Editorial Note
1Althusser was himself aware of the shortcomings of the Roy translation, and wrote in his Notice to the first edition of Lire le Capital: ‘We have often had occasion to correct the standard French translations, including that of Volume One of Le Capital by Roy, so as to keep more closely to the German text …’ (p. 5). Where Althusser and his colleagues noted divergences in the French translation of Le Capital, we have maintained here their references to the volumes published by Éditions Sociales.
Presentation
1Althusser taught at the ENS from 1948 to 1980. Cf. É. Balibar, notice ALTHUSSER (Louis), in Bulletin de l’Association amicable de secours des anciens élèves de l’École normale supérieure, 1993, 45, rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris, as well as Y. Moulier-Boutang, Louis Althusser, une biographie (2 vols), Paris: Grasset, 1992 and 2002.
2The English edition of For Marx corresponds to the French original. The essays published in Positions appear in different English volumes.
3Formen, die der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise vorhergehen, a section of the Grundrisse (pp. 471–513).
4Cf. Pierre Macherey, ‘La philosophie de la science de Georges Canguilhem’, présentation de Louis Althusser, La Pensée, no. 113, January–February 1964.
5On Althusser’s encounter with Lacan in the early 1960s, cf. E. Roudinesco, La Bataille de cent ans. Histoire de la psychoanalyse en France, vol. 2, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986, pp. 386ff, which attributes this to Lacan’s reading of Althusser’s article ‘Philosophie et sciences humaines’, published in the Revue de l’Enseignement Philosophique, 13, 5, June–July 1963. In the theoretical conjuncture of the constitution of ‘structuralism’, the determining event was the appearance of ‘Freud et Lacan’ in La Nouvelle Critique, no. 161–162, December 1964-January 1965. Jacques Rancière’s text in this volume particularly makes several references to articles by Lacan published in La Psychanalyse (Paris: PUF, eight issues between 1956 and 1964), later collected in the volume Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), with a systematic index compiled by J.-A. Milner.
6In December 1960, Meillassoux had published in Cahiers d’Études Africaines (no. 4) his article ‘Essai d’interprétation du phénomène économique dans les sociétés traditionnelles d’auto-subsistance’, prefiguring his Anthropologie économique des Gouro de Côte-d’Ivoire (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1964). Some years later, Emmanuel Terray would revisit this work, comparing it with the propositions of Lire le Capital: ‘Le matérialisme historique devant les societies lignagères et segmentaires’, in Le Marxisme devant les societies ‘primitives’. Deux études, Théorie V, Paris: Maspero, 1969.
7Maurice Godelier, ‘Les structures de la méthode du Capital de Karl Marx’, Économie et Politique, nos. 70 and 71, May and June 1960, and ‘Quelques aspects de la méthode du Capital’, ibid., no. 80, March 1961 (both republished in Rationalité et irrationalité en économie, Paris: Maspero, 1966).
8Tape recordings of the sessions of the seminar were preserved by Althusser and are today available for consultation at the Institut Mémoire de l’Éditions Contemporaines. The Fonds Althusser established at the IMEC also holds preparatory notes and manuscripts, as well as copies of the first edition of Lire le Capital annotated and corrected by Althusser (IMEC, 25 rue de Lille, 75005 Paris).
9The subsequent volume, numbered IV, would be Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, 1966. This was followed in 1968 by the translation of Ludwig Feuerbach, L’Essence du Christianisme, translated and with a preface by Jean-Pierre Osier (‘Théorie/ Textes’). 1969 saw Emmanuel Terray’s Le Marxisme devant les societies ‘primitives’. Deux études (Théorie V). The ‘Théorie’ volumes published by François Maspero between 1965 and 1981 carry on their cover a drawing representing a limping goose, symbol of theory, designed by the architect Jacques Regnault and reproducing a detail from a Ravenna mosaic.
10The German text referred to by Althusser here may be either that of the 1955 Dietz Verlag edition or that of 1962, between which there are significant differences. For Theorien über den Mehrwert, it would be the Dietz Verlag edition, published in three volumes in 1956, 1959 and 1962 respectively. References to the Grundrisse are to the Dietz Verlag edition of 1953. There are also some references to the 1955 Dietz Verlag collection of Marx and Engels’s Kleine ökonomische Schriften, which contained in particular the text Die Wertform, an alternative draft of the first section of Volume One of Capital.
11A certain number of translations separate from other contributions have appeared in various journals, but only recently are complete editions appearing in foreign languages. The first of these was the Japanese edition, followed by Italian and German as well as the present English edition.
12This corresponds to the ‘Foreword to the Italian Edition’ in the 1970 English edition.
13This was published in English as ‘How to use Lire le Capital’, in Economy and Society, vol. 5, no. 3, 1976.
Part One: From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy
1We owe this result, which has revolutionized our reading of Freud, to Jacques Lacan’s intransigent and lucid – and for many years isolated – theoretical effort. At a time when the radical novelty of what Jacques Lacan has given us is beginning to pass into the public domain, where everyone can make use of it and profit by it in his own way, I feel bound to acknowledge my debt to an exemplary reading lesson which, as we shall see, goes beyond its object of origin in some of its effects. I feel bound to acknowledge this publicly, so that ‘the tailor’s labour (does not) disappear … into the coat’ (Marx), even into my coat. Just as I feel bound to acknowledge the obvious or concealed debts which bind us to our masters in reading learned works, once Gaston Bachelard and Jean Cavaillès and now Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault.
2Louis Althusser, For Marx, Verso: London 2006, pp. 46, 66–70, etc.
3Auguste Comte often came very close to this idea.
4‘Relation of immanent reflection’: this ‘reflection’ itself poses a theoretical problem which I cannot deal with here, but which will be outlined at the end of this introduction (section 19).
5The recourse made in this text to spatial metaphors (field, terrain, space, site, situation, position, etc.) poses a theoretical problem: the problem of the validity of its claim to existence in a discourse with scientific pretensions. The problem may be formulated as follows: why does a certain form of scientific discourse necessarily need the use of metaphors borrowed from non-scientific disciplines?
6I retain the spatial metaphor. But the change of terrain takes place on the spot: in all strictness, we should speak of the mutation of the mode of theoretical production and of the change of function of the subject induced by this change of mode.
7If I may invoke my personal experience, I should like to give two precise examples of this presence elsewhere in Marx or in Engels of the question absent from its answer. At the cost of a decidedly laborious investigation, the text of which (For Marx, pp. 89ff) bears the mark of these difficulties, I succeeded in identifying a pertinent absence in the idea of the ‘inversion’ of the Hegelian dialectic by Marx: the absence of its concept, and therefore of its question. I managed to reconstruct this question laboriously, by showing that the ‘inversion’ Marx mentions had as its effective content a revolution in the problematic. But later, reading Engels’s Preface to Volume Two of Capital, I was stupefied to find that the question I had had such trouble in formulating was there in black and white! Engels expressly identifies the ‘inversion’, the ‘setting right side up again’ of the chemistry and political economy which had been standing on their heads, with a change in their ‘theory’, and therefore in their problematic. Or again: in one of my first essays, I had suggested that Marx’s theoretical revolution lay not in his change of the answers, but in his change of the questions, and that therefore Marx’s revolution in the theory of history consisted of a ‘change of elements’ by which he moved from the terrain of ideology to the terrain of science (For Marx, p. 47). But recently, reading the chapter of Capital on wages, I was stupefied to see that Marx used the very expression ‘change of terrain’ to express this change of theoretical problematic. Here again, the question (or its concept) which I had laboriously reconstituted out of its absence in one precise point of Marx’s, Marx himself gave in black and white somewhere else in his work.
8Pierre Macherey, ‘A propos de la rupture’, La Nouvelle Critique, Paris, May 1965, p. 139.
9For Marx, pp. 34–5.
10For Marx, pp. 164ff.
11The same applies to the ‘reading’ of those new works of Marxism which, sometimes in surprising forms, contain in them something essential to the future of socialism: what Marxism is producing in the vanguard countries of the ‘third world’ which is struggling for its freedom, from the guerrillas of Vietnam to Cuba. It is vital that we be able to ‘read’ these works before it is too late.
12So long as empiricism is understood in this generic sense it is possible to accept the inclusion within the concept of empiricism of the sensualist empiricism of the eighteenth century. If the latter does not always realize knowledge in its real object in the way I am about to describe, if from a certain standpoint it thinks knowledge as the product of a history, it realizes knowledge in the reality of a history which is merely the development of what it originally contains. By this standard, what I am about to say about the structure of the real relationship between knowledge and its real object is equally valid for the relationship between knowledge and real history in eighteenth-century ideology.
13I am neither inventing nor joking. Michelangelo developed a whole aesthetic of artistic production based not on the production of the essential form out of the marble material, but on the destruction of the non-form which envelopes the form to be disengaged even before the first chip is cut out. A practice of aesthetic production is here buried in an empiricist realism of extraction.
14Note carefully that here I only discuss and reject the theory of models as an ideology of knowledge. In this respect, however elaborate its forms (e.g., contemporary neo-positivism), it remains an avatar of the empiricist conception of knowledge. This rejection does not include within its ban another meaning and use of the category ‘model’, precisely the meaning that effectively corresponds to the technical use of ‘models’ as can be seen in various circumstances in the technical practice of planning in the socialist countries. The ‘model’ is then a technical means with which to compound the different data with a view to obtaining a certain goal. The empiricism of the ‘model’ is then in its place, at home, not in the theory of knowledge but in practical application, i.e., in the order of the technique for realizing certain aims as a function of certain data, on the basis of certain knowledges provided by the science of political economy. In a famous phrase which has unfortunately not had the echo it deserved in practice, Stalin condemned the confusion of political economy and economic policy, of theory with its technical application. The empiricist conception of the model as an ideology of knowledge obtains all the appearances necessary for its imposture from the confusion between the technical instrument that a model in fact is, and the concept of knowledge.
15The brilliant errors of Politzer’s Critique des fondements de la psychologie largely depend on the ideological function of the uncriticized concept of the ‘concrete’: it is no accident that Politzer’s proclamation of the arrival of ‘concrete psychology’ was never followed by any works. All the virtue of the term ‘concrete’ was in fact exhausted in its critical use, without it ever founding the slightest amount of knowledge, which only exists in the ‘abstraction’ of concepts. It was already possible to see this even in Feuerbach, who tried desperately to free himself from ideology by invoking the ‘concrete’, i.e., the ideological concept which confuses knowledge and being: obviously, ideology cannot liberate ideology. The same ambiguity and the same play on words can be found in all the interpreters of Marx who refer themselves to the Early Works, invoking ‘real’, ‘concrete’ or ‘positive’ humanism as the theoretical basis of his work. They do have excuses, it is true: all Marx’s own expressions in the Works of the Break (the Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology) speak of the concrete, the real, of ‘real’ concrete men, etc. But the Works of the Break themselves are still trapped in the ambiguity of a negation which still clings to the universe of the concepts it rejects, without having succeeded in adequately formulating the new and positive concepts it brings with it (cf. For Marx, pp. 36–7).
16For Marx, pp. 190–1.
17In France, the work of Koyré, Bachelard, Cavaillès, Canguilhem and Foucault.
18Georges Canguilhem, La Formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris: PUF, 1955.
19Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, New York: Vintage, 1988.
20Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, New York: Vintage, 1994.
21Pierre Macherey, ‘A propos de la rupture’, pp. 136–40.
22A discourse inaugurated by Descartes, expressly conscious of the crucial importance of the ‘order of reasons’ in philosophy as well as in the sciences, and also conscious of the distinction between the order of knowledge and the order of being, despite his lapse into a dogmatic empiricism.
1: The Critique of Political Economy in the 1844 Manuscripts
1The reference is to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.
2Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Brook, London : Verso, 2013, pp. 208–9.
3Ibid., p. 157.
4Jean-Yves Calvez, La Pensée de Karl Marx, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1956.
5MECW 3, pp. 418–43.
6Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Brook, p. 171.
Chapter 2: Critique and Science in Capital
1See the Appendix (pp. 123–5) on the problems raised by this point.
2The question is to know the type of object we are dealing with and what founds its nature as an object.
3The French edition of Capital Volume One reads rather differently: ‘There is only one determinate epoch in the historical development of society which generally transforms the products of labour into commodities, the one in which the labour expended in the production of useful objects takes on the character of a quality inherent in those things, their value’ (t. I, p. 75). Note Marx’s addition of the qualifying ‘generally’. This is not unconnected with the difficulty referred to in the Appendix below.
4It seems that this analysis of form defines for Marx the form of scientificity. It is interesting to read his admiration for Aristotle on this point; Aristotle is described as the great thinker who was the first to analyse so many forms, whether of thought, society, or nature, and amongst them also the form of value (Vol. 1, p. 151).
5See in particular Marx’s letters to Engels of 8 January 1868 and to Kugelmann of 11 July 1868.
6In ‘Fonction de la formation théorique’, Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes, no. 1, Jacques-Alain Miller has expounded this law of inversion which determines the perception of the structure by the subject:
In the structural system in which production is articulated in a specific mode, the zone of the displacement of the subject – in so far as it maintains itself at the level of the current (actuel), i.e., in so far as the structure concedes it the perception of its state (of its apparent motion) while stealing that of its system – is defined as illusion. The latter, in so far as the subject reflects it, signifies it, in a word reduplicates it, perpetuates itself in the form of ideology. Illusion and ideology, if they are thought in the continuity from a ‘seeing’ to a ‘telling’, form the element natural to a subject rigorously qualified by its insertion into the structure of a social formation. Precisely because the economy is the last instance, to be situated as the referent of all manifestations of social practice, its action is radically foreign to the dimension of the current (actuel), it offers itself by its effects. The absence of the cause is enough to achieve the inversion of the structural determinations at the level of the individual consciousness. As perception, the inversion is illusion. As discourse, ideology.
7The price of production of a commodity is equal to its cost of production plus a percentage of profit calculated in conformity with the general rate of profit. The latter represents the ratio of the total mass of surplus-value extorted by the capitalist class to the total capital it has advanced. Indeed, it is essential to realize that surplus-value is produced for the whole of the capitalist class. The movements of competition which balance up the rates of profit in the different spheres have as their aim the realization of this ‘capitalist communism’.
8The money-value M permits the purchase of a commodity-value C of commodities L (labour-power) and mp (means of production). These are then engaged in the productive circuit P which results in an increased commodity value C′ which is converted into M′.
9The exchange M – C.
10Further on we shall see the theoretical calamity that befell Price in taking this reason for a geometrical reason.
11The precise inadequacy of this scheme to express the mechanism of fetishization becomes readily apparent if we note that the ‘subjectification’ of things (autonomization of material bearers) by no means corresponds to a materialization of persons. On the contrary, it is the form (figure) of the contract between two free persons, two constitutive subjectivities that, in the form of interest-bearing capital, corresponds to the form (figure) of the automaton-thing. Evidently fetishism does not concern the relation of a subject to an object but the relation of each of these bearers to the relations of production that determine them.
12Cf. Jacques Lacan, ‘Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”‘, Écrits, London: Norton, 2006, p. 544:
When Daniel Lagache thus starts from a choice he proposes between a structure that is in some sense apparent (which would imply a critique of what is natural in descriptive characteristics) and a structure that he says is located at some distance from experience (since it is a question of the ‘theoretical model’ that he recognizes in psychoanalytic metapsychology), this antinomy neglects a mode of structure which, although it is tertiary, cannot be excluded – namely, the effects that the pure and simple combinatory of the signifier determines in the reality in which it is produced. For is it not structuralism that allow us to posit our experience as the field in which it (ça) speaks? If the answer is yes, structure’s ‘distance from experience’ vanishes, since it operates there not as a theoretical model, but as the original machine that directs (met en scène) the subject there.
13Let us recall that in order to pose the theory of the three sources, Adam Smith had to misrecognize that value produced breaks down in reality on the one hand into capital and on the other into revenue (wages, profit and rent). The part destined to be reconverted into capital disappears in his analysis. In other words, the same thing is expressed by saying that wages, profit (profit of enterprise + interest) and rent constitute value, or that profit and rent constitute surplus-value.
14Marx-Engels, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd 3, Berlin, 1932, p. 501.
Chapter 3: Remarks by Way of Conclusion
1To say that classical economics cannot see these points because they contain inscribed in them the historical character of the capitalist mode of production and therefore its inevitable end, and to say that capitalism cannot bear to look its own death in the face, is obviously no substitute for the formulation of the concept of this blindness.
Part Three: On the Process of Exposition of Capital (The Work of Concepts)
1This is why we shall avoid as far as possible speaking of an order of exposition.
2Let us remember that autonomous is not synonymous with independent: the process of acquiring knowledge is specific, but not separate.
3The point, therefore, is to give the idea of epistemology a new meaning: the preconditions that it takes as objects are not only rational conditions, they are also objective conditions.
4With the ambiguity that this notion bears in Hegelian philosophy: self-knowledge that is by this fact alone knowledge of the whole.
5We can say in a general sense that every enterprise of demystification is mystifying in kind.
6Of course, Marx’s work cannot be reduced to an event in the history of science, ‘in the pure element of thought’. But the revolution that Marx effected took place also in this history, removing it from its status as a purely theoretical history.
7Not on the ground of economic science, but alongside it, in the new context of a problematic of the mode of production.
8It is clear, moreover, that the ‘start’ is from the real; but that does not allow anything to be said about the form that this departure will take – and this is the essential problem.
9It is idealism that reduces material reality to simply a content.
Chapter 2: The Analysis of the Commodity and the Appearance of Contradiction
1It should be noted that the thing is not a purely qualitative factor: it is susceptible to quantitative treatment.
2Clearly, we should not say that for Marx contradiction is always and essentially apparent, i.e., a property of thought: the materialist dialectic is one that, on the contrary, studies contradictions ‘in the very essence of things’, according to Lenin’s formulation. But, in the passage of the text we are considering, the beginning of the analysis of value, contradiction operates as a formal contradiction. We can at least draw one hypothesis from this: the analysis of Capital presents and develops several kinds of contradiction, and its ‘logic’, despite being effectively materialist, cannot be reduced to a logic of contradiction in general.
3In this sense, a formal contradiction is also a real contradiction.
Chapter 3: The Analysis of Value
1If this confusion is maintained, it prevents any understanding of how thought appropriates the real on the basis of the real itself.
2Cf. Louis Althusser, ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’, For Marx.
3Knowledge does not reflect reality either mechanically or immediately.
4Which does not mean that it constitutes it. Quite the contrary: and it is here that the notion of reflection acquires its full meaning.
5This process of knowledge, however, is neither independent nor primary. It is determined as such by the material reality (whose reflection it is, as the effect of objective conditions).
Chapter 1: Introduction
1For very profound reasons, it was often in fact political militants and leaders who, without being professional philosophers, were best able to read and understand Capital as philosophers. Lenin is the most extraordinary example: his philosophical understanding of Capital gives his economic and political analysis an incomparable profundity, rigour and acuity. In our image of Lenin, the great political leader all too often masks the man who undertook the patient, detailed and profound study of Marx’s great theoretical works. It is no accident that we owe to the first years of Lenin’s public activity (the years preceding the 1905 Revolution) so many acute texts devoted to the most difficult questions of the theory of Capital. Ten years of study and meditation on Capital gave the man the incomparable theoretical formation which produced the prodigious political understanding of the leader of the Russian and international workers’ movement. And this is also the reason why Lenin’s political and economic works (not only the written works, but also the historical ones) are of such theoretical and philosophical value: we can study Marxist philosophy at work in them, in the ‘practical’ state, Marxist philosophy which has become politics, political action, analysis and decision. Lenin: an incomparable theoretical and philosophical formation turned political.
Chapter 3: The Merits of Classical Economics
1Cf. Part One, sections 16 and 18.
2Cf. Part One, sections 16, 17 and 18.
3The price of this silence: read Chapter 7 of Rosenthal’s book (Les problèmes de la dialectique dans ‘Le Capital’) and in particular the pages devoted to avoiding the problem of the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ abstraction (pp. 304–5, 325–7). Think of the fortunes in Marxist philosophy of a term as ambiguous as ‘generalization’, which is used to think (i.e., not to think) the nature of scientific abstraction. The price of this unheard silence is the empiricist temptation.
4There must be no misunderstanding of the meaning of this silence. It is part of a determinate discourse, whose object was not to set out the principles of Marxist philosophy, the principles of the theory of the history of the production of knowledges, but to establish the methodological rules indispensable to a treatment of Political Economy. Marx therefore situated himself within an already constituted learning without posing the problem of its production. That is why, within the limits of this text, he could treat Smith’s and Ricardo’s ‘good abstractions’ as corresponding to a certain real, and keep his silence as to the extraordinarily complex conditions that gave birth to classical Political Economy: he could leave in suspense the point of knowing what process could have produced the field of the classical problematic in which the object of classical Political Economy could be constituted as an object, giving by its knowledge a certain grasp on the real, even though it was still dominated by ideology. The fact that this methodological text leads us to the threshold of the requirement that we constitute that theory of the production of knowledge which is the same thing as Marxist philosophy, is a requirement for us: but it is also a requirement for which we are indebted to Marx, so long as we are attentive both to the theoretical incompleteness of this text (its silence on this particular point) and to the philosophical scope of his new theory of history (in particular to what it constrains us to think: the articulation of ideological practice and scientific practice to the other practices, and the organic and differential history of these practices). In other words, we can treat the silence in this text in one of two ways: either by taking it for a silence that goes without saying because its content is the dominant theory of empiricist abstraction; or by treating it as a limit and a problem. A limit: the furthest point to which Marx took his thought; but then this limit, far from returning us to the old field of empiricist philosophy, opens a new field before us. A problem: what precisely is the nature of this new field? We now have at our disposal enough studies in the history of learning to suspect that we must look in quite different directions from the empiricist one. But in this decisive investigation, Marx himself has provided our fundamental principles (the structuration and articulation of the different practices). From which we can see the difference between the ideological treatment of a theoretical silence or emptiness, and its scientific treatment: the former confronts us with an ideological closure, the latter with a scientific openness. Here we can see immediately a precise example of the ideological threat that hangs over all scientific labour: ideology not only lies in wait for science at each point where its rigour slackens, but also at the furthest point where an investigation currently reaches its limits. There, precisely, philosophical activity can intervene at the level of the life of the science: as the theoretical vigilance that protects the openness of science against the closure of ideology, on condition, of course, that it does not limit itself to speaking of openness and closure in general, but rather of the typical, historically determined structures of this openness and closure. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin constantly recalls this absolutely fundamental requirement which constitutes the specific function of Marxist philosophy.
Chapter 4: The Errors of Classical Economics: Outline of a Concept of Historical Time
1Hegelian philosophy has even been called a ‘speculative empiricism’ (Feuerbach).
2Cf. ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ and ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’ in For Marx, op. cit., pp. 87ff., and 161ff.
3Cf. Part One, section 13.
4To avoid any misunderstanding, I should add that this critique of the latent empiricism which haunts the common use of the bastard concept of ‘diachrony’ today obviously does not apply to the reality of historical transformations, e.g., the transition from one mode of production to another. If the aim is to designate this reality (the fact of the real transformation of structures) as ‘the diachrony’, this is merely to apply the term to the historical itself (which is never purely static) or, by making a distinction within the historical, to what is visibly transformed. But once the aim is to think the concept of these transformations, we are no longer in the real (the ‘diachronic’) but in knowledge, in which – in so far as the real ‘diachronic’ itself is concerned – the epistemological dialectic that has just been set out comes into play: the concept and the ‘development of its forms’. On this point cf. Balibar’s essay below.
5We are indebted to Kant for the suspicion that problems which do not exist may give rise to massive theoretical efforts, and the more or less rigorous production of solutions as fantastic as their object, for his philosophy may be broadly conceived as a theory of the possibility of the existence of ‘sciences’ without objects (rational metaphysics, cosmology and psychology). If it so happens that the reader does not have the heart to tackle Kant, he can consult directly the producers of ‘sciences’ without objects: e.g., theologians, most social psychologists, some ‘psychologists’, etc. I should also add that in certain circumstances, the theoretical and ideological conjuncture may make these ‘sciences without objects’ produce or contain, during the elaboration of the theory of their supposed ‘objects’, the theoretical forms of existing rationality: e.g., in the Middle Ages, theology undoubtedly contained and elaborated the forms of the theoretical then in existence.
Chapter 5: Marxism Is Not a Historicism
1Gramsci: ‘No, the mechanical forces never predominate in history; it is the men, the consciousnesses and the spirit which mould the external appearance and always triumph in the end … The pseudo-scientists’ natural law and fatal course of events has been replaced by man’s tenacious will’ (from a text published in Rinascità, 1957, pp. 149–58, quoted by Mario Tronti in Studi Gramsciani, Rome: Editoria Riunità, 1959, p. 306.
2Here we need a full study of his typical metaphors and their proliferation around a centre which it is their mission to focus as they cannot call it by its right name, the name of its concept.
3The fact and necessity of this dislocation are not peculiar to Marx but common to every scientific founding moment and to all scientific production generally: a study of them is part of a theory of the history of the production of knowledges and a history of the theoretical the necessity for which we feel here also.
4This is not untrue, of course, but when this limitation is directly related to ‘history’ there is once again a risk of merely invoking the ideological concept of history.
5In the sense defined in For Marx, pp. 242ff.
6‘Assuming Benedetto Croce’s definition of religion as a conception of the world which has become a norm of life, since norm of life is not understood in a bookish sense but as a norm realized in practical life, the majority of men are philosophers in so far as they work practically; a conception of the world, a philosophy is implicit in their working practice’ (Gramsci: Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, Milan 1948, p. 21).
‘But at this point we reach the fundamental problem facing any conception of the world, any philosophy which has become a cultural movement, a “religion”, a “faith”, any that has produced a form of practical activity or will in which the philosophy is contained as an implicit theoretical “premise”. One might say “ideology” here, but on condition that the word is used in its highest sense of a conception of the world that is implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity and in all manifestations of individual and collective life. This problem is that of preserving the ideological unity of the entire social bloc which that ideology serves to cement and unify’ (ibid., p. 7).
The reader will have noted that the conception of an ideology which is ‘implicitly’ manifest in art, law, economic activity and ‘all the manifestations of individual and collective life’ is very close to the Hegelian conception.
7All men are philosophers’ (ibid., p. 3).
‘Since all action is political, can one not say that the real philosophy of each man is contained in its entirety in his political action? … Hence the reason why philosophy cannot be divorced from politics. And one can show furthermore that the choice and the criticism of a conception of the world is also a political matter’ (ibid., p. 6).
‘If it is true that every philosophy is the expression of a society, it must react on that society and determine certain positive and negative effects; the precise extent to which it reacts is the measure of its historical scope, of the extent to which it is not an individual “elucubration” but a “historical fact”’ (ibid., pp. 23–4).
‘The identity of history and philosophy is immanent in historical materialism … The proposition that the German proletariat is the heir of classical German philosophy contains precisely the identity between history and philosophy …’ (ibid., p. 217). Cf. pp. 232–4.
8What corresponds here to the concept of historicism’, in this interpretation, has a precise name in Marxism: it is the problem of the union of theory and practice, more particularly, the problem of the union of Marxist theory and the workers’ movement.
9Gramsci, op. cit., pp. 8–9.
10Cf. e.g.: ‘The philosophy of praxis derives certainly from the immanentist conception of reality, but it derives from it in so far as it is purified of any speculative aroma and reduced to pure history or historicity or to pure humanism … Not only is the philosophy of praxis connected to immanentism. It is also connected to the subjective conception of reality, to the extent precisely that it turns it on its head, explaining it as a historical fact, as the “historical subjectivity of a social group [class]”, as a real fact, which presents itself as a phenomenon of philosophical “speculation” and is simply a practical act, the form of a concrete social content and the means of leading the ensemble of society to shape for itself a moral unity’ (ibid., p. 191).
Or again: ‘If it is necessary, in the perennial flux of events, to fix concepts without which reality cannot be understood, one must also, and it is indeed quite indispensable, fix and recall that reality in movement and concept of reality, though logically they may be distinct, historically must be conceived as an inseparable unity’ (ibid., p. 216).
Echoes of Bogdanov’s empiricism are obvious in the first text; the second features the empiricist-speculative thesis of all historicism: the identity of the concept and the real (historical) object.
11Cf. Gramsci’s astonishing pages on science in Il materialismo storico, pp. 54–7. ‘But in reality science, too, is a superstructure, an ideology (p. 56).
12Ibid., p. 160.
13On the concept of ‘mediation’ see Part One, section 18.
14Gramsci even gives Sartre’s distinction between philosophy and history in so many words (Il materialismo storico, op. cit., p. 197).
15The same structural causes can give rise to the opposite effect: with Sartre, we can say just as easily that the Marxist science of history becomes philosophy.
16Cf. Gramsci’s critique of Bukharin, and Colletti’s introduction to Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, now in Marxism and Hegel, London: Verso, 1973.
17A moment ago I spoke of the peculiar origins of Sartre’s philosophy. Sartre thinks with Descartes, Kant, Husserl and Hegel, but his most profound thought undoubtedly comes from Politzer and (paradoxical as this juxtaposition might appear) secondarily from Bergson. But Politzer is the Feuerbach of our time: his Critique des fondements de la psychologie is a critique of speculative Psychology in the name of a concrete Psychology. Sartre may have treated Politzer’s themes as ‘philosophemes’: he has not abandoned his inspiration; when Sartre’s historicism inverts the ‘totality’, the abstractions of dogmatic Marxism, he is also ‘repeating’ in a different place and with respect to different objects an ‘inversion’ which, from Feuerbach to the Young Marx and Politzer, has merely conserved the same problematic behind an apparent critique.
18This surreptitious practice is common to all the humanist interpretations of Marxism.
19Cf. La Nouvelle Critique, nos. 164, 165, etc.
20This example can, by analogy, be compared with that of the symptom, the slip of the tongue and the dream – which is, for Freud, a ‘wish-fulfilment’ (plein du désir). [Cf. Louis Althusser: ‘Freud and Lacan’, New Left Review 1/55, May-June 1969, p. 61, n.6.]
Chapter 6: The Epistemological Propositions of Capital (Marx, Engels)
1Cf. Capital, Vol. 1, p. 90 n1, where Marx speaks of creating a new ‘terminology’.
2This is a very remarkable, even exemplary text. It gives us a quite different idea of Engels’s exceptional epistemological sensitivity from that which we have gathered from him in other circumstances. There will be other occasions on which we shall be able to signal Engels’s theoretical genius, for he is far from being the second-rate commentator usually contrasted unfavourably with Marx.
3The history of science is no different from social history here: there are those in both ‘who have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing’, especially when they have seen the show from the front row.
4A good example: Freud’s ‘object’ is a radically new object with respect to the ‘object’ of the psychological or philosophical ideologies of his predecessors. Freud’s object is the unconscious, which has nothing to do with the objects of all the varieties of modern psychology, although the latter can be multiplied at will! It is even possible to see the number one task of every new discipline as that of thinking the specific difference of the new object which it discovers, distinguishing it rigorously from the old object and constructing the peculiar concepts required to think it. It is in this basic theoretical work that a science wins its effective right to autonomy in open combat.
Chapter 7: The Object of Political Economy
1On the modern theories, Maurice Godelier’s remarkable article ‘Objets and méthodes de l’anthropologie économique’ (L’Homme, October 1965 and in Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, London: Verso, 2014) can be read with profit.
2The concept of ‘civil society’, as found in Marx’s mature writings and constantly repeated by Gramsci to designate the sphere of economic existence, is ambiguous and should be struck from Marxist theoretical vocabulary – unless it is made to designate not the economic as opposed to the political, but the ‘private’ as opposed to the public, i.e., a combined effect of law and legal-political ideology on the economic.
Chapter 8: Marx’s Critique
1Although there is no time to do it here, I should like to note that it would be of great interest to study these long critiques of Marx’s in order to find out on the one hand what distinguishes Marx from Smith in this crucial matter and on the other how and where he locates the essential difference – in order to find out how he explains Smith’s incredible ‘oversight’, ‘blindness’, ‘misconstruction’ and ‘forgetfulness’ which are at the root of the ‘absurd dogma’ that dominates all modern economics, and finally, in order to find out why Marx felt the need to begin this critique four or five times over, as if he had not got to the bottom of it. And we should then discover, among other epistemologically relevant conclusions, that Smith’s ‘enormous oversight’ was directly related to his exclusive consideration of the individual capitalist, i.e., of economic subjects considered outside the whole as the ultimate subjects of the global process. In other words, we should discover once again the determinant presence of the anthropological ideology in its directly effective form (essential references: Capital, Vol. 2, pp. 268–305 and 435–512; Vol. 3, pp. 971–91, Theories of Surplus-Value, MECW 30, pp. 398–408).
2For all these questions, barely outlined in this chapter, see Étienne Balibar’s paper – especially his important analysis of the concept of productive forces.
3See his paper in this volume.
4One important specification. The term ‘property’ used by Marx can lead to the belief that the relations of production are identical with legal relations. But law is not the relations of production. The latter belong to the infrastructure, the former to the superstructure.
5Cf. Godelier’s article ‘Objet et méthode de l’anthropologie économique’ (L’Homme, October 1965 and in Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, op. cit.).
Chapter 9: Marx’s Immense Theoretical Revolution
1See above, Chapter 3 of this essay.
2Cf. Part One, section 14.
3An expression Jacques-Alain Miller has introduced to characterize a form of structural causality registered in Freud by Jacques Lacan.
4Capital, Vol. 3, p. 956: ‘All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence.’ This re-echoes the old dream which haunted all classical political reflection: all politics would be superfluous if men’s passions and reasons coincided.
Appendix: On the ‘Ideal Average’ and the Forms of Transition
1Cf. Balibar’s paper.
Part Five: On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism
1Notable among these manuscripts is the one titled ‘Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production’ (Grundrisse, pp. 471–514).
2Lenin: ‘What the Friends of the People Really Are and How they Fight the Social-Democrats’, Collected Works, Vol. I.
3Louis Althusser, ‘A Complementary Note on Real Humanism’, For Marx, pp. 242–7.
4‘Artificial but not arbitrary.’ Here I have adopted Auguste Comte’s very words in the Cours de philosophie positive (First Lecture, Vol. I, p. 24) about the division of science into several branches. The problem of the ‘break’ between the different states of a single science is of the same nature: ‘It is impossible to assign a precise origin to this revolution … It is constantly more and more complete … However, … it is convenient to fix an epoch in order to prevent our ideas from straying’ (ibid., p. 10). Bacon, Descartes and Galileo thus determine the transition of physics to positivity, and at the same time the beginning of the general preponderance of the positive state. With his double articulation of the sciences and the law of the three states, Comte is the most rigorous thinker so far of this general theoretical problem: how the distinct practices which constitute a ‘division of labour’ are articulated together, and how this articulation varies with the mutations in these practices (‘breaks’).
5Here we should note a serious difficulty for our reading, not only where the Contribution is concerned, but also Capital: the term ‘social formation’ which Marx uses, may be either an empirical concept designating the object of a concrete analysis, i.e., an existence: England in 1860, France in 1870, Russia in 1917, etc., or else an abstract concept replacing the ideological notion of ‘society’ and designating the object of the science of history in so far as it is a totality of instances articulated on the basis of a determinate mode of production. This ambiguity includes, first, philosophical problems of a theory of science and of the concept, which are not explicitly solved, and the empiricist tendency to think the theoretical object of an abstract science as a mere ‘model’ of existing realities (see Althusser’s paper on this point). But, secondly, it also includes an objective omission from historical materialism itself, which can only be imputed to the inevitably gradual character of its development: Capital, which expounds the abstract theory of the capitalist mode of production, does not undertake to analyse concrete social formations which generally contain several different modes of production, whose laws of coexistence and hierarchy must therefore be studied. The problem is only implicitly and partially contained in the analysis of ground-rent (Volume Three); it is only present practically in Marx’s historical and political works (The Eighteenth Brumaire, etc.); Lenin alone, in The Development of Capitalism in Russia and the works of the period of the transition to socialism, begins to treat this problem theoretically.
And we should also note that the insufficient elaboration, in this first draft, of the concepts which designate the articulation of the instances of the social formation, is in itself the (negative) cause of a constant confusion in Marxist literature between the social formation and its economic infrastructure (which is itself often related to one mode of production). Many of the contemporary discussions of non-capitalist or pre-capitalist modes of production bear witness to this.
Chapter 1: From Periodization to the Modes of Production
1Periodization, thought of as the periodization of the modes of production themselves, in their purity, first gives form to the theory of history. Thus the majority of the indications in which Marx assembles the elements of his definition are comparative indications. But behind this descriptive terminology (men do not produce in the same way in the different historical modes of production, capitalism does not contain the universal nature of economic relations), there is the indication of what makes the comparisons possible at the level of the structures, the search for the invariant determinations (for the ‘common features’) of ‘production in general’, which does not exist historically, but whose variants are represented by all the historical modes of production (cf. the 1857 Introduction).
2Louis Althusser: ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’, For Marx, op. cit., Chapter 6.
3It is not my aim to give a theory of ‘fetishism’, i.e., of the ideological effects directly implied by the economic structure, nor even to examine in detail what Marx himself tells us about it, but merely to retain and use the index he provides by explicitly linking the problem of fetishism with that of the place of the economy in the structure of various social formations.
4First of all, since it is always necessary at the theoretical level to begin with what is determinant ‘in the last instance’. The reason is clear: the very names of the problems depend on it.
5Pierre Vilar writes of the feudal mode of production: ‘In general, growth seems to depend on a re-occupation of waste lands, on an investment in labour rather than in capital, and the owning classes’ levy on production is legal and not economic’ (Première Conférence Internationale d’Histoire Économique, Stockholm 1960, p. 36). To this point we should add the oft-repeated comment that it is difficult to find specifically economic crises outside capitalism.
6On this point, see particularly the works of Claude Meillassoux: ‘Essai d’interprétation des phénoménes économiques dans les sociétés d’auto-subsistence’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 1960, no. 4; Anthropologie Économique des Gouro de Cote d’Ivoire, The Hague: Mouton, 1964.
Chapter 2: The Elements of the Structure and their History
1Obviously, we are here using a general concept of ‘manual labour’, one not restricted to actions performed by the hands, although the hands are the dominant organs, but extended to the work of the whole psycho-physiological organism. Similarly, ‘machine’ should not be understood in the restricted sense of machines which are mechanical.
2In the text of Capital, this determination is followed by a second one, which notes that in the capitalist mode of production the description ‘productive worker’ is at the same time restricted to the wage-worker, the worker who corresponds to an advance of variable capital for the capitalist. These two inverse movements (extension-limitation) are not mutually exclusive or contradictory.
3The function of ownership of the means of production may be performed by individuals, collectivities, real or imaginary representatives of the collectivity, etc.; it may appear in a unique form, or, on the contrary, be duplicated – ‘property’ and ‘possession’, etc.
4‘The means of labour acquire in mechanization a material form of existence (materielle Existenzweise) which is the condition for the substitution of natural forces for human force, and the conscious application of science instead of empirical routine’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 508).
5References to the ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ are to The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey, Vol. VII, London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
6In reality, these questions are necessarily posed to any theory of development, notably in its original domain: the biological (whether individuals or species are concerned). The Darwinian revolution can be situated in a history of theories of development as a new way of posing them, which introduces a new answer (‘evolution’, restricted to the species and distinct from individual development). On this point, it has been possible to write: ‘Originally such a development was understood as applying to a unique and qualified individual. No doubt, around the middle of the [nineteenth] century, it became hard to tell what was the subject of this development (what developed). This invariant behind the embryological transformations could not be assimilated to surface and volume (as in an unfolding), nor to the adult structure (as in a maturation) … Other than [a] pseudo-unity in instantaneity (ecological, etc.), the only universe left for Darwin was a unity in a succession reduced almost to a minimum: that of a continuous lineage (filiation), both in the genealogical sense (all species deriving from the same stock) and in an almost mathematical sense (tiny elementary variations). This lineage explained the relative persistence of types and plans of organization: it was not the substratum or foundation of the history: it was merely a consequence of it– (G. Canguilhem, G. Lapassade, J. Piquemal and J. Ulman: ‘Du développement à l’évolution au XIXe siècle’, Thales, vol. 11, 1962). In Freudian (and Marxist) pseudo-development, we do not even find this minimum – we are dealing with the radical absence of any preexisting unity, i.e., any germ or origin.
7Althusser has proposed the term ‘technical relations of production’, which clearly marks the distinction. But we should remember that ‘relations’ in itself implies their social character.
8Particularly in The Birth of the Clinic.
Chapter 3: On Reproduction
1Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Theory of Imperialism, in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 2, London: Verso, 2015, p. 7.
2‘The capitalist thinks that he is consuming the produce of the unpaid labour of others, i.e., the surplus-value, and is keeping intact the value of his original capital; but what he thinks cannot alter the actual situation. After the lapse of a certain number of years, the value of the capital he possesses is equal to the sum total of the surplus-value he has appropriated during those years, and the total value he has consumed is equal to the value of his original capital. It is true that he has in hand a quantity of capital whose magnitude has not changed, and that part of it, such as buildings, machinery, etc., was already there when he began to conduct his business operations. But we are not concerned here with the material components of the capital. We are concerned with its value’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 715).
3In Volume One, Marx defines them in their concept (but not in all their effects) by the analysis of the abstract object which he calls ‘an autonomous (verselbstständigten) part of the social capital’ (Capital, Vol. 2, p. 429). By which we are obviously to understand, as Establet notes in his paper (p. 490), not a real firm or enterprise which is capitalist in form, but a fictive capital which is necessarily a productive capital and yet carries out all the functions historically assumed by different types of ‘capital’ (merchant’s capital, interest-bearing capital, etc.). The division of social capital is an essential property: it is therefore possible to represent capital in general by one capital.
For their part, only the analyses of reproduction in Volume Two, Part Three (‘The Reproduction and Circulation of the Total Social Capital’), which make way for the establishment of schemas of reproduction, and thus allow the mathematical formalization of economic analysis, explain by what mechanism the reproduction of the social relations is assured, by subjecting the qualitative and quantitative composition of the total social product to invariable conditions. But these structural conditions are not specific to the capitalist mode of production: in their theoretical form they imply no reference to the social form of the production process, to the form of the product (‘value’), to the type of circulation of the social product which it implies (‘exchange’), or to the concrete space which supports this circulation (‘market’). On this point, I refer the reader in particular to the various recent works of Charles Bettelheim, and to his critical comments in Problèmes de la Planification, no. 9 (École Pratique des Hautes Études).
Chapter 4: Elements for a Theory of Transition
1These limits must not be confused with the limits of variation (Grenzen) which we discussed above.
2Not even the time of economic history, of course, if by that is meant the relatively autonomous history of the economic base of the mode of production. This is for two main reasons: firstly, such a history, dealing as it does with concrete-real social formations, always studies economic structures dominated by several modes of production. It therefore has nothing to do with the ‘tendencies’ determined by the theoretical analysis of isolated modes of production, but with the compounded effects of several tendencies. This considerable problem lies outside the field of the present analysis, and it is only touched on incompletely in the next section (on the ‘phases of transition’). Secondly, the ‘age’ of production which we are discussing here is not, clearly, a chronological feature, it does not indicate how old capitalist production is: for it is an age compared between several economic zones (or ‘markets’) subject to the capitalist mode of production, which is important because of the effects which lead to an unevenness in the organic composition of capital from one region to another or from one department to another. According to the closeness of the analysis, it will be a matter of an average organic composition or of a differentiated analysis of the organic composition of capital from branch of production to branch of production: this is the beginning of a study of the effects of domination and uneven development implied by the unevenness of the organic composition between competing capitals. Obviously, this is not our object here. I am only suggesting it as a possibility.
Part Six: Presentation of the Plan of Capital
1The phrase in brackets does not appear either in Marx’s original, or in the English translation. [Translator.]
2Engels, who was quite aware that the opposition between ‘necessary fiction’ (law of value) and ‘study of the real’ (theory of profit), introduced into Capital an unjustifiable methodological caesura, undertakes in this text to restore the unity of Capital. But instead of demonstrating that the law of value and the theory of profit are theoretical productions of the same type, he confines himself, on the basis of a historical argument, to establishing that they are equally real. Apart from the fact that the arguments he presents are all debatable, and that, in particular, the application of the law of value to modes of production that are only marginally commodity ones raises more problems than it resolves, Engels’s text ends up explaining that economic categories are presented in Capital according to the order in which they were historically determinant, i.e., according to an order whose inadequacy that Marx had clearly explained (1857 Introduction; Grundrisse, p. 102).
3For Max Weber, the production of concepts in the human sciences is a matter of bringing together all the differentials that a given phenomenon presents in relation to the series of phenomena of the same type (the unity of the field that makes possible the measurement of these differentials is based on the perspective taken by the author as a function of his particular values), the individual unity of the differentials being liable to ‘understanding’.
This is how Weber proceeds in constructing the ideal type of capitalist enterprise, in his Foreword to The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism. It would be impossible either to use more consciously the implicit problematic of any constructor of models, or to distance oneself more clearly from Marx. In fact, if thinking a real phenomenon means constructing a schema of it, then a principle of schematization is needed (since real phenomena do not lend themselves to such dissection, or else lend themselves to any kind): science does not offer this principle, and if dissection and schematization are needed, this therefore has to be introduced from outside. An outside that, for econometricians, is generally constituted by value in the proper sense of the term, and by the need to produce additional profit; with Max Weber it is constituted by values, in a more noble but also vaguer sense. In either case, conceiving science as schematization of the real amounts to removing from it any autonomous problematic. The immense merit of Max Weber and his successors, such as Raymond Aron, lay in their perfect awareness of this presupposition. There could be no better way of opposing a science of schemas to Marxism. When, in the Foreword to The Protestant Ethic, Weber brings together all the differentials of the capitalist enterprise and gives us to think, as the unity of these differentials, a certain type of rationality which we can understand perfectly because it is our own, we certainly recognize the reality that Marx deals with in Capital, and can even subscribe to each of Weber’s statements (since they are all without exception drawn from Marx); but we cannot recognize between these statements the theoretical relations produced by Marx, which give the laws of one and the same object. What separates Marx from Weber is the scientific character of the Marxist method. This does not mean that a Weberian method cannot produce any scientific concept, simply that a scientific method, and that of Marx in particular, cannot be a Weberian one.
4This amounts to ‘qualifying’ what has just been said in a schematic form. Lukács, in The Destruction of Reason, rightly rails against ‘the qualifications dear to professors’. But this only makes sense if at the same time any enterprise of schematization is rejected as unscientific; in other words, if it is turned essentially against its author.
5In undertaking this refutation of Godelier’s interpretation, it is important to recognize its claims. At a time when Marxists were more concerned with applications (scientific or political) of Marxist theory, Godelier had the merit of being the only person to raise anew the problem of the method of Capital. He himself undertook a rectification of his initial procedure in an original work on the relations between value and prices (in La Pensée), in which the relation between these two categories is no longer conceived on the basis of the microeconomic/macroeconomic distinction, but in terms of relative logical simplicity and complexity. This position is broadly convergent with the conception we are developing here.
6Since it is simply a matter of accounting for a pedagogy whose relationship with the theory it teaches is necessarily approximate, and hence of untangling how a pedagogy can be mistaken in pronouncing its own laws as laws of the object it teaches, we shall content ourselves here with defining the ‘model’ on the basis of an excellent work of popularization, M. Blanché, L’Axiomatique, Paris: PUF, 1955, p. 38: ‘It is always possible, if several systems of values are found that satisfy the set of relations defined by the postulates, to give various concrete interpretations, or, in other words, to choose between several realizations. These concrete realizations of an axiomatics are known as its models.’
7By ‘articulation’ here we mean the structured totality of two theoretical elements located on either side of a break.
8Louis Althusser, For Marx, pp. 183–91.
9Here, therefore, it is neither a question of the real autonomy of a firm nor of its actual dependence on the entirety of real economic processes.
10Marx shows in fact that the coexistence in three cycles is only possible as the coexistence in the space of production of three movements that are out of phase, and that the theory of this coexistence is only thinkable by way of the abstraction of value, a category determined by production.
11If, at the level of application, this circularity, which seems to the person displaying it as the supreme refinement of the dialectic, does not have much idea of what it is about, it does however have a rigorous foundation in the Hegelian concept of the unity of opposites, which presupposes their identity as the original division of one and the same original unity. As we see, neither the Hegelian theory nor its blind application is adequate for conceiving the relation between the laws of production and the laws of circulation, despite seeming however to be perfectly so.
12See ‘The Object of Capital’, in this volume.
13See Althusser’s Introduction to ‘The Object of Capital’, and ‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy’.
14The passage in The Poverty of Philosophy on the watermill and the steam mill is clearly of the first type, as well as the text of the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in which Marx tries to conceive a theory of economic revolutions on the basis of the development of the productive forces.
15On these concepts, see the text in this volume by Étienne Balibar.
16It may seem strange that we do not account for the historical aspect of the second part of Sub-articulation B. This is because the history in question is only an instrument of demonstration: the concepts necessary to account for the transitory character of manufacture are the same as those that serve to conceive the solution of the problem of freedom and surplus labour. It would be a major misconception to seek to read the text of Part Four as the statement of a law of evolution of the capitalist system. P. Mantoux believes he can refute Marx on this point, since even in England manufacture did not always or even most often precede large-scale industry. But all that Marx assumes as historically attested in his demonstration is that manufacture, everywhere that it did exist, was only a transitory stage. The reason for this fact lies in the partial lack of fit between relations of production and system of productive forces. To account for this, therefore, it is necessary to produce a non-empirical concept of the system of productive forces, which is the essential object of Part Four of Volume One.
17Pierre Vilar, ‘Histoire sociale et philosophie de l’histoire’, La Pensée, no. 118, p. 76: ‘This means is to consider every historical phenomenon … in three successive ways: to consider it first of all as a sign, proceeding then to the noting of facts and analyses: considering it then as a result, looking backward; and finally considering it as a cause, looking forward.’
18Let us recall that Articulation II concerns the ensemble of the two theoretical elements (Volumes One and Two on the one hand; Volume Three on the other), determined by a break running between Volume Two and Volume Three.
19On all these points, I refer to Chapter 2 of Jacques Rancière’s essay.
20Marx refers here to Volume Two, but this also applies to Volume One.
21In the sense that we defined this term above, modifying Marx’s expression ‘social division of labour’.