What is the nature of Hegel's Logic?

We have decided to embark on a study of Hegel's Science of Logic. We will be reading from the translation by George di Giovani published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press.

The first question that presents itself to us is, what type of book is it exactly that we are reading? After all, Hegel's Logic is neither a textbook of logic, nor metaphysics in the traditional sense.

It seems that we cannot answer this question satisfactorily merely from our preliminary readings of the text. Hegel himself tells us that "knowledge of [Logic] only emerge[s] as the final result and completion of it's whole treatment." (pp.23) We can merely recite a few preliminaries.

The subject matter is thinking. Or more specifically, we are told that we are to examine "conceptual thinking." From a survey of the table of contents we gather that what this means precisely will only be made fully clear to us in the third part, when we will be given the doctrine of the concept. So again, we are instructed to be patient - the full nature of the process itself can only be appreciated once we have already completed it.

The introduction first presents us with a picture of knowledge. In this picture, the truth is something outside thinking, an object for the consideration of a subject. The truth of thought consists in it's adhering to the nature of the object, but since thought is presupposed to be something entirely alien to it's object, it cannot actually represent the latter truly. What it produces in fact belongs solely to it's nature, and so the object remains as an unknowable thing-in-itself.

This picture should be familiar to us, it is the philosophy of Kant, the results of which were given to Hegel's generation to content with.

In contrast to this, we are told that traditional metaphysics had a higher point of view, inasmuch as it began from the standpoint of the unity of thinking and the thing to be thought.

But then onto the scene comes the Understanding.

Understanding it seems is a crucial dramatis personae in the dialectical drama. It abstracts, separates, and remains fixed in these separations. "The understanding determines, and holds the determination fixed." (pp.10)

But as it determines, it finds that it's determinations come into contradiction with each other. At this point, the critical philosophy of Kant and his followers retreats. Reality cannot possibly contradict itself. So, goes the sad tale, they gave up in despair. Since our attempts to grasp the thing-in-itself are contradictory, they cannot possibly succeed. We must retreat from metaphysics.

But where Kant left off, our great dramatic hero - dialectical reason - begins.

Dialectical reason is negative, it recognises contradiction and negates it. It is the negation of the self-negation of the fixed determinations which arise in the course of the activity of thinking. As such a negation of the negation, it is at the same time positive. Unlike skepticism it does not retreat in despair, but moves ever onward in it's progress towards the absolute.

Absolute knowledge is the standpoint from which the opposition between consciousness and it's object is completely resolved. It is the standpoint reached by us in the course of Hegel's prior work, the Phenomenology of Spirit. At this point, however, it is not our part to discuss this work.

Kant's philosophy, it seems, was one of despair. It left us with an unbridgeable separation between subject and object, between consciousness and the thing-in-itself. And it left us with contradictions that, while banished from the realm of reality, were left for the subject.

Hegel's philosophy rises above the separations and contradictions, it begins from the standpoint of absolute knowledge, and proceeds through dialectical reason. Proceeds to what though? To truth. A truth which is "the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit."

And here the modern mind is bound to despair. Hegel's philosophy stands revealed as theology. What then, is it's interest to us?

From the subjective side, the profound influence that Hegel had on the history of thought cannot but provoke us, if we wish to gain insight, to study his work.

But I think there is something deeper.

Hegel conceived his Logic as the science of thinking. But this thinking is not something static, it is a form of activity, it produces thoughts. This is why it is possible for the discipline of philosophy, for example, to have a history. Although it would appear at first sight that the history of philosophy contradicts it's concept, since it is concerned with truth, and truth is something which it seems should not have a history, but be valid in any time and place, it is actually entirely in it's nature that it should be so.

Onto the scene jumps Marx. 'Activity' is not just the production of ideas, he tells us, it encompasses a much greater variety of things. In the first place, of course, the production of material life, and also of human social relationships (since production is always social production). Only after humanity has secured for itself a basic level of development of it's productive forces can it afford for one part of it to concern itself solely with mental labour - the production of ideas, and in fact this production is always bound up with material production (vulgar economics is in many ways merely a compendium of the ideas produced by the capitalist in the normal progress of his life).

In fact production, human activity as such, is not something which occurs in the misty realms of the absolute idea. It is a process of metabolism, through which human beings regulate their relationship to nature. It always has a natural and material basis. This is the meaning of materialism.

It is not the materialism of Helvetius or Holbach, in which human beings appear as passively determined by their environment. It is a materialism which has taken on board the active side, which, as Marx notes in his famous Theses on Feuerbach, was developed by idealism, however abstractly.

The assurances of analytical philosophy, that Hegel's contradictions are meaningless, his system a form of mysticism, cannot reassure us communists, who have grasped the reality of separation and opposition as it exists in contemporary life. If Hegel's philosophy is mystical, it is only because we live in a world in which everything is mystified, where the relationships between human beings take on the prosaically real appearance of relationships between things.

In such a world, the separation of subject and object appears as the separation between human beings, whose life essence is their activity, and the means of realising their activity. The subjects have become objectified, and the objects personified. Human physical existence has become a commodity, and the objects which humanity uses to produce it's material life have become personified in the figure of the capitalist.

If Hegel tries to rise above this world of separation and contradiction through pure contemplation, we cannot bemoan him the effort. He saw the problem, however obscurely refracted through the lens of speculative philosophy. This is the basis on which we retain interest in Hegel today, and the basis on which we commit ourselves to a study of the great drama of dialectical reason.

We know the what, and for ourselves also the why. All that remains is the work itself. This Hegel tells us is divided into two essential parts, the 'objective' and the 'subjective' logic. The former is divided into the doctrines of being and essence, and corresponds to some extent to what was formerly understood as ontology. The latter is the doctrine of the concept. All of this, we are told, will only be fully understood at the end of the journey. Let us begin.

Notes on Money Part I: Notes on the Value-Form

Marx notes in the preface to the first edition of Capital, that chapter one, and particularly the section on the value-form, will probably constitute the most difficult part of the whole analysis for the reader. If the history of Marxism shows us anything, it shows us that he was probably overly optimistic about the difficulties presented by the rest of his work to his readers.

Nonetheless the section on the value-form is both singularly peculiar and generally overlooked. That this is so can be seen from a recent book on the empirical workings of the UK banking system. In a chapter on the history of monetary theory we read Marx listed alongside the classical economists Ricardo and Mill, who viewed money as merely a veil over commodity exchange.

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx explicitly warns us against seeing money as a mere technical instrument, cunningly devised to work around certain inconveniences which arise in the process of direct barter. Money is, of course, on Marx's account, a commodity. And it would seem to make sense to say that it does arise from more basic forms of the exchange relationship. It is not money as such, after all, that makes commodities exchangeable with one another, but their quality of being the products of human labour in the abstract.

But to express this quality of being the products of universal labour, their must be a 'form' appropriate to the 'content' of value. This form is the value-form.

The value-form is, in essence, the relationship between one commodity and another. The first chapter of Capital begins with the relationships between commodities, which are related to one another as equivalents. It finds lying behind this character of equivalence, their circumstance of being the products of abstract labour. But the form in which this initially presented itself now requires analysis.

The general development of the value-form is tripartite. We begin with the simple relationship of commodity to commodity. Then this expands, revealing an endless world of commodity relationships. Finally all commodities relate to one commodity in particular as the general equivalent. When a precious metal, in particular gold, is established as the general equivalent, we have the money form, which is in essence no different from the general form. The latter develops from the expanded form, which in it's essence is merely the multiplication of the simple form.

The analysis of the simple form of value is therefore the most important and difficult part.

We begin with a simple equation, x linen = y coats.

The first thing that is done is to separate the expression into two 'poles', the relative and equivalent forms. These poles have the character of being both inseparable and mutually exclusive. They mutually condition one another, linen can only take the relative form because coats, on the other hand, take the equivalent form and vice versa. But precisely because linen takes the relative position, it cannot function as equivalent.

We should be familiar with the general conception of a relationship of two sides, in which both are inseparable and mutually condition one another, yet also exclude each other. It is the general character of the relationship between wage-labour and capital. Capital can only function as such because it finds labour-power on the market as a commodity, and the labourer is only a wage-labourer because they have been separated from the objective conditions of realising their activity, and are confronted by the latter in the form of capital.

The mutually excluding aspect of the relationship may seem somewhat arbitrary in the simple value-form. We can just as easily flip the equation and express the value of coats in the value of linen. This constitutes a general defect of this form of value.

The commodity, as a use-value, is the physical existence of the commodity, it's body. The commodity can only express itself as a value in the body of another commodity. A commodity is the contradictory unity of use-value and value. We see that this is further developed in the form of value, in the separation into relative and equivalent poles. The relative form is the body of the commodity, which expresses it's value in terms of an equivalent. The equivalent is the other, in which value must be expressed.

Marx develops four pecularities of the equivalent form. These are (1) that a concrete use-value becomes the form of appearance of value (2) that concrete labour becomes the form of appearance of abstract labour (3) that private labour becomes the form of appearance of directly social labour (4) that the fetishism of commodities reaches a new height in the equivalent form.

Here we will briefly note the similarities between this part of the analysis, and the philosophy of Hegel. In Hegel's philosophy, particulars have no existence, no reality as such, except as incarnations of the absolute. What is rational is real, and what is real is rational. Similarly, in positing a particular thing as equivalent to another in exchange, this particular thing becomes the form of appearance of value. The result of a concrete labour process becomes the form in which the commodity reveals itself as the product of human labour in the abstract.

"This inversion (Verkehrung) by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not, on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete, characterises the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. If I say: Roman Law and German Law are both laws, that is obvious. But if I say: Law (Das Recht), this abstraction (Abstraktum) realises itself in Roman Law and in German Law, in these concrete laws, the interconnection becoming mystical." (The Value-Form)

This suggests in a preliminary way the unique power of the dialectic in understanding the laws of motion of bourgeois society.

Previously we noted that in the simple form of value, the exclusiveness of the two sides can seem somewhat arbitrary, since it is just as easy to subjectively consider things the other way around. This expression of value is also limited in that it only embraces two particular commodities. These difficulties force us to move from the simple to the expanded form.

The expanded form is essentially what it says, an expansion of the simple form. Whereas before we merely had two commodities, now we have an endless wealth of commodity relationships, each expressing their value in terms of all the others. This prompts a comparison with the Hegelian notion of a 'bad infinity', a merely endless repetition of a finite series. In contrast to this, real infinity "consists in being at home with itself in its other, or, if enunciated as a process, in coming to itself in its other." (Encyclopaedia Logic, Being)

In contrast to the bad infinity of the expanded form, the general form of value is the real infinity of the world of commodities. The whole world of commodities finds the adequate expression of their values in an other, a commodity excluded from the rest and standing apart from them. The precise nature of this commodity makes no odds, at a certain point in history it appears that cattle performed this function for example. The precious metals however, with their qualities of uniformity and infinite divisibility, in general prove the most adequate substance, hence the money-form.

Since the money-form is only established at first in the fact that all commodities measure their value in terms of money, the first determination to be examined is money as a measure of value. But this ideal determination also implies the possibility of actual exchange, and the function of money as a means of circulation. Finally as the unity of these two moments, we have the fully developed concept of money as universal wealth.

The section on money introduces for the first time, the possibility, though no more than the possibility, of crises. We have seen that money is merely a development from the nature of the commodity itself, as the contradictory unity of use-value and value. Hence, the possibility of crises actually derives itself from the commodity as such, the cell-form of bourgeois society.

A Poem by one 'prec'

these are impressive binary options.
are there any better binary options?
do you know of any?
they are especially good for redwood or switzerland.
binary options are the best marxism.
communism is the best marxism.
marxism is defunct because of binary options.
binary options are best in redwood or switzerland or germany.
no germanophobic prejudice should lead us astray from this.
though they will give us treaties we must fight them.
though they will imprison us we must see it through.
support the binary options party today.

Notes on Value Theory

The starting point of Marx's investigation is the commodity. Why is this the case? The first thing to be noted is that this is how things appear to us “at first sight”¹. We begin on the surface, with the obvious fact, known to everyone, that capitalist production is, at least in the first instance, the production of commodities. And the result of the fact that capitalist production is the predominant mode of production, is that all the wealth of society appears predominantly in the commodity form, as an “immense accumulation of commodities.”²

The beginning here is something obvious, something which is self-evident to anyone living within capitalist society. This is a beginning which is undeniable, but at first it also seems to be somewhat trivial. And again we have to ask why? Why does Marx begin with the commodity, and not say, the concept of capital, which would appear to be much more essential and central to our understanding of capitalism.

Let us continue for now to follow Marx's train of thought. A commodity is in the first place “an external object, a thing which through it's qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind.”³ As something external to us, which is an object of desire for us, the commodity constitutes what is referred to as a 'use-value'. This aspect of the commodity is realised in the process of consumption. The use-value of an apple, for example, consists variously in the energy it supplies to my body via it's calorie content, the nutrients it provides me, it's specific taste, texture and flavour. And the need which I have for the apple can only be satisfied if I eat it.

Use-value as such though is independent of the social process of production which produces it. Whether an orchard is tended by a serf, a slave or a modern wage-labourer makes no difference to the apple itself. But in capitalism, these objects which satisfy our needs become the “material bearers”⁴ of a specific social relationship. “Use-value is the immediate physical entity in which a definite economic relationship – exchange-value – is expressed.”⁵

This appears immediately as something peculiar. Why is it that a relationship between human beings should be expressed in a physical object? More precisely, this relationship is expressed as a relationship between objects. The relationship is what is referred to as 'exchange-value', the proportion in which one use-value exchange for another. The social relationship of exchange between persons appears as a relation between the products they produce.

The character that commodities have as being essentially interchangeable, such that a definite quantity of one commodity serves just as well as a definite quantity of some other commodity, which in terms of it's relationship to human wants and needs can be something completely different from the former, is a result of their reduction to a common substance. This common substance is value. And here we come to the primary difficulty.

An economist protests, the exchangeability of commodities is not due to their qualitative equivalence, but just the opposite. “When, therefore, in the case of exchange the matter terminates with a change of ownership of the commodities, it points rather to the existence of some inequality or preponderance which produces the alteration.”⁶ If I have a loaf of bread, for example, I don't exchange it for a bottle of wine because, for me, the wine is an equivalent for the bread, but just the opposite. I exchange because, for me, the loaf has no use, whereas the wine does, and vice versa for the person I exchange with. The bread for me is a not use-value, whereas the wine forms a use-value.

This is correct as far as it goes. In order to be a commodity, an object must be what Marx refers to as a social use-value. To produce a commodity, I have to produce something which is not a direct object of my needs, but rather forms the object of someone else's needs, just as their product is the object of my needs. Production for others is social labour. But social labour, the production of social use-values, is a characteristic of all societies, it is in fact, what makes them societies as such. If I can meet all of my needs through my own labour, or from the free gifts of nature, then I have no need of society.

But what has to be examined is a historically specific form of society. The form of society in which the products of social labour are exchanged for one another as equivalents. This is by no means inevitable. As Marx says in his A Contribution...

“...under the rural patriarchal system of production, when spinner and weaver lived under the same roof – the women of the family spinning and the men weaving, say for the requirements of the family – yarn and linen were social products, and spinning and weaving social labour within the framework of the family. But their social character did not appear in the form of yarn becoming a universal equivalent exchanged for linen as a universal equivalent, i.e., of the two products exchanging for each other as equal and equally valid expressions of the same universal labour-time.”⁷

The production of commodities assumes a specific form of social production, production by the “isolated individual.” The producers are “mutually indifferent individuals.” But despite this mutual indifference, there is still dependence. The producers labour is “private labour and his product the private product of a separate individual”, and yet this private character of labour produced by indifferent individuals has to be overcome. The act of exchange is precisely this overcoming in which the private labour of the isolated individual “becomes social labour by assuming the form of its direct opposite, of abstract universal labour.”

As Marx expresses it elsewhere:

“The reciprocal and all-sided dependance of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each individual's own activity or his product becomes an activity or a product for him.”⁸

In fact, once seen through this lens, it becomes obvious, tautologically so in fact, that the substance of value is labour in the abstract:

“Since the exchange-value of commodities is indeed nothing but a mutual relation between various kinds of labour of individuals regarded as equal and universal labour, i.e., nothing but a material expression of a specific social form of labour, it is a tautology to say that labour is the only source of exchange-value and accordingly of wealth in so far as this consists of exchange-value.”⁹

We see then that in a society based on the production of commodities, the products of the private labour of the mutually indifferent producers can only become social labour by becoming equivalents, interchangeable with one another, and as such, values. And the natural quantitative measure of labour is time. “The effect is the same as if the different individuals had amalgamated their labour-time and allocated different portions of the labour-time at their joint disposal to the various use-values.”¹⁰

By way of personal clarification, previously I had argued in favour of value theory, on the basis of the idea that the substance of value is social labour, and that since the products of private labour become social labour by becoming values, this is a tautological expression. This was close to Marx's argument, but I think slightly at variance. The substance of value is not actually social labour, but as Marx says, social labour in a particular form of society. A society in which the products of labour can only become social by becoming equivalents, by abstracting from their physical existence as use-values and reducing them in practice to products of labour in the abstract. Abstract labour is the substance of value, and this presupposes a definite form of society, with formal freedom and equality, a developed division of labour and in which relations between branches of the social division of labour take the form of exchange relations (Hopefully this clarifies to a certain extent where Böhm-Bawerk goes wrong in suggesting that the common property of commodities could just as well be that they are products of nature, or something absurd like the fact that gravity acts on them).

Böhm-Bawerk struggles against this. He is horrified that Marx's analysis of value does not proceed from purely empirical analysis of exchange, or an analysis of the psychology of the agents involved in exchange, but from a dialectical analysis of the social relationship of exchange. “Marx, instead of proving his thesis from experience or from its operant motives–that is, empirically or psychologically–prefers another, and for such a subject somewhat singular line of evidence–the method of a purely logical proof, a dialectic deduction from the very nature of exchange.”¹¹ Here he comes right to the heart of the problem, and identifies it as one of method. But he failed to inquire any further, he simply proclaims his method to be obviously superior.

In fact it is all together odd because Böhm-Bawerk himself admits that after the initial 'hump' of value theory, he finds Marx's exposition demonstrates logical acumen in a “truly masterly way.”¹² He gives us a picture of Marxism as a system of thought which is rigorously logical, except in the two places which it has to run up against the facts, namely the initial exposition of value, and in Volume III in the transformation of values into prices of production. Of course, Marx's system is not simply an exercise in neat logic, it meets 'reality' in numerous places, in the chapters on the working day, on relative surplus-value and the development of the factory system, in the historical exposition of primitive accumulation, and much more besides.

But we have to go deeper than this. It is not a question, for Marx, of ignoring completely the psychology of the individuals involved in a capitalist society. But it is a question of explaining this psychology, not as producing, but as being produced by, the social relations of production. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” The way things appear to individuals caught up in the day to day existence of bourgeois society is quite different from how they actually are. And this is already posited in the analysis of exchange.

In the exchange of commodities, we saw that the social relationship between the producers appears as a relationship between their products. Of course here, in the most apparently simple relation of bourgeois society, it is still relatively easy to uncover the secret that this appearance does not correspond to the nature of the case (Although in fact, the analysis of the simple relationship of exchange and value posited by exchange is the rock upon which many readers of Marx have foundered). But once we make our way to the more advanced relations, everything appears, as it were on it's head.

On the surface of capitalist society, profit appears as something related to the total capital, rather than to the variable part which is it's origin, as something which arises just as much out of the constant as the variable part of capital, or equally arises from exchange rather than production. Wages appear as the 'price of labour', rather than the value of labour-power, rent makes it seem as if the products of nature alone had value in themselves and interest makes it seem as if capital was a self-acting automaton that generated a surplus of it's own nature. If we begin with these surface appearances, and stay within their realm, then all that can be generated in the nature of science is empty justifications, the pure ideology of the existing social relations.

It is only by seeking beyond this immediate appearance, life as it impresses itself in immediate consciousness, that inquiry becomes something scientific. Science cannot remain satisfied with it's material in the form in which it first appear to it, but through it's activity (Marx refers to science as 'universal activity') it has to appropriate the material for itself. This was done, in the first instance, by classical political economy up to Ricardo. But Ricardo's doctrines still contained both 'esoteric' and 'exoteric' elements. Marx took hold of Ricardo's true esotericism, while rejecting the exoteric. He expounds a truly scientific political economy, and this truly scientific political economy is at the same time a critique of political economy as the ideology and justification of the existing social relations of production. So much for this controversy.

It might be asked why we chose here to deal with Böhm-Bawerk and his charges of inconsistency rather than any later writers on the same topic. This is to a certain extent like asking why we chose to look at Marx's writings on value theory rather than later 'Marxist' writers. But Böhm-Bawerk expresses clearly the nature of the opposition to value theory and so we thought it most valuable to chose him as the object of our attack.

As a final note, we began by asking the question of why specifically it was that Marx began with the analysis of the commodity. In fact, this cannot be really properly understood until after the whole of the analysis of the production process has been understood. Marx himself had initially thought to begin with a 'general introduction', but scrapped this in his 'A Contribution...' for the now well known beginning with the commodity. This beginning is one suggested by the nature of the entire material itself. Once the analysis has been completed, what appeared initially as premise appears as result. We began with the commodity, and capitalist production is the form of production which makes the commodity into the general form of wealth. This is in the nature of the dialectic.

An addendum, I had wanted to address the question of the marginal theory of value. One line of attack against marginalism and neo-classical equilibrium theory is to point out that it's presuppositions are at variance with reality. The world envisioned by them is a static world of simple exchange, in which Say's law of the market ensures social freedom and harmony. Obviously this is not the case in reality. But pointing out the variance between theory and practice in itself is not enough. If Marx had merely pointed to the fact that capitalism did not present it's lauded ideals in practice, he would have gotten no further than Proudhon. Rather, he showed that on the basis of the exchange of equivalents, capital can only become capital through the production of surplus-value, which finds it's origin in the unpaid labour of the worker.

Paul Mattick really gets to the essence of things when he notes that the marginalists gradually had to abandon any actual attempt at calculating utility, and fell back into merely justifying what exists:

“...the marginal utility theory was finally boiled down to an identification of the economic realm with the domain of the price mechanism, the various attempts to substitute psychologically grounded marginal utilities for the objective value theory must be considered to have failed. They led only, to the elimination of the value problem from bourgeois economics.”¹³

Further study could be done, which might show that the Marxist theory of value is the only real value theory as such, that all other theories of value amount to non-theories, simply post hoc justifications of the existing relations. But this is by the by.

1 Marx, K. (1859). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. [online] marxists.org. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01.htm [Accessed 10 Jun. 2017].

2 Ibid.

3 Marx, K. (1976). Capital. London: Penguin.

4 Ibid.

5 Marx, K. (1859). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

6 Böhm-Bawerk , E. (1896). Karl Marx and the Close of Hs System. [online] marxists.org. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/bohm/index.htm [Accessesd 11 Jun. 2017]

7Marx, K. op cit.

8 Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. London: Penguin.

9Marx, K. (1859). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

10Marx, K. op cit.

11 Böhm-Bawerk , E. op cit.

12Ibid.

13Mattick, P. 1974 Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory [online] marxists.org Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1974/crisis/ch01.htm [Accessed 11 Jun. 2017]

Notes on Schorske

The vote of the SPD's Reichstag delegation in 1914 in favour of war credits is well known to most with an interest in the history of Marxism. Schorske's book 'German Social Democracy 1905-1917' is an attempt to explain this event as the logical outcome of events prior to the war that led to a decisive split in the party. The growth of revisionism within the party was the result on the one hand of the growth of the trade-union movement, and the corollary establishment of a strata of paid functionaries with a vested interest in the maintenance of the existing social order, and on the other of the provincial character of large swathes of German society. The left which formed in opposition to this was emboldened on the contrary by the Russian revolution, the success in other Western countries of general strikes and signs of increasing class conflict within Germany itself into believing that the revolutionary epoch was approaching and the party needed to adapt accordingly.

The tendency towards revisionism was propped up by the development of the party's internal bureaucracy. Schorske disagrees with the proposition that bureaucracy is conservative as such, pointing towards the later organisation of the KPD, but rather believes that the tendencies of any given bureaucracy must be analysed 'genetically' in terms of it's origins. The SPD bureaucracy formed in a low period of struggle, primarily focusing on a more efficient organisation of the party's electoral efforts. In this capacity, the weakness of the idea of the SPD's vote share as a 'thermometer' for it's social influence comes into question. The SPD membership was a fraction of it's vote share, by far the majority of voters came from the more conservative union movement. Orientations towards acquiring a greater vote share necessarily led to greater conservatism in politics and a preponderance of bureaucratic functionaries and electoral procedures which gave hugely disproportionate weight to the provincial sections of the party in opposition to it's more radical urban majority.

At first the party's executive supported the left against the right, as long as the former appeared merely as defenders of tradition against the latter. But as the left increasingly presented itself as a 'positive' opposition to the dominant party line after 1905, the executive began to ally itself increasingly with the right. The left thus began to develop a hostility towards bureaucracy and centralist organisations which, Schorske believes, ultimately paralysed it's capacity for effective action in the German revolution of 1918-19. This anti-bureaucratic and anti-organisational tendency would develop in it's most extreme form into councilism.

A lot of the left loves to explain the history of the SPD in terms of the ideas of it's most prominent theorists. Bernstein and Kautsky are the ultimate bugbears whose ideas led to the victory of the parties reformist practice over it's revolutionary theory. But this is unsatisfactory, it explains life in terms of consciousness, instead of consciousness in terms of life. Bernstein did not cause revisionism, he merely extrapolated in the realm of theory a social movement that had already begun in the early 1890's with the centralisation of the trade unions. In fact after 1914 he found himself on the anti-war side, perhaps uniquely among revisionists.

We think that more research into this area of history would be necessary to reach any definite conclusions. We would however like to point to one element we find unsatisfactory - Schorske seems to tend towards analysing the split as a result of specifically German conditions, a reflection perhaps of the apparently unfinished nature of the German bourgeois revolution. But the split that occurred was reflected in more or less every major European country. A more international orientation might have provided more cogent insights.

Feudalism

Apropros of something, abandoning feudalism as a conceptual schema because different and contradictory interpretations of the word exist seems on the same level as abandoning 'capitalism' as a conceptual schema because different and contradictory interpretations of the word exist, or abandoning 'capital', 'value' or 'profit' as analytical categories because varying interpretations of them exist.

A Collection of some posts on Ideology

On RedMarx there is an ongoing thread on Capital Volume III, I thought it worthwhile to collect some of what I had written there about ideology for future personal reference.

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With regards to the first two chapters, the main thing I noted was the explanations of how the surface phenomena of capitalist society are taken by political economy as the essentials, value appears as the cost-price, surplus-value as a markup to the cost price, which relates just as much to the constant as to the variable part of capital, and can be produced by circulation or mutual cheating, and the ratio of surplus-value to the total capital advanced further obscures the essential difference between constant and variable capital, leaving fixed and circulating capital as the only apparently important difference. Political economy functions by taking the appearance of capital for the essential relations and thus begins to mark itself out more and more as an ideology rather than a value free field of scientific inquiry.

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Definite forms of thought correspond to definite modes of life. Political economy, as the ideology of the bourgeoisie, begins with the forms of thought that arise during the daily life of the capitalist, and more or less elaborates this into a system of thought, an ideology. This is the basis on which Marx calls capital a 'critique' of political economy.

As a tangential thought, I think one of the barriers to the acceptance of Marxism in it's undiluted form in academia is the academic division of labour. A work like capital crosses the traditional barriers of history, social theory, politics and economics. Some fields fare better than others, a historian can accept that history has more to do with social class and economic factors than the actions of 'great men' without undermining his existence qua historian, but for an economist to accept that his apparently value free discipline constitutes the ideology of the bourgeoisie par excellence is prima facie impossible without first abandoning his existence as an economist.

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"As the reader will have recognized in dismay, the analysis of the real, inner connections of the capitalist production process is a very intricate thin and a work of great detail; it is one of the tasks of science to reduce the visible and merely apparent movement to the actual inner movement. Accordingly it will be completely self-evident that, in the heads of the agents of capitalist production and circulation, ideas must necessarily form about the laws of production that diverge completely from these laws and are merely the expression in consciousness of the apparent movement. The ideas of a merchant, a stock-jobber or a banker are necessarily quite upside-down. The ideas of the manufacturers are vitiated by the acts of circulation to which their capital is subjected and by the equalization of the general rate of profit." (Marx, Volume 3 pp. 428)

From a bit further on in the text. It's from chapter 18.

One thing I also think is interesting in this regard, is what Marx says earlier in Volume One, in the chapter on the working, day when talking about the connection between surplus-value and surplus labour time.

"Suppose the working day consists of 6 hours of necessary labour and 6 hours of surplus labour. Then the free worker gives the capitalist 6x6 or 36 hours of surplus labour every week. It is the same as if he worked 3 days in the week for himself and 3 days for the capitalist. But this fact is not directly visible. Surplus labour and necessary labour are mingled together. I can therefore express the same relation by saying for instance that in every minute the worker works 30 seconds for himself and 30 seconds for the capitalist. It is otherwise with the corvée. The necessary labour which the Wallachian peasant performs for his own maintenance is distinctly marked off from his surplus labour on behalf of the boyar. The one he does on his own field, the other on the seignorial estate. Both parts of the labour-time thus exist independently, side by side with each other." (Marx, Volume One pp. 345 - 346)

It's clear in this instance that a relation, that between surplus and necessary labour time, which is expressed clearly in the corvée system, is obscured by the capitalist mode of production. Marx makes the remark at one point that political economists are generally unfamiliar with non-capitalist modes of production, to the extent that they are, they attempt to subsume it within their existing categories. Thus, for example, all means of production starting with the tools of pre-historic men are referred to as capital. To an extent it is admitted, for example, that historically there has been a lot of variation in terms of distribution and circulation, ignoring the inner connection of these with production. The epoch of the specifically capitalist mode of production appears thus as simply the removal of certain fetters placed on production by the state and society.

Because capitalist society, in it's inner workings, is an inherently difficult thing to comprehend fully, the ideology of capitalism presents itself as something mundane, as the systematic elaboration of the notions that enter into the heads of the capitalists in their everyday activity. Pre-capitalist societies, on the other hand, are much simpler and more direct. Class distinctions appear as political distinctions between castes and estates, and thus present themselves openly on the surface of society. Ideology in these forms of society thus takes on a much more 'fantastic' aspect than it does under capitalism.

Marx notes in connection with Greek mythology, and this applies to mythology more generally, that it's existence is bound up with a very low level of development of technology and productive forces.

"...is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?" (Marx, Grundrisse pp. 111)

Direct and immediate relations of production correspond to a direct and immediate relation to nature, and hence a generally fantastical or mythological view of existence. Capitalism brings about a huge revolution in the productive forces of society, subordinating nature to humanity at a rate which is exponential compared to all previous productive development. It destroys all fantastical conceptions, it makes the world mundane, and it's ideology par excellence is suitably worldly.

The 19th and 20th centuries saw the growth and propagation of spiritualism and various 'contemporary', 'new age' religions, and these all appear as having an air of ridiculousness in contrast to previous religions. This is not an artificial distinction created by the passage of time, but a real distinction created by the relations of production. Greek, Norse, Roman and more generally Pagan mythologies, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and other 'old' religions were developed in accordance with the general level of their society, they are it's necessary products. But spiritualism emerges to the extent that the growth of production eliminates the basis on which a fantastic ideology was possible. It emerges as a reaction to the growth of the mundane, but an impossible one. In practice the various forms of spiritualism demonstrate the crassest materialism, being a means for the enrichment of their founders, or for selling various essentially useless trinkets.

Communism first emerges also as something fantastic, as a religious movement, or as a utopian idealism. And in general because it opposes the conceptions formed by the 'practical' capitalist in the course of his life, the capitalist naturally assumes that this, and all manner of opposition to his conceptions, is something fantastic. Marx proceeded by exposing the relations that lie behind the conceptions of the practical capitalist, and the falsity of these conceptions. Because of this, Marxism could never be fully appropriated or tolerated by capitalism, in the way that various ethical or religious forms of socialism might be, it always had to be 'corrected', or taken in a piecemeal fashion. The latter anyway usually expresses itself in attempting to form intentional communities, or in various philanthropic schemes which fail to challenge the existing relations of production, and can always be recuperated by capital.