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Behind the Crisis Marx’S Dialectics of Value and Knowledge by Guglielmo Carchedi

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Behind the Crisis Marx’S Dialectics of Value and Knowledge by Guglielmo Carchedi Behind the Crisis Marx’s Dialectics of Value and Knowledge By Guglielmo Carchedi LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011 Contents Foreword: On Marx’s Contemporary Relevance ...................................... vii Chapter One Method .................................................................................. 1 1. The need for dialectics .............................................................................. 1 2. Dialectical logic and social phenomena ................................................. 3 3. The dialectics of individual and social phenomena ............................. 22 4. Class-analysis and the sociology of non-equilibrium .......................... 31 5. A dialectics of nature? .............................................................................. 36 6. Formal logic and dialectical logic ........................................................... 39 7. Induction, deduction and verification ................................................... 44 Chapter Two Debates ................................................................................. 53 1. Recasting the issues .................................................................................. 53 2. Abstract labour as the only source of (surplus-) value ........................ 55 3. The materiality of abstract labour ........................................................... 60 4. The tendential fall in the average profit-rate (ARP) ............................. 85 5. The transformation-‘problem’ ................................................................. 101 6. The alien rationality of homo economicus ................................................ 124 Chapter Three Crises .................................................................................. 131 1. Alternative explanations .......................................................................... 131 2. The cyclical movement ............................................................................. 143 3. The subprime debacle ............................................................................... 157 4. Either Marx or Keynes .............................................................................. 170 Chapter Four Subjectivity .......................................................................... 183 1. Crisis-theory and the theory of knowledge .......................................... 183 2. Neither information-society nor service-society .................................. 185 3. Individual knowledge ............................................................................ 192 vi • Contents 4. Social knowledge .................................................................................... 203 5. Labour’s knowledge ............................................................................... 208 6. Knowledge and value ............................................................................ 220 7. The general intellect ............................................................................... 225 8. Science, technique and alien knowledge ............................................. 244 9. Trans-epochal and trans-class knowledge .......................................... 256 10. Knowledge and transition ..................................................................... 267 Appendix One The Building Blocks of Society ....................................... 273 Appendix TWO Objective and Mental Labour-Processes ...................... 277 Appendix Three Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts ............................. 279 References ....................................................................................................... 291 Index ................................................................................................................ 299 Foreword: On Marx’s Contemporary Relevance As these pages are being written, we are witnessing a deep crisis of the West- ern capitalist civilisation – overlapping environmental, energy-, and eco- nomic crises, social exclusion, and famines. The roots of these as well as other evils should be sought in an economic system whose basic aim is produc- tion for profit, and that therefore requires human and environmental exploi- tation, rather than the production for the satisfaction of everybody’s needs in harmony with each other and thus with nature. The thinker, whose work offers the sharpest tools for an analysis of the root causes of these and other social ills, is undoubtedly Marx. Much has been written since Capital was first published, and more recently after the demise of the Soviet Union and the consequent triumph of neoliberalism, about the irrelevance, inconsistency, and obsoleteness of Marx. This book goes against the current. It argues that Max’s work offers a solid and still relevant foundation upon which to further develop a multi-faceted theory highly significant to understand the contem- porary world, both its present condition and its possible future scenarii. More specifically, this book is about the present crisis. But it is also and perhaps mainly about what lies behind the crisis. In this, it differs from other works on this topic, whose focus is essentially the economic causes and conse- quences of crises. The basic thesis is that, to understand the crisis-ridden nature of this system, one needs to develop Marx’s own method of enquiry, that is, to rescue it from the innumerable attempts to see Marx through an Hegelian lens. This is the task of Chapter 1, which provides a specifically Marxist inter- pretative template, a distinctive dialectical method of social research extracted from Marx’s own work rather than from Hegel’s. The starting point is the conceptualisation, through the application of a clear and workable notion of dialectics as a method of social research, of social phenomena as the unity- in-determination of social relations and social processes. This method rests on three fundamental principles: that social phenomena are always both poten- tial and realised, both determinant and determined, and subject to constant viii • Foreword movement and change. On this basis, the capitalist economy is seen as being powered by two opposite rationalities: one is the expression of capitalism’s tendency towards its own supersession and the other is the expression of the counter-tendency towards reproduction, even if through crises as potential moments of supersession. In other words, the dialectical method reveals the dynamics of capitalism, namely, why and how it attempts to supersede itself while reproducing itself. From this perspective, the economy and thus society do not and cannot tend towards equilibrium. The notion that the economy is in a state of equilibrium, or is tending towards it, which is the mainstay of neoclassical economics and of almost all other economic theories, are, it will be argued, highly ideological and scientifically worthless. The thesis that capi- talism tends not towards equilibrium and its own reproduction but towards its own supersession requires the introduction of a novel distinction, that between concrete and abstract individuals and thus between individual and social phenomena. Central to society’s contradictory movement and tendency towards its own supersession is the dialectical interplay of individual and social phenomena and thus of subjectivity and objectivity. This subjectivity is informed by the internalisation by each individual of a double and contradic- tory rationality in its endless forms of manifestation: capital’s need for human exploitation and labour’s need for human liberation. It follows that subjectivity and more generally knowledge, both individual and social, are contradictory because class-determined. Of great significance is the question as to whether this principle holds only for the social sciences or whether it can be valid for the natural sciences and techniques as well. To anticipate, Chapter 4 examines both similarities and differences between the dialectics of society in Marx on the one hand and Engels’s dialectics of nature on the other hand. While there are many common features, one basic difference stands out: for Marx, all knowledge is class-determined and thus has a class-content. This includes also the natural sciences and techniques. Not so for Engels, even though it would be difficult to find in Engels a clear statement to this effect. Therefore, the difference between the two great think- ers revolves around the class-determination, as opposed to class-neutrality, of the natural sciences and techniques and thus of the forces of production. The importance of the implications of this issue for a theory of social change cannot be overestimated. Finally, social analysis on the basis of the above- mentioned three principles of dialectics cannot avoid the question of the use Foreword • ix of a dialectical logic as opposed to formal logic. Section 6 in the first chap- ter considers the basic features of formal logic and its relation to dialectical logic. On this basis, it distinguishes between formal-logical contradictions (mistakes) and dialectical contradictions, those which arise from the contra- diction between the realised and the potential aspects of reality. The conclu- sion is reached that the rules of formal logic (rather than formal logic itself, whose class-content is inimical to labour) apply to the realm of the realised (which without the potentials is a static reality) and that only dialectical logic (which incorporates the rules of formal logic but not formal logic itself) can explain movement
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