I should like to close by raising a problem, the problem of the possibility of the discourse of classical economics.
There is in fact one discourse whose conditions of possibility are clearly defined, that of vulgar economics. The problem is different where classical economics is concerned. The latter is not basically dependent on the conceptions of the agents of production. It is only dependent on them in its weaknesses (e.g., in the exoteric Adam Smith). How are we to explain both the relative autonomy of the discourse of classical economics, an autonomy that enables it to dissipate the appearances of fetishism, and its essential limitedness, its inability to arrive at an understanding of the real motion of capitalist production?
After praising the dissolution carried out by classical economics, Marx states: ‘Even its best representatives [of classical economics] remained more or less trapped in the world of illusion their criticism had dissolved, and nothing else is possible from the bourgeois standpoint’ (Vol. 3, p. 969). How is this impossibility revealed? I can try to reflect on the existence of two privileged points at which the misrecognition of the structure contained in the discourse of classical economics is affirmed. There are two things that classical economics does not see.
We have examined at length the first point, which concerns the misrecognition of the value-form. Here is how Marx poses the necessity of this misrecognition in classical economics:
It is one of the chief failings of classical political economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and in particular, of their value, in discovering the form of value which in fact turns value into exchange-value. Even its best representatives, Adam Smith and Ricardo, treat the form of value as something of indifference, something external to the nature of the commodity itself. The explanation for this is not simply that their attention is entirely absorbed by the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If we then make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc. (Vol. 1, p. 174n34).
What classical economics misrecognizes by allowing the value-form to be classified as inessential is the special historical character of the capitalist mode of production.
The same is true in the analysis of the second point, which concerns the origin of surplus-value. Practically all the errors of Smith and Ricardo, all the false formulations that they give to different problems have this same consequence: to obscure the formation of surplus-value.
There is a distinction absent from the whole discourse of classical economics, the distinction between variable capital and constant capital. Now positing this distinction dissipates the mystery of surplus-value. It reveals the motor of this process of capitalist production, the opposition between capital and wage-labour. It reveals capitalist production as determined by determinate historical relations of production.
Thus all the omissions and contradictions of the discourse of classical economics which turn on these two points, tend to conceal this fact; the existence of a historically determinate mode of production.
In classical political economy’s game of hunt-the-thimble, this is a point at which it must always get warm. There is something that it cannot see and this something that it cannot see is also what it has not to see. The concept of this having not to see is not in fact formulated by Marx.1 He does not reflect conceptually the specific conditions of possibility of the discourse of classical economics. The way he thinks the intrinsic limitedness of classical economies is analogical.
This will emerge from a study of a text in Volume Three, commenting on Ricardo’s position on the problem of the falling rate of profit:
It is the rate of profit that is the driving force in capitalist production, and nothing is produced save what can be produced at a profit. Hence the concern of the English economists over the decline of the profit rate. If Ricardo is disquieted even by the very possibility of this, that precisely shows his deep understanding of the conditions of capitalist production. What other people reproach him for, i.e., that he is unconcerned with ‘human beings’ and concentrates exclusively on the development of the productive forces when considering capitalist production – whatever sacrifices of human beings and capital values this is bought with – is precisely his significant contribution. The development of the productive forces of social labour is capital’s historical mission and justification. For that very reason, it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher mode of production. What disturbs Ricardo is the way that the rate of profit, which is the stimulus of capitalist production and both the condition for and the driving force in accumulation, is endangered by the development of production itself. And the quantitative relation is everything here. In actual fact, the underlying reason is something deeper, about which he has no more than a suspicion. What is visible here in a purely economic manner, i.e. from the bourgeois standpoint, within the limits of capitalist understanding, from the standpoint of capitalist production itself, are its barriers, its relativity, the fact that it is not an absolute but only a historical mode of production, corresponding to a specific and limited epoch in the development of the material conditions of production (Vol. 3, p. 368).
Let us note the concepts in play here. First we have Ricardo’s mere ‘suspicion’ (Ahnung). The presence of this concept is not neutral. Marx uses it precisely every time he wishes to point out Ricardo’s forebodings, his intuitions about the intrinsic nature of the capitalist mode of production which go beyond his limited ‘standpoint’. This necessary limitedness is marked here by three expressions: in rein ökonomischer Weise, im bourgeois Standpunkt, innerhalb der Grenzen des kapitalistischen Verstandes.
We can compare these expressions with a text from Volume One to be found at the end of the chapter on wages: ‘Classical political economy stumbles approximately onto the true state of affairs, but without consciously formulating it. It is unable to do this as long as it stays within its bourgeois skin’ (Vol. 1, p. 682).
A comparison of these two texts enables me to bring out the analogical model Marx uses to think the limitedness of classical economics. We have here the definition of a capitalist understanding (kapitalistische Verstand) which must not be confused with the conceptions (Vorstellungen) of a capitalist subject. Marx thought this capitalist understanding in terms of the model of the development of modes of production. We know that in a determinate mode of production, the productive forces develop up to a certain point where their development is fettered by the relations of production. The latter constitute the peculiar limit or barrier of a mode of production, a limit or barrier which is manifest in the phenomenon of the restriction of the productive forces. Now, the kapitalistische Verstand is thought precisely as a theoretical mode of production within which the theoretical productive forces can develop only up to a certain point, remaining subject to the absolute barrier peculiar to this mode of production. It is in this non-explicit analogical model that Marx thinks the intrinsic possibility and limitedness of the discourse of political economy, a prisoner of its ‘bourgeois skin’ as the productive forces are prisoners of bourgeois relations of production.
If this is so we can indeed affirm that Marx does not give us the concept of the possibility of the discourse of classical economics. In order to be able to formulate this concept it is necessary to think the common ground on which Marxist science parts with classical political economy. That is to say, in order to understand the possibility of classical economics it is necessary to pose the problem of the possibility of that science itself, of its relation to its historical conditions of possibility.
Marx by no means resolves this problem by resorting to a parallel between the development of the contradiction inherent to the capitalist mode of production and the development of its critique. I am referring to those famous texts where Marx explains that the scientific critique of the capitalist mode of production is possible from the moment that that system is itself in crisis.
It may be asked whether this link between crisis and critique is not a leftover from the historicist ideology characteristic of The German Ideology. Moreover this conception comes into contradiction with another conception in Marx – that of the purity of science. The possibility of this science is then linked to a sort of breathing space in history. Ricardo can conduct a scientific discourse because he is writing at a time of stability in which history is in some sense neutralized. As soon as the crises of capitalism and class struggles worsen, this discourse ceases to be possible and Ricardo’s successors collapse into apologetics and vulgar economics.
Generally speaking, a historicist conception, the one that accompanies the concept of critique, is opposed in Marx by a conception which founds the science in a radical rupture with the conditions of existence of historical agents. The problem is then to think the conditions of this rupture. If in Capital Marx determines the site of the science and the forms of its scientificity, it can be asked if he answers the question: how does one reach this site of the science?
In vulgar economics we see that the question is resolved by the determination of the place of the capitalist subject in Wirklichkeit; one can reach the domain whence comes the discourse of vulgar economics because one is already there. On the other hand there is no answer to the question of the access to the scientific discourse. And I do not think that the question is resolved by the famous passages in the 1857 Introduction.
We know that this question has been posed in the form ‘theory and history’, notably by Della Volpe’s school. But the answer this school gives it in the theory of the concrete-abstract-concrete circle, or the theory of the transition from historico-material instances to historico-rational instances, tends to fall behind the radical distinction established by Marx between the thought process and the real process. On the one hand the determinations of the abstract and the concrete are confused with those of thought and reality (empiricist subreption). On the other hand, the epistemological model proposed here is wholly permeated by the ideological categories past, present and future, which are imposed by the fact that the given object (history) has been accepted uncritically in its vulgar ideological definition. This reflection in the epistemological statement of the ideological properties of the ideological object that Della Volpe has adopted is manifested on the one hand in the conception of concrete-abstract-concrete movement and on the other hand in the antecedents-consequents structure supposed to define the form of scientificity. The relations between economic categories are thus thought on the model of a succession of antecedents and consequents situated in a linear continuum. We have seen from the example of Pietranera how this theory of rationality as a linear order of implications (a reflection of the properties of the ideological concept of history) misrecognized the dimension of science and the nature of the process that is its object.
Thus we see that the theoretical difficulties raised by the answer lie in the very way the question has been posed. We must therefore here carry to a conclusion a movement for which Marx provides us with the exemplary form and proceed to examine the very terms of the question, in particular the concept of history. If we are incapable of resolving the problem we shall at least know on what terrain it can be resolved – that of a different concept of history.