FOUR FORMS OF CRITICAL THEORY - MARX'S DEVELOPMENT 1

Transcription

1 APPENDIX I FOUR FORMS OF CRITICAL THEORY - SOME THESES ON MARX'S DEVELOPMENT 1 To make a single presentation on Marx's philosophical development seems to be not so much a bold, as rather a presumptuous enterprise - the thema per se requires first of all a philological attention to detail, and the sheer quantity of the literature on the subject with all its unsolved problems seems to warn against too audacious, overall generalizations. If I nevertheless have chosen this subject, it is not because I did not realize the questionable character of such an attempt, but because I do think that something is essentially wrong with the alternative and competing pictures of Marx that are offered in the literature on his development. In any case the term 'theses' in the title of this paper is meant quite earnestly - I would like to bring out only some indications pointing to relevant and perhaps neglected aspects of the well-known texts which show their interrelations in a somewhat new light. As against all the quantity and variety of the literature on the subject, Marx's development is essentially interpreted in it according to one of two rival schemas: that of the rupture, 'coupure', or that of continuity. Both schemas have many variants as to the detail, and both have a high ideological content - a remark which is not intended to discredit them ab ovo. It is another question that the first variant of the schema of rupture, at least as it has been elaborated in the official communist ideology around the thirties, was dictated almost completely by directly political considerations: the opposition between the young ('Hegelian' or 'Feuerbachian') Marx and the 'mature' Marx (where under the label 'young Marx' works belonging to his pre-socialist period and works written after 1843 were equally included) served first of all as a kind of diversionist manoeuvre with the help of which one could push aside, as not truly authentic, a number of his writings, the problematics and the content of which could not be assimilated into the already rigidly institutionalized framework of the 'true' Marxist theory. Even the point of the decisive 'turn' (usually fixed around 1847) was dictated in this interpretation by considerations of an ideological-hagiographic convenience - it was 126

2 FOUR FORMS OF CRITICAL THEORY 127 predetermined by the fact that the Manifesto had to be a work of authentic and mature Marxism. It was from the early fifties on, and especially after , that this whole conception of a fundamental rupture became attacked in the name of a new 'Marx-renaissance', one of the main tenets of which consisted precisely in the rediscovery and 'rehabilitation' of the young Marx and in the demonstration of the essential continuity of his oeuvre, at least from 1844 on. This interpretative turn was primarily motivated by an intention to demolish the completely petrified framework of the official Marxism and to find in the classical tradition itself elements. which can serve as starting points to face theoretically the changed realities of our own time. At the same time, and especially in Eastern Europe, this trend was from the very beginning connected with a search for the theoretical basis and ideological justification for the incipient criticism of the allegedly 'socialist' societies - even the rather abstract character of such a notion as 'alienation' in the early Marx corresponded well to the theoretical vagueness and practical limitations of this commencing leftist criticism of home-societies. Personally, I would uphold that this later trend of Marx-interpretation has reached lasting objective results. It has proved that such allegedly Hegelian or Feuerbachian ideas as designated by the terms 'alienation', 'objectivation', or 'human essence', etc., do occur and playa constitutive part in works of Marx that definitely could not be considered early Of immature. Nevertheless, the theoretical criticism of this conception of continuity, which began essentially from the mid-sixties and which resulted in a revival of the schema of rupture, has demonstrated in my opinion - and this remark is intended here first of all as self-criticism - the problematical character of an endeavour that often satisfied itself by discovering the presence of the ideas of young Marx in the writings of the old, and that sometimes ended up by depicting The Capital as an application, at the best as an economical concretization and enrichment of the earlier elaborated philosophical ideas and theories. The new schema of 'coupure' was surely dictated not by philological considerations - the way its main representative, Althusser handled the texts was strikingly arbitrary (even if this arbitrariness has been methodologically fortified by the hermeneutically rather strange proposal to read the texts as completely correct answers to questions all put entirely wrongly). The standpoint,

3 128 APPENDIX I represented by Althusser, Colletti and others, partly foreshadowed, partly expressed the political-ideological turn of at least one part of the Western New Left. It was this political change that resulted in the rejection of ideas connected with the anti-dogmatic 'Marx-renaissance', now considered to be an attempt to dissolve Marxism in an abstract-liberal humanitarian ideology in which both its theoretical specificity and its revolutionary edge are lost. And while this newly proposed scheme of cleavage seems to me not much less arbitrary than the earlier one, it had, however, the real merit of drastically drawing attention to that different 'intellectual climate', way of argumentation etc., which one undoubtedly encounters when one compares The Capital with the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, with The German Ideology, and - I would add - even with the Grundrisse. Now, if on the background of all these controversies one looks at the very texts of Marx and undertakes the somewhat tedious job to read them just consecutively, with supposedly naive eyes, the first impression gained is, I think, of an extraordinary continuity. This undoubtedly can partly be explained by subjective-biographical considerations. From 1844 on Marx worked almost literally and only with some short interruptions on one book, on the critique of political economy. His rather neurotic fear of publishing, this constant compulsion to rewrite, which, on the other hand, is always motivated by vague dissatisfaction with the form of exposition, but invariably results in a change of content - all this invokes at first sight a picture of almost organic growth of his ideas. But there is surely more behind this impression of continuity than these personal accidentalities: the identity and constancy of fundamental theoretical intentions, of that which is so often designated by the name of critical theory. I use this term here in a very broad sense. I mean by it, on the one hand, negatively, the rejection by Marx of all the previous philosophical ideologies as necessarily reproducing the false alternative of an acritical acceptance or an unreal criticism of the given social reality - an opposition in which the social function and status of philosophy, that of being the abstract-transcendent expression of this reality itself, finds its contradictory form of appearance. On the other hand, positive~y, this idea involves the program of a theory which in reality itself finds the tendencies pointing to, and striving towards, its own overcoming, since social reality is conceived in this conceptualisation not only in the form of an object to be described and explained, but also as a collective subject who

4 FOUR FORMS OF CRITICAL THEORY 129 reaches through the theory its own self-consciousness, the consciousness of its latent radical needs, induced and developed under the impact of the existing social c6nditions, but unsatisfiable, or even inarticulable within their system. This constant self-understanding of the character and role of his theory was, of course, also accompanied in Marx with a number of constant theoretical premises of content: practical materialism, the designation of the revolutionary subject as the class of the proletariat, some fundamental and unchanging aspects in his critique of capitalism, etc. But I would like to suggest - and this is my main contention - that within the framework of these common-invariant assumptions and orientations definite changes were taking place in Marx's views concerning not only particular theoretical themes, but also the way of realisation of the idea of critical theory itself, both in theoretical and practical respects. More particularly these changes concerned: (1) the method of the theory, meaning by this varying conceptions of the relationship between its 'empirical', descriptive-explanatory and 'valuerelated', critical-practical aspects and constituents, and - in close connection with this - alterations in the understanding of the relation between economy and philosophy; (2) the postulated unification of theory and practice, meaning by it differing conceptions of the way theory may and have to be connected with the workers' movement, including both different arguments for the revolutionary role of the proletariat and different socio-political strategies, suggested by them; and finally (3) the aim of the unified practico-theoretical, radical activity, understanding by this different conceptions of socialist society, first of all of socialist economy (within the constant framework negatively circumscribed by the essentially stable outlines of the critique of capitalism). In sum we find in Marx's development different types or forms of critical theory, realised with varying degrees of elaboration, but clearly distinguishable from each other. All in all in Marx's oeuvre we meet with four forms of critical theory, which are primarily exemplified - leaving the question of the transition between them aside - in the Economic Philosophical Manuscripts, in the writings of (first of all German Ideology, Poverty of Philosophy and the manuscript on A rbeitslohn), in the Grundrisse and in The Capital respectively. In the following I shall

5 130 APPENDIX I attempt to characterize, certainly in a very schematic way, the fundamental differences between them. If one turns to the fragmentary and severely damaged text of the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 (supplementing them with the generally contemporaneous economical excerpts and notes of Marx), one of the most significant facts about his views at that time emerges from the rarely analyzed, first three, economic chapters of the manuscripts. And what is interesting about these chapters is the strangely uninteresting character of their content. To put it drastically: Marx writes for immediate publication (as we know from the preface and from the correspondence) a book on the critique of national economy, in which the discussion of purely economic subject matters does not contain a single original idea. Even formally the first three chapters predominantly relate the views of others, first of all Adam Smith. There are very few critical remarks in this exposition, and again they are not original, but derived from the literature known to Marx. And what is even more odd, at some rather crucial points, e.g., in the discussion of the division of labour, Marx introduces different and logically contradictory views from the literature (those of Smith, Say, Skarbek and Mill) - with a seemingly similar tone of assent. All this surely cannot be explained by the 'immaturity' of Marx's economic views. Behind this procedure there lies a definite conception of economic theories in general and of the possibility of their socialist critique in particular. According to it, the ensemble of the theories of bourgeois national economy presents - and just in their logical contradictions - an essentially correct description of the empirical reality of capitalist economy; and they offer such a description first of all due to the fact (and to the degree) that they are consistently economic theories, that they depict the economic life of capitalist society as a closed system with its own logic and finality. It is indeed due to this characteristic that they express adequately the essence of bourgeois society: the divorce and the domination of purely economic motives (that of the maximization of profit and accumulation) from, and over, the whole of social life, the reduction of all human subjects to the role of mere instruments of production, subordinated to its alienated movement and ends. On the other hand, these theories are, as Marx explicitly states, all equally false, and again precisely because they are consistently economic theories. For by depicting capitalist economy as a system with its own logic, they imply that it is rational. They all deny chance which

6 FOUR FORMS OF CRITICAL THEORY 131 is the only true law of an economy based on competition, and therefore they arbitrarily fix some one-sided moment or aspect of its haphazard movement as a law. Because of this voluntaristic abstraction then each of them necessarily falls into contradiction with the facts, with itself and with the rival theories. Socialist thinking can surmount these contradictions in theory and the real antinomies of the irrational-anarchic capitalist economy in practice only if it transcends the economic view-point as such. 'Socialist economic theory' would be a contradictio in adjecto. Critical theory of society can exist only as the philosophical criticism of national economy conceived as the 'necessary false consciousness', as the ideology of capitalism - in the form of confronting the contradictory ensemble of its alleged, reified laws with the concrete, living activity and needs of those real subjects, from whom it cynically abstracts. The method of this philosophical criticism is again rather peculiar from the view-point of Marx's later development. Marx actually starts from the relation of the worker to the world of social wealth as it is fixed in political economy and interprets it as a specific, historical type of materialpractical subject-object relationship. He then attempts to demonstrate that this relation between the proletarian as the representative individual of bourgeois society and the product of his labour is only the externalized expression of the relation of the worker to his own productive activity. It is this latter relation which constitutes for Marx the essential phenomenon of alienated labour. In capitalist society the activity of the wage-labourer is socially determined in a dual-contradictory way: as the only source and universal possibility of all human riches and simultaneously as the actuality of absolute poverty. This alienated activity then posits, on the one hand, the whole world of social objectivations under the form of capital and, on the other, the relation of the proletarian to another, antagonistic type of social individuality, to that of the capitalist. Through this philosophical critique Marx aims to reduce, to trace back all the reified and disjointed aspects and preconditions of bourgeois economy (described by national economy either in the form of accidental facts or in that of eternal necessities) to the living activity of the wage-labourer as their real subject. In this way he intends to uncover their inherent interconnections, their conditional-historical 'necessity' and at the same time their place in the overall process of history understood as the self-creation of man in, and through, his own activity. It is, I think, rather evident that

7 132 APPENDIX I this program and method of philosophical critique is nothing else but an attempt at the materialistic transformation and radicalisation of the method of the Hegelian Phenomenology. Through it the phenomenological 'forms of consciousness' (Gestalten des Bewusstsein) become replaced by social types of living individualities as they are determined by their place in the material life process of society; the Hegelian starting point of an immediate cognitive subject-object relation ('sense-certainty') is replaced by the practical-mater.ial relation of the empirical subject to the product of his labour; and the phenomenological movement, instead of the theoretical acts of 'recognition' of the world as externalization of consciousness, ends with the practical program of the appropriation of the world of social objectivations by its creators through the revolutionary transformation of the existing society. The application of this method of 'materialistic phenomenology' is tied, however, to presuppositions of a practical type. The whole theoretical procedure of reducing the complex interrelations of socio-economic life to the relation of a historically'representative individual to his own activity rests on postulates in Marx concerning the unalienated relationship between the individual and society, on an understanding of communism as the complete and total reconciliation between human essence and individual existence. That is, if alienation means first of all the growing gulf between societal and individual development, its abolition designates at that time for Marx the realization of their complete unity and coincidence: the creation of such social conditions under which each individual will actually be able to appropriate and to realize in his life all the totality of the historically created and objectified human needs and abilities. Communism designates a stage of historical development when the practical identity of society and person will be reached. So the application of the phenomenological method of 'representative individuals' has eo ipso a critical meaning and intent: it means the application of unalienated standards to an alienated state of society. This method dissipates the fetishistic appearances, reducing all reified forms of life to the activity of the living individual, and simultaneously it demonstrates the limits of a purely theoretical defetishization in the sense that the above reduction can take place only if the existence of an antagonistic type of individuality hostile to the worker, is posited and presupposed. This means, however, that the materialist radicalisation of the

8 FOUR FORMS OF CRITICAL THEORY 133 phenomenological method is definitely bound in the Manuscripts to a not only vague, but also utopian conception of communism. It results in a curious strain which is present in this work between what one may call a 'realistic' philosophical and a utopian practical orientation. On a theoretical philosophical level Marx unambiguously maintains the idea of 'human finitude': the human individual is always 'a suffering and dependent' being; the universalisation of man, making up the content of historical progress, is an unending process that constantly removes and pushes out the concrete boundaries of human dependence, but never can eliminate the very fact of external limitations and historical determinations as such. It is from this standpoint that Marx criticizes the idealistic conception of freedom in general, and the Hegelian theory of abolition of alienation (as overcoming objectivity as such) in particular. Emancipation means for him not the overcoming of human finitude, the liberation from all the external determinations as the state of perfect and absolute autonomy, but a concrete historical change in the character of these determinations. It designates the creation of such conditions of life, under which men will be able to remove consciously and constantly those social limits which historically have turned into barriers upon the manifestation of their concretely formed personalities. But this philosophical conception stands in collision with the utopian character of the practical programme in which communism appears as the complete abolition of all possible sources of social conflicts and the absolute satisfaction of all needs, inevitably invoking the idea of an end of history. 1'he presence of this strain can nowhere be seen better than in Marx's theory of the proletariat as the subject and bearer of critical theory. The emancipatory mission of the proletariat is derived in the Manuscripts according to a logic of negation of negation. Because of their absolute alienation, the wage-labourers do not constitute a class oj, and in, bourgeois society at all; they have no particular interests to realize within its framework. So their collective radical activity by necessity is directed at transcending the general conditions of human alienation. Since the proletariat is not a particular class, it is the universal class. But the state of absolute alienation is depicted by Marx as such a situation of complete dehumanisation, material and intellectual deprivation that it becomes impossible to answerthe question: What motives, what kind of practical impulses can emerge out of this condition of brute-like existence for the pro-

9 134 APPENDIX I letarians to appropriate and to realize the socialist theory? There seems to be no imaginable social-political strategy able to bridge this gap and to render the initial contact between real life-practice and theory, between the actual situation of the invoked revolutionary subjects and the radical content of the theory possible. The rather idealized descriptions of the first political, self-educational workers' associations as prefigurations of the new society, that one also encounters in the Manuscripts, stand without any possible connection with the theoretically derived characterization of the situation of the working class, all the more, since Marx at that time has a completely negative attitude toward trade-unions as the economic mass organizations of wage-labourers. In all probability it is these strains within Marx's theory that determine the next stage of his development: In general this evolution leads from the philosophical criticism of political economy as the basic ideology of bourgeois society to apltilosophically oriented critical economy. The first step in this direction, but in a specific and distinct form, was taken in the writings of The most visible change occurs in Marx's attitude toward philosophy. The German Ideology definitely replaces the earlier idea of critical theory as philosophical criticism of ideologies with a programme of the fusion of philosophy and empirical historical-social sciences, within the framework of which the orientating and ordering categories of philosophy have to prove their validity not only in making the empirical material of history comprehensible, but first of all by relating it to, and focusing it around, the practical possibility of human emancipation. More concretely: critical theory now takes on the form of a radical investigation of such empirical social problems that have an immediate life-importance for the revolutionary struggle of the working class and its strategy, on the basis of a practically oriented and philosophically anchored general theory of history. Together with this change there occurs a sharp transformation in the method of critical theory, too. Marx now definitely gives up the method of a 'materialist phenomenology'. He further upholds the defetishizing postulate to analyse and understand the whole of human history in terms of human activities, practices; but now he stresses the fact that the historically produced and objectified social relations of the individuals are just as much elementary, irreducible and 'substantive' constituents and preconditions of social life as the very individuals themselves.

10 FOUR FORMS OF CRITICAL THEORY 135 Therefore the deduction of the first from the immediate material activities of the second is now rejected as speculative and circular. It is from The German Ideology on that the notion of social totality, understood as a system of dynamically changing social relationships constituted by interconnected and institutionalized social practices, acquires a central role in Marx's theory. If the 'phenomenological' method of the Manuscripts made it possible for Marx to give a comprehensive characterization of the unity and continuity of the historical process as contradictory-alienated progress of mankind - and the results of this conceptualisation were retained in his later works - in The German Ideology he first elaborates those theoretical concepts with the help of which he can describe and analyze the relatively stable discontinuities of this process, the main socio-economic formations. The characterization of critical theory as the fusioi} of philosophy and empirical social investigations acquires a clearer meaning if we take into account the simultaneous changes in Marx's attitude toward economic theory. In the writings of this period he definitely abandons the idea that every attempt to create a comprehensive and contradiction-free theory of bourgeois economy is eo ipso practically apologetic and theoretically unrealizable. Marx now accepts in the main outlines Ricardo's theory just because he considers it to be the 'scientific system' of political economy, and within its framework he now first accepts the labour theory of value as well. But by acknowledging the possibility of a 'scientific' economy he does not yet deem it necessary to work out an independent, critical economic system of his own which in the totality of its explanatory content could be counterposed to the systems of bourgeois political economy. In the writings of this period he basically relies on the conceptual framework of the Ricardian theory. Nevertheless, it is at this time that the idea of a critical economy of the proletariat takes its beginning. This idea, however, is yet conceived as the program of radical elucidation of such, empirical problems that from a purely theoretical viewpoint have only a partial-particular significance, but that are immediately connected with decisive aspects of the class struggle - and therefore are either neglected or ideologically distorted in bourgeois economics, while having a life-importance for the strategy of the revolutionary workers' movement. In the late forties this means first of all an attempt at the creation of an independent and critical theory of wages.

11 136 APPENDIX I Since he later completely revoked it, it is rarely emphasized that the first original contribution of Marx to economics was his theory of wages elaborated in the writings of , especially in the manuscript Arbeitslohn (1847). To put it very crudely: Marx now accepts (in contrast to the Paris Manuscripts where he reproduced the views of Adam Smith) the Malthusian law of overpopulation and, as its corollary, the law of the continuously sinking level of wages, only he argues that these are not natural, but historical necessities, determined ultimately by the social character of technical development under capitalism. It is the way capitalism applies machinery and transforms thereby both the labour and the economic situation of the immediate producer that creates a constant over-population (industrial reserve-army) within this system which then exercises an irresistible (on the long-run) downward pressure upon the wage-level. This theory now makes it possible for Marx to reconsider also his earlier conception of the revolutionary mission of the working class. This revision does not entail a radical revocation of his earlier view, but rather its concretization and the logical junction of its disconnected, or even contradictory elements. The thesis of the necessarily sinking level of wages now provides a concrete, economic-empirical content to the conception of the absolute alienation of the proletariat. As an effect of this law the workers are in principle excluded from the participation in the growth of that social wealth which is produced by capitalist development. The gulf dividing their practical situation from the riches of objectified social possibilities of need-fulfillment is constantly widening, by a historical-social necessity. On the other hand, Marx now energetically underlines the historically positive aspect of wage-labour: the abstract character of industrial work, constituting one aspect of its alienation, means at the same time the emancipation of the worker from all those limited, narrow determinations which in pre-capitalist systems accrued to the very personality of the producer, and as 'natural' (naturwiichsig) social roles restricted also the character oftheir interaction. Due to this fact, the associations of the proletariaris cannot be based on pre-existent social ties of limited-'organic' kind, but only on creative and se~f-educative social contacts and activity, in which the workers participate with their whole personality. In such a way the idea of the workers' associations as fundamentally new types of human community now becomes reconciled - at least at an abstract-theoretical level - with the conception of their total alienation.

12 FOUR FORMS OF CRITICAL THEORY 137 Whatever be the merits and difficulties of such a conception, it first renders possible to elaborate a general strategic scheme for a revolutionary workers' movement. The starting point of it is the revised evaluation of the role of 'economic coalitions', trade-unions. The law-like tendency of the sinking wages, constantly endangering even the traditional subsistance level of the workers, inevitably drives them to defend their elementary common interests: to form coalitions of ever growing scope. These economic associations cannot actually counterweight the iron laws of capitalist development, in fact they cost to the working class more than the purely economic advantages they yield. But because of the specific character pertaining to all organizations of the modern proletarians, they and the experiences of the common struggle, of the temporary successes and the inevitable long-run defeats, develop in the wage-labourers, on the one hand, new radical needs, and, on the other, a new radical consciousness leading to the creation of revolutionary political organizations of a new type. Finally, in the writings of this period one can observe a rather slow change - certainly not independent of the transformations already discussed - concerning the idea of communism as well. Restricting myself to bare guidelines, I can only point to the fact that Marx now gives up the identification of communism with the idea of a direct and total unity of the individual and the society. He undoubtedly retains the conception of the directly social character of individual activities under socialist conditions (there is, in particular, only one economic subject in socialism), but the structured character of this society now gains an equal emphasis. The model of communist society as 'one person' is now replaced with that of 'one factory' or 'one enterprise'. It is in this connection that the problem of planning first emerges and gains importance in Marx's thinking, though still in a vague and abstract form. It is, however, clear that the planned distribution of the factors of production and the newly produced use-values cannot be based under socialist conditions - according to Marx at that time - on the principle of labour expenditures (production costs measured by necessary labour time), since this again would reduce the share of the producers in their products to a bare and sinking subsistence minimum. Further, there is a change in the meaning of the 'abolition of division of labour', which retains its programmatic importance in the works of this period, too. But step by step it ceases to involve the perspective of a com-

13 138 APPENDIX I plete identity of individual and societal abilities. There are two meanings to it, which in the writings of this period occur side-by-side, though in dubious logical concord. One way of argumentation points to the manysided character of the requirements 'automatical' industry makes on the producer, and concludes that the present narrow, one-sided division of labour-functions is in fact a fetter on technological progress which is sustained only by the necessity to subjugate the worker in the production process itself to the authority and domination of capital. The other argument starts from the observation that modern industry reduces all kinds of labour to simple labour, and then emphasizes the positive possibilities entailed in this tendency for the regular change of activities and the liquidation of a life-long specialization. It is interesting to observe the co-existence of these two trends of thought at the same time, since later they will acquire independent and in a sense mutually exclusive elaborations - the first in the Grundrisse, the second in The Capital. The next change in the structure and self-understanding of the Marxian theory, which occurs in the mid-fifties, is mainly the result of 'external' causes: of historical experiences in the light of which its earlier variant could not be maintained in its crucial points any more. Already in 1850, reflecting on the defeat of revolution, Marx comes to the conclusion that the revolutionary storms of political struggle and the counter-revolutionary standstills of stability alternate each other corresponding with the rhythm of economic crisis and prosperity. This understandably focuses his attention on the periodic character of capitalist reproduction. This shift of interest, however, acquires a principal significance only at the mid-fifties, when on the basis of the experiences of prosperity and of comparison of the workers' situation in various countries of Europe, Marx is forced, after long vacillations, to give up his theory of wages. The pivotal role the theory of sinking wage-level had played earlier in his theory, by linking together its theoretical and practical elements, is now overtaken by considerations pertaining to the overall laws and regularities of the process of reproduction under capitalism. It seems that at first he tries to elaborate a separate theory of crises, just as earlier he has worked out an independent theory of wages - his manuscripts from the early fifties deal primarily with problems of money, credit, banking and financial crisis. But in the course of this work he not only arrives at results irreconcilable with the Ricardian system of economy (earlier accepted by him), but he also reaches the con-

14 FOUR FORMS OF CRITICAL THEORY 139 clusion that a separate theory of crises is impossible, since crises are nothing else but the summary results - the real expressions and the violent reconciliations - of all the contradictions of capitalist economy. The greater the importance Marx ascribes to the periodic character of capitalist development for the possibility of its revolutionary transformation, the closer he gets to the idea of an elaboration of a critical system of economy of his own. This is the practical and the theoretical background on the basis of which the new form of critical theory emerges: the critical system of a philosophically oriented and historically situated political economy of capitalism. It centers around the problems of surplus-production and capitalist accumulation, that is around the questions of the general tendencies of the total process of capitalist reproduction, and it aims to provide thereby lasting orientation for the class struggle of the proletariat, an orientation which is effective and valid also in the lulls of political struggle, in the protracted periods of relative stability. This form of critical theory is embodied in a great number of manuscripts beginning with the Grundisse and ending, for the sake of simplicity, with the text known to us of The Capital. As far as economic theory is concerned, the starting and the end-point of this series of manuscripts seem to be very closely related, the differences between them being those of further elaboration and maturation of ideas. What is more, the basic philosophical framework of the Grundisse and The Capital is also a common one. I mean by this, first of all, the presence in both.of that fundamental dichotomy of content and form that Marx took over from the Aristotelian-Hegelian tradition and the use of which first enabled him to raise the basic question of a critical economy, the question about the genesis of those socio-economic form-determinations (Formbestimmungen) which define the character of the process of reproduction in a capitalist society. Nevertheless, notwithstanding all these important points of agreement and correspondence, I would maintain that precisely as variants and embodiments of a critical theory of economy, Grundisse and The Capital represent different view-points, and if the Grundisse is a 'rough draft', it is not yet the draft of The Capital. The differences in question are the most conspicuous in regard to the practical aspects of critical economy, first of all the very meaning ascribed in these two works to the historical perspective of socialism. In the

15 140 APPENDIX I argumentation of Grundrisse, one of the basic contradictions of capitalism arises out of the fact that it increases the productive forces to a degree where the process of production ceases to be a process of labour in the direct sense and becomes transformed into a 'scientific process', into the technical application of the natural sciences. By this, however, capitalism undermines its own foundation - commodity production based on the law of value. Because living labour thereby becomes only a secondary and subordinate element of production, and therefore the quantity of socially necessary labour time more and more loses its validity and effectivity as the regulator of the distribution of factors of production. The ever deeper and ever more destructive character of crises under capitalism is connected with the progression of this process. Accordingly, socialism means abandoning the very principle of regulating the reproduction of material activities on the basis of necessary labour expenditures. It is not labour time, but free time which will become the measure of wealth in the future society. Production itself ceases then to be a process in which man figures only as one of the physical-natural forces, subject to the iron control of the laws of nature and to the dictate of natural necessities. In the automatic factory the individual will fulfill the role of the conscious director and regulator of the scientific-technological process in which he or she no more participates immediately. In such a way labour becomes one of the forms of free and creative human activity. On the other hand, since only universal, primarily scientific cultivation of the individual can create the social preconditions for such productive activity, disposable time as time for developing creative abilities itself becomes a direct economic factor. The divide between labour-time and free-time disappears, since the individual capable of new discoveries becomes even technically the real basis of enlarged reproduction at this stage of history. No doubt, in The Capital Marx lays a not lesser emphasis upon the transformation of production into the application of science: he again speaks about the development of the 'automatic atelier' etc. - only their meaning has now become essentially different. Marx now posits a progressing tendency of capitalist development to reduce skilled labour to a simple one, to the few simple forms of movement of the human bodily organism, and considers this trend as a lasting technical necessity remaining in force under, nay, creating the material basis for, a socialist system of production. For the elimination of the 'old division of labour' means

16 FOUR FORMS OF CRITICAL THEORY 141 for him now the abandonment of specialisation made possible only by this process of simplification and mechanization of all labour functions. It is the regular alternation of such simple work tasks, together with the drastic reduction of labour time, which in the future will terminate the stupefying, depersonalizing effects of labour under capitalism. In such a way the individual will become able to act as the conscious subject of free and creative activities outside the sphere of production: because, in The Capital, Marx definitely revokes the perspective of the Grundrisse concerning the merging of necessary and free time, too. On the contrary, socialism now appears - as clearly attested in the famous passage of the third volume about the realms of freedom and necessity - as just that society which really works out, and creates an adequate institutional basis for, their differentiation. For the first time in history it will reduce labouring to a purely natural-technical necessity, completely freed both from the role of custom, on the one hand, and from the effects of domination, on the other. Thereby it will render autonomous social and cultural activities - praxis as an end-in-itself - for all the members of society possible. This also implies a radical change of view concerning the economic principles governing reproduction in socialist society. According to The Capital socialism liquidates the regulatory function of the law of value only in the sense that it abandons its reifiedly mediated social form connected with commodity exchange. But it preserves its general content in the sense that socially necessary labour time remains the universal measure of all costs demanded by production - a function which Marx now regards as a historically constant, 'technical' necessity of any process of reproduction. Socialist economy in the given respect acquires now the meaning of a project to make social labour costs the direct, consciously and planfully applied regulator of the process of material reproduction, in the form of a purely technical computation, which instrumentalizes the earlier and independently taken, democratic social decisions about the ends of production, transforming them thereby into economically rational social tasks. In connection with these changes in the historical-practical perspective of the theory, there occurs also a definite transformation in the understanding of its subjective preconditions under capitalism. If one compares the corresponding passages in the Grundrisse and The Capital - a procedure which became really possible only now, with the publication of the Manuscripts from , serving as the connecting link between them

17 142 APPENDIX I - one finds that Marx quite consistently replaced passages and types of argument referring to the revolutionary potential of the working class by arguments of another type. Put simply one may say: the basic emphasis in the Grundrisse fell on the radical needs of the proletariat, understood as needs which in their concrete content transcend the capitalist system of social relations. These were conceived as, on the one hand, needs evoked by participation in modern forms of production itself - toward the manysided development of the individuals, toward the collectivist organization of life activities, etc. On the other hand, these were envisaged as needs emerging from the formally free character of exchange between the workers and the capitalist that emancipates the consumption of the immediate producer from the pre-capitalist forms of direct social regulation and bondage, thereby renders possible a qualitatively limited and insecure, but for the emergence of/class-consciousness very essential participation in the 'fruits of civilization', and creates in the working class sui generis cultural needs. In The Capital one meets with a changed argumentative strategy that predominantly refers to the law-like movement of wages and unemployment determined and dictated by the cyclical pattern of capitalist reproduction. The revolutionary motivation of the working class is now localized first of all in the impossibility of satisfying with any kind of certainty and stability even its elementary needs. (True, elementary is understood now not naturalistically, but in the sense of a historically formed, traditional living and cultural standard.) From the viewpoint of an overall judgment about Marx's development the real question, however, remains whether these practical differences in the respective conceptions of the Grundrisse and The Capital are correlated with theoretical disparities. Here I have to restrict myself to an almost bare affirmation. I would like simply to point to three particular problem-areas. The first concerns the much discussed question of the changed outline and structure of the two respective manuscripts. The transformation in this respect seems to me both drastic and conspicuous: in the Grundrisse the course of exposition is organized according to the principle of ascendance from the abstract to the concrete, in The Capital to that from the essence to the appearance, and these two pairs of categories are certainly not identical, neither in Hegel, nor in Marx. If this transformation remained largely unnoticed in the passionate and prolonged dispute over the subject, this was in all probability due to the fact that the actual

18 FOUR FORMS OF CRITICAL THEORY 143 sequence of categories and themes in both works remained to a large extent the same. But the aforementioned change in the 'plan' means that the same (and to a large degree identically analyzed) economic phenomena and categories are differently interpreted in the two works insofar as their Junction and significance within the socio-economic totality is concerned. So in the Grundrisse the starting and the end-point of the analysis are characterized by terms such as "capital in its ideal average" versus "capital in its actuality" or "the general notion of capital" versus "its inner living organisations" etc. In The Capital, on the other hand, the materially same moments of the exposition are described in the form of dichotomies like "the imperceptible essence" versus "the forms on the surface of appearances" or "the essential though hidden nuclear form" versus "the finished form on the surface", etc. To mention only one concrete example ~ in the Grundrisse, competition is consistently treated as constituting the inner nature and actuality of capital; in the later work, however, it is emphatically referred to as the sphere of mere appearances. Generally, the whole course of exposition is conceived in the Grundrisse as the evolvement (Ent/altung) of a single socially specific-particular content disclosing its historical dynamism, while in The Capital it is understood as the process of systematic unravelling of the inherent distortion (Entstelluhg) of the same content, which now acquires a normative accent (hence also the central role of 'fetishism' still absent from the earlier work). This is connected, in my view, with a less evident change in the meaning of the most basic philosophical constitutive categories, first of all that ofjorm and content. In the Grundrisse this dichotomy is applied primarily to elucidating the basic distinction between the material-technical elements of the life-creation process of society (elements which are inherited during, and accumulated in the course of, historical progress), on the one hand, and the social functions these elements obtain in the result of the specific character of their unification within a definite historical totality of'social relations, on the other. This meaning of the dichotomy is best exemplified in the contradiction between use-value and value. True, already in the Grundrisse Marx applies at some places the same dichotomy to the side of 'form' itself: he speaks about objectified labour as the economic 'content' or 'substance' of the value-form ~ but he is hesitant in this use, and in general attempts (even terminologically) to separate the two meanings of 'content' involved in such a procedure. In The Capital, on the other

19 144 APPENDIX I hand (and this is especially true about the text of the first edition), we encounter an almost completed metaphysics of form and content. Their dichotomy is applied not only to the characterisation of the relation between use-value and value, but also, on the one hand, to a rudimentary analysis of the use-value (distinction between the man-made useful 'form' and the natural substratum of the product) and, on the other hand, to a highly intricate analysis of the value-form itself (the complicated set of relationships between exchange-value and value on the one hand, and 'value-form' and 'value-substance', on the other). This change seems to indicate a striving in the Marx of The Capital to find out in the socioeconomic forms and relations themselves historically constant, so to say 'technical', structural elements, a tendency which is certainly not unconnected with his changed view on the ahistorical validity of the generalized law of value. Finally, and summing up all the particular remarks and references: there seems to be a change between the Grundrisse and The Capital in the historical topos ascribed to capitalist society and its practical overcoming. The idea of a divide between prehistory and really human history is present in both. But in the Grundrisse it is understood as a radical historical transformation that finally eliminates the basic antinomy of necessity and freedom characterizing all preceding human development. In The Capital, however, bourgeois society becomes that stage in historical progress which prepares all the objective and subjective preconditions not for the ultimate elimination of this antinomy, but for the adequate and final socioinstitutional separation of its contradictory aspects. Socialism will succeed in reducing the antinomy of necessity and freedom to its real, anthropological (ultimately ontic) foundation: the sphere of necessity to the relation between men and nature alone, thereby creating a true sphere of freedom encompassing the totality of social interactions between men. In this sense socialism, and particularly socialist economy, appears now as the universal and direct-immediate realisation of those determinations which are implied in the abstract notion of material social production (the paradigmatic form of human life-activities) as such - determi~ations which in the previous course of history did only appear either in some narrowly limited, local, or in a universal, but reified and distorted form. The domination of men over men can be practically overcome only if man's dependence on nature, his subjugation to its laws, always demanding some form of