The first premise of a viable position is the indissoluble unity of consciousness and world structure. It is not merely that consciousness is directed toward objects; it is simultaneously constituted by the system of social relations in which these objects are reproduced. The view which must by emphatically rejected is the dualism of external objects of consciousness on the one hand, and pure, private, self-contained acts of conscious illumination on the other. We are not only conscious of the world, but in, through, and with the world. Therefore, if we divide human activity into motivation, intention, purpose, and meaning on the one side, and the structure of objective relations on the other, we are merely engaging in a heuristic device that we understand to be a moment of analysis later to be integrated.
Structure and consciousness are dialectically related, both logically and historically. The term “structure” is equivocal, however, and its meaning varies with its context—with the material of which it is the structure. The structures that are crucial to our analysis are mateiial, formal, and sociopsychological. The manner in which they are both imposed and created makes up the genesis and sense of their present relevance. A material structure is a causal relationship that exists independently of our consciousness and will. It may obtain in the external world described by physics and chemistry, or in the biological nature of the body. Though we can utilize such processes for our own purposes, the laws in question are independent of our choice.
But just as there are fixed material relationships, and structures of the material world, so there are sociopsychological relations which delimit the circumstances of human social existence. For in this realm, too, laws obtain that cannot be voluntarily vanquished. If, for example, we treat children with cruelty rather than kindness, consequences will emerge and later impose themselves just as surely and adamantly as any of the facts that make up the realm of physics. The causal lines may be more difficult to trace, but that is another matter. It is true that we have the power to intervene so as to modify previous influences, but, of course, each later intervention produces its own consequences which stand obdurately against our mere wish. Our freedom in regard to our own sociopsychological existence consists in part in our ability to choose our original determinations within a range of considerable latitude; but we are then bound to struggle with the effects of our freedom. What Engels described in regard to naturalistic ecology obtains in the entire realm of human existence:
Let us not flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopatamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centers and reservoirs of moisture.
But if it has already required the labor of thousands of years for us to learn to some extent to calculate the more remote natural consequences of our actions aiming at production, it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social consequences of these actions. 54
An economic system includes aspects of material and sociopsychological structures. An example of such a complex of structures is the fact that human beings can work past the point of reproducing their subsistence. The fact is not a creation of human will but an externally constituted reality which contains elements of physiology, ecology, and sociopsychology. But it is not a necessary fact, for it is quite conceivable that human beings might have been so constituted that all of their labor was necessary for their mere survival. Whether such a condition ever obtained is beside the point. It is a logical possibility. But the sheer facts of the world are different. Human inventiveness has, therefore, the power to provide for material reproduction and for surplus, beyond. This fact, too, is not a human invention, though what use is made of it is, whatever the constraints, a matter of human decision. So exploitation becomes a possibility because of imposed biological and psychological factors. And the manner in which human beings exercise their freedom, which is also
originally imposed rather than created, obviously transforms the original physiological determinants that first gave rise to the possibility of human determination. All of this occurs within reciprocal limits, of course, tor nature has its obduracy to which human inventiveness must eventually succomb. A people which obstinately imposes its arbitrary will on recalcitrant nature will perish in the process.
Some of the relationships in the world are neither material nor sociopsychological, but formal—necessary in virtue of their formal structure alone. It has been argued by some (conventionalists) that these necessary connections are true by the simple fact of human definition, and by others (realists), that these relationships are logically necessary characteristics of any structure of being. My own view is that once the basic terms of mathematics and logic are defined, the consequences of this original choice are no longer arbitrary. To deny this position is to fall into self-contradiction or irrelevance. Either conventionalism argues for its own position on the basis of compelling reasons, and so contradicts the thesis that good reasons are so bv mere choice, or it simply declares itself true by fiat, in which case no other person is compelled to accept it.
A socioeconomic system contains material, sociopsychological and formal relationships. Like any human construction it involves an initial determination that is neither imposed by logical necessity nor totally arbitrary. It may be judged more or less appropriate to its circumstances by criteria of survival and maximum human fulfillment. Since all social decisions are ultimately mediated through the determinate structures of the world, the more we lose control over our fundamental social choices, the more the fixed, imposed properties of the world come to dominate us. This is, in part, what Marx meant by the fetishism of our social relations. Our inability to collectively construct our social relations makes us subject to the fact that these relations are determined by the exercising of class power. But our compliance in the decisions of others is necessary for the continued reproduction of the capitalist system, which is why we experience our subordination as alienation rather than sheer natural imposition. As our attitude toward the world becomes passive, we come to view its structures as wholly necessary. We thereby relinguish our power to select out of the range of possible determinations those that would most fully liberate us as human beings. The hypothetical laws of the natural and sociopsychological world, laws that state which consequences would follow from particular premises, appear as categorical determinations—universal, unalterable processes beyond any human contrivance.
When human purpose is not fully realized, that, is, when the system of social relations is inadvertently rather than intentionally produced, the material and sociopsychological structures through which this abortive action manifests itself gains power over our human nature. Social
relations become thinglike, and resemble merely natural laws, because they are equally imposed and seemingly unalterable. The external and social structures that might carry our intentions, carry us instead in the wake of their facticity.
It is important to note that social structure, as such, is neither good nor bad. A collectively chosen social system will also contain and impose necessary patterns of power, experience, and consciousness upon its members. But the greater the understanding and power of the social agents, and the more democratically they can exercise their capacity to control nature and themselves, the more likely they are to construct a system that meets the various dimensions of their social existence, from individual self-reflection to collective action. For under such an arrangement these dimensions are capable of sustaining each other, and the antagonisms that rend capitalist society along class, sexual, and ethnic divisions imposed upon the social division of labor, lose much of their destructiveness. It is not that all disagreement, friction, and conflict of interest will cease; but such motives are likely to diminish and be transformed as the arsenal of economic weaponry which elicits these responses is dismantled.
Under capitalism, divisions between the powerful and the powerless, manifested in an antagonism between individual interest and the structure of social power, always prove invidious. Consider the case of an individual capitalist who attempts to minimize the wages paid his own workers but suffers the consequences of a general decline in purchasing power when his own practice becomes common policy. There appears to be some contradiction in the logic of the individual situation. For what is reasonable for the capitalist as a single employer is illogical for him as a member of a system. And yet the imperatives of that system appear to dictate both its particular and its global prerequisites.
For the critical point about the social system is that it depends on a conceptual framework to organize the relationship among formal, sociopsychological, and material determinations. It can thus harbor contradictions between its general meaning or syntax and the specific intentions of its agents. But since it is also a system of class power, one group can use this potential disparity for its actual advantage. 1 his situation seems precisely what Marx intended when he distinguished between “the common interest which appears as the motive of the act as a whole
but, as such ... is not the motive” and the “self-reflected particular interests” of one individual “in opposition to that of the other. The common interest is the structural framework of the system as a whole and of the particular “logic” of the individuals who constitute it. On the surface, this is a framework of freedom, of formally equal subjects of exchange. On the surface, the structure of the economy appears to be a
democratically elaborated formal arrangement, created by its individual members and subject to their transformation. It appears, in other words, as a conventional structure justified by its beneficial consequences. “In the depths,” however, external compulsion dominates the system. The social world thereby becomes for its subjects an imposed necessity, a system more closely resembling the properties of the natural world than of a genuine human community. On its formal, ideological surface, capitalism appears to have the character of a human invention serving die common interest. In tact, it contains the natural necessity of material relationships because
men make their history themselves, but not as yet with a collective will according to a collective plan . . . and for that very reason all such societies are governed by
necessity [emphasis added]. 55
Social structures become independent of the will of their members in a twofold manner: (1) They proceed through actually independent causal relations which (2) are given their meaning through the estranged determinations of an alienated society. The logical structure of a socioeconomic system thereby is shown to depend on the level of alienadon or freedom that obtains within it.
Motives and structural presuppositions are inseparable. That is why Marx emphasized the fact that “the common interest which appears as the motive of the act as a whole is recognized as a fact by both sides.” The act by which individuals reproduce their own individual interests is simultaneously the act by which they reproduce the system as a whole. Of course, they do not act directly on behalf of the system, but they cannot act without reproducing its logic. For their individual acts are defined by that system and only intelligible within it. Like the elements of a language, which have no significance in themselves but derive their meaning from their place in a larger configuration, the individual competitive acts of distinct capitalists appropriate the larger logic while they are explicitly directed to particular ends. In other words, the particular motives of individuals within the capitalist system are motives as defined by that system, while the system itself requires for its reproduction the general awareness and particular interests of its individual members. The logic of the concepts and the logic of human practice are two aspects of the same activity. However abstractly and idealistically Marx may speak of the categories of capitalism, and however much he may seem to derive these concepts merely from each other in the style of Hegel, it is important to keep in mind the human existence which grounds conceptual categories in the actual practice of human beings. However much value is described “as a mere germ, which must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can ripen into the Price-form,” it is crucial to
insist on what Marx was apparently well aware of, but neglected to explicate systematically:
What, first of all, practically concerns producers when they make an exchange, is the question, how much of some other product they get for their own? in what proportions the products are exchangeable? When these proportions have, by custom, attained a certain stability they appear to result from the nature of the products [emphasis added]. 56
However much value is determined by labor time, unless this structure comes to be embodied in the practice of human beings, it will not determine the nature of exchange.
Since I have so much emphasized my disagreement with Godelier’s contention that social “structures do not depend on the individual members of society,’ I want to be certain that I am not taken to assert that social structures are what their individual members understand them to be. There is a fundamental and ineradicable distinction in capitalist society between the structured system of individual beliefs and the actual fundamental social structures. The structural unconscious, the determinate social compulsion Marx uncovered, does, tragically, act behind the backs of individuals and in their depths. But it is out of individual human activity that it comes into being and exercises power over its creators. The whole issue is contained in the phrase of Marx’s Russian reviewer, that Marx treats social structure as “governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence.'
If this phrase is taken literally to indicate that the structure does not depend on the individual members of society, it is misconceived, for the reasons I have offered. But it can be understood to mean that while the structures are wholly dependent upon human will, consciousness, and intelligence, they do not coincide with the self-understanding of that will, consciousness, and intelligence possessed by the members of society. Two facts are true: A social structure that does not depend on human intention is a contradiction in terms; but the actual prevailing social structures do not coincide with human intentions as the subjects of those intentions understand them. Marx himself is often careless in his exposition: “These quantities (values) vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers.” 57 Independently of the action—no; but independently of the intended action—yes.
In this chapter I have been concerned to develop the rudiments of an account, based on Marx’s views of social structure, that would explain how the conscious intentions of human agents come to be so embodied in the world as to defeat their will and understanding. The next stage of analysis would consist of a detailed account of the specific institutions through which human action is structurally formed. Such a presentation
is the subject ot another work, though we can say something general about the functioning of all institutions.
Their most important characteristic is that they channel human action in accordance with previously constituted relations of power and meaning. Every significant institution serves the same structure of power—the domination of the productive process by the class with predominant control over its property and forms of accumulation. But this purpose is served in a multitude of ways, and the structural conflicts Marx noted manifest themselves not only within single institutions but among their diverse functions. Schools must form attitudes of subordination, the acceptance of anonymous authority, the division of means from ends, and the inculcation of specific skills. Mass advertising is concerned to further fantasies of social escape, consumptive gratification and the release of inhibition. Even the media play very different roles: New spapers articulate the ideology of the political process which makes the semblance of democracy credible and efficient. Television and film provide cultural paradigms of success, appropriate character, and collective delusion. An institution like the family bears the imprint of these various tendencies, which are not easily reconciled, as they in fact must attempt to reconcile each other. Education, for example, must distribute enough literacy to make a contemporary industrial system possible, but not in such a way that reason becomes a technique commonly employed to dissect and challenge the system of power. The conduit of social structure is the institution, which articulates individual existence through a system of variegated roles.
It is therefore very important to avoid the kind of approach to the issue taken by Michael Schneider in Neurosis and Civilization. Much of this book is illuminating and profound. But Schneider has a tendency to derive the characteristics of individual life directly from the most abstract features of the capitalist system. Basing himself on Marx’s distinction between concrete use value and abstract exchange value, Schneider argues
our main thesis . . . that the structure of social instincts and needs becomes, with the historical development of the structure of commodity and money, just as abstract as the latter. 08
In his most careful statement, Schneider maintains that
we are aware, of course, that the clinical phenomenon of “repression” is not simply identical with the political-economic phenomenon of “abstraction” of use-values and of the usable needs and satisfactions related thereto. However, it can be shown that a necessary connection exists between the degree of abstraction which (capitalist) commodity society has reached in the course of its history and its degree of social instinctual repression. ’ 9
There are two difficulties with this statement, however: First, it is highly improbable that any measure of degrees of historical repression can be articulated because society simultaneously elicits and denies the needs of its members. Even if such a standard were available, it is extremely unlikely that primitive societies based on use value are uniformly less repressive than contemporary capitalism.
Second, Schneider does not heed his own careful noting of the distinction between repression and abstraction and welds them together throughout the remainder of his analysis. First, he asserts that “exchange-value consciousness thus is indifferent, even blind to the sensuous-concrete quality and diversity of the use-value 60 and, after favorably citing the following statement of Haug’s:
A training in self-mastery to the point of indifference, as the preparation of sensuality adequate to the exchange principle, is the prerequisite for the execution of social relationships which reverberate from the exchange society into individual life. 61
Schneider proceeds to the claim that “‘abstract man,’ who is the personification of ‘abstract human labor,’ has just as abstract a relationship to his own sensuality as to the sensuality of use-value” and is therefore the “materialistic foundation of that psychic 'process of abstraction which Freud described through the concept of ‘repression.’” 62
Now, Marx undoubtedly made a fundamental and significant contribution to our understanding in the powerful manner in which he urged the distinction between use and exchange value. The fact that capitalists are concerned to accumulate abstract value (profit) and are ultimately indifferent to the specific manner in which their profit is amassed can hardly be overemphasized. It is finally quite irrelevant to the capitalist whether his profit derives from the sale of automobiles, patent rights, medical services, or books critical of corporate capitalism. Nor is it possible to understand the alienation of contemporary life without focusing on the central fact of capitalist production—that the capitalist cares nothing for the particular nature and needs of the laborer, and is only interested in the laborer’s abstract capacity to produce more value for the capitalist than is required for his own reproduction. To the capitalist it is quite certainly a matter of indifference what specifically the concrete nature of the work force, the consumer, or the population at large amounts to. But capitalism does not function only in the long run, or at the level of ultimate purpose, and for capitalism to reproduce itself as a daily occurrence it is absolutely vital that the capitalist grasp, master, and elicit the specific system of needs and material and psychological gratifications upon which the entire capitalist enterprise depends. The ultimate purpose of exchanging use values may well be the accumulation of abstract value, that is, profit, but unless the material
process which elaborates use value remains within capitalist control, the process of abstract exchange will simply cease to exist.
The second and more significant difficulty with Schneider’s emphasis on abstraction is that it tends to separate the self into two distinct realms: the ego, as the “rational” calculator of abstract, exchange value and the id as repository of abstracted-repressed use value. Something in this account is certainly correct and there is an important measure of the truth in R. Reiche’s characterization of the contemporary psychoanalytic understanding of positive ego functions as
grouped around control, domination, decision, limitation, comprehensiveness, overview, subordination, watchfulness: all negative associations go in the direction of dissolution, inability to draw a limit, letting oneself go. . . . The category of the ego only unlocks its secret meaning when regarded in the context of a social formation that is based on competition; it is bound to the commoditv-selling, market-oriented bourgeois who must defeat his opponent but by emotionally neutral means, that is, without directly killing him [emphasis added]. 63
An observation that Schneider crystallizes with the comment:
The other half of psychic activity, the “passions,” “sensuousness,” and the “instinctual nature” of man is shunted off into the incalculable (and therefore rebellious) psychological remnant of the private sphere, that is, into the underground of the “personality,” into the “id.” 64
But the problem with this dualism is, first, that it leads Schneider to the view that “immediate sensuous needs” can neither be destroyed not inhibited, 63 that is, that they are simply given; and even more significantly, to the strange misconception that conscious life is devoid of concrete need, desire, passion, and character, and that under the domination of capitalist exchange, we have somehow become abstract beings. The original structural dualism between essential relations and phenomenal forms is replicated as a new dichotomy between concrete passion operating in the depths and abstract calculation exhaustively characterizing consciousness. However, the unconscious contains its own abstractions, and our lived experience is massively, obviously, and irreducibly passionate, needful, sensuous, and wholly concrete.
Marx noted:
Money is therefore not only an object, but is the object of greed. . . . Greed as such, as a particular form of the drive, i.e. as distinct from the craving for a particular kind of wealth, e.g. for clothes, weapons, jewels, women, wine etc., is possible only when general wealth, wealth as such, has become individualized in a particular thing, i.e. as soon as money is posited in its third quality (representing a general social result). Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed. 66
What is crucial in this passage is the account of greed as “a particular form of the drive.” Schneider moves from a passion for abstraction to abstract passion. The latter phrase is a contradiction in terms. There are no needs, desires, images, feelings, or longings that are not concretely this particular need, desire, etc., rather than that. They are of course influenced and permeated by abstract considerations, but this can hardly remove them from the immediate world of concrete existence. I he bourgeois may wish to defeat his opponent without killing him, but his means are anything but “emotionally neutral.” I hey are motivated by very definite anticipations of power, prestige, authority, dominance, and popularity and produce very definite emotional experiences in those who are affected by this action.
I noted earlier that when Marx placed the content of exchange “entirely outside economics” he was engaged in a serious mistake. It was an error that stems from a strong tendency in Marx’s analysis to overlook the fundamental significance of use value for an understanding of society. Of course, Marx recognized that nothing will be exchanged unless it is in some way “useful” to its purchaser. But he seems to assume that since all societies produce use value while only capitalism is defined by the production of exchange value, it is in the process of exchange and its foundation in abstract value and labor that the uniqueness of capitalism lies.
Formally, the assumption is correct. Materially, however, what Marx articulates so profoundly in the introduction to the Grundrisse —that production and consumption, use and exchange, are dialectically related—tends to disappear from the detailed development of his argument. Marx’s opposition to subjective-bourgeois theories of value led him finally to overemphasize the “objective” constitution, the independent existence, the quantifiable measurability of value. Through this tendency Marx was again led to minimize one of his own important economic insights—that the value of labor power itself is ultimately defined in terms of socially necessary labor power required for its subsistence, a notion that can only be understood historically, politically, socially, and subjectively.
Therefore, while Marx does not deny the continued existence of use value as the presupposition of exchange value, he does not incorporate a history or social critique of use, need, or human nature in his explicit analysis of capitalist development. And this emphasis, rooted in a concern for scientific objectivity, leads Marx, against his own profound insight in the Philosophic Manuscripts and introduction to the Grundrisse, to take the concreteness of practical subjectivity, for granted.
It is the necessry pre-requisite of a commodity to be a use-value, but it is immaterial to the use-value whether it is a commodity or not. Use-value in this indifference to the nature of its economic destination, i.e. use-value as such lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy. It falls
within the sphere of the latter only in so far as it forms its own economic destination. It forms the material basis which directly underlies a definite economic relation called exchange value. 67
I’he dialectic of production-consumption implies that use is the material product as well as the “material basis” of a definite “economic relation,” and that, finally, no dualism between content and form, use and exchange, is possible. Nor is this merely an issue of abstract dialectics. For contemporary capitalism is marked precisely by the fact that natural use value ceases to exist, and that every need of the individual is mediated by commodities. It is very misleading, then, when Schneider, building on Marx’s ambivalence, interprets capitalism as the repression of use value. It is one thing to be told that capitalism is indifferent to any particular use value, or, more accurately, that it is sustained precisely by the rapid succession of one use value by another. It is a very different matter to be told that capitalism is indifferent to use value as such. The first contention is suggestive; the second, mystifying. The frenzied, manipulative, profit-oriented replacement of previous commodities and needs by new instances is a very concrete structure which results in a very concrete consequence—exhaustion, anxiety, shallowness, despair, impotence, and fear of commitment. These experiences are not abstractions, but very concrete moments of social anguish.
However abstract the structure of economic development may be in the understanding, or even in the practices of capitalist replacement, it is a structure sustained by concrete activity. It is a structure that functions through human experience, not beyond it. If we note that contemporary sexuality is marked by a tendency toward the hoarding and substitution of sexual partners, it will not explain much to identify these features w ith the deep structures of capitalist production and exchange. For what occurs in the sexual lives of individuals is mediated by particular social experiences, and is the result of (a) the use of sexuality as a narcotic to assuage strong feelings of anxiety, (b) a socially determinate consumptive compulsion to accumulate experiences as well as tangible commodities, (c) a deeply maintained achievement orientation which is transformed in the capacity-need to produce erotic experiences in another, and (d) the recognition of sexuality as a still occasionally uncommoditized experience, which, in its “useless” intimacy, transcends the predominant forms of capitalist instrumentality. The tendency to abstract from the uniqueness of other individuals is caused by a very definite historical structure.
Marx is closer to the truth when he notes:
Indifference toward a specific kind of labour presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer dominant. As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst ol the richest possible concrete development 68
But this fact, as it operates under the capitalist compulsion to commoditize all experience, alters the very nature of use value as a category. As a commentator on the writings of the french critic Baudrillard has noted:
Marx asserts in Capital that use values, unlike exchange values, are incomparable” and their irreducible particularity makes it impossible to treat them in a homogeneous fashion. Baudrillard’s point is that this is simply inconsistent. For there to be exchange value it is already necessary that utility become the principle of reality for the object as product. Exchange presupposes that the objects are already rationalized as useful.™