Materials from Lotta Continua on Alfred Sohn-Rethel Translated by Richard Braude 1. Costanzo Preve, Commodities and Thought: Sohn-Rethel’s Book. (LC, 5 August 1977, p. 6) 2. Costanzo Preve, Manual and Intellectual Labour: Towards Understanding Sohn-Rethel. (LC, 5 August 1977, pp. 6–7) 3. Costanzo Preve, Sohn-Rethel in Italy. (LC, 5 August 1977, p. 7) 4. Costanzo Preve, Never Become an Academic Baron. (LC, 5 August 1977, pp. 6–7) 5. ‘F.D.’, Reading This Page. (LC, 3 September 1977, p. 7) 6. Pier Aldo Rovatti, Towards A Materialist Theory of Knowledge. (LC, 3 September 1977, pp. 6–7) 7. Antonio Negri, The Working Class and Transition. (LC, 6 September 1977, pp. 6–7) 8. Francesco Coppellotti, On Sohn-Rethel. (LC, 10 September 1977, p. 5) Translator’s note: Costanzo Previ is cited as the ‘editor’ of the pages in the 5 August issue. From the style, my guess is that he wrote one long piece which was then split into three and touched up by the paper’s editors. The third piece (‘Sohn-Rethel in Italy’) is in his characteristic tone; the joke in the first piece about auto-reduction feels less like him. As for the identity of ‘F.D.’, the author of the introductory note of the 3 September issue, I really have no idea. ∵ 1 Costanzo Preve, Commodities and Thought: Sohn-Rethel’s Book (LC, 5 August 1977, p. 6) In speaking about Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s book (Intellectual and Manual Labour, Feltrinelli, 1977) one can first of all say ‘it goes far beyond the intentions’ of Marx, Engels and Lenin. It would be all too easy, armed with red and blue pencils, to show how the author does not always make use of ‘determinate Richard Braude - 9789004444256 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:40:38AM via free access 174 materials from lotta continua on alfred sohn-rethel abstractions’ and that the ‘inversion’ between historical and logical categories is not always the same as Marx’s own. But our author is quite aware of this. Sohn-Rethel immediately claims that his ‘study has been undertaken in the belief that an extension to Marxist theory is needed for a fuller understanding of our own epoch. Far from moving away from Marxism, this should lead deeper into it … We understand “our epoch” as that in which the transition from capit- alism to socialism and the building of a socialist society are the order of the day. In contrast, Marx’s epoch was engaged in the capitalist process of development; its theoretical perspective was limited to the trends pushing this development to its limits. It is clear that this change of historical scenery shifts the Marxist field of vision in a significant way’.1Whoever does not want to expand their field of vision, i.e. whoever subtracts the thought-form of natural sciences and the technological aspect of the productive forces away from historical materialism, thus splits their thought between ‘two concepts of truth: the one dialectical and time-bound, the other undialectical, consigning any awareness of histor- ical time to oblivion’;2 well then, they ought to know that this means going ‘not the way of socialism, but that of technocracy … and that Marxism’s funerals as a theoretical perspective are merely a question of time’.3 Having put his cards on the table in terms of what he thinks about the future, Sohn-Rethel can now turn to the past, noting that the very concept of ‘truth’ arises historically in the context of the separation between hand and mind. The ‘social synthesis’ (a basic concept in S-R) is that determinate ‘social’ configur- ation of the relation between intellectual labour and manual labour, not to be perceived in a strict sense of a quantitative percentage of the two ‘factors’, but to be identified in the qualitative character of the dominance of exchange over material production, of the dominance of ‘asocial’ appropriation over social production and of the forms of knowledge that necessarily correspond to this. Let us provide an example familiar to many comrades: the struggles of 1969 taught us that there is little sense in speaking of the ‘working class’ without also and above all investigating the technical, political and social ‘class composi- tion’.Gasparazzo, for example, is not ‘the working class’ in general, but a specific ‘political composition’ of the working class.4 Well, we can broaden the concept of ‘class composition’ to all of society, we can study the historical genesis of any 1 See present edition, p. 1. 2 Ibid., p. 2. 3 I can’t find this last quotation in either the German 1989 edition or the English 1978 edition. (trans.) 4 A cartoon character created by Roberto Zamarin in 1972, a representation of the Southern Italian mass worker in the North Italian factories. (trans.) Richard Braude - 9789004444256 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:40:38AM via free access materials from lotta continua on alfred sohn-rethel 175 given social configuration without fear that we will end up in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, and above all we can investigate the origin of the ‘forms of thought’ generated by the division of labour, the birth of commodity exchange and still more by the role of money and in doing so we will comecloser to the idea of a ‘social synthesis’. In order to fully grasp this concept we need, however, to note that if this ‘social synthesis’ does not happen through the transparency of production and organic exchange between man and nature but through the ‘abstract’ form of exchange (for S-R it is not so much ‘labour’ that can be defined as ‘abstract’ but rather ‘exchange’ itself, inasmuch as it is exchange that begins to ‘magically’ produce abstractions in the heads of people who have money in their pockets) – if this is the case, then we see the birth of an intellect (as a particular, historical form of thought) that will proudly pretend to be transcend- ental but that pretends as such with a ‘necessarily false conscience’, inasmuch as it will have been generated in the same form as that of exchange. At this point we need to take Kant to heart, the great master of transcend- ental thought. S-R substantially ‘deduces’ the Kantian categories of ‘exchange abstraction’ and with it the very ‘historicity’ and indeed its universalising cog- nitive pretext. Indeed, S-R shows the birth of Western philosophical thought itself in seventh and sixth century Greek thought (BC) to have a direct relation with the minting of coinage, which happened in precisely this period. ‘Who- ever has money in their pockets has well-determined conceptual abstractions in their heads, consciously or otherwise’,says S-R, and he isn’t joking. Thus even if it is only a marginal statement, the bourgeoisie are not wrong when, see- ing young people engaging in ‘auto-reduction’, or going to the supermarkets without paying for things, they say that they ‘aren’t thinking properly’: perhaps they aren’t, but they are acting in line with the most recent German philosophy. It’s a joke, but there is a serious side: it is clear that the whole question of needs, of their phenomenology and their satisfaction is invented by the ‘decentring’ of their subject, through the fact that their ‘thinkability’ has to pass anyway under the Caudine Forks of ‘exchange abstraction’: that this ‘abstraction’ is real enough is demonstrated today in the threats of the capitalist crisis and the rising problem of money for young proletarians. ∵ 2 Manual and Intellectual Labour: Towards Understanding Sohn-Rethel (LC, 5 August 1977, pp. 6–7) While S-R identifies the methodological potential of ‘pure economy’ and ‘empirical sociology’ in being able to explain what is actually happening in Richard Braude - 9789004444256 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:40:38AM via free access 176 materials from lotta continua on alfred sohn-rethel society, due to the flaw of their genesis (i.e. abstract intellect, the result of exchange abstraction, in turn generated by the concept of property), he nev- ertheless claims that ‘abstract intellect produces objectively valid knowledge’, even if with a false consciousness, because ‘while a class chooses ideology cor- responding to its own interests, science chooses a class that can adequately apply it’. Along with another thousand questions, this is what emerges from the first part of the book. In the second part, which is really more interesting and also easier to follow for the reader who is not a ‘philosopher’, S-R traces the dia- lectical development of the thought-form bound to the form-of-exchange of primitive communities through to the Egyptians and Greeks, down to the form- ation of mechanistic thought in its twin aspects as ideology and science (and thus in a manner that is perhaps truer than that of Adorno and Horkheimer, who tend to isolate and focus only on the first aspect, thus leaving their flank open to attacks by various Defenders of the Truth, such as Paolo Rossi). The third part of the book, which deals with the transition towards a social synthesis based on production rather than circulation, on labour rather than exchange, focuses mainly on Taylorism in its double aspect of ‘degradation’ and the pre-eminence of a new ‘social synthesis’; here S-R sees in what he calls the ‘bureaucracy of the usurpers’ the final strategic enemy of a classless social- isation; he clarifies (see the passage on the analysis of the two conceptions of capitalism in Marx), beyond any doubt, that ‘the theory I develop here must be interpreted as a contribution to the building of socialism after the revolu- tion and not as a theory of revolution itself’ – a theory that, for this reason, cannot be employed for irritating, pointless ‘prefigurative’ uses.