mode, including which level is, at any moment ofa conjuncture, 'in dominance'. This is the modal determinacy which production exercises in Marx's overall sense. In its more narrow and limited sense as merelv one moment, forming a 'differentiated unity' with others production has its own spark, its own motive, its own 'determinateness' derived Irom other moments in the circuit (in this case, from consumption). To thl,s argument - the nature ofthe relations of determinacy and complementarity or conjuncture between the different relations or levels of a mode of production Marx returned at the end of tbe Introduction. One of its results, already foreshad(nved here, is the 'lavy of uneven development'. Marx now goes back to the beginning: the method of Political economy (31). In considering the political economy ofa country, where do we hegin? One possible starting position is with 'tbe real and concrete', a given, observable, empirical concept: e.g. population. Production is inconceivable without a population which produces. Tbis starting jicMnt, hovyever, would be wrong. Population, like 'production', is a deceptively transparent, 'given' category, 'concrete' only in a common-sense way (32), Already it presupposes tbe division into classes, the division of labour, and tbus wage-labour, capital, etc: tbe categories ofa specific mode of production, 'Population' tbus gives us only 'a chaotic conception of tbe whole'. Further, it triggers olT a meth(Klological procedure which moves from the blindingly obvious to 'ever nKjre simple concepts', 'ever thinner abstractions'. This was the method ol abstraction ot the 17th century economists. It is also the 'metaphysical' method of Proudhon which Marx pilloried so brilliantly and brutally in 'Ihc Poverty of Philosophy. Latei" economic theorists hegin with simple relations and trace their way back to tlie

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concrete. Tbis latter path, Marx calls 'the obviously scientifically correct one'. This 'concrete' is concrete in a ditterent sense from the tirst formulation. In the tirst case, 'population' is 'concrete' in a simple, unilateral, common-sense way - it manifestly exists; production cannot be eonceived without it, etc. But the method whicb produces the 'complex concrete' is concrete because it is 'a rich totality of many determinations and relations'. Tbe method then, is one whicb has to reproduce in thought (the active notion of a practice is certainly present here) tbe concrete-in-history. No rellexive or copy theory of truth is noyv adequate. The simple category, 'population', has to he reconstructed as contradictorily composed ot the more concrete historical relations: slave-owner/slave, lord/ serl, master/servant, capitalist/labourer. This clarification is a specific practice which theory is required to perform upon history: it constitutes tbe tirst part of theory's 'adequacy' to its object. Tbought accomplishes such a clarification by dec'omposing simple, unilied categories into tbe real, contradictorv, antagonistic relations which compose them. It penetrates what 'is immediately present on tbe surlace ol bourgeois society', what 'appears' as 'the phenomenal form of the necessary lorm of tbe appearance of 'a process which is taking place behind' (33), Marx sums up tbe point. The concrete is concrete, in history, in social production, and thus in conception, not because it is simple and I'mpirical, but because it exhibits a certain kind of necessary complexity. Marx makes a decisive distinction between the 'empirically-given', and tbe eoncrete. In order to 'think' tbis real, concrete historical comjilexity, yve mtist reconstruct in tbe mind the determinations which constitute it. Tbus, what is multiply determined, diyersely unilied, in history, already 'a result', appears, in thought, in theory, not as 'where we take off Irom' but as that which must be produced. Thus, 'the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of tbe concrete hy way of thought'. Let us note at once, that this makes the 'way of thought' distinct from the logic ol history as such, though it does not make thought 'absolutely distinct'. What is more, tor Marx, the concrete-in-history makes its appearanc:e once again, now as tbe historical substratum to thought. Though the concrete-in-history cannot he the point of departure for a theoretical demonstration, it is the absolute precondition for all theoretical construction: it is 'the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure lor observation and conception' (our italics). Marx's formulations bere (34) are seminal; tbe more so since tbey haye, in recent years, become the locus classicus ofthe whole dehate concerning Marx's epistemology, Tbe 'way of thought', Marx seems to be arguing, must 'lav hold upon historical reality' - 'appropriate the concrete' - and prcjduce, by way of its own distinct practice, a theoretical construct adequate to its object ('reproduce It as the concrete in the mind'). It is important, however, to see that, right away, Marx addresses himself directly to the much-vexed question as t(5 whether this 'theoretical labour' can be conceived of as a practice which 'takes

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place entirely in thought', which 'is indeed its own criterion', and v\hich 'has no need for verification from external practices to declare die knowledges tbey produce to he "ti"ue'" (35). Significantly, his remarks here are, once again, embedded in a critique ot Hegel, api-ocedure which ajipears to warn us explicitly against any final, idealist bracketing. Because 'thought' has its own mode ol appropriation, Marx argues, thcrelore Hegel made the error ol thinking that 'the real' was the product of 'thought concentrating itself, prohing its own dejiths, and untokling itself out of itself. From this, it was an easy step to thinking ol thousjbt as absolutely (not relatively) autonomous, so that 'the movement ol the categories' hecame 'the real act ol production'. Ot course, he continues, thougbt is thought and not another thing; it occurs in the head; it requires the process of mental representations and operations, BLit it does not, lor that reason, 'generate itself. It is 'a |)roduct ol thinking and comprehending', that is, a product, rather, of tbe working-up ol observation and conception into concepts. Any theory of 'theoretical practice', such as Altbusser's, wbich seeks to establish an 'impassable threshold' betyveen thougbt and its object, bas to come to terms witb the concrete reference (it is not, in our view, an empiricist reduction) emhodicd in Marx's clear and unambiguous notion, bere, that thought proceeds trcmi the ' uorkinq-up ol observation and concept ion'(our italics), Tbis jiroduct of theoretical labour, Marx ohserves ncjw, is, of course, a 'totality of thoughts' in the head. But tbought does not dissolve 'tbe real subject' - its object - which 'retains its autonomous existence outside the bead'. Indeed, Marx caps the argument hy brielly referring to tbe relation of tbought to social being, a reference consonant with his position as previously stated in the ['heses on heuerbacb. Tbe object, 'the real' will always remain outside the head, so long as 'the bead's eonduct is merely speculative, merely theoretical'. That is, until the gap between tht>ught and heing is closed ;;) practice. As he had argued, 'Man must prove the truth i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness, ol his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality ot thinking, that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.' There is no evidence here for Marx having fundamentally broken yvitb tbis notion that, though thinking 'has its own way', its truth rests in the 'this-sidedness' of thinking, in practice. In fact, the 18^7 text makes the point explicit: 'Hence, in tbe theoretical method too, the subject, society, must always he kept in mind as tbe presupposition' (36), Oil this e\idence, we must pi'efer Vilai-'s brief hut succinct gloss o\er Althusser's complex hut less satislying ones: 1 admit ihat one ought neither to mistake thought for reality nor reality lor thought, and that thought bears to reality only a 'relationsbip ol knowledge', for v\bat else could it do? Also that the process ot knowledge takes place cntirelv within thought (where else on earth c:ould it take placer) and that there exists an order and hierarchy of 'generalities' about v\hieh Althusser has had really major things to say. But on the other hand 1 fail to

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see what 'astounding' mistake Engels was committing when he wrote (in a letter, incidentally, as a casual image) that conceptual thought prcjgressed 'asymptotically' towards the real.
(New Left Review, 80)

As Vilar remarks, 'when reading the ]S'>7 Introduction, if one should "bear its silence", one should also take care not to silence its words', (New Left Review 80, p,74 5). Thought, then, bas its own distinct, 'relatively autonomous' mode ofappropriating 'the real'. It must 'rise from the abstract to tbe concrete' not yice \ersa. Fhis is difterent Irom 'the process by which the concrete itself comes into heing'. The logic ot theorizing, then, and the logic of history do nor form an 'immediate identity': they are mutually articulated upon one another, but remain distinct within that unity. However, lest we immediately tall into the opposite error that, therefore Uiinking is its oyvn thing, Marx, as we have seen, immediately turned, a,s if in the natural course of tbe argument, to the critique of Hegel, for whom ol course, the march of tbe categories was precisely the onlv motor. In so doing, Marx offered a critique of every otber position which w ould transpose tbe di.stinctivene.ss of thought from reality (in terms ofthe modes of their production) into An absolute distinction. His qualifications on this 'absolute' break are [jivotal. Thought always has built into it the concrete substratum ofthe manner in which tbe category bas been realized bistorically within the spixific mode of production being examined. In so far as a category already exists, albeit as a relatively simple relation of production, not yet with its 'many sided connections', then that category can already appear 'in tbought', hecause categories are 'the expression ol relations'. It, then, turning to a mode in which that category appears in a more developed, many-sided form, we employ it again, hut noyv to 'express' a more developed relation, then, in that sense, it does remain true that the development of the theoretical categories directly mirror the evolution of historic relations: tbe 'patb of abstract thought, rising from the simple to tbe combined', does indeed 'correspond to the real historical process'. In this limited case, the logical and historical categories are indeed parallel. The notion tbat Marx has prescribed tbat the logical and the historical categories never converge is shown to be incorrect. It is a matter of cases. In other cases, howe\er, the two movements are not identical in this way. And it is tbese instances wbich concern Marx, for this was j^recisely Hegel's error, Marx's critique of any attempt to construct 'thinking' as wholly autonomous is that ibis constitutes an idealist problematic, which ultimately deri\es the world trom the moyement of tbe Idea. No formalist reduction - whether ofthe Hegelian, positivist, empiricist or structuralist variety escapes this stricture. The distinctiveness ofthe mode of thougbt does not constitute it as absolutely distinct trom its object, the concrete-in-history: what it does is to pose, as a problem I'emaining to be resolved, precisely how tbought, whicb is distinct,

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forms 'a unity' with its object: remains, tbat is to say, neverthe!e,ss determined 'in the last instance' (and, Marx adds, in the 'first instance, too, since it is Irom 'society' that thinking derives its 'presupposition'). The subsequent passages in tbe 1857 Introduction in fact constitute some of Marx's mcjst cogent retlections on the dialectical relation of thougbt, of tbe 'tbeoretical method', to the historical object of yvhicb it produces a knowledge: a knowledge, moreover, which - he insists remains 'merely speculative, merely theoretical' (tbere is no mistaking that 'merelv') so long as practice does not, dialectically, realize it, make it true. If tbought is distinct in its mode and path, yet articulated upon and presupposed bv scjcietv, its ohject, how is this 'asymptotic' articulation to be achieved? The terms are here ct>nceivecl as neither identical nor merely externally juxtaposed. BLit what, then, is tbe precise nattire ot tbeir unity? II the genesis ot the losjical categories whieh express historical relations dilters trom the real genesis of those relations, what is tbe relation between them? How does the mind reproduce the ccmcreteness ofthe historical world in thought} Tbe ansyyer bas something to do with the way history, itself, so to speak, enters the 'relative autonomy' of thought: the manner in wbich the historical object of thougbt is rethought inside Marx's mature work. The relation ot thought to history is definitively nor presented in the terms of a historical evolutionism, in wbich historical relations are explained in terms ol tbeir genetic origin,s. In 'genetic historicisni', an external relation of 'neighbourliness' is posited between any sjjccific relation and its 'historical background': the 'development' of tbe relation is then conc:ei\ed lineally, and traced through its branching variations: the categories of thought faithftilly and immediately mirror this genesis anil its evolutionary paths. This migbt sound like a caricature, until one recalls tbe inert juxtaposings, tbe faithful tracing out of t|uite unspecilied 'links', which has often done justice for modern instances ol the Marxist method. It is crucial to distinguish Marx from tbe e\oltitionism ot a positivist historical method. We are dealing here neither with a disguised variant of positivism nor with a rigorous a-historicism but witb that most dillicult ol theoretical models, especially to tbe modern spirit: a historical epistemolog\\ Marx now emplovs again the distinctions be has made between ditterent types of 'relation': immediate, mediated, etc. Previously, these bad been applied to the categoi-ies of a theoretical analysis - 'producti(jn', 'distribution', 'excbange'. These distinctions are now applied again; but tbis time to tbe ditfcrent types of relations which exist between thougbt and history. He proceeds hy example. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel liegins yyith tbe category, 'possession'. Possession is a simple relation whicb, bowe\er, like 'jiroduction', cannot exist \yithout more concrete relations - i.e. historical groups with possessions. Groups can, however, 'possess' without their possessions taking the form of 'pi-ivate property' in the bourgeois sense. But since the historico-judicial relation, 'possession', does exist, albeit in a simple form, we can tbink it. Fbe simple relation is the 'concrete substratum' of our (relatively simple) concept

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of it. If a concept is, bistorically, relatively undeveloped (simple) our concept (of it) will be abstract. At this level, a connection ofa Jairlv reOexive kind does exist betvyeen the (simple) leyel of historical development of tbe relation and the relative (lack ot) concreteness ofthe category wbich appropriates it. But now Marx ccmiplicates tbe Theory/Histor) c<}uplet. Historically the development of tbe relation is not evolutionary. No straight, unbroken path exists from simple to more c(jmplex development, either in thought or history. It is possible tor a relation to move from a dominant to a suhordinate position within a mode of production as a wbole. And this question of dominant/ subordinate is not 'identical' with tbe previous question of simple/more developed, or abstract/concrete. By referring the relation to its articulation within a mode of produetion, Marx indicates the crucial shift from a progressive or sequential or evolutionary historicism to what we might eall 'the history of epochs and modes': a structural history. This movement towards the concepts of mode and epoch, interrupts the linear trajectory of an evolutionary jirogression, and reorganizes our conception of historical time in terms ot the succession of motles ot production, defined hy the internal relations of dominance and subordination hetwx'en the different relations which constitute them. It is a crucial step. There is, of c ourse, nothing original w hatever in draw ing attention to the fact that Marx divided history in terms of successive modes of jirofluction. Yet the eonsetjuence ot this break with genetic evolutionism does not appear to have been fullv registered. Tbe concepts, 'mode of prodtiction' and 'social formation' are often employed as it tbey are, in fact, simply large-scale bistorical generalizations, within wbich smaller chronological sections of historical time can be neatlv distributed. Yet, with tbe concepts of 'mode of production' and 'social formation', Marx pin-points the structural interconnections which cut into and break up the smooth march of a historical evolutionism. It represents a rupture yyith historicism in its simple, dominant form, though tbis is not, in our view, a break
with the historical as such.

Take money. It exists before hanks, before capital. If yve use the term, 'money', to reter to tbis relatively simple relation, we use a concept wbich (like 'possession' aho\e) is still abstract and simple: less concrete than the concept of 'money' under commodity production. As 'money' becomes more developed so our conce])t of it will tend to become more 'concrete'. However, it i,s possible lor 'money', in its simple form to have a dominant position in a in(Kle of production. It is also possihle to conceive ot 'money', in a more developed, many-si{led torm, and thus expressed by a mcjre conerete category, occupying a subordinate position in a mode of production. In tbis douhle-titting procedure, the eouplets simple/developed or abstract/concrete refer to what we migbt call tbe diachronic string, the developmental axis of analysis. Tbe couplet dominant/subordinate points to the synchronic axis the position in which a given category or relation stands in terms of the other relations with which it is articulated in a .specific mode of

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production. Tbese latter relations are always 'thought' by Marx in terms of relations of dominance and subordination. The characteristic modern inflexion is to transfer our attention from the first axis to the second, tbus asserting Marx's latent structuralism, Tbe difficulty is, however, that the latter does not bring the former movement to a halt but de!a\s or (better) displaces it. In tact, the line ol histoi-ical deveUjpment is always constituted within or behind the structural articulation. The crux ot this 'practical epistemology', then, lies pi'ecisely in the necessitv to 'think' the simple/developed axis and tbe dominant/sLibordinate axis as dialectically related. This is indeed how Marx defined his own method, by jjroxy, in the second Afterword to Capital: 'Wbat else is he picturing hut the dialectic method?' Take another case. Peru was relatively de\ eloped, but had no 'money'. In the Roman Empire, 'money' existed, hut was 'subordinate' to otber payment relations, such as taxes, payments-In-kind. Money only makes a historic appearance 'in its full intensitv' in bourgeois .societv. Tbere is thus no linear progression of this relation and the category which expresses it through each succeeding historical stage. Money does not 'wade its way tbrough each historical stage', it may appear, or not appear, in ditterent modes: be developed or simple: dominant or subordinate. What matters is not the mere appearance ol the i-elation sequentiallv through time, but its position within the c-oniiguration ot protluctive relations which make each mode an ensemble. Modes ol production form the discontinuous structural sets through which history articulates itselt, Historv moves but onlv as a delayed and displaced trajectory, through a series ol st>cial formations or ensembles. It develojjs hy means ol a series ot breaks, engendered by the internal contradictions specitic to each mode. The theoretical method, then, to be adeqtiate to its subject, society, must ground itself in the specific arrangement of histoiical relations in the successive modes ot production, not takes its positions on the site of a simple, linearly constructed sequential historv (37). Now Marx defines the articulation of thought and history, 'flic 'most general abstraction' in the main sense of general (i.e, many-sided development) appear only when tbere is, in society, in history, 'the richest possible concrete development'. Once this has happened 'in reality', the relation 'ceases to he thinkable in its particular (i,e. abstract) form alone'. Labour, as a loose, catchall, concept (such as 'all societies must labour to reproduce') has thus heen replaced by tbe more conerete category, 'labour-in-generaf (generalized production), but only because the latter category now reters in bourgeois society to a rt-al, concrete, more many-sided, historical appearance. The 'general concept' has, Marx strikinglv asserts, 'become true in practice'. It has achieved that specificity, 'in thought', whicb makes it capable of appropriating the I'oncrete relations of labour in practice. It has 'acliie\ed practical truth as an abstraction only as a category ot the most modern soeiety'. Thus, 'even the most abstract categories . . . are nevertheless . . , themselves likewise a product ot historical

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relations and possess their full validity only for and within these relations' (p.105). It is lor this reason especially that hoLir^Jcois society, 'the most developed and the most complex historic organization ol production' allows us insights into vanished social lormations: provided we tlo not make o\er-hastv 'idcntitie.s' or 'smudge over all historical clilferences'. For, it is only in so Far as older modes ol production survive within, or reappear in modified form within, capitalism, that the 'analomy' of the latter can pro\ icie 'a key' to previous social formations (3H), Again, we must 'think' the relation between the categories of hourqeois social formations and those of previous, vanished formations, not as an 'immediate identity', hut in ways which preserve tlieir appearance in hourgcois society (that is the relations of developed/simple and of Jominant/suhordinate in which new and previous modes of production arc arranged or combined within it). From this hasis, Marx can make his critique of sinij^le, historical evolutionisni: 'The .so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest torm regards the previous ones as steps leading up U) itself. This is lo regard tlii' matter 'one-sidedly'. This does not, however, aholish 'history' froin the scheme. If thought is grounded in social being, but not in st>cial heing conceived 'evoiutionarily' then it must he prc.scn; social reality Tnodern bourgeois society, 'the most tieveloped and complex historic organization ot production' which forms thought's pi-esupposition, its 'point of departure'. The object of economic theorizing, 'modern bourgeois society', is 'always v\hat is given in the head as well as in reality' (39), And it is this point il 'holds for science as well' which is 'deci,sive for the order and sequence of the categorie.s'. It has recently been argued that, with this observation about the distinction between the historical and the logical succession ofthe categories, Marx makes his final rupture with 'historicism'. It is often forgotten that the point is made hy Marx in the context ol a discussion ahout the fundamentally relativised epistemologica! origins of thought itself: a discussion which specifically draws attention to the dependence ot the logical categories on ihc relations, the 'forms of being', which they 'express', 'Fliu,s, not what thought produces hv its own 'mechanisms' from within itself, hut what is concretely 'given in ihc head as w ell as reality" is Marx's starting-point here lor his discursus on the epistemological foundations of method. 'The order and sequence ofthe economic categories", then, do not 'follow one ant)ther in the sequence in which they were historically decisi\e': not because - as was true for Hegel the logical catcgcjries engender themselves aho\e or outside the 'real relations', hut becau,se the epistemological rcfeixncc
tor thought is not the past but the present historic organi/.ation of production (h(mrgeois

society). 'This is a quite diffei-cnl ai-gumeut. Thus, what matters i,s not the historical seqiuncc ol the categories hut 'their order within bourgeois society'. ln bourgeois society, each category docs not exist as a discrete entity, whose

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separate historical development can he traced, hut \\ithin a 'set', a mode, in relations ot dominance and subordination, of determination, and tleterminaleness to other categories: tin cnsemhle of relations. This notion of an ensemble does indeed interrupt break with - any straight hi,storical evolutionism. The argument has then, sometimes, been taken as supporting Marx's final hreak wilh 'history' as such a bi'eak expre.s.sed in the couplet, historicism/scicnce. Marx, in my view, is drawing a different distinction, signalling a different 'break': that between a sequential historical c\olutionlsni determining thcnight/and the
determinaleness of thought within the present historte organization of social forma-

lions. The i-elalions ol production ofa niodt- of production are artit:ulatfd as an

ensemble.

There arc complex internal i-elalions and connections hetween them. In each mode, moreover, there is a level of determination 'in the last instance': one specific production-relation which 'predominates over the rest . . . assigns rank and inlluence to the others , . . hathes all other colours and nKxlifies Uieir particularity' (40). Marx insists that we attend lo the specificity of each cnsemhle, and to the relations of determinati(jn, domiiiancc and suhojxlinalion ^\hich constitutes each epoch. This points towards the Allhussercan concept of a social lorniation as a 'complexly structured whole' 'sti'uctured in dominance' and to the coniplcinentary notions of 'o\fr-tlelcrininalion' ant! Vxjnjunclure'. 'I he lull theoretical implications oCtliis modal conception lakes Marx a good deal of ihe way towards what we may call a 'structural historicism'. But, since thought, too, takes ils origins from this 'reality', which is 'always gi\en in the head', it too operates hy wa}- of an e]5istcmology determined in the first-lasL instance by the 'present historical organization of production'. Marx now develops thi,s ai-gument, again by way of examples. In bourgeois society, 'agriculture is progressively dominated by capital'. What matters for the order and sequence ot categories is not the evolution of any one relation say, teudal property - inlo industrial capital: though, in Capital, Marx doe,s at certain points provide just .such a historical .sketch. It is the relational position of industrial capital and landed property, or of 'capital' and 'rent', in the cajiitalist mode as against their relational position in say, the feudal mode, w hich matters. In the latter, 'combination' pi'ovides the starting point of all iheori/ing. This is 'ami liisloricist' ilhy that term we mean that the rnethotl does not rest with the tracing ot the historical de\elopmenl of each relation, singlv and se(|uentially, through time. But il i,s pi-oloundly historical once we recogni/e that the startingpoint - bourgeois societv - is not outside history, hut rather 'the jiresi'iil historic organization of society'. Bourgeois society is what 'historv' has delivc-red to the present a.s its 'result'. The hourgeois ensemble of relations is the prcsenl-ashistory. Flistory, we may say, realizes itself progressively. Theory, however, appropi-iates history 'regressi\'el\'. Theory, then, starts from history as a developed result, post festum. Thi,s is its presupposition, in the head. IIistor>\ hut onl\' in its realization a,s a 'complexly structured totality', articulates itself as the

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epistemological premise the starting point, of theoretical labour. This is what I want to call Marx's historical not 'historicist' epistemology. However undeveloped and un-theoreticised, it marks off Marx's method sharply both from a philosophically-unreflcxivc traditional modcslsicL including that final reference to the selfgenerating 'scientificity' of science which indexes the lingering positivist trace within structuralism itself. Colletti has expressed the argument succinctly when he ohserves that much theoretical Marxism has shown a tendency to mistake the 'first in time' - i,e. that trom which the logical process departs as a recapitulation ot the historical anteccndents with the 'first in reality' or the actual foundation ofthe analysis. The consequence has been that whereas Marx's logico-historical reflections culminate in the tormation of the crucial prohlcm of the contemporaneity of history (as Lukacs once aptly said, 'the present as history') traditional Marxism has always moved in the opposite direction ofa philosophv of history which dcriycs its explanation ot the present from 'the heginning of time'. (41) Mai-x's 'historical epistemology', then, maps the mutual arlicidalion ofhistorical movement and theoretical rellecticm, not as a simple identity but as differentiations within a unity. He retains in, as it were a displaced form the historical premise, thoroughly reconstructed, inside the epistemological procedure and method, as its final determination. This is not thought and reality on infinitely pai-ailcl lines with 'an impassable threshold' hetvyeen them. It signifies a conyergence what Engels called an asymptotic movement on the ground ot the given: here, hourgeois society as the ground or object hoth of theory and practice. It remains an 'open' epistemology, not a self-generating or self-sufficient one, because its 'scientificity' is guaranteed only hy that 'fit' between thought and reality each in its own mode - which produces a knowledge which 'appi-opriatcs' reality in the only way that it can (in the head): and yet deli\ers a critical method capable of penetrating hehind the phenomenal forms of,society to the hidden movements, the deep-structure 'real relations' which lie hehind them. This 'scientific' appropriation ofthe laws and tendencies ofthe structure ofa social formation is, then, also ihe law and tendency of its 'passing avyay': the possihility, not ofthe proof, hut of the realization of knovyledge in pi'acticc, in ils practical I'csolution - and thus, the self-conscious oyerthrow of those ri-lations in a class struggle which moyes along the axis of society's contradictory tendencies, and which is something more than 'merely speculatiye', more than a theoretical speculation. Here, as Colletti has i-emarked, we are no longer dealing with 'the relationship "thought-heing" within thought, hut rather with the relation between thought and reality' (42). It is woi'th rcterring this methodological argument in the Iniroducrion to passages in ihe Grundris.'^c itself where the distinetions hetween the 'historical origins' of the capitalist mode, and capitalism as 'the present historic

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organization ot protluction' are elaborated (43), The cajiitalist mode, Marx is arguing, depends on the transformation of money into capital. Thus, money constitutes one <jt 'the antidi'kn ian contlitions t>f ca|>ital, helongs to its historic prcsuppositit)ns', But t>nce this transformation tt) its motlern torm in commodity production is accomplished the establishment tjf the capitalist mcxle ol production proper capitalism nt> longer depends directly uiion this recapitulatit)n ot its 'historic presupjjosition' for its continuation, fhese presuppositit:)ns are now 'past and gone' lhe\ hel<)n^ UJ 'the history t)f its formation, hut in no way to its contemporary history, i.e. not to the real system ot the mode ot ijrotluction ruled hv it'. In short, the historical condilions for the appearance ofa mutle of protluction disappear into its results, and are reorganized hy this rcalizalitjn: capitalism now posits 'in accordance with its immanent essence, the conditions which torm its point of departure in production', 'posits the eonditions for its realization', 'on the hasis tif its own reality'. It (capitalism) 'nt> longer proceeds from presuppositions in ortlcr to hecome, hut rather it is itself presupposed, and proceeds from itself to create the contiitions tjf ils maintenance and growth'. Thi,s argument is again linked by Marx vyith the error of Political Ect>nt)my, which mistakes the past contlitions for capitalism hecoming what it is, with the present conditions under which capitalism is tirganized ami appropriates: an error which Marx relates lo Political Lconomy's tentlency to treat the harmonious laws of capitalism as natural and 'general'. In the face of such evitlence from the drundris.se, and later irom Capita! (44), it cannot he seriously maintained for long that, with his hrief remarks on the 'succession ot the categories' in the I8'>7 Introduction, Marx wholly relinc|uishes the 'hisloricar method for an essentially synchrt)nic, structuralist t)ne (in ihe normal sense). Marx clearly is scjmetimes unrepenlantly concerned, precisely, w ith the most tielicate reconstruction ot the genesis ot certain key calegt>ries anti relations of htjurgeois society. We must distinguish these trom the 'anatomical' analysis of the structure of the capitalist mode, where the 'present historic organization of production' is rt^sumed, analytically and theoretically, as an ongoing 'structure ol production', a combination ot productive motles. In the latter, 'anattimical' methtjd, hi.story and structure hayc been tlccisiyely reconstructed. The methodological requirement laid on his readers is to maintain these two modes of theoretical analysis a yiew eloquently endorsed in the Afterword to Capita! 1, 'fhis injunction constitutes hoth the comprchcnsiyeness, and the peculiar difficulty, of his dialectical niethotl. But the temptatitm to bury one side of the method in favt>ur of the other whether the historical at the expense ofthe structural, or yice yersa is, at hest, an evasion ot the tliecjretical dilTiculty Marx's own wt>rk proposes: an evasion tor whicli there is ntj warrant in the lS'i7 Introduction. As 1 lohshavvm has remarked: a structural model enyisaging only the maintenance ofa system is inadequate. It is the simultanet>us existence of stabilizing and disruptive

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elements which such a motlel must retlcct . . . Such a dual (tlialectical) model is difficult to set u[) and use, for in practice the temptation is great to operate it, accordingto taste t>r occasion, eithei^ as a stable tunctionalism or as one of revolutionary change; whereas the interesting thing ahoul it is, that it is both. (45) The pr{)hleni touched on here goes to the heart ofthe 'prohlem of methotl', not only of the 18S7 Introduction, hut of Capital itself: a question which the Introduction throws light on hut does not resolve. Godelicr, tor i^xample, argues for 'the priority ofthe study of structures over that of genesis and evolution': a claim, he suggests, inscribed in the ycry architecture of Capital itselt (46). Certainly, the main emphasis in Capital falls on the systematic analysis ol the capitalist mode of production, not on a comprehensive reconstruction ol the genesis of bourget)is society as a social formation. *Fhus, the long section Capita! Ill on 'Ground Rent' opens: 'The analysis of landed property in its \arious histt)rical tbrms helongs outsitle ofthe limits of this work . . . We assume then that agriculture is dtjminaled hy the capitalist mode of production' (47). This does not contradict the ccntralilv of those many passage,s which are in tact directly historical or genetic in form (including parts of this same section ol Capita! til), hidced, there are important distinctions between different kinds of writing here. Much that seems 'historical' to us now was, ot course, tor Marx immediate and ctjntemporary. The chapter on 'The Working Day', in Capita! I, on the other hand, ctjntains a graphic historical sketch, which a!so supports a theoretical argument - the analysis of the forms of industrial labour untler capitalism, and the system's ahility, first, t(3 extend the working day, and then, as labour becomes organized, the movement towards ils limitation ('the outcome ofa protractetl ciyil war'). Both are motlally difterrnt trom 'the task of tracing the genesis ofthe money-tt)rm . , , from its simplest , . . to tiazzling money-form', announced early in the same volume (48): a genesis vvhicli Marx argues 'shall, at the same time, solve the riddle presented by mt)ney', hut which in fact is not cast in the form ofa 'history of money' as such, hut an analysis ot 'the form of value' (own italics), as expressed in the money-form, a quite tiifferent matter. And all of these ditler again, trt)m the substantive historical material in Capita! I, addressetl explicitly to the question of 'origins' hut whic:h Marx dcliherately put after, not before, the basic theoretical exposition. None of these qualifications should he taken as modifying tiur appreciation oi the protoundly historical imagination which informs Capita! throughout. Decisively, the systematic ft>i-m o\' the work ne\er undercuts the fundamental historical premise which trames the whole exijosition, and on which Marx's claim lor its 'scientiticity', paratloxically, rests: the historically-specific, hence transitory, nature of the capitalist epoch and the categt)ries v\hich express it. As early as I 846, he had saitl this tt) Anncnkoy, a propos Proudhon: 'He has not pcrcciyed that ectjnomic categories are only abstract expressions ot these actual

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relations and only remain true while these relations exist' (49), He never changed his mind (50), It is certainly the case that, in extenso. Capital deals with the ft)rms and relations which the capitalist system requires to reproduce itsi-lf on an expanded scale: that is, with the 'structure and its variations'. Some ofthe most dazzlinp parts ol the manuscript consist, precisely, of the 'laying hare' of the lorms ofthe circuits ot capital vyhich enable this 'metamorphosis' to take place. But Marx's method depentis on itientifying two dialectically related hut discontinuous leyels: the ctintradictory, antagonistic 'real ix'lations' whicii sustain the reproductive processes of capitalism, and the 'phenomenal forms' in which the contradictions appear as 'eqiialized'. It is the latter which inform the consciousness of the 'hearers' ot the system, and generate the juridical and philosophic concepts which mediate its movements. A critical science must unmask the inverted forms ol the metamorphosis of the structure of capital, and lay hare its antagonistic 'real relations'. The difficult hut magnificent opening sections on CommotlityFetishism (which it is novy sometimes fashionahle to dismiss as another Hegelian trace) not only lay the hase, substantially, for the rest ofthe exposition; they also stand as a dramatic demonstration ofthe logic and method by which the other discoveries ofthe work are produced (51), Thus, though for Marx one of the truly staggering aspects of capitalism was, exactly, its sclf-reprotluction, his theory transccndcti Political Hc(}nt)my t>nly in so far as he c<juld SIK)W- that the 'forms ofthe appearance' ot this structure could be read through, read hehind, read hack lo their presuppositions as if one were 'deciphering the hieroglyphic to get hehinti the secret of our own social products'. And one ofthe sources of these permanent, sell-i-eprotlucing 'appearances' of capitalism to which Marx drew our attention was, precisely, the 'loss' (mis-recotrnitjon) of any sense of its moyements as socially-created, historically produced forms: Man's reflcctitins on the forms of social life, and consequently also his scientitic analysis ot these forms, take a course tlirectly opposite lo that of their actual historical deyclopment. He begins post festum with the results ofthe process ot deyelt>pment already to hand. The characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life hetorc man -seek,s to decipher, nt)t their historical character, for in his eyes thev are immutable, but their meaning. 'St) too', he added, 'the economic categories, already tliscussed hy us, hear the stamp of history'. They are 'socially yalid and, therefore, ohjectiye thoughtlorms which apply to the protluction-relations peculiar to this t)nc historically determined mode ot social production' (52). But, this decipherment (which is, in its 'practical state', his method: 'all science would he supertluous it the t>ut\vartl

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appearance and the essence of things tlirectiy coincided' (53)) is not fust a critique. It if- a critique ofa certain distinctive kind - one which not only lays bare the 'real relations' hehinti their 'phenomenal forms', hut does so in a way which also reveals as a contradictt)ry and antagonistic necessary content what, on the surface ofthe system, appears only as a 'phenomenal form', tunctional to its sellexpansion. This is the case vyith each of the central categories which Marx 'deciphers': commt)dity, lahonr, wages, prices, the equivalence of exchange, the organic comjiosition of capital, etc. In this way, Marx combines an analysis which strips off the 'appearances' of how capitalism works, discovers their 'hidden substratum', and is thus ahlc to reveal how it really wt.)rks: vyith an analysis vyhich reyeals why this tunctionalism in depth is also the source of its own 'negation' ('with the inexorability of a law of Nature') (54). The first leads us to the ideological leycI, at which the 'phenomenal forms' are taken at their justificatory face-value: thev 'appear directly and spontaneously as current modes of thought' i.e. as the prevailing forms of common-sense perceptions. The second penetrates to 'the essential relation manifested within', to 'their hidden substratum': thev 'must first be discoycred by science'. Classical Political Economy prt)vides the hasis - hut tmly via a eritique - of this second, scientific icycl, since it 'nearly touches the true relation of things, without however consciously tormulating it' (55). Marx's critique transcends its origins in Political Economy, not only because it formulates consciously what has heen lett unsaid, hut hecause it reveals the antagonistic moyement concealed hehind its 'automatic mt)de', its 'spontaneous generation' (56). The analysis of the titjuble form ot the commodity use-value, exchange-value with which Capita! opens, and which appears at first as merely a formal expositit)n, t)nly delivers its first substantive conclusion when, in the Chapter on 'The General Formula tor Capita!', the 'circuit of equivalence' (M-C-M) is redefined as a circuit of disequilibrium (MC-M'), where 'This increment or excess over the original value I call "surplus yalue'". 'It is this movement that converts it (value) into capital' (57). Thus, as Nicolaus has argued: Exploitation proceeds behind the back ot the exchange process , . . produttion consists of an act of exchange, and, on the other hand, it consists of an act which is the opposite of exchange . . , the exchange ot equiyalents is the fundamental social relation of production, yet the extraction of non-cquiyalents is the fundamental force of production, (58) Tt) present Marx as if he is the theorist, solely, ofthe operation of 'a structure and its \arialions', and not, also anti .simultaneously, the thet)rist ot its limit, interruption and transcendence is to transptise a dialectical analysis into a structural-functionalist one, in the interest of an altogether abstract scicntism. Godelier is aware that an analysis ot the yariations ot a structure must embrace the notion of ct)ntratlictit)n. But the 'functionalist' shadow continues

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to haunt his structuralist treatment of tlii.s aspect, 'I'hus, lor Godelicr, there are two, iundamental contradictions in Marx's analysis ofthe system: that hetween capital and labour (a contradiction witbin the structure ofthe 'social relations of production') anti that between the socialized nature of labour under large-scale industry and the productiye force.s of ca])ital (a contradiction between structure). Characteristically, Godelier exalts the latter (deriying from the 'ohjectiye properties' t)f the system) over the former (the struggle hetvyeen the classes). Chai-actcristically, Marx intended to connect the tvyo: to found the sclfconsciou.s practice of class struggle in the ohjectiye contradictory tentlencies of tlie system (59). The neat, hinary contrast otVered hy Gotlelier hetween a 'scientitic' contradiction which is ohjectiye material and systemic, and the practice ot class struggle which is epiphenomenal and teleological tlisappears in the tace t)f this essential internal ctinneetettncss of theory lo practice. Korsch long ago, and correctly, idenlified the attempt 'to degrade the opposition hetween the social classes to a temporary appearance ofthe underlying contradiction hetvyeen the productive forces ant! produetion-rclations' as 'Hegelian' (60). Marx ended his letter outlining the theoretical argument of yolume 3 thus: 'Finally, since these three (yvages, ground rent, profit) constitute the respective .sources ol income of the three classes . . . we haye, in conclusion, the elass struggle, into which the movement ofthe whole Seheisse is resolvetl' (61). Yet, when Godelier quotes Marx's letter to Kugelniann (62) 'I represent large-scale industry not only as the motlier t)f antagonism, hut alst) as the creator ofthe material and spiritual conditions necessary for the solution of this antagonism, he appears unahle to hear the seconti half of Marx's sentence at all. Yet, for Marx, it w as exactly the intcrpenetration ofthe 'ohjectiye' contradictions of a productive mode with the politics ofthe class strtiggle vyhich alone raisetl his t)wn theory above the level ofa 'Utopia' to the status ofa science: just as it was the coincidence of an adequate theory vyith the fonnation tif a class 'tor itself which alone guaranteed the 'complex unity' of theory and practice. The idea that the unity ot theory and practice coLiltl he constituted on the grountl of theory alone woultl not have occurreti U Marx, especially after the detnolilion of > Hegcd, There remain the extremely ci^yptic notes (6^) which conclude the Introduction: notes on notes 'tt) he mentionetl here . . . not to he ttjrgotten', nt)thing more. 1 he points rapidly touched on in these pages are, indeed, theoretically of the highest importance: hut there is scarcely enough here tor anything that we could call a 'clarification'. They arc at hest, traces: what they tell us is that signiticantly enough Marx alreatly had these questions in mind. What they hardly reveal is what he thought about them. They primarily concern the supcrstructurai tbrnis: 'Forms of the State and Forms of Consciousness in Kelatit)n to Relations of Production and Circulation, Legal Relations, Family Kelations'. What would the modern reader give tor a section at least as long as that on 'The Method of Political Economy' on these points. It was not to be.

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We can, then, merely, note what the problems here seemctl to him to he. They touch on the question as to how, precisely, we are to understand the key concepts: ']5ioductiye forces', 'relations of production'. Morcoyer, they specify these concepts at the more mediated levels: the relation of these intrastruclural concepts to war and the army; to cultural history and historifjgraphy; to international relations; to art, education and law. 'fv\o conceptual lormulations ot the first importance are hricfiy enunciatetl. First, it is said again, that the productive-forces/relations-of-production distinction, tar from constituting two disconnected structures, must he conceived dialectically. The bt)undaries oi this dialectical relation remain to he sjiecifietl in any theoretical tullness ('to he determined'): it is a dialectic which connects, but which is nol an 'immediate identity' - it docs not 'suspenti the real tlitference' hetvyeen the two terms. Second, the relation of artistic development, of etiucation and oi lavy to material productit)n is specifietl as constituting a relation of 'unevtm development'. Again, a theoretical note o( immense importance. The point ahout artistic dcyelopment and material production is then brietly expantled. The 'unevenness' ofthe relation of art to protluction is instanced by the contrast between the flowering of great artistic vyork at a point of early, indeed, 'skeletal' social organization Greek civilization. Thus the epic appears as a developed category in a still simple, ancient, mode of productit)n. This instance parallels the earlier example, where 'money' makes its appearance within a still undevelopetl set of pi-t)ductive relations. Tht>ugh Marx is here opening up a problem of great ct)mplexity the graphic demonstration of the 'law of the uneven relations of structure anti superstructures' he is less ct)ncernctl v\ ith developing a specifically Marxist aesthetics, than w ith questions of method and conceptualization. His argument is that, like 'money' and 'labour', art does not 'wade its way' in a simple, sequential march Irom early to late, simple to developed, in step with its material hase. We must look al it in ils 'modal' connectit)n at specitic stages. His concrete example - Greek art is suhordinatetl to the same theoretical preoccupation. Greek art presupposes a sjiecific set of 'relatit)ns'. It requires the concrete organization ofthe prt)ductive forces of Ancient society - it is inct)mpatihle with spindles, railways, locomotives. It requires its own, specific modes of production the t)ral art ofthe epic is incompatible with electricity and the printing press. Moreover, it requires its ov\n forms of conscit)usness: mythology. Not any mythology - Egyptian mythology belongs to a difterent ideological complex, and vvouiti not do. But mythology as a form ot thought (at the ideological leyel) survives only tt) the degree that the scientific mastery over and transformation of Nature is yet not fully accomplished. Mythology lasts only so long as science and technique haye not oyertakcn magic in their social and material pacification ot Nature. Thus, mytht)togy is a lorm ol consciousness which is only possihle at a certain leye! of deyclopment ofthe productive torces anti hence, since this n"iytholt)gy forms the characteristic content and mode of

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imagination tor lhe epic, tbc epic is connected - but hy a complex and uneven chain of mediations to the productive forces and relations of Greek socictv. Is this historical coupling, then, not irreversible? Do not ancient society and the epic disappear together? Is the heroic form of Achilles ima^inahle in the epoch of modern warfare? Marx does not end his inquiry with thi.s demonstration of the historical compatibility between artistic and material forms. The greater theoretical difficulty, he observes, is to conceive how such apparently ancient forms stand in relation to the 'prc.'ient historic organization of production' (emphasis added). Here, once again, Marx gives a concrete instance of the way he combines, in his method, the analysis oi concrete instances, the epochal development of complex structures [hroufjh time, and the structural 'law' of the mutual connection and interdependence of relations irilhin the present mode of production . The demonstration, though brief and elliptical, is exeni|ilary. The answer to the question as to why we still respond positively to the epic or Greek drama - in terms of the 'chai-m' for u.s of 'the historic childhood of humanity' - is, however, unsatisfactory in almost every respect: a throwaway line. The resolution to these perplexing, (and, in our lime, progressively central and determining) theoretical issues is achieved stylistically, but not conceptually. What light, if any, does the IS'il Introduction throw on the prol>lem of 'theoretical breaks' in Marx? Marx considered classical Political Economy to be the new science of the emergent bourgeoisie. In this classical form, it attempted to formulate the laws of capitalist production. Marx had no illusions that Political Economy could, untransformed, he made theoretically an adequate science tor the guidance of revolutionary action; though he did, again and again, make the sharpest distinction lietween the 'classical' period which opened with Petty, Boisguilleberl and Adam Smith and closed with Ricardo and Sismondi, and its 'vuljiarisers', with whom Marx dealt dismissively, but whom he read with surprising thoroughness and debated intensivelv to the end of his life. Yet some of his sharpest criticism was reserved for the 'radical' Political Economists- the 'left-Ricardians', like Bray, lhe Owenites, Rodbertus, Lasalle and Proudhon - who thought Political Economy theoretically self-sufficient, though skewed in its political application, and proposed those changes from above which would bring social relations in line with the requirements of the theory. The socialist Ricardians argued that, since labour was the source of value, all men should become labourers exchanging equivalent amounts of labour. Marx took a harder road. The exchange of equivalents, though 'real enough' at one level, was deeply 'unreal' at another. This was just the frontier beyond which Political Economy could not pass. However, merely bv knowing this to be true did not, in Marx's sense, make it real for men in practice. These laws could only be thrown over in practice: they could not be transformed by juggling the categories. At this point, then, the critique of Political Economy, and of its radical revisionists, merged with the metacritique of Hege! and his

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radical revisers the left-Hegelians: for Hegel, too, 'conceived only (jf abstractions which revolve in their own circle' and 'mistook the movement ol the categories' for the profane movement of history; and his radical disciples thought the Hegelian system complete, and only its application lacking its proper finishing touch. Certainly, when Marx said of Proudhon that he 'conquers economic alienation only wilhin the bounds of economic alienation', it was a direct echo, if not a deliberate parody, of the critique he had alread)' made of Hegel (64). It is this point that bourgeois relations must be overthrown in practice before thev can he wholly superceded in theory - which accounts tor the complex, paradoxical, relations Marx's mature work bears to Political Economy: and thus for the extreme difficulty we have in trying to mark exactly where it is tliat Marxism, as a 'science', breaks wholly and finally with Political Economy. The difficulty is exactly that which has in recent years so preoccupied the discussion of Marx's relation to Hetrel: and it may be that yve must tentatively return the same kind of answer lo each form ot the question. The whole of Marx's mature effort is, indei-d, the critique of the categories of Political Economy. The critique of method is positively opened, though not closed, in the 1857 Introduction. Yet Political Economy remains Marx's only theoretical point-ot-de]jarture. Even when it has been vanquished and transformed, as in the case of the dismantling ot the Ricardian theory of wages, or in the break-through with the 'suspended' concept ot surplus value, Marx keeps returning lo il, refining his differences from it, examining it, criticising it, going beyond it. Thus even when Marx's theoretical formulations lay the foundations of a materialist science of historical formations, the 'laws' of Political Economy still command the field, theoretically because they dominate social liie in practice. To paraphrase Marx's remarks on the German 'theoretical conscience', Political Economy cannot be realized in practice without abolishinir it in theory, just as, on the other side, it cannot be abolished in practice until it has been theoretically 'realised'. This is in no sense to deny his 'breakthrough.s'. In a thousand other ways. Capital, in the doubleness of its unmasking and reformulations, its long suspensions (while Marx lavs bare the circuits ot capital 'as it they were really so', only to show, in a later section, what happens when we return this 'pure case' to its real connections), its transitions, lays the toundation ot a 'scientitic' ci'itique of the laws of capitalist production. Yet it remains a critn^uc to the end: indeed, the critique appears (to return to the lS:'i7 text) as paradigmatically, tbe form of the
scientificity of hi.s method.

The nature ot this 'end' toward which his critique pointed must be spelled out. It was not an attempt to erect a scientifically self-sufficient theory to replace the inadequate structure of Political Economy: his work is not a 'theoreticist' replacement of one knowledge by another. In the aftermath of tlie 1848 upbeayals, Marx's thought did, clearly, increasingly cast itself in the form of

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theoretical work. No iloubt the systematic and disciplined nature of ihis v\ork im]>osed its own excluding ami absorbing rhvthms: the letters eloquently testity to that. Yet lor all thai, the theoretical labour of which the successive drafts and predrafls of Capital were the resull, had, as its pi-ospecli\ e 'end' paradoxically something other ihan tbe 'founding of a science'. We cannot pretend, as yet, lo ha\e mastered the extremely c(>m|ilex ainiculations which connect the scientific forms of historical materialism with the revolulionarv practice ot a class in struggle. Bul we have been right to assume tbat, the power, the historical significance, of Marx's iheoi'ies are related, in some way we do not yet tuily understand, jirecisely to this dotihle articulation of theory and practice. We are by now familiar with a kind of 'reading' of the more |)olemicai texts - like the Manifesto where the theory is glimpsed, so to speak, retracted through a more 'immediate' political analysis and rhetoric. But \ve are still easily confused when, in the later texts, the nioyement of the classes in struggle is glimpsed, so to speak, refracted thrtjugh the theoretical constructs and arguments. It is a strong temptation to believe thai, in the latter, only Science holds the lield. Marx's mature methotl we would arijue does not c()n.sist ot an attempt to found a closed theoreticist replacement of bourgeois Politital Economy. Nor does il represent an idealisi i-ejiiacemcnt of alienaled bourgeois relations by 'trulv human' ones. Indeed, i^real sections of bis work consist ol the prolountlly i-evolutionarv, critical task ot show ing exact I v how llie laws ol political economy rccdlj ivorkcd. They \yorki.-d, in part, through iheir very iormalism: he patiently anahses the 'phenomenal forms'. Marx's criticjtic, then, takes us to tbe level at which the real relations of capitalism can be penetrated and revealetl. In Ibrmulatiny the nodal points of this critique. Political Economy - the highest expression of lhe.se relations grasped as mental categories provided the only possible starting point. Marx begins there. Capital remains 'A Critique of Political EcfMiomy': not 'Communism: An alternative to Cajjitalism'. Tbe notion ol a 'break' - final, thorough, complete - by Marx with Political Economy is, iiltitnatelv, an idealist notion: a notion which cannot do justice to the real complexities of theoretical labour Capital and all that led up lo It. Much the same coul<l be said of Marx's relation to Hegel, though here a substantive 'break' is easier to Identify for what it is w orth, it is identitied time and again for us by Marx himself. It is the relation lo Hegel in terms of method which continues to be troubling. Early and late, Marx and Engels marked the thoroughgoing manner in which tbe whole idealist tramework ot Hegel's thought had to be abandoned. The dialectic in its idealist form, t<w, bad to Lindersio a thorough transformation for its real scientilic kernel to become available lo historical materialism as a scientitic starting-point. It has been argued tbat Marx and Engels cannot have meant it when they said tbat something rational could be rescued from Hegel's idealist husk: yel, for men who spent their lives attempting to harness thought to history in language, they apjiear peculiarly addicted lo that troubling metaphor of 'kernel' and 'husk'. Could

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something remain ot Hegel's tneihod which a thorough i^oing transformation would rescue - when his ,^jstcm had to be totally abandoned as mystification and idealist rubbish? But that is like asking whether, since Ricardo marked the closure of a bourgeois science (and was a rich banker to boot) there was anything which the tounder of historical materialism could learn from him. Clearly, there was: clearly he did. He nevei- ceased to learn from Ricardo, even when in the throes of dismantling him. He never ceased to take his bearings from classical Political Economy, even when he knew it couUI not finally think outside its bourgeois skin. In the same way, whenever he returns to the wholly unacceptable substance of the Hegelian system, be alvyays pinpoints, in the same moment, what it is he learned from 'that mightv thinker', v\hal had to be turned 'rigbtside-up' to be of seryice. This did not make the mature Marx 'a Hegelian' any more than dApital made him a Ricardian. To think this is to misunderstand protbundly the nature of the criiique as a form of knowledge, and the dialectical method. Certainly, as far as the IS'j? Incrodtiction is concerned, time and again, Hegel is decisively al)andoned and overthrown, almost at the very points where Marx is clearly learning or re-learning wmeihin^j trom his dialectical method. One ot the traces ot light which tliis text captures for us is the illumination of this surprisingly late moment of supercession - of relurn-and-transformation.

Endnotes and references

I have used the translation ol'lhe IS^j>7 Introduction by Martin Nicolaus, in his edition of The Grundrisse, Pelican (197.3). 2. Pierre Vilar, 'Writing Marxist History', New Left Review 80. 3. SatDtliche Schrifien., voi 1, Translated in Hook, From Heqel to Marx. 4. (jrundrisy.e, pp, I 56 7. 5. On the 'real relations/phenomenal form' distinction, Cf. especially, Mepham, 'the theory of Ideology in Capital' (below) and Geras, 'Essence + Appearance: Aspects of Fetishism in Marx's CapitaF. Neiv Left Review 65, 6. Capital I, p, 745. 7. Karl Koi'sch, Three Essays On Atarxism, Pluto Press (1971), 8. Capital i, p. 76. 9. Povertj of Philosophy, ]ip. 1 1 8 9 , 1 2 1 , 10. In t h e Critique of ILcijcl's dialectic. 1 1 . liLonomic &_Phihm>phu-al Ihinu.scripts, p. 190. 12, ibid, p. 44, I 3. Cl: Marx's ironic use oi the terms, Crundrisse, p. 450, 14, Economic SLPhilosophiciil Manuscripts, p, 186-7. 1 5, The Holy Family, 16. Economic Si^Philowphical Manuscripts, p. 190, 17. 18^)7 Iniroduction, p. 90, 18. Cf: Introduction, p, 88, 100. 1.

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31 , 32,

33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 , 42, 43, 44, 45, 46,

47, 48, 49, 50, 51,

Introduction, p. 93, CI': Marx's mori- (IL-VL-IOJXHI notion of how the 'aetivity' of labour appears in the prot-lucl as a 'fixed quality without motion': Capita! 1, pp. 180 1 . Economic SLPhilosophiea! Manuscripts, pp, 140-1. Introducihm, p. 92. IntrodvKiion, p, 9 5; the distinctions between the three types of identity-relation arc not as clearly su.stained as one could wish, Introduction, p. 94, Grundrisse, p. 161 Capita! 1, p, 356, Crundrisse, p. 148: our italics. Introduetion, pp. 90 3, Cf: the dismantling of the theory of wages in Capita! 11 and of the 'Trinity Formula' In Capita! III. !ntrodmtiot), p. 98, !niroduction, p. 100 On Hegel's and Marx's u,sage of 'concrete', Cf: Kline, 'Some Critical Comments on Marx's Philosophy', in .\larx &. The Western World, ed, N. Lobkowic/, Notre Dame (1967), Grundrisse, p . 2 5 5 . !ntroduition, p. 101 , L, Althusser, For .-^hirx, p. 42, 58, Introduction, p. 102, Marx's discussion of a further example labour - has heen omitted here, Introduction, p. 105. Introduction, p. 1056, !ntroductwn, p. 107, L, Colletti, Marxism &_l-}cge], pp, 1 .H)-l. ibid, p. i'54. Cf: Grundrisse, p. 4591T. Cf: Capital I, p. 7621T. E. Hobsbawm, 'Marx's Contriijution lo Historiography', in Ideology &.,Social Science, ed, Blackburn. Cf: Godelier, 'Structure & Contradiction in Capital', in Blackburn, (ed), op cit,: and developments o f t h e same argument in Godelier, Rationalitj &_ !rrationt.iliiv In Economics, NI.B, CapiiuHU, p. 720, Capita! Ill, p. 48, Reprinted in Poverty oj Philosophy, p. 209, He quoted his reviewer in the European Messenger lo the same effect, without demur: in the Afterword to tbe 2nd H<lition o\' Capital. hor a recent, and striking, reassertion ofthe centrality of'Fetishism' to Capita! from an 'anti-historicisl' interpreter of Marx, Cf. The 'Interview with Lucio Colletti', in Mew Left Revien 86,

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52,
53, 54, 5 5. 56. 57. 56, 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

The quotes are from Capital 1, pp, 74-5, 169, 42, Cf, also, Engels to Lange,
in .!/- Correspondence, p. 198. Capital III, p . 7 9 7 . Capital I p. 763. C^n this point, also, Cf: 'Interview witb L. Colletti', New Left Review 86. Capital I, p. 542. Capital I, p. 1 50, In Blackburn, (ed), op. cit. pp. ^24 5, The two strands are beautifully and inextricably combined in pas,sages such as, e,g. Capital I, p. 763ff, K. Korsch, Karl Marx, p. 201. To Ungels: Correspondenee, p. 245: dated 3 0 / 4 / 1 8 6 8 . Dated 1 1/7/1868, onlv three months later. Introduction, pp. 109 11. Holy Family, p . 2 1 3 .