through the work of two practical historians. One is the Marxist historical geographer David Harvey in an article written very recently; the other a monograph by Eric Hobsbawm produced a generation ago. In different ways both illuminate Marx’s material dialectic of the abstract and the concrete. David Harvey’s essay on Marx’s method was published in 2012.3 Harvey makes two initial points. First, that Marx wrote very little history: probably only the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and The Civil War in France would qualify in formal terms. Second, that neither study appears to conform to guidelines laid out by Marx in his major theoretical outline, the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Here Marx defines, briefly but cogently, the material dialectic that drives humanity forward: At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. By contrast, says Harvey, Marx’s two historical essays do not position the events of 1848-52 or 1871 within such an overarching politico-economic analysis. Their style is fluid: events almost accidental. Both Brumaire and The Civil War tend to focus almost obsessively on the manoeuvres and personalities of political leaders. Comments are made about the economic orientation of particular factions and or social groups but these are relatively off-hand and not founded in any wider analysis of economic trends. Little or no attempt is made to position them within a historical reconstruction of an unfolding interaction between the forces and relations of production. Harvey then turns to Marx’s great economic works, the three volumes of Capital. Here, paradoxically, he finds the missing history – at least in Capital Volume 1. He notes that Marx’s methodological approach was based on a critique of the categories of classical political economy and hence to an extent, in terms of structure, constrained by them. But the force of Marx’s critique was derived historically – by using his understanding of the historical unfolding of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production to expose the real content, context and meaning of ‘abstract’ terms such as capital, labour and rent. Here Harvey demonstrates precisely the difference between Marx’s materialist dialectics and the neo-Kantian ‘analytical’ use of concepts. He instances Volume I’s focus on the way ‘labour power’ was historically created as a commodity through
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primitive accumulation, the divorce of labour from the means of subsistence, and, technologically, through the accompanying the division of labour. The concept of ‘abstract labour’ developed by Adam Smith and Ricardo is transformed through its concrete reconnection with social processes. The subordination of labour is understood not as a universal condition but as a historical creation through capitalist class struggle that transformed the character of social organisation and state power. Equally, Harvey shows how Marx deploys a detailed historical analysis of the struggle over the length of the working day to expose the way surplus value is extracted in the workplace after the sale of labour power. As we have just noted, the sale of labour power was itself not a normal market transaction. But thereafter, in the workplace, another battle took place. This was over the extraction of surplus value, how many hours constituted a working day, for how long the employer could extract value, and the legal constraints which the trade unions were able to place on it through collective struggle. Concrete historical analysis again transforms the abstract category of ‘profit’ into an understanding of the contingent process by surplus value is extracted from workers. Harvey finds Volumes 2 and 3, respectively on exchange and distribution, less ‘historical’ in their character – although sections of Volume 3 do contain remarkably perceptive comments on the tendency to monopolisation and its consequences for banking and financial manipulation. More questionably, Harvey argues that these gaps in Marx’s application of his ‘method’ are at least partly explained by his comments in Grundrisse, the first outline of the work that was to become Capital. Here Marx distinguished between different levels of explanation: ‘between the universality of the metabolic relationship with Nature, the generality of the laws of motion of capital, the particularities of distribution and exchange and the singularities of consumption’.4 In Capital I Marx focuses historically on the generality of the laws of capital – even though he was constrained by his self-imposed framework of a critique of classical political economy. Harvey argues that what Marx never managed to do was to embark on an explanation of the singularities of consumption – the interactions of everyday life and the detailed material of history. Harvey’s conclusion is that, apart from Capital 1, a magnificent exception, Marx’s history was not written. Marx never completed the planned fourth volume of Capital that would have included discussion of the State and which might have enabled him to do so. Nonetheless, argues Harvey, Marx’s own preferences in terms of method are clear. Again quoting Grundrisse, Harvey highlights the importance which Marx attached to understanding history as ‘an organic whole’ – the ‘mutual interaction’ which takes place between different moments, the members of a totality, distinct within a
unity’ with labour at its centre: the ‘natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between human beings and nature and therefore human life itself’.5 If there is one major anomaly in Harvey’s treatment of Marx – particularly in an article entitled ‘Marx’s Method’ – it is that he makes no use of Marx’s own exposition of what he described as The Method of Political Economy in Grundrisse.6 This deficiency is remedied by Eric Hobsbawn. In his 1964 introduction to Marx’s Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, he describes this section as being ‘as brilliant, profound and exciting as everything that Marx wrote in this crucial period of his thought’.7 In it Marx argues for the need to interrogate all given concepts and to do so not abstractly in terms of logic but historically and materially in terms of specific societies in their movement and development. It is worth quoting the opening section in full: It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. e.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. . even the most abstract categories, despite their validity –
precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations.. Here Marx acknowledges Hegel’s dialectics but, as noted earlier, goes on to argue that concepts must be refined, transformed and made concrete in relation to specific societies in their movement and change. ‘The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations.’ Concepts must be ‘evaporated’ in face of these unfolding processes in order, ‘ultimately, to yield a new abstract determination’. It was precisely in this way that Marx redefined abstract ‘labour’ as conceived by Adam Smith as ‘labour power’, a commodity to be ‘bought’ within the very particular power structures of capitalist society and used to create surplus value. Without such specific social determination it would be meaningless. As Harvey observed, Marx’s critique of the categories of political economy in Capital 1was not achieved through abstract reasoning but by actually writing history and laying bare material processes. It is in this sense that Marx would have described as ‘idealist’ the various attempts made in the 1970s to give his work an academically respectable status. All, though in very different ways, sought to give Marxism a conceptual ‘rigour’ that would harmonise it with one or other of the established academic disciplines. The French philosopher Althusser drew, among other sources, on the structuralism of Gaston Bachelard. G.A Cohen utilised the assumptions of English analytical philosophy. E. O. Wright and Charles Tilly adopted the frameworks of Weberian sociology and Jon Elster rational choice game theory. While Althusser’s structuralism and Wright’s Weberianism are very different, they similarly privilege a priori conceptual definitions as tools for classification and analysis. So also, from a different direction, does Cohen when he seeks to introduce ‘those standards of clarity and rigour which distinguished twentieth century analytical philosophy’.8 For all of these approaches the assertion of logical precision comes first, history second and there is no scope for any dialectical encounter on the way.9 This does not mean, as we have already argued, that Marx rejected the scientific utility of abstract concepts. On the contrary, as David McLellan stresses, what was essential, and what Marx described as ‘the secret of scientific dialectics’, was to treat economic categories as the ‘theoretical expression of the historical relations of production corresponding to a particular stage of development in material production’. ‘In Marx’, comments McLellan, ‘[the dialectic] was material – designed to satisfy the material needs of men. For Marx the dialectical interchange between man and nature was conducted through a specific mode of production which itself generated new needs and the means to satisfy them
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