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ABSTRACT
Abstraction has taken very different terminologies revolving around the relation between reality and thought. In this framework, the debate on the issue of crisis is fueled by different, often one-sided and ideologically contradictive, uses of abstraction. In this work, we attempt to show that without an adequate grasp of the role of abstraction, and without sufficient flexibility in making the needed abstractions, most interpreters of Marx — Marxists and non-Marxists alike — have constructed versions of his theories that suffer in their very form from the same rigidity, inappropriate focus, and one-sidedness that Marx saw in bourgeois ideology. In this framework, we argue that Marx's abstraction is not ‘other things equal', i.e. ceteris paribus, but ‘nothing equal'. In the same vein, we argue that the capitalist process is a ‘non-equilibrium' process. Instead of ‘laws', we argue that tendencies and contradictions may be found in the Marxian oeuvre. Furthermore, we argue that the isolation of the third Volume of Marx's capital from the rest of the Marxian oeuvre facilitates the interpretation of Marx's method in terms of ‘mechanical materialism’.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Editor and the anonymous referees of this Journal for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 ‘Everything is what it is and not another thing’ — Bishop Butler's slogan admirably sums up the logic of this sort of analytical approach; this saying was used by G.E. Moore as the motto of his Principia Ethica (Citation1903 [Citation1993]), and thereby achieved modern currency as one of the slogans of the analytical movement (see also Sayers Citation1984, p. 5).
2 Within the Althusserian framework, ‘abstract-in-thought’ is identical to ‘mode of production’, while for Jameson the mode of production consists the highest abstraction within his three-level analysis.
3 Given that change is always a part of what things are, Marx’s research problem could only be how, when, and into what they change (Ollman Citation2003, p. 67).
4 Hegel explained that when one speaks about the difference between two things, that is how identity emerges. The ‘truth’ of these two objects consists only in their relation to each other — ‘each contains the other in its own concept’ (Hegel Citation1966, p. 118). Hegel was arguing:
we speak, accordingly, of the notions of colour, plant, animal, etc. They are supposed to be arrived at by neglecting the particular features which distinguish the different colours, plants, and animals from each other, and by retaining those common to them all … But the universal of the notion is not a mere sum of features common to several things, confronted by a particular which enjoys an existence of its own. It is, on the contrary, self-particularizing or self-specifying, and with undimmed clearness finds itself at home in its antithesis. (Hegel Citation1975, p. 225, original emphasis)
5 Ricardo is an eloquent paradigm of narrow abstractions, ‘one can see that though Ricardo is accused of being too abstract, one would be justified in accusing him of the opposite: lack of the power of abstraction, inability, when dealing with the values of commodities, to forget profits, a factor which confronts him as a result of competition’ (Marx Citation1968, p. 191). While ‘classical economy is not interested in elaborating how the various forms come into being, but seeks to reduce them to their unity by means of analysis, because it starts from the given premises’ (Marx Citation1989/Marx and Engels Citation1989, p. 500).
6 Marx rejects deductive frameworks for explaining central processes of capitalism, e.g., ‘since sales and purchases are negotiated solely between individuals, it is not admissible to seek here for relations between whole social classes’ (Marx Citation1992, p. 550). In the same manner he rejects reductive frameworks as well, ‘for, in the beginning of civilization, it is not private individuals but families, tribes, etc., that meet on an independent footing’ (Marx Citation1992, p. 332, see also Paolucci Citation2007, p. 40).
7 According to Heinrich (Citation2012), the view that the various fragmentary references to crisis theory in the three volumes of Capital constitute a fully developed coherent structure, which only requires diligent exegesis, has never seemed sensible. In the same spirit, Milios, Dimoulis, and Economakis (Citation2002) argue that Marx’s theoretical views expressed on the economic crisis are not given in that a developed and analytical form to constitute a general theory.
8 In the twentieth century, the starting point for Marxist debates on crisis theory was the third volume of Capital, the manuscript of which was written in 1864–65; later, attention was directed towards the theoretical considerations on crisis in the Theories of Surplus-Value, written in the period between 1861 and 1863 and finally, the Grundrisse of 1857–58 also came into view, which today plays a central role in the understanding of Marx’s crisis theory for numerous authors (Heinrich Citation2012).
9 Crisis has been ascribed with ontological chatacteristics in the history of capitalism since the developmental of capitalism is a process of the collision with its internal limitations (Kuruma Citation1972, p. 323).
10 Against this arguement, Wolff (Citation1978, p. 52) detached the crisis from the tendency of the profit rate to fall, arguing that ‘when the aspects of capital accumulation which tend to diminish realized profit rates come into play, crisis does not necessarily, automatically follow’. While, according to Clarke (1994, p. 96) cyclical crises do not come up from the secular tendency for the rate of profit to fall, while a lower general rate of profit makes crises more likely and more destructive.
11 Marx turns his attention for the first time to the secular law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, in the Grundrisse, something that had been a long-standing preoccupation of classical political economy (Clarke 1994, p. 96). However according to Heinrich (Citation2012) the assumption that Marx intended to base his theory of crisis upon this law, is primarily a consequence of Engels’s editorship of the third volume of Capital. Engels heavily revised the material to construct the third chapter on the ‘law’: he condensed it with abridgments, he made rearrangements, and divided it into four subsections creating the impression of an already largely completed theory of crisis (Heinrich Citation2012). And since Engels gave the whole thing the chapter title ‘Development of the Law’s Internal Contradictions,’ he created — on the part of readers who did not know that this chapter title did not at all originate with Marx — the expectation that this theory of crisis was a consequence of the ‘law’ (Heinrich Citation2012).
12 Often, Marx was describing recurring fluctuations as crisis cycles (Heinrich Citation1995), depicting an intentional splicing between the notions of fluctuations and crisis.
13 In other words, the law would apply, should organic composition of capital, the ratio of technical composition of capital to productivity of labor takes prices greater than unit.
14 The establishment of a permanent relation between crisis and the Law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, generated models ending up in the abolition of capitalism in terms of its own ‘fate’.
15 According to Fineschi (Citation2009) competition as phenomenal form is instead the manifestation of the essence and not an immediate identity with it. Rosdolsky (Citation1977) thought that competition should be treated inside capital in general as a solution of the classics’ misinterpretation of the relation of capital itself and many capitals.
16 In fact, whereas from 1857 to 1863 in the manuscripts as well as in Marx’s letters, Marx often referred to ‘capital in general’ when discussing the structure of the planned work, this term no longer showed up anywhere after the summer of 1863 (Heinrich Citation2012). In the Manuscripts of 1857–58 and 1861–63, Marx dealt substantially with the topic ‘capital in general’; in several plans he put down in that period this was indicated as the first point of the book on capital, to be followed by the ‘competition’ of ‘many’ capitals. At the end of 1862 Marx referred to a new project, in which that category was not mentioned (Fineschi Citation2009). This reference opened a debate on whether Marx abandoned the notion of ‘capital in general’ or it was maintained as part of a new outline (Fineschi Citation2009). We understand capital in general as the ‘capital as a whole’, even though according to Muller (Citation1978) and Schwarz (Citation1978) capital as a whole cannot be simply reduced to capital in general (see further Fineschi Citation2009).
17 The concrete in thought is the product or result of thought through a process of synthesis, of aggregation, in which the significant parts of reality are combined in a totality, in which they are dynamically articulated in a specific way (Germer Citation2001).
18 Marx's theory of interest up to Theories of Surplus Value does not yet contain a systematic investigation into the credit mechanism; there is only an elaboration of the abstract form of interest-bearing capital, presupposing the existence of moneyed capitalists outside the industrial enterprise (Itoh Citation1978).
19 In a similar vein, if we attempt to locate objectivity of value outside of the exchange relationship, it eludes our grasp; the objectivity of value is quite literally a ‘spectral objectivity’ (Heinrich Citation2012).
20 To abstract does not mean that you can then take the pieces [like the economists do] and create a rational actor out of them (Durkheim Citation1886 [1970]).
21 Key problem is that causality cannot be handled in the same way in social science as in natural science (Swedberg Citation2020, p. 261).
22 The first two volumes of Capital do not fundamentally go beyond the analysis of ‘capital in general’, while the third volume is the place where competition, credit and share-capital are introduced. According to Crotty (Citation1993, p. 6) ‘Volume I abstracts as much as is practical from cost-profit differences among firms and from details of the process of competitive struggle: though competition is intense, all firms are implicitly assumed to receive their proportionate share of industry profit, therefore, the effect of competition cannot be fully explored until the many capitals approach of Volume III’. Furthermore, referring to profit; ‘profit in general’ should be contrasted with the profit of one individual capital, ‘at the expense of another’ (Rosdolsky Citation1977, p. 50).
23 Bargaining power is an indispensable tool that capitalists use, in order to maintain stable real wages (Pollin Citation1998). Meanwhile, Engels identifies the regular displacement of labor in the cyclical alternation of boom and slump as the essential mechanism through which the proletariat is formed as a revolutionary class (Clarke 1994, p. 57).
24 Stalin, in his History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Short Course (1938) presented dialectical materialism as a set of propositions and laws representing the Marxist–Leninist world outlook and characterizing Marxism as a science that had identified the laws of history. With the general ossification of philosophy in the Soviet Union from Josef Stalin onwards, dialectical materialism failed to develop and found little favor elsewhere. The Stalinist transformation of Marxism into an official belief system served to provide an ideological rationalization of the Soviet regime (Walker and Gray Citation2007, p. 305). While, ‘dialectical conception of Marxism although flourishing for a short season in the late 1960s and 1970s, it nevertheless entered a major crisis in the 1980s under the pressure of an antagonism to a “straw Marx” characterized by determinism, vulgar materialism, and economic reductionismism’ (Gimenez Citation2005, p. 11).
25 The term comes from Freudian psychoanalytic theory where it is used to show how several simultaneous factors each with some explanatory power can contribute to the formation of a dream (Freud Citation1965, in Smith Citation1984, p. 520). By over-determination Althusser combines the determinacy ‘in the last instance’ of productive forces and the ‘relative autonomy’ of the superstructure. He argues that ‘social formation’ is constituted in ‘instances’, determined by more than solely economy, incorporating ‘regional structures’ within the whole (Smith Citation1984, p. 519). Hardy (Citation2014, p. 463), on the contrary, argues that determination ‘in the last instance’ incorporates the idea that productive relations are embedded in social relations, and thus they are not formed independently from wider social relations (Resnick and Wolff Citation1987, pp. 92–93; Elliott Citation1993, p. 236). Wolff (Citation2006, p. 86) essayed to combine the Hegelian dialectic with the Althusserian notion of overdetermenation, resulting in an anti-essentialist, subtler form of Marxist analysis (Hardy Citation2014, p. 454). Overdetermination, according to Wolff (Citation2006, p. 80) entails: ‘that every aspect of history — an individual, an event, a social movement … is constituted by all the other aspects of the social and natural totality within which it occurs. It has its existence (and each specific quality of that existence) only insofar as it is overdetermined in and through (constituted by) the relations that bind it to them all. The logic of overdetermined constitutivity displaces … [the logic] of causes and their effects’ (see also Hardy Citation2014, p. 456).
26 Natural law theories have as their foundation the idea of a natural order; under this perspective, the purpose of the social theorist is to discover the social physics which regulates the social universe (Clark Citation1989). By placing nature as the final cause, a social theory is elevated to the lofty and respectable heights of the natural science. Naturalism manifests itself in two ways: analysis of innate human nature; and the reliance on ‘state of nature’ explanations to illuminate the origins and functions of social phenomena.
27 The need to unravel the cause of the causes has always been the key question from its early beginning, in the field of political economy; same as in all social sciences. According to Russel (Citation1918 [1963], ch. 9, p. 141) ‘the law of causality, I believe, is a relic of bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm’. For Sraffa, ‘cause [is] required only when there is a deviation from what is normal, or uniform, or constant’ (Sraffa Citation1960, BIII up to 27/8i-iii–D1/9, quoted in Parrinello Citation1999).
28 As Haavelmo (Citation1944, ch. II, pp. 27–28) points out, the specific instance of the Walrasian system of equilibrium in probabilistic and holistic systems is defined as the one that emerges a posteriori out of an enormous set of possibilities. ‘But once this is established, could we not then forget about the whole process, and keep to the much simpler picture that is the actual one?’
29 Marx attempting to clarify the relationship between economic aggregates and the forces affecting the general rate of profits in rather tedious calculations he typically kept one variable constant in order to identify the impact of changes of some other variable on the rate of profits (Kurz Citation2018).
30 In the end, ‘Marxist pluralism allows for only two interpretations: either Marxism reduces to the few common theories, or it is a culture and not a theory, a collective consciousness’ (Sacristán Citation2003, p. 224).
31 Scientific questions are reduced into empirical realities, and as a result, they ‘are not the global and complete systematizations traditionally envisioned by philosophers’ (see also Waismann Citation1951).
32 Τrends in the short-term may exist, although no general predetermined result in the long-term future of capitalist development is in force (Papageorgiou and Michaelides Citation2016, p. 8).
33 According to Freeman (Citation1995, p. 51) when value theory is conceived in non-equilibrium terns, the result is an alternative to neoclassical economics.