A Thesis in Philosophy by William Clare Roberts © 2005 William Clare
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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts THE LABORS OF KARL MARX: TEKHNĒ, VALORIZATION, REVOLUTION A Thesis in Philosophy by William Clare Roberts © 2005 William Clare Roberts Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2005 The thesis of William Clare Roberts was reviewed and approved* by the following: Daniel W. Conway Professor of Philosophy Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee Mitchell Aboulafia Professor of Philosophy John Christman Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Science Interim Head of the Department of Philosophy Nancy Love Associate Professor of Political Science and Communication Arts and Sciences Terrell Carver Professor of Politics, Bristol University Special Signatory *Signatures are on file with the Graduate School. Abstract This dissertation comprises a comprehensive re-reading of Marx’s understanding of labor. In order to make sense of Marx’s emphasis on labor, I argue, we must take his own productive activity seriously. Doing so obviates many of the standard objections to Marx’s critique of capitalism. It does so by redirecting attention towards Marx’s effort to transform his readers from isolated individuals into a revolutionary laboring multitude. I begin with an examination of “concrete labor”—the intentional production of useful things—which reveals that this is the motor of human history for Marx because our products escape from the intentions that formed them. The materiality of production, Marx shows, confounds the idealism of intentionality. This dynamic is greatly exacerbated by capitalism, to which I turn next. The abstract logic of capitalist production is so divorced from its material effects that it threatens to utterly use up the earth and the workers on which it depends. Having reconstructed Marx’s account of labor and capital, however, only establishes the terms of the problem. The idealisms of concrete labor and capital have brought society to an impasse. In order to show how Marx confronts this impasse, I argue that we must recognize the profound self-reflexivity of Marx’s writings. Marx does not just write about labor, he engages in his own form of productivity. He endeavors, though his own writing, to redirect his readers away from both traditional intentionality and capital and towards the revolutionary materiality that conditions and frustrates these idealisms. My reading here gives special attention to Volume I of Capital, which is Marx’s most elaborately developed attempt to work this transformation on his readers. I demonstrate that Marx in fact extensively modeled Capital on Dante’s Inferno. Adapting the structure and purpose of Dante’s poem, Marx leads us on a descent through the mystifying categories of modern economics (the idea of capitalism) in order to free us from the fear of eternal imprisonment in this modern equivalent to Hell. Overcoming this paralyzing fear is Marx’s real labor. His hopeful materialism is an affirmation of what he calls “the movement that overcomes the present.” iii Table of Contents List of Figures vi Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Chapter One: Concrete Labor: The Making of ‘Man’ 1 A. Labor as tekhnē 4 1. Technical purposiveness 4 2. The double subordination 9 3. Form and function 15 B. The use and disadvantage of labor for life 20 1. Life and function 20 2. Arendt’s protest 25 3. The technicity of life 29 4. The anticipation structure of life 33 C. Towards a natural history of history 36 1. Externality and dysfunction 36 2. The natural origins of labor 41 3. Promethean anarchy 45 Chapter Two: Abstract Labor: The Production of Capital 52 A. The two-fold form of labor 55 1. The power of abstraction 55 2. Locating the abstraction of labor 58 3. The abstraction of the marketplace 64 B. The exploitation of labor 71 1. The valorization process 72 2. Formal subsumption 76 3. Real subsumption 81 C. The animated monster 86 1. Making capital productive 86 2. The transubstantiation of capital 92 3. Squandering substance 96 iv Chapter Three: Labor’s Hell: Into Political Economy 104 A. At the entrance to science 106 1. Karl Marx’s Wanderjahre 109 2. The function of the katabasis 113 B. Marx as guide 116 1. The guide’s rhetoric 116 2. The guide’s awareness 124 3. Getting past the inscription 128 C. The anatomy of Hell 133 1. The inverted world 133 2. The archaic limit 145 Chapter Four: Of Science and Poetry: Out from Political Economy 152 A. The thingly veil 155 1. The dead letter 155 2. Marx’s irony 158 B. The dangers of phenomenology 162 1. The economy of appearances 162 2. Imminent paralysis 165 3. Paralysis: a case study 170 C. Hope and the laboring body 178 1. The persistence of hope 178 2. The gravity of idealism 180 3. Centrifugal resistance 188 Chapter Five: Labor’s Purgatory: The Divine Comedy 197 A. “…that something in its heart that can fight back and resist…” 200 1. Objectifying the contradiction 202 2. Epicurus’ operation 206 B. The work of undermining 215 1. Specters of revolution 218 2. Some grave remarks 225 3. Acting lessons 231 C. Revolutionary stomachs 236 1. The character of Bonaparte’s steward 238 2. Vogt’s representations 242 3. Marx’s mode of production 248 Conclusion: The Steeling School of Labor 254 Bibliography 260 v List of Figures 1. The parallel structures of Dante’s Inferno and Marx’s Capital: p. 136 2. Bell and Sekine’s model of society’s trajectory through capitalism: p. 182 vi Preface Labor seems a quite simple category. Grundrisse, “Introduction” (1857)1 I begin this dissertation on Marx by noting the inescapability of Hegel. When Charles Taylor published his book on Hegel in 1975, he could say that, although Hegel’s problematic and approach are still centrally important to our time and thought, “his conclusions are dead.”2 Thirty years on, even the conclusions seem to have arisen to walk amongst us again. John Rawls proclaimed for political philosophy (a subject he almost single-handedly revived in America) the task of reconciling us to our time.3 John McCumber has striven to comprehend much of Twentieth Century Continental and postmodern thought as a series of gestures towards a very Hegelian project of freedom.4 Robert Brandom, Robert Pippin, and John McDowell have led the charge to rehabilitate Hegel within an Analytic idiom, which is especially astonishing given the deep-seated, virtually constitutive opposition of Analytic philosophy to anything resembling muddle-headed German dialectics.5 Habermas seems to be right about this; “we remain contemporaries of the Young Hegelians,”6 belabored by the Geist of one long dead. 1 G 103 2 Hegel, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 570. 3 Justice as Fairness: a Restatement, ed. E. Kelly, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 3-4. 4 See, e.g., his The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy, (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1993), and Philosophy and Freedom: Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault, (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000). 5 Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) and Tales of the Mighty Dead, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Robert B. Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); John McDowell, Mind and World, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). 6 The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, tr. Frederick G. Lawrence, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 53. vii Because philosophy finds itself haunted by Hegel, I want to turn to Marx. If the death of those regimes that held Marx aloft as their standard initially catalyzed proclamations that Hegel had triumphed over Marx,7 it has also set Marx free. Without an official dogma, and a state apparatus to maintain it, it is suddenly not so clear what “Marx” actually means. Once the statues are torn down and the sloganeers fall silent, all we have left is an immense collection of texts, texts that are far less chiseled and monumental than the statues and slogans they replace. Hegel had to die before he could return to haunt us; only after the first wave of Hegelianisms had died out was there any room for a new appreciation to grow. Perhaps it is the same with Marx. Now that Marx is dead and buried, his specter has been set free to roam. And perhaps also that other ghost, the ghost of revolution that moves about beneath the earth. Perhaps it is “still preoccupied with journeying through purgatory,” as Marx says in the Eighteenth Brumaire; perhaps it will yet cause us to “spring from [our] seat and cheer: Well undermined, old mole!”8 When you look under Arbeit in Konrad Löw’s Marxismus Quellen Lexicon, you encounter this surprising statement; “While Arbeit is of central significance for the Marxian worldview, Marx and Engels did not concern themselves with it systematically.”9 The judgment is seconded by Julius Dickmann; “The central concept of Marx’s entire system of teachings is the concept of human labor. […] But if one searches in the Marxian writings for a general conceptual definition of human labor, 7 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Penguin Books, 1992); Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), Ch. 3 (Himmelfarb cites a comment by Vaclav Havel as the source of the declaration). 8 EB, LPW 115; translation modified. 9 Konrad Löw, Marxismus Quellen Lexicon, (Köln: Kölner Universitätsverlag, 1985), p. 29. viii one will not find it anywhere.”10 Nowhere in Marx’s writings is there a prolonged explication of the most fundamental category of his ontology and his politics.