‘The Theory of the Form and the Development of Forms: Fetishism, Methodology and Social Theory in New Readings of Marx

Introduction

Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism is emblematic in a number of ways of the treatment of Western Marxism, at least in the Anglophone literature. Like the contributions of Jay and Jacoby; for Anderson, Western Marxism came to an end in the 1960s. While such a periodization can be said to register the move away from Marx by those who appropriated the legacy of Western Marxism -- such as the second generation of Frankfurt School critical theory – or those whose rejected its ‘meta-narratives’ for a set of more suspect meta-narratives – i.e. the postmodern condition -- it also ignores subsequent subterranean developments in Marxist thought. Nevertheless, Anderson’s parenthetical comparison of Theodor W. Adorno and Louis Althusser can be seen to shed some light on several striking points of similarity shared by two New Readings of Marx devised by Adorno’s and Althusser’s students, which have been effectively ignored by wider Anglophone (and Francophone?) scholarship. In the following, I substantiate these points of similarity. I also attempt to undermine the grounds of incompatibility between these New Readings. Finally, I point towards some ways in which both of these New Readings have been used to productively supplement each other in recent German Marxian theory.

I do this by focusing on how Adorno and Althusser’s respective criticisms of the form of Marxist Humanism that was hegemonic in the 1960s are reflected in two New Readings of Marx developed by their students: Jacques Rancière and Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt. I show that both of these New Readings were centered on Capital-centric interpretations of Marx that were opposed to the Marxist Humanist interpretation of Capital by way of the 1844 Manuscripts. In so doing, I pay particular attention to the topic of Marx’s theory of value as it pertains to issues of Marx’s method and its relation to his social theory qua the theory of fetishism.1 This allows me to show how both New Readings criticised the Humanist interpretation of Marx and its conception of Marx’s 1 I use the term theory of fetishism to refer to the subject matter first discussed by Marx in Section 1 part 4 of Capital Volume 1. In this usage the theory of fetishism refers to the specific concept(s) of fetishism as well as reified social relations, abstract labour, real abstraction etc. I use this broad definition because it provides a way of referring to the range of interpretations such as ‘reification’ and ‘alienation drawn from this section in the methodological and social theoretical interpretations of Lukács, Marxist Humanist, Ranciere and Backhaus. I focus on the theory of fetishism because of its importance in each of these figures readings.

theory of fetishism as an instance of the theory of alienation on both a methodological and socio-theoretical level. It also lets me show that these New Readings respective interpretations of fetishism -- as pertaining to the methodological and social theoretical aspects of the theory of value Marx promulgated in Capital -- which endeavoured to present the genesis of autonomous and inverted social forms of domination -- mark methodological and socio-theoretical advancements over previous types of Western Marxism. However, since these advances do not form complete and unproblematic theories in their own right, I also make the case that drawing on both of these New Readings might prove productive. In order to do this, I first move to question what many in these subterranean traditions within the Anglophone and Francophone world have seen as the basis of the irreconcilability between these schools by arguing that Rancière’s anti-humanism and Backhaus and Reichelt’s negative humanism are of a different register and thus do not render their respective interpretations of Marx’s methodology and social theory incompatible. I then provide an example of how aspects of both of these New Readings can be seen have been used productively in an interpretative overview of one of most important recent works in German Marxian theory, Michael Heinrich’s The Science of Value, pointing to the possibility of how they might be used in Anglo and Franco Marxian theory. It is my hope that this broad discussion will generate interest in these New Readings and advance the sort of work that draws on both of them in the Anglophone and Francophone world.2

I proceed as follows; first I frame these New Readings by drawing on the work of Ingo Elbe to provide a paradigmatic sketch of methodology and social theory in ‘Traditional Marxism’ and ‘Western Marxism’. I then provide a comparative exposition of Rancière’s and Backhaus and Reichelt’s New Readings before closing with some thoughts as to their synthetic influence on the work of Michael Heinrich and John Milios.

I2 This article is a revised version of a paper delivered as part of a panel on New Readings of Capital after 1968 at the Annual Historical Materialism Conference. As the title indicates, the panel aimed to bring together the New Readings of Capital developed in the 1960s. The revisions I have provided attempt to further these ends by extending the length of the paper. However its intent, which is to offer a broad and speculative discussion of the importance of these New Readings, their affinities, and possible compatibilities, rather than a focused Marxological or philogical study, remains. This is why is choose to highlight a number of issues in a speculative mode, which would serve as the topic of individual articles in a Marxological mode.

The distinctions Ingo Elbe draws between different ways of reading Marx’s theory in ‘Between Marx, Marxism and Marxisms’ will be used to differentiate the New Readings of Marx that this paper discusses from ‘Traditional Marxism’ and ‘Western Marxism’.

In Elbe’s provocative analysis, ‘in many respects, [Traditional] Marx-ism is Engels’ work and for that reason actually an Engelsism.’ This is because it was Engels’ interpretation of Marx’s Capital that became an essential component of ‘Traditional Marxism’s’ worldview. As Elbe, and others, point out such an interpretation consisted in a ‘logico-historical’ interpretation of Part One of Capital Volume 1 and a ‘substantialist’ interpretation of the theory of value that took Marx to be a ‘neo-Ricardian.’ When aligned with Engels’ dialectical conception of nature, Capital was taken to methodologically demonstrate the logico-historical iron of laws of history that would eventually lead to a revolution in which a worker’s state replaced the bourgeois state.

Western Marxism arose in a period of existential crisis for this worldview engendered by the marked regression of the workers’ movement due to a number of word-historical events that called these logico-historical dialectics into question. The latter are a point of criticism in what is considered the founding text of Western Marxism: Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, which in Elbe’s words, breaks with Traditional Marxism on the ‘level of social theory and methodology.’

As Elbe notes, Lukács’ social theory ‘is the first to understand the character of capitalist rule the way Marx did – anonymous, objec-tively mediated, and having a life of its own’. However, Lukács’ methodology ‘avoids a reconstruction of Marx’s theory of capital-ism’. Instead, Lukács’ statement that ‘the chapter dealing with the fetish-character of the commodity contains within itself the whole of historical materialism’ (170) is indicative of a methodology that takes his particular interpretation of commodity fetishism to be ‘the central structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects’ (83) The result is an ‘an analogizing combination of a value theory reduced to the “quantifying” value-form (due to an orientation towards Simmel’s cultural critique of money) and a diagnosis, ori-ented towards Max Weber, of the formal-rational tendency of the objectification of the labor process and modern law’ that provides a social theory by generalizing these properties to a myriad of objective and subjective aspects of capitalist society.

Following the publication of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts these aspects of Lukács’ thought were formalized in the Hegelian-Marxism of Marxist Humanism. In an interpretative tour de force that overcame mere history, Lukács’ theory of reification was often said to have

discovered the theory of alienation, despite the fact that Lukács’ theory was formulated before The Manuscripts were discovered. Despite Lukács own objections3, in such an interpretation the methodological and social theoretical aspects of the theory of reification were thus more or less grafted onto Marx’s theory of alienation. This culminated in the hegemonic current of Marxist Humanism which even in its most sophisticated form -- in the work of Henri Lefebvre for example -- read Marx’s theory of fetishism as the economic form of alienation, formulating a corresponding social theory by generalising a quantitative-qualitative opposition to an array of objective and subjective social phenomena that were not addressed in Capital in order to provide diagnoses of universal social malaise, ennui and dehumanisation.4

As I Indicated above, Perry Anderson points out that Althusser’s and Adorno’s work in the 1960s share some intriguing points of similarity:

Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, first developed in lectures in Paris in 1961

and completed in 1966, reproduces a whole series of motifs to be found

in Althusser’s For Marx and Reading Capital … among other themes,

Adorno …. attacked philosophical concentration on alienation and reification

as a fashionable ideology, susceptible to religious usage; the cult of the works

of the Young Marx at the expense of Capital; anthropocentric conceptions of history, and the emollient rhetoric of humanism accompanying them’ P. Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, p. 72.

While these parallels deserve attention in their own right,5 they can quickly be demonstrated in the following. Althusser’s statement that ‘the whole, fashionable, theory of 'reification' which ‘depends on a projection of the theory of alienation found in the early texts, particularly the 1844 Manuscripts, on to the theory of 'fetishism' in 3 CF Lukács 1967 introduction to History and Class Consciousness. 4 CF in the realm of everyday life how Lefebvre deploys the following opposition between two ‘distinct’ types of leisure: the quantitative type, in which ‘leisure’ is ‘integrated with everyday life (the perusal of daily papers, television etc.) and is conducive to profound discontent, and the qualitative side; ‘the prospect of departure, the demand for evasion, the will to escape through worldliness, holidays, LSD, debauchery of madness.’ 5 Indeed one might provocatively say that Fredric Jameson is the one notable scholar who examines Althusser and Adorno and even then it is in terms of how they are used in Jameson’s own project.

Capital’ is mirrored in Adorno’s comment that ‘the term “alienation” has recently become fashionable in both East and West, thanks to the veneration of the young Marx at the expense of the old one, and thanks to the regression of objective dialectics to anthropology. (History and Freedom, p 265). 6

As I will now show, these parallel points of criticism were taken up on a methodological and socio-theoretical level by the New Readings of Marx propagated by Althusser’s and Adorno’s students, which centered on esoteric readings of a Capital-centric Marx which argued that the theory of fetishism pertained to the methodological genesis of a social theory of autonomous and inverted social forms of domination.

II

This can be seen in Rancière’s case by focusing on his contribution to Lire le Capital.7 ‘The Concept of ‘Critique’ and the Critique of 6 in addition, Althusser’s criticisms of the Humanist interpretation of Marx, in which ‘The Economic-Philosophic manuscripts have nourished a whole ethical or (what amounts to the same thing) anthropological interpretation of Marx -- making Capital, with its sense of perspective and apparent 'objectivity', merely the development of a youthful intuition which finds its major philosophical expression in this text and in its concepts: above all in the concepts of alienation, of humanism, of the social essence of man, etc. for marx 155-6 are reflected in Adorno’s point that ‘Talk of “self-alienation” is untenable…that talk has become the stock in trade of apologists who will suggest in paternal tones that man has apostatized, that he has lapsed from a being-in-itself which he had always been. Whereas, in fact, he never was that being-in-itself, and what he can expect from recourses to his is therefore nothing but submission to authority, the very thing that is alien to him. It is not only due to the economic themes of Das Kapital that the concept of self-alienation plays no part in it any more; it makes philosophical sense. ND See also Adorno’s criticism that humanist interpretation of reification is the ‘the reflection-form of false objectivity; to center theory on it, a form of consciousness, makes critical theory idealistically acceptable to the dominating consciousness and the collective unconscious. It is to this that the earlier texts of Marx, in contrast to Capital, owe their contemporary popularity, especially among theologians’ and his statement on the ‘debased’ ‘appeal to an inalienable essence of Man which has long been alienated. It was not Man who created the institutions but particular men in a particular constellation with nature and with themselves.’ In the jargon of authenticity. 7 Rancière’s contribution has a peculiar and unfortunate history. It was delivered alongside the other contributions to Lire le Capital in

Political Economy’ provides his criticism of Marxist-Humanism and a Capital-centric reading of Marx that focuses on his theory of value and the related issues of fetishism, methodology and social theory.8

Following Althusser, Rancière argues that the Early Marx presented a critique of political economy on the basis of Feuerbachian anthropology that was still within an ‘ideological discourse.’ In Rancière’s reading, such a critique ‘hangs on the way in which … the subject, the object and the method are linked together.’ Here the object of critique is ‘an experience whose subject is humanity’. Such an object is linked to the method of critique because humanity (the subject) has been ‘blind’ to the contradictions that generate such an experience. The method of this anthropological critique is thus to identify these contradictions, which it does by identifying the fundamental contradiction behind them; alienation. In so doing, critique grasps that alienation stems from a subject predicate inversion that separates humanity from its own essence. This separation is realized in social divisions and the identification of human essence with theses divisions in which these essences are alienated and become autonomous powers.

Such a notion of critique, according to Rancière, is deployed on the level of political economy in the 1844 Manuscripts. In this instance, the Early Marx’s critique of political economy takes the categories of political economy as a given. Instead of examining the relationship between form and content, this early version of critique focuses on the substance underlying these categories. Alienated labour, as the unrecognized substance of private property, is exemplary of this alienated separation. For Rancière’s, the Early Marx’s critique of political economy is accordingly conducted from this anthropological standpoint. The method and social theory that correspond to this standpoint are centred on the separation between human essence and alienated social spheres.

Although he notes that vestiges of this standpoint persist in the Late Marx, Rancière asserts that there is a ‘change in the function of the structure of incarnation’ in the concept of critique between the Early and the Late Marx. Rancière’s ‘symptomatic reading’ of Capital attempts to substantiate this change by

the course of a seminar on Capital held at the Ecole Normale Superieure early in 1965 and Published in 1965. However, it was left out of the subsequent translation of Lire le Capital. This meant that its eventual translation was delayed and it did not appear in German until 1972 and in English even later, with the last part of Rancière’s contribution appearing as a journal article in 1976 and the entire contribution in 1989. 8 I chose to focus on Rancière’s contribution to Lire Le Capital because, as I show below, it provides an analysis of Marx’s theory of value as pertaining to the theory of fetishism, methodology and social theory. In this regard it is an exception to Althusser and Balibar’s downplaying of fetishism and its importance for these related issues.

deciphering an esoteric system hidden behind the exoteric account that the prevalent Marxist Humanist reading he is criticising draws on. Rancière holds such a reading discloses that a ‘reorganization of Marx’s theoretical field constitutes the transition from the ideological discourse of the Young Marx’ to the ‘scientific discourse’ of the Late Marx.

In this ‘reorganization’ the ‘scientific discourse’ of the Late Marx’s critique of political economy replaces the anthropological standpoint of the Early Marx. Rancerie argues that whereas in the Manuscripts ‘the equations which expressed the contradictions … all referred to the equation: essence of man = essence foreign to man, i.e. they referred as their cause to the split between the human subject and its essence (107), Capital possesses a ‘metonymic causality’. In Althusser’s words, in such a notion of causality, ‘the structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which comes and alters their aspects, forms and relations and which is effective on them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside them.’ Rather, this metonymic causality explains the internal connection between the social relations of production and social processes. Thus, according to Rancière, in Marx’s late critique of political economy ‘we are no longer dealing with an anthropological causality referred to the act of a subjectivity’. Instead

what determines the connection between the effects (the relations

between commodities) is the cause (the social relations of production) in

so far as it is absent. This absent cause is not labour as a subject, it is the

identity of abstract labour and concrete labour inasmuch as its generalisation expresses the structure of a certain mode of production, the capitalist mode of production.

In Rancière’s view this theory of metonymic causality is also what distinguishes the Late Marx’s theory of value from Ricardo’s. Ranceire argues that Ricardo (like the Early Marx) takes the categories of political economy as a given and focuses on the substance underlying them; failing to examine the relationship between form and content. For Ricardo, labour is thus the trans-historical substance of value. It does not matter in what form this substance appears. In distinction, according to Rancière, the Late Marx’s scientific approach rests on the ‘critical’ question of why the content of labour takes on the form of value.

Is it is this reading of Marx’s theory of vale as a ‘theory of the form’ that links Rancière’s notion of metonymic causality to the issue of Marx’s methodology, the theory of fetishism and the conception of both as integral to a social theory of abstract social domination. For, as signalled above, metonymic causality is concerned with the

relation between social labour (social relations of production) and the form in which it necessarily appears (the relations between commodities). In Rancière’s further analysis, this form necessarily arises from the historically-specific character of these social relations (the identity between abstract labour and concrete labour) so that

labour is [necessarily] represented in value, it takes on the form of the

value of commodities’. Consequently, value takes on the form of a thing.

The form/content relation as a relation between the inner determination

and the mode of existence, is thus realized in the phenomenal form, of this determination’.

In contrast to the methodologies employed by Lukács and Marxist Humanism, Rancière does not simply generalize the relationship between abstract labour and concrete labour to capitalist society. Rather, he stresses that the issue of methodology is tied to Marx’s method of presentation, which proceeds across all three volumes of Capital where ‘the development of the forms of bourgeois production, which constitutes the object of Capital proper, is thus thought as the development of forms of motion for the primitive contradiction, the opposition between abstract labour and concrete labour ‘118 Therefore, Marx’s theory of value, and its socio-theoretical dimension, proceeds through out the presentation of Capital so that ‘the theory of the forms and the development of the forms’ acquire ‘precision’ and are completed at the end of Volume III ‘where these forms are manifest at the surface of capitalist production.’ 129

This is demonstrated in Rancière’s account on how this idea of metonymic causality is relayed in the argument of Part One and realized in the theory of fetishism and the related concepts of appearance, materialization and inversion. In Rancière’s analysis, ‘the concept of fetishism in Capital poses a problem which can be initially formulated in the naive form: What is involved in fetishism?’ As Rancière’s answers shows -- ‘we shall only understand fetishism if we think it in continuity with what I have said about the structure of the process and the development of its forms’ -- such an understanding relies on Rancière’s distinction between the Early and Late Marx and his notion of metonymic causality qua presentation. In contrast to the major figures of Marxist Humanism, Rancière does not interpret Marx’s account of the commodity in terms of an opposition between quantitative things and qualitative humans dehumanized by the production of these things, nor does he follow other types of Western Marxism and utilise such an interpretation of the commodity to provide an account of the socially pervasive

objective and subjective aspects of capitalist society. Instead, this reading focuses on the centrality that the section on fetishism possesses in Marx’s method of presentation, arguing that properly understanding this section in relation to the other sections of Part One, discloses what differentiates Marx’s theory of value from the Ricardian theory of value. Moreover, in contrast to the prevailing notions that fetishism consists in a theory of alienation or ideology that can be generalised to social totality from Part One of Capital Volume 1, Rancière stresses that the concept of fetishism is integral to Marx’s account of the objective ‘very special’ social reality of capitalism and that this account develops from abstract to concrete through out the course of the presentation of Capital. Consequently, in Rancière’s reading, Marx expounds ‘fetishism by theorising the structure which founds the thing-form adopted by the social characteristics of labour.’ By virtue of its place in this methodological presentation of metonymic causality, Marx’s theory of fetishism describes the ‘phenomenal’ social ‘reality’ in which the structures of capitalist social production are realized and simultaneously mystified.

This ‘phenomenal reality’ is consequently a theory of social domination, which according to Rancière, further differentiates the Late Marx from the Early Marx. Whereas the Early Marx used the term gegenstand in a sensualist manner to describe a world characterized by the separation of human essence into alienated spheres, in the Late Marx ‘this concept of reality must be understood to mean precisely the space in which the determinations of the structure manifest themselves (the space of phantasmagoric objectivity).’ Consequently, gegenstand is used to describe the Gegenstandlichkeit of commodities; ‘the sensuous-supersenuous character of capitalist social reality in which the structure is manifested, whilst simultaneously concealed’. Such a sensuos-supersensous social reality is generated by the necessary inverted appearance of ‘phantasmagoric objectivity’ wherein ‘the mechanism of appearance (schein)’ is generated by the dislocation between the constitution of forms and their perception’ 140 leading to an inverted social reality ‘founded in the structure of the process itself’. Consequently,

the pattern which designate the speculative procedure in the anthropological critique, here designates the process which

takes place in the field of reality itself. This concept of reality must

be understood to mean precisely the space in which the

determinations of the structure manifest themselves (the space of phantasmagoric objectivity).

Rather than a world characterised by separation, as in the Early Marx, these determinations of the structure thus manifest

themselves in this space of social reality as an internally related series of chiasmus that articulate an abstract and autonomous form of inversion and subjectivation. For Rancière this determination consists in a double motion: the ‘materialization of the social determinations of production and the subjectification of its material bases’ in which the ‘subjectification of the thing’ and ‘the acquisition by the thing of the function of motor of the process’ invert to determine persons as ‘bearers’ or ‘supports’ of the structure their relations constitute. In this process such a function does not belong to a subject or to the reciprocal action of a subject and an object, but to the relations of production ‘which are radically removed from the space of subject and object in which they can only find ‘supports’.’ (Traeger) Moreover, ‘the properties received by the thing are not the attributes of a subject but the motive power of the relations of production. It is insofar as the thing inherits the motion that it presents itself as a subject.’

In Rancière’s account, this chiasmus develops in the course of Marx’s presentation from its most abstract level in ‘the simplest determination of the capitalist mode of production’ to its most concrete in 'the enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world' of the Trinity formula. The latter ‘incarnates’ the chiasmus between the personification of things and the reification of persons -- the social determinations of production and the personification (Versubjjektiviierrung) of the material foundations of production -- which characterize the ‘modes of existence’ of the entire capitalist mode of production and the related concepts of inversion and support (traeger).

Consequently, in Rancière’s reading, Marx’s theory of fetishism describes the phenomenal reality of phantasmagoric objectivity in which the structures of the ‘very special’ type of capitalist social production are realized and simultaneously mystified. This phenomenal form of appearance – arising from the contradiction between concrete and abstract labour inherent in the socially specific capitalist relations of production – personifies things and constitutes subjects as supports, determining their action and their consciousness. In contrast to the Western Marxist methodology and social theory, Rancière offers a reading of fetishism from the perspective of the ‘theory of the form and the development of forms’ pertaining to a social theory of the phantasmagoric forms of social reality that are generated by the relation of production and embodied in personified things presented at different levels of concretion through out Capital. In so doing, he also criticises the Marxist Humanist interpretation of Marx and its social theory of alienation from the perspective of a Capital-centric interpretation of Marx that posits a break and subsequent methodological and theoretical advancements in Marx’s mature critique of political economy.

III

As I will now show Rancière’s New Reading of Capital possesses striking similarities with the work of Backhaus and Reichelt, with one notable exception; rather than positing a break between the Early ‘anthropological’ Marx and the Late ‘scientific’ Marx, Backhaus and Reichelt argue for continuity in what can be called the negative anthropological standpoint and the ‘skeletal structure’ of Marx’s concept of critique and his theory of social domination. Nevertheless, as I will try to show this exception is not as much of an irreconcilable and diametrical opposition as it would appear. In the first place, this negative anthropological standpoint is opposed to Marxist Humanism and its social theory of alienation. In the second place, the skeletal structure aligned to this standpoint consists in a minimal conception of human essence that posits continuity in a notion of critique and a theory of social domination that possesses more parallels with Rancière’s account of the Late Marx than the Early Marx. Finally, Backhaus and Reichelt’s Capital-centric interpretation of Marx argues that the Late Marx possesses methodological and socio-theoretical advances over the Early Marx and Western Marxism, insofar as the theory of fetishism pertains to the methodological genesis of a social theory of autonomous and inverted social forms of domination.

This can first be seen by summarizing what Reichelt terms the ‘construction’ of Marx’s theory of social reality, which he argues serves as ‘the organizing skeleton’ that runs throughout Marx’s works, albeit ‘dressed in various costumes.’9 This ‘construction’ consists in several key aspects that form the structure of Marx’s theory of social domination. They are as follows: (1) Marx conceives social reality as constitutive of forms that are created by a process of social constitution; (2) this process of social constitution consists in a dynamic and contradictory process in which essence must appear and hide itself in appearance; (3) these forms of social reality are constitutive of a sensuous-supersensuous and inverted world in which people are dominated by the abstractions they collectively constitute.

Reichelt’s ‘organizing skeleton’ is thus predicated on a notion of anthropology in so far as it views social constitution as an essential human property which is tied to a theory of social domination in which social reality is characterized by a sensuous-supersensuous world in which essence necessarily appears in inverted forms. Yet this notion of anthropology differs with the Humanist interpretation of Marx, and Rancière’s interpretation of the Early Marx, as it does not serve as the standpoint for a critique of a divided world in which 9 (Reichelt 2005, 57) and (Reichelt 2000).

essence and appearance are separated. In further distinction, Reichelt argues that ‘Marx’s ‘earlier conceptualizations, and in particular the discussion of alienated labour, the alienation from species-being, etc. … are to a certain extent the counter-concepts to the existing forms of an inverted society.’ Rather than the positive basis of Marx’s critique, as in Marxist Humanism, these concepts are a ‘negative mirror-image’ of this inverted world. This means that the anthropological aspect of Marx that Reichelt and Backhaus view as persistent in the Early and the Late Marx might be said to be of a different register than Rancière’s account of the humanist critique of the Early Marx.

This can be seen in more detail by turning to ‘Some Aspects of Marx’s Concept of Critique in the Context of his Economic-Philosophical Theory’, which outlines what Backhaus views as the contours of Marx’s ‘anthropological or critical standpoint’. Like Rancière, Backhaus holds that Feuerbach was an important influence on the Early Marx’s conception of critique. However, Backhaus’s characterization of Feuerbach’s influence is notably different, as can be seen in the three ways he argues Feuerbach had ‘some influence’ on Marx’s concept of critique: (1) that social inversion can be grasped because essence can be conceived independently from its forms of appearance; (2) the conception of essence as a process of human constitution that appears in ‘alienated’ and contradictory forms; and (3) his critical-genetic method as the derivation of these estranged and contradictory forms of appearance from human social constitution.10

Therefore, while Backhaus’s undoubtedly conceives of Marx’s critical standpoint as anthropological -- its conception of anthropology, once again, is rooted on a different and far more minimal notion of human essence than Rancière’s analysis of the Early Marx. As with Reichelt, this anthropological aspect of Marx’s critical standpoint does not pertain to Rancière’s notion of this standpoint i.e. ‘ essence of man = essence foreign to man … referr[ing] as their cause to a split between the human subject and its essence’ in the sense that Marx’s anthropology is the basis for a notion of the separation of a positive conception of the subjective experience of human essence from a dehumanized humanity. Rather, Backhaus’ notion of Marx’s anthropology can be said to be minimal in so far as it conceives of human essence as generic, non-individualistic social activity in which human social relations collectively constitute a society that, mirroring Reichelt, appears in contradictory and inverted forms. Moreover, in a further difference with Ranicere’s analysis of the Early Marx, the method of critique tied to this conception of anthropology does not disclose that the substance of social institutions are alienated human essence, but derives how inverted ‘forms’ are socially constituted. Thus Backhaus and Reichelt’s 10 (Backhaus 2005)

conception of Marx’s anthropology is not Marxist Humanism; nor is it concerned with an ‘anthropological causality referred to the act of a subjectivity’ in the sense that Rancière describes it, but in the social constitution of perverted forms of negative objectivity.

This sets up an interpretation of the relation between the Early Marx and the Late Marx’s method of critique and his theory of social domination that is opposed to Marxist Humanism, while also stressing more continuities than the break posited by Rancière. One might say that whereas Marxist Humanism interpreted Marx from the perspective of his early work, and Rancière posits a paradigm shift, Backhaus and Reichelt argue for a refinement within their paradigmatic definition. Thus Reichelt characterizes this process of refinement in regard to the skeletal structure of Marx’s theory of social domination as follows:

even in his doctoral thesis on Democritus’ and Epicurus’ Natural

Philosophy, Marx pursued a programme of deciphering society as an

‘organic’ [naturwuchsige] form of increasing individualization. Marx’s focus

is on forms, at first on forms of consciousness (i.e., religion, philosophy,

morality, law), then later on the forms or categories of political economy.

For Marx, the focus on forms was identical with the critique of the inverted forms of social existence, an existence constituted by the life-practice of

human beings. All these forms obtain as inverted form of a ‘community’ that is external to the individuals, and from which they must emancipate themselves in order ever to be able to interact with one another ‘as individuals’

In addition, Backhaus argues for continuity in Marx’s concept of critique:

Marx employs the phrase ‘verruckte’ (perverted) forms in its double

sense as, on the one hand, puzzling, mystical essence, and, on the other

hand, as a sphere outside of Man, displaced or transposed. ... If one

replaces ‘social relation’ by ‘appearance of humaness’ and things qua

‘value thing’ by the thing in ‘difference from humanness’ that, as a

transcendental thing, is transposed in a sphere ‘outside of Man’, then

becomes sufficiently clear the continuity of the fundamental character

of Marx’s critique of economics from the early writings to Capital.’ 25

Consequently, from this perspective, The 1884 Manuscripts do not represent the philosophical foundation of Marx’s later work, nor were they jettisoned. Rather, in Backhaus’s words, they ‘represent many clues in the direction of Marx ‘refining his critical programme’ leading to a new form of critique.’ 18. For Backhaus, as with Rancière, this form of critique is the critique of political economy, which was mostly fully refined by the late Marx in the process of writing Capital.

Backhaus first presents these claims in ‘On the Dialectics of the Value-Form’. In this seminal essay11, Backhaus argues that ‘the labour theory of value has been taken up or criticised in a grossly simplified and frequently wholly distorted form’. Like Rancière, Backhaus’ argues secondary literature has failed to grasp that Marx’s theory of value differs with the Ricardian theory of value, consisting in a social theory of autonomous and inverted forms that are unfolded ‘from the abstract to the concrete’ across all three volumes of Capital. Echoing Rancière’s notion of the theory of the form and presentation of the forms’, Backhaus argues that Marx’s theory of value can be found in the ‘dialectic of the value-form.’

This is demonstrated by Backhaus in his short reconstruction of Part One of Capital Volume 1. This reconstruction is premised on Backhaus’s contention that Marx’s ‘dialectical method [of presentation] cannot be restricted to leading the form of appearance back to the essence; it must show in addition why the essence assumes precisely this or that form of appearance.’ (102). In contrast to accounts that understand Part One Section III as ‘additional proof’ of Marx’s argument in the first two sections, this leads Backhaus to argue that the section on the value-form is an essential element of Marx’s presentation because it shows that ‘value cannot be expressed’ but necessarily appears in an ‘inverted form, namely, as the relation of two use-values’ (101).

As Backhaus further argues, Marx’s method of presentation also links the section on the value-form to the theory of fetishism; with the three peculiarities of the equivalent-form disclosing the secret of the ‘objective semblance’ of the thing-like form ‘which constitutes the mystical character of the commodities’. Such an interpretation stands in marked contrast to Backhaus’s characterisation of Marxist Humanist interpretations of fetishism in which:11 ‘On the Dialectics of the Value-Form’, first presented in 1967 and published in German in1968, was also subjected to translation lag appearing in French in 1974 and English in 1980.

The authors refer to some sentences from the fetishism chapter in Capital

and interpret them, conceptually and also for the most part terminologically,

in the manner of the German Ideology, a manuscript in which the meaning

of the labour theory of value was still unknown. The usual quote is: to the producers ‘the social relations of their private labours appear as what they

are i.e. not as immediate social relations of persons in their labouring activity

but rather as thing-like relations of persons and social relations of things. From this quote is simply read that the social relations have ‘made themselves autonomous’ vis-à-vis humans. A comment which constitutes the theme of

the early writings and has become a common-place of conservative cultural criticism under the catchword of ‘alienation’ or ‘depersonalisation’ 104

In Backhaus’s estimation such an interpretation, which regresses to the standpoint of the Early Marx (i.e. Marxist Humanism) and its corresponding social theory (alienation (!!)), misses that ‘the point of the critique of political economy…is not the mere description of this existing fact, but the analysis of its genesis.’ 104 For Backhaus, in contrast, ‘the proper sense of the ‘critique of economic categories’ consists in demonstrating the social conditions which make the existence of the value-form necessary.’ 107 Thus, in further contrast to neo-Ricardian and Traditional Marxist interpretations of the labour theory of value, Backhaus provides an analysis of these social conditions in reference to the genesis of the ‘structure’ of ‘the social relation of things’.

To do so, Backhaus once again parallels Rancière in stressing that: ‘the analysis of the logical structure of the value-form is not to be separated from the analysis of its historical, social content.’ Also echoing Rancière by stating that ‘The classical labour theory of value, however, did not pose the question of historical, social circumstances of that labour which represents itself as ‘value-creating’. The conversion of labour into a form alien to it is not reflected upon. ‘ Therefore, in another similarity with Rancière, Backhaus states that Ricardo and neo-Ricardian interpretations of Marx, ‘Do not pose the question why in commodity production labour is expressed as the exchange-value of products, as a ‘thing-like property possessed by them.’ 107

In contrast, according to Backhaus, Marx’s monetary theory of value, rests on a fundamental and historically-specific social contradiction. ‘the hidden reason for the existence of the calculation

of value … in the contradiction … between private and social labour’. 107 Echoing Rancière account of metonymic causality -- wherein what determines the connection between the effects (the relations between commodities) is the cause (the social relations of production)’ -- Backhaus argues that ‘the doubling of the commodity into commodity and money is first deciphered when it can be shown that this antagonistic relation between things expresses a relation between people which is similarity structured in an antagonistic way.’ This ‘fundamental contradiction’ ‘expresses itself’ in ‘the derived contradiction that the exchange of activities and products must be mediated by a particular and simultaneously universal product’

Moreover, since ‘these ‘social relations of persons’ must be so defined that from their structure the antagonistic ‘relation of things’ becomes comprehensible.’112 this ‘contradiction’ has ‘pre-eminent significance for’ Backhaus interpretation of Marx’s ‘social theory’ and for the methodological presentation of this theory beyond Part One.107 In the case of the latter, Backhaus argues that ‘The value-form analysis is significant in a three-fold respect: it is the point of confluence of sociology and economic theory; it inaugurates Marx’s critique of ideology and a specific theory of money which founds the primacy of the sphere of production vis-à-vis the sphere of circulation and thus of the relations of production vis-à-vis the ‘superstructure’ 112

This means that in the case of the former, again echoing Rancière,

the ‘sensible super-sensible thing’ designates a ‘reality sui generis’ which cannot be reduced either to the technological and physiological aspects of the labour process nor to the contents of human consciousness or unconsciousness. Abstract value objectivity is for Marx social objectivity par excellence. Through the fact that this dimension of reality is simultaneously subjective and objective it distinguishes itself from all those social connections which are solely constituted by conscious action.’

As a result ‘value is the subject’ of this ‘sui generis’ ‘inverted reality’ of abstract social domination.

For Backhaus, as with Rancière, Marx’s theory of value can thus be said to be a theory of the form and the presentation of forms. Like the latter, the former along with Reichelt, propounds a Capital-centric interpretation of Marx that is opposed to the Marxist Humanist interpretation of Capital and its corresponding social theory. Moerover, Backhaus and Reciehlt also hold that the esoteric method and social theory Marx formulated in Capital – as the genetic presentation of a theory of how a historically-specific type of

labour necessarily appears in inverted forms of domination -- represent advances over his early work.

Surprisingly, these similarities have largely gone unnoticed in the Anglophone and Francophone worlds. Instead, where these traditions have come into contact with each other, the issue of humanism and anti-humanism has led to polemics between those drawing on these New Readings.12 This is unfortunate because although these New Readings mark advances over previous types of Western Marxism, in the ways I have indicated, neither are complete or coherent on their own. However, the grounds of this opposition do not seem to be as radically opposed as their respective positions would indicate. For, as I have shown, Rancière’s account of a break between the Early and the Late Marx is predicated upon a positive notion of anthropology and a corresponding mode of critique that I have argued is of a different register than the minimal social anthropological aspect of Backhaus and Reichelt’s account of continuity in Marx’s notion of critique and his theory of social domination

This raises the question of ways in which these New Readings might supplement each other. For instance, on one hand; perhaps Backhaus and Reichelt’s idea of social constitution could be used to account for what composes the fundamental contradiction between concrete and abstract labour, which Rancière does not really address.13 On the other hand, since Backhaus and Reichelt’s initial view that the esoteric Marx’s dialectical method could simply be reconstructed by drawing on the texts where it was not disguised -- such as the Grundrisse, Urtext and the first edition of Capital -- was eventually deemed naïve when their further work came to see the problems with Marx’s method as ‘legion’, perhaps Ranciere’s New Reading could be of help with some of these problems. For instance, Rancière’s point that primitive accumulation is the historical precondition of the capitalist social relations that is necessarily presupposed in Marx’s presentation, might be used to explain the historical presupposition that inform Backhaus and Reichelt’s logical account of Capital in much the same way that Werner Bonefeld has argued is necessary. Finally, there is the issue of relating the social 12 CF the polemics between Open Marxism and Althusserian Marxism such as Simon Clarke’s One-Dimensional Marx, 13 Using the notion of human social constitution in this manner might also alleviate Rancière’s later misgivings about the ‘distortions’ in the Althusserian scientific enterprise and his later contention of a refined continuity between the early and late Marx in which ‘the discourse of illusion’ in Capital ‘is no longer the product of a separation, but always the simple intensification of a process of illusion which is at the same time the process of constituting reality. The position of science is thus located by the very movement which poses critical discourse.’ How to use lire le capital.

theory that both identify in Capital to capitalist society, which as ever is vexed and vexing question that might to well to draw on both.

In my final section, I will show how a strand of recent German work can be seen to draw on elements of both of these New Readings, pointing to ways this strategy might likewise be productive in the Anglophone and Francophone spheres.

IV

The foremost productive use of these New Readings can be seen in Michael Heinrich’s The Science of Value. As Heinrich himself notes, ‘after all the discussions of the late 1960s and 1970s’ the Science of Value ‘was an attempt to determine the peculiar scientific kernel of Marx’s project of a Critique of Political Economy’. As I will try to show, Heinrich’s influential interpretation of this scientific kernel can seen to bring together motifs from the New Readings discussed above.

This is first evident in Heinrich’s analysis of the standpoint of critique in the Early Marx and the Late Marx. Following Rancière, Heinrich posits that the late Marx broke with a notion of humanism grounded on anthropologism as well as individualism. Like Rancière, Heinrich holds that Marx’s anthropology formed the standpoint of his early critique, which consisted in a positive notion of human essence and an idea of separation. Heinrich also argues that Marx broke with this anthropologism in Theses on Feuerbach. Yet, as I have argued a break in this conception of anthropologism is not the same as break in Backhaus and Reichelt’s interpretation of Marx’s anthropology. Moreover, Heinrich’s account of Marx’s break with individualism is compatible with, and may well from, Backhaus and Rancière’s notion of human social constitution in so far as Heinrich argues that the Late Marx broke with individualism in favor of a theory in which ‘Society doesn’t consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of relations in which the individuals exist. So, society is not constructed out of individuals, society is the sample of the relations of the individuals. When you want to understand society you have to start with the relations and not with the individuals. 714-15 Heinrich’s interpretation of these issues can then be seen to be anti-humanist in the sense that he argues Marx broke with a positive notion of anthropology, yet his notion of Marx’s break with individualism also possesses a theory of society that follows Backhaus and Reichelt’s notion of social constitution.

In addition, Heinrich’s account of Marx’s theory of value can be seen to fuse elements of Rancière’s notion of science and Backhaus’ idea of critique. In the first case, Heinrich describes ‘Marx’s fundamentally new project of the critique of political economy’ as a ‘a project, which was not only meant to add a new theory to the existing theories, but to practice a critique of a whole science, to articulate a scientific revolution’. This scientific critique consists in the ‘dual enterprise of a critique of the categorical preconditions of classical political economy and the solution of the problems that were formulated on the foundation of these preconditions’. Differing with the early Backhaus and Reichelt, Heinrich argues that ‘Marx did not always succeed in disentangling himself from the discourse of classical political economy, so that his argumentation exhibits numerous ambiguities and problems.’ Consequently, the critique of political economy is not a complete system that can be reconstructed; it must be deconstructed. In this sense the elements of Marx’s scientific critique and his break with political economy must in a way be read symptomatically in order to separate them from the instances in which they overlap with Marx’s neo-Ricardian elements.

This is reflected in understanding of Marx’s theory of value that follows both of the New Readings conception of how Marx’s theory of value differed with the Ricardian theory of value; ‘The presentation of the specific social form of labour as reflected in the various economic manifestations from the commodity form of the product of labour to profit and interest, is the actual core of Marx’s labour theory of value.’ Heinrich’s analysis of the presentation and content of this theory can also be seen to utilize aspects of both New Readings.

On the issue of methodology, Heinrich can be seen to follow Rancière’s statement contra Backhaus and Reichelt that the mode of presentation in Capital is not homologous with the Hegelian dialectic.14 Rather, Heinrich might be said to follow Backhaus in more specific sense, holding that Marx’s mode of presentation is dialectical in the sense that it unfolds the ‘fundamental structures of the capital relation’ making ‘clear at what point and in which regard historical observation must enter the scene’, following from the theoretical development in order to explain the preconditions that inform this peculiar type of social labour or where ‘further conceptual development is no longer possible’.

Moreover, Heinrich’s analysis of value might be said to unite the fundamental elements of Rancière’s and Backhaus’s interpretations. 14 Thus while Reichelt sees ‘Marx’s value theory as a materialist deciphering of Hegel’s world spirit’, Rancière argues that it combines a method of presentation that draws on Hegel with historical elements that do not.

In Heinrich’s work, value is presented as unfolding from the fundamental contradiction between concrete and abstract labour which culminates in a monetary theory of value that ties together all three volumes of Capital. For Heinrich, value as a real abstraction thus consists in abstract labour and is realized in exchange. Consequently, in Heinrich’s interpretation, money is not ‘an appendage of value … Marx’s value theory is rather a monetary theory of value’ (63). This is due to the fact that a monetary theory of value is necessary for explaining how commodities relate to each other in the act of exchange in which value is realized and how money 1) functions to measure value, and 2) serves as the means of circulation of value. Money thus serves to unify production and circulation providing the means of capitalist valorisation.

Finally, following both New Readings , Heinrich stresses that fetishism is not a form of false consciousness or alienation. Instead he points out that Marx’s theory of fetishism is a multi-faceted theory of ‘objective’ social domination in which commodities possess ‘spectral’ and ‘value-objectivity’ (72) constituted by the reification of social relations in which things become personified and function as the bearers of value whilst individuals are dominated as the bearers of these relations. As Heinrich stresses these of the theory of fetishism do not simply consist in commodity fetishism but also apply to money and capital and reach their completion in the Trinity Formula.

Conclusion

I have argued that the New Readings of Marx developed by Ranciere and Backhaus and Reichelt possess striking similarities that been neglected. As I have shown both of these New Readings provide a Capital-centric interpretation of Marx that is opposed to Marxist Humanism’s interpretation of Capital, its methodology and its social theory of alienation. As I have also shown both of these New Readings conceive of Marx’s theory of value as ‘theory of the form and the development of forms’ in which the genetic presentation of a theory of how a historically-specific type of labour necessarily appears in inverted ‘fantasmagoric’ forms of abstract social domination is unfolded across all three volumes of Capital. Yet as I have also indicated, while both of these New Readings offer methodological and theoretical advances over previous types of Western Marxism, they run up against problems on their own. I have raised the possibility that these problems might be overcome by drawing on both of these New Readings. Towards this end, I have tried to undermine the grounds of oppositions between them by arguing that the conception of anthropology they operate with is at a different register and so does not foreclose the possible compatibility of their methodological and social theoretical

interpretations of Marx. As I have further shown, leading work in Germany can be said to have productively drawn on these traditions. It is my hope that these points I have raised will contribute to Anglophone and Francophone Marxian theory following suit.