OPEN MARXISM. - Werner Bonefeld

What is Marxism? Is there anything existing which could be regarded as the truthful identification of Marxism? Was Marx himself a Marxist, a notion he strongly rejected?

Is Marxism a system of answers, analyses, academical records and party politics?

Regarding the last decades of marxist discussion, it seems more than obvious that Marxism was/is identified with structuralism: Althusserian over and superdetermination and Poulantzarian sociologism. Class struggle was/is identified as a dysfunctionality of structures, whose essence was truth-the truthful identification of politics in itself as a matter of academical analysis light years away from the question: On which side are you standing?.

Thus, the crisis of structuralism is necessarily regarded as the crisis of Marxism (Althusser).

In this paper I argue that, conversely to structuralist presupposition, the crisis of structuralist Marxism shows the strength of Marxism. It bears the chance to recognise once more the force of history, which was somehow veiled in previous marxist discussion: class struggle.

Marxism is a revolutionary theory, which inherently unites theory and practice. The politics of Marxism thus consist necessarily of the unity of critique and destruction, denunciation and decomposition, demystification and destabilisation. This mutual interplay of critique and destruction emphasises the revolutionary project of social emancipation: the abolishing of all forms of oppression, political power and exploitation. It thus aims to substitute for bourgeois society in all its ramifications “an association, which will exclude classes and their antagonism” (Marx a). With reference to Bloch, this association names the future goal of nonalienated existence whose final word is 'homeland'. Homeland inherently excludes political power, since political power “is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society” (Marx b).

Marx explicitly insists on the structurally given crisis-ridden transformation of the historical forms of capitalist relations, by which an ever changing pattern of social composition within capitalist society and the conditions of struggle are constituted. The permanent decomposition and recomposition of the 'enchanted and perverted world' (Marx) of bourgeois society is thus inherent within capitalism, due to the presence of labour within capital.

The permanent and dynamic effort of capital to restructure its control over labour is the precondition of the stability of the capitalist system and vice versa. As for labour, it is the action of destabilisation of capital, which immediately leads to the action of destruction (see Negri, 1979). The historical form within which the transformation of this antagonism is promoted is crisis.

Referring back to Marx, it is possible to work out an history of the inventions which are made solely for the reason of 'supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class' (Marx c). The whole story about the so-called historical obstacles to the increase of the productive forces and the crisis-ridden transformation of these relations promotes a profound theoretically illuminated account of the changes within capitalism. Thus, the 'state, as the concentrated and organised force of society' (Marx d). is developed by defending property, freedom and equality against social unrest. It is precisely this freedom of resistance which is as productive for the development of the forms of state power as strikes are for the invention of machinery (see Marx e). The process of decomposition and recomposition appears to be a historically changing form of primitive accumulation, by which capital permanently transforms the social preconditions of control (see Negt/Kluge 1981).

Despite these general characteristics, the state, the bourgeois society, the historical pattern of capitalist relations never did, don't and never will exist. Although it should be a commonplace that “it is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers ... which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political forms of the relations of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of state”. But, as Marx continues, “this does not prevent the same economic basis - the same from the standpoint of its main conditions - due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and graduations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances” (Marx f).

Within the context of persisting national development patterns, the permanent revolution of the relations of production alters the capital relations, profoundly, towards a 'higher state of social production' (Marx) and thus reproduction, although the basic pattern remains: the capitalist relation of necessary and surplus labour.

Considering this structurally given permanence of change, the marxist concepts have to be open to the changes in the composition of the social relations which occur during the process of transformation. This is ever more obvious, since it is marxism that analyses the permanent decomposition and recomposition of bourgeois society as a structurally given mediation of its social antagonism and thus as a means of its existence. Further, marxism's concepts have to be dynamically open in order to add to the critique of political economy new social phenomena which for their part inevitably relate to the historically asserted forms of struggle.

This openness of categories is very much insisted on by Marx. Capital is the 'general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity' (Marx g). Marx's concept of abstract and concrete is thus the methodological metaphor for the continuity of the discontinuous development of the concrete within the abstract and vice versa (see Marx Grundrisse).

In short, the politics of critique and destruction has to be reconsidered and has to be readjusted to the changing forms taken by political power within capitalism, to different forms of extracting surplus labour, to changing forms of obscuring exploitation and to the changing composition of capitalist relations themselves.

In this sense capitalist reality constitutes a permeant challenge for the marxist concept of politics. The dynamic decomposition and crisis-ridden recomposition of social relations and conditions adds new social phenomena to its existence throughout the history of capitalism. 'The heresy of reality' (see Agnoli in M/A 1980), thus implies the incompleteness of categories insofar as the basic pattern of the social structure appears in various forms and within changing empirical circumstances.

Open Marxism thus applies the concept of abstract and concrete mentioned above to the decomposing reality of the enchanted and perverted world of capitalism. It necessarily contains, and is founded on, the principle of doubt: instead of the certainty of the orthodox manner of making use of concepts, it reclaims the incompletness of the process of thinking, it readopts the unpredictability of the 'legitimacy of chance' (Marx) and it reconsiders the historically adequate policy of critique and destruction.

The principle of doubt is a prerequisite of the politics of Marxism as well as for its explicit historical target of 'homeland'. It is an explosive force which challenges the orthodox preservation of classical politics in a world of permanent change.

The orthodox explanation of the changes having taken place since the form of capitalist relation which Marx envisaged is partly concerned with the fear 'that empirical evidence might occur, that wasn't discussed by the classics' (Agnoli, in M/A 80). Instead, open Marxism regards the appearance of new empirical evidence as a necessary development which has to be analysed as a dynamic transformation of the concrete totality of the perverted world within the 'general illumination' of 'the all-determining power of capital' (Marx-Grundrisse). This should be common sense since capital is a dynamic relation of antagonism.

Open Marxism contrasts with a 'purely contemplative knowledge' (Bloch), adopted by dogmatism which relates the present to an isolated past and which entirely loses the connection with the process of history. It thus challenges the relevance of referring, with profound knowledge, to certain hitherto somehow hidden or minor interesting arguments of marxist classics, in order to analyse new forms of capitalism purely by quoting from their work. It challenges the exposition of a certain type of understanding of capitalism, which substitutes for the concrete application of a marxist analysis a recollection of quotes.

The principle of doubt inherently forms part of the concept of an open Marxism which reconsiders the open and contingent process of class struggle, its changing forms and conditions. It thus reconstitutes Marx's understanding of politics and undermines the certainty of orthodox Marxism which seems to possess a profound analysis of the course of transformation of society under the effect of class struggle while also sharing in the knowledge of its unpredictability. Hence - a matter of quoting.

Taking into account the changing forms of the presence of labour within capital, the project of marxist politics has to be reconsidered as continuously as the the decomposition of society itself takes place. Both the concept of an open Marxism and its principle of doubt promote the vitality of Marxism, corresponding to its object of critique and destruction, by avoiding pure contemplation and its inability to cope with the process of change.

Open Marxism analyses the continuous discontinuity of capitalist development, that is, the dialectic of the relation between abstract and concrete. By doing so it reflects on the reality of change within, or as a means of existence of, the abstract structure of capitalism. As such, open Marxism is densely interwoven with the process of past-present-future. Although it doesn't share the (arrogant) certainty of (and thus the complacent politics of conservation adopted by) dogmatism, it promotes the politics of Marxism through the 'militant optimism' (Bloch) whereby 'homeland' is to be achieved. Hence its practical strength.

The explosive force of the principle of doubt, which contributes to open Marxism, challenges the widely shared assumption of a crisis of Marxism. This reoccurring assumption seems to be fashionable in times of capitalist restructuring and offense. Despite Marxism's allegedly final exhaustion, it should be clear from what has been said so far, that Marxism is not in crisis as long as it provokes and produces crises of historically developed 'schools' or of Marxists themselves.

Metaphorically, Marxism is the theoretical concept of practice and the practical concept of theory which provokes crises of itself as a matter of its inherent strength and validity.

Literature:
Marx a The Poverty of Philosophy, in Collected Works, Vol. I, p. 121

Marx b ibid.

Marx c Capital, Vol. I p. 411

Marx d Capital, Vol. I p. 703

Marx e Theorien über den Mehrwert, in MEW 26.1 p.363

Marx f Capital, Vol III p. 791-2

Marx g Grundrisse, p. 107.

Other Literature:

Bloch Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Frankf., Vol I.

M/A 80 Mandel/Agnoli, Offener Marxismus, Campus Frankfurt-New York 1980

Negt/Kluge 1981 Geschichte und Eigensinn, 2001 Verlag, Frankfurt 1981

Negri 1979 Sabotage, Trinkont Verlag, München 1979.

The aim of the present paper is to elucidate Marx's understanding of the relation between theory and practice. No claim is entered to the effect that Marx's conception of the theory/practice relation is original to him: rather – although space prevents a defence of this view here – I would argue that it originates with Hegel, who urges that true theory and free (or mutually recognitive) practice are internally linked.1 If this is so, then Marx's reading of Hegel as an idealist who severs theory from practice, preparatory to reducing the latter to the former,2 wholly misses its mark. So too does Marx's polemic against the Young Hegelians3 who, it may be argued, carry forward Hegel's understanding of theory's relation to practice rather than succumbing to “idealism”, as Marx thinks. My concern in what follows is not, however, with the fairness or unfairness of Marx's criticisms but with the substantive view of the relation between theory and practice which Marx defends. To this view I turn.

I

Marx develops his characteristic understanding of the relation between theory and practice in the course of polemics which, in the 1840s, mark successive stages in his break with his erstwhile Young Hegelian allies.4 From his scattered comments and assertions both then and later, a rich and systematic conception of the relation between theory and practice emerges. The task of the present section is to make this conception clear.

Marx's anti-Young Hegelian polemics argue for both a distinction between and a unity of theory and practice. A key point of interest is how, in his view, the distinction and the unity are combined.

The thesis of the distinction between theory and practice is urged by Marx against Young Hegelianism which had, in his estimation, denied it. The Young Hegelians are said to postulate a 'mystical identity of practice and theory' which conflates the former with the latter: 'The act of transforming society is reduced to the cerebral activity of critical criticism' (CW, 4, pp. 193, 86; cf. 5, pp. 4, 30-1, 91, 379). 'Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order. In order to carry out ideas men are needed who can exert practical force' (CW, 4, p. 119). Marx's relatively straightforward distinction is, thus, between theory, which can change only ones own interpretation of the world, and practice, which is alone capable of changing the world itself: 'The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely as long as the head's conduct is merely speculative, merely theoretical.'5 Of course, a simple theory/practice distinction of this sort is not sufficient to establish what sort of practice is necessary to change social relations – this latter, of course, being Marx's central concern. For example, even if social relations are practical in the sense of constituting, at any given time, a distinctive 'mode of life [Lebensweise]' (CW, 5, p. 31), it might still be possible to change them not through the threat or exercise of force but through a practice of rational persuasion. (Insofar as rational persuasion effects changes in the world, it counts as 'practice' in terms of Marx's distinction.) For Marx, there is a presumption that in changing social relations force is directly or indirectly involved, theory itself becoming force (Gewalt) 'as soon as it has gripped the masses' (CW, 3, p. 182). This, however, is a function not of the theory/practice distinction as such but of an understanding of existing social relations as ones where issues of domination are at stake. Marx's view of his Young Hegelian erstwhile allies might be summarised by saying that Young Hegelianism is impotent as propaganda, and retreats into the idealist illusion, because existing power relations are such as to undermine the possibility of an effective public sphere. The suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung, edited by Marx in 1842-43, signals for him the end of the illusion that merely publicistic activity (as distinct from political organisation) is a sufficient lever of social change.

Besides social relations, ideological forms (which are, of course, bound up with social relations) fall, for Marx, on the side of what is changeable only through practice ('Theses on Feuerbach', IV: CW, 5, p. 4). Thus, for example, Marx criticizes Max Stirner for destroying, not an ideological category 'itself' (which is to say, in its public or social existence), but only 'his emotional personal relation to it' (CW, 5, p. 36). There is, to be sure, an evident distinction between destroying a category's hold on oneself and destroying its hold on others; but there is, in addition, a further sense in which a turn to practice may be relevant here. For it may be the case that even for oneself the grip of a specific ideological category or form can be broken only through a practical change in social relations: ones 'emotional personal relation' to the category, or in other words the grip upon one of the category as “obvious common sense”,6 may survive a “scientific” refutation of it. A passage in Capital appears to be to this effect: Marx's contention is, apparently, that even a category which has been seen through by means of 'scientific discovery' may retain its grip upon someone who knows it to be misleading.7 So to say, once the “scientist” leaves his or her study, and functions not as a theorist but as a family member or citizen, the ideological “hermeneutical atmosphere” of the society concerned asserts itself (or re-asserts itself) with full force.

According to Marx, it seems, ideological categories are not merely added to social reality like icing on a cake: they are rooted in social existence. Patterns of thinking are not, for Marx, merely bound up with social relations but form an essential part of what, in a given instance, “society” is. In order to follow through this line of thought, we may turn from Marx's thesis of a distinction between theory and practice to his thesis that theory and practice form a unity.

Marx urges the thesis of a unity of theory and practice by affirming both the necessity of theory to practice and the necessity of practice to theory. The necessity of theory to practice is implied in his 1844 view of revolutionary practice as involving a unity of philosophy and the proletariat and his 1845 view of revolutionary practice as ‘“practical-critical” activity' (CW, 3, p 187; 5, p. 3).8 It is implied also in his characterisation of human as opposed to animal production both in the 1844 Manuscripts – 'Man makes his life activity the object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity' (CW, 3, p. 276) – and in Capital.9 The necessity of practice to theory, on the other hand, is affirmed directly: 'Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being, and the being of man is their natural life-process' (CW, 5, p. 36). The necessity of practice to theory is likewise implied when Marx tells us that 'scientific' activity is 'social' activity (CW, 3, p. 298) and also that 'All social life is essentially practical' ('Theses on Feuerbach', VIII: CW, 5, p. 5). For Marx, neither thoughts nor language form a 'realm of their own' but are, rather, 'only manifestations of actual life' (CW, 5, p. 447).10 But, if theory and practice are thus mutually necessary and so form a unity, it remains to determine what form this unity has and how it is to be understood.

An answer to this question is suggested by two further passages. In one, Marx rejects the view – its exponents are unspecified – which 'does not include philosophy in the circle of German reality' (CW, 3, p. 180). In the other, he urges his point in the form of a rhetorical question: ‘“Can the [Young Hegelian] critic live in the society he criticises?” It should be asked instead: must he not live in that society? Must he not be a manifestation of the life of that society?' (CW, 4, p. 160). In short, theory is socially real – it is located in society – but at the same time 'All social life is essentially practical' (CW, 5, p. 5). Thus it can be suggested that the best way to characterise Marx's view of the distinction between, and unity of, theory and practice is to say that, for him, theory is a real and necessary moment (or aspect) of society as a totality (or whole). Thus practice is theory-inclusive just as theory, for its part, is practice-related and subsists only on a practical terrain. Just such a view of theory as a moment of practice is expressed in the already-quoted phrase ‘“practical-critical” activity', 'critical' being understood here as indicating the theoretical moment in practice, or 'activity', taken as a theory-inclusive whole. Seen in this way, theory is neither external to practice (a 'realm' of its own: CW, 5. p. 447; cf. 'Theses on Feuerbach', IV) nor yet – as in Marx's view it was for the Young Hegelians – the sole and true form of practice, nor yet again something socially and practically in essential or unreal. Theory is distinct from practice in that it forms a moment (rather than the whole) of practice: there are things practice can do – e.g. 'changing the world' – which theory on its own cannot. And theory is in unity with practice since that of which it is a moment is a practical whole.

Thus the theses of the distinction between and unity of theory and practice – which at first sight might seem mutually exclusive – elegantly and lucidly combine. Moreover, the view of theory as a moment in, and of, practice provides clarification of the sense in which the destruction even for oneself of an ideological practice may be accomplished only in social and practical terms. Borrowing Wittgenstein's terminology11 one might say that, for Marx, changing (again, even for oneself) a form of language – or “theory” – involves changing, in practice, a form of social life.

The conception of the theory/practice relationship here ascribed to Marx can be summarised in the form of a diagram (the arrows indicating paths of reciprocal interaction as, over time, practice constitutes theory which in turn informs or guides practice):

The disadvantage of the diagram is that its shape derives from a logical theory of sets and subsets, and thereby fails to render clearly the notion of an internal relation – a relation of reciprocal mediation – between theory (as moment) and practice (as totality) which is central to Marx's account. In Hegel's terms, it belongs at the level of abstract 'understanding' and not at the level of dialectical 'reason'. Because of this, I should like the diagram to be seen on the model of a Zen koan rather than as a definitive version of what has been said. Once the point of the diagram has been appreciated, its form should be forgotten: the ladder should be cast away immediately it has been climbed.

II

Some implications of the account just given of the theory/practice relationship can now be made clear. From what has been said it follows that, for Marx, there can be no question of viewing the thesis of the unity of theory and practice as a simple political ought-to-be. For in Marx's view theory already just is, qua theory, a moment of practice: the only question can be whether this unity, which already exists, has an adequate form. “Adequacy”, here, refers to theory's mode of self-understanding.

Theory which understands itself as forming a practice-independent 'realm of its own' forms an inadequate unity with practice, since such a self-understanding is blind to – indeed, precludes awareness of – theory's practice-relatedness. Such relatedness obtains, although it is denied. Marx's rhetorical question – 'Must the critic not live in the society which he criticizes?' – suggests that an adequate unity exists only when theory grasps, or is at least capable of grasping, itself as a moment of a practical (“practical” in a theory-inclusive sense) whole. Marx takes the Young Hegelians to task for lacking just such a grasp of their theorising as practice-related: 'It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection between German philosophy and German reality, the connection of their criticism with their own material surroundings' (CW, 5, p. 30). This passage imposes on theorising the requirement, not merely that it looks to its own practical effectiveness, but that it takes account of its constitution in and through practice, i.e., its inherence in a practical and social totality which is present in (and hence constitutive of) each of its moments or parts.12

We can summarise this by saying that Marx requires theorising to be practically reflexive. Theory is reflexive when it reflects upon the constitution, and hence the validity, of its own categorial terms or (what is the same thing) its truth-criteria. Theory is practically reflexive when it understands the constitution of its terms and truth-criteria to be a practical and social constitution, i.e., when it understands that practice and society impinge on theory at the level of the categorial system it employs and when, accordingly, it thematizes this practical constitution (or practice-relatedness) in the course of posing to itself the question of the validity of its terms.

To be sure, theory might reflect on its own practical preconditions without, at least explicitly, raising in the course of this reflection the question of its categorical validity. For example, it might ask after the conditions of its own possibility in a purely causal or “sociological” way. However, Marx's assertion that theoretical 'mysteries... find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice' (CW, 5, p. 5) implies a view of theory's practice-relatedness as impinging on its substantive validity. And it is certainly theory's categorial (as distinct from its merely “empirical” or first-order) validity which he has in mind when he claims, of Young Hegelianism, that 'Not only in its answers, [but] even in its questions there was mystification' (CW, 5, p. 28): mystification at the level of questions is mystification at the level of truth-criteria and categorial terms. The thrust of his polemic is to assert that practical reflexivity is needful in order to gain purchase on the question of the validity of categories and that, converesely, practical reflexivity brings the question of category-validation into theoretical view.

For Marx, the notion of practical reflexivity passes into the mainstream of all Marxism which is “non-vulgar” or, in other words, which articulates itself in a conceptually rigorous way. Habermas summarises a lengthy tradition of Marxist and 'critical' thinking when he refers (favourably) to theories which 'incorporate reflexively the fact that they themselves remain a moment of the objective context which, in their turn, subject to analysis'.13 The theme of practical reflexivity is signalled, likewise, by Lukacs,14 Gramsci,15 Horkheimer,16 Kojeve17 and Sartre.18 The specific questions raised by these varying formulations of a common theme fall outside the bounds of this paper, which deals with the notion of practical reflexivity itself, generically, and with issues to which it gives rise. Why should practical reflexivity be needful, and what theoretical requirements does it entail?

III
There is a difference between saying that theory's terms must be compatible with a reflexive grasp of itself as a moment of practice, and saying that such a grasp must actually be present in any given theoretical case. The latter is, as I understand it, Marx's claim at least where social or “human” theory is concerned. The need for actual – and not merely, so to say, potential – practical reflexivity is clearest in the case of social theory which is intended as social critique in an explicitly oppositional or “revolutionary” sense. This is so because failure explicitly to thematize practical reflexivity means that theory lacks the distance or detachment from its object which would enable its object to be called in question. That is, theory would lack the distance which enables its object's claims about itself – the “ideologies” or, as it were, the hermeneutical and categorial “atmosphere” which forms the socially real theoretical moment of a society as a practical totality – to be bracketted or, as it were, placed in quotes.

An object-lesson is once again provided by the Young Hegelians as pilloried by Marx. Lacking practical reflexivity and thus critical distance, the Young Hegelians merely 'recognize', and hence reinforce and confirm, the existing social world by means of a seemingly different interpretation of it; as a result the Young Hegelians 'in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering” phrases, are the staunchest conservatives' (CW, 5, p. 30; cf. pp. 293, 300, 304, 415, 432). Behind Stirner's allegedly utopian alternative to existing social relations (his proposal of an anarchic 'Association of Egoists'), the outlines of existing ideological categories and social relations can be discerned (CW, 5, pp. 392, 398, 406, 409, 411; cf. Engels in CW, 4, pp. 329, 564).

The hermeneutical atmosphere of a society is functionally necessary (or at least advantageous) to the reproduction of the society through time; to breathe that atmosphere unthinkingly, and so reproduce its categories in one's allegedly oppositional works, is accordingly self-deteating because it contributes to the continuing maintenance of the social status quo. Lacking a sense of how practice constitutes theory – that is, failing to grasp 'the connection of their criticism with their own material surroundings' – the Young Hegelians are unable to address the issue of the practice to which, in its turn, their own theorising leads; these two failings go hand in hand, and 'conservatism' (a reinforcement of the status quo) is the outcome. Only if we reflect on the practical constitution of our theory's categories, or in other words on our place as critics in the society we criticize, can we make a question out of whether our theory's categories merely copy down, and thence reinforce, the social relations to which we stand opposed.

What of social theory which holds no overt brief for opposition but which aims, merely, to achieve truth? (Most “social science” is of course theory of this kind.) I propose that even theory of this non-oppositional sort must be practically reflexive, i.e., must pose to itself, explicitly, the question of the practical and social constitution of the terms which it employs.

The object-lesson, here, is supplied in Marx's critique of political economy. Marx's later work makes it clear that explicit practical reflexivity is needful in order that description of structures of social practice should not merely reproduce – as, for example, does 'vulgar' political economy19 – 'appearances', that is, the ideological claims as to its own nature which form a real part of society and which society makes about itself. Such 'appearances' are the theoretical moment of society as a practical structure or whole: in other words, a society's mode of self-presentation is, itself, a real part of that society (in the sense that practice “includes” theory).

The point is that appearances may be systematically misleading as to the character of the practice (the social structure) in which they inhere. In other words, they may mediate to itself a social reality which exists in a perverted and mystificatory form. This, in Marx's view, is the case with the way in which capitalist society presents itself, or “spontaneously” appears. The sphere of exchange gives rise to the ideologies of individualism – 'freedom, equality, property and Bentham', as Marx has it20 – and these ideologies make up a realm of appearance (a realm of functionally necessary mediation) directly contradicted by the structure of the capitalist production process – which structure is in Marx's view decisive for the character of capitalist social relations (and hence practice) taken as a whole. The sphere of exchange is for Marx a 'surface process, beneath which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which... apparent individuality and liberty disappear'; when we explore the process of production we find that 'exchange turns into its opposite and the laws of private property – liberty, equality, property – turn into the worker's propertylessness and the dispossession of his labour'.21 The “vulgar” economist merely copies down the appearances of liberty, equality, etc, and takes them at their face value; only a critique of political economy can pose the question of the reliability of these appearances as accounts of the social practice which they mediate and help to perpetuate and within which they stand. The vulgar economist lacks the practical reflexivity which allows Marx himself to pose (and to answer in the negative) the question of whether capitalism's appearance-ideologies are indeed trustworthy theoretical guides.

Of course, Marx's stance vis-a-vis capitalism is oppositional: sarcasm, anger, mockery and vitrioloc wit are Capital's ever-recurring motifs. But the above sketch of his interrogation of the ideologies of 'freedom, equality, property and Bentham' shows that it is not merely his stance of opposition which brings the theme of practical reflexivity to the fore. For the very possibility that social appearances may be misleading – that society's theoretical moment may conceal, and contradict, the nature of social practice – is sufficient to make a “bracketting” of these appearances (of society's “hermeneutical atmosphere”) incumbent on any social theorist who aims to present a true account of the nature of the social practice concerned. And from this it follows that social theory which aims at truth, and not merely social theory which aims at opposition, must be practically reflexive; for only a practically reflexive theory (a theory which construes the social theorist as him or herself socially situated) can make a question out of the way in which society as it were “spontaneously” presents itself to theorist and non-theorist alike. Accordingly all social theory, and not merely oppositional theory, abandons the requirement of practical reflexivity at its peril.

Horkheimer makes this point when he condemns theory for which 'subject and object are kept strictly apart... If we think of the object of the theory in separation from the theory, we fall into quietism or conformism'.22 The theorising 'subject' must grasp, reflexively, his or her presence in theory's subject-matter or 'object', viz. society as a practical totality, if 'quietism or conformism' (or in other words an unquestioning endorsement of extant ideological categories) is to be avoided. Certainly, the severe term 'quietism' underscores Horkheimer's oppositional stance; but the 'conformism' which is also to be avoided is a conformism inimical to the interests of truth itself. To be sure, it may so happen that social 'appearances' turn out to be reliable guides to the nature of social practice: by definition, this would be so only in an 'emancipated' society where alienation and estrangement no longer prevailed. But the theorist (or indeed the citizen) can never know in advance whether this is so: hence 'critical' consciousness – “critical” in the sense of “interrogative” and not necessary in the sense of “oppositional” – is always needful. Critique indeed must become (it must lead to) opposition if it turns out that benign appearances conceal, and inhere in, oppressive and dehumanising practice: but what is, in the first place, needful is the interrogative stance whose possibility practical reflexivity supplies. And this interrogative stance (therefore, practical reflexivity also) remains needful in all possible social formations whatever – and so, too, in a society where emancipation prevails. For society can know that it is emancipated – it can guard against regression, distortion and the re-emergence of estrangement – only if interrogative and practically reflexive consciousness are in play. It can know that it is emancipated only if interrogative and practically reflexive modes of consciousness are part of its sensus communis or, in Gramsci's meaning of the term (which is also the classical one), its “common sense”. Far from it being the case that emancipation abolishes the need for practical reflexivity, an emancipated society is one where practical reflexivity and its implications come into their own.

In sum: practical reflexivity is needful for all social theory because it is not the case that “spontaneously” common-sensical ideas come out of nowhere. They come from practice or, rather, they inhere always-already in society as a practical totality; they form the theoretical moment in and through which a specific practical secures a conviction of its legitimacy and so reproduces itself. In this sense society (the totality) is present in them (in society's theoretical moment). All social theory is thus required to be on guard against false obviousness. It is so required because this obviousness – the seemingly self-evident and self-explanatory character of categories like individuality and rationality – may possibly be “mystificatory” or false: and the practice-constitution of theory penetrates, without remainder, all theory whatsoever – even theorising of the most rarified and conceptually esoteric kind. No theory forms a practice-independent 'realm of its own'. But if all theory must be practically reflexive, the requirement of practical reflexivity applies to oppositional theory with a redoubled force. For not only must such theory (like all theory) aim at truth; in addition, it must inform and guide a practice which differs from that which carries forward, and so reproduces, the status quo. And it can do this only if it loosens the grip – the 'mental cramp', in Wittgenstein's phrase – of those categories, and ideologies, which ensure that practice flows in socially approved channels and in those alone. What remains valid in Lenin once the suspect notion of a “vanguard party” is rejected is his insistence that, without a theory which calls in question received appearances, the possibility of a revolutionary movement cannot be entertained.23

IV

What, for theory, does the requirement of practical reflexivity entail? I suggest that, with good reason, this question admits of being answered only in the most general terms. For what practical reflexivity does is to place at issue, without remainder, the categorial framework which a given body of theory employs; and this means that the terms in which practical reflexivity goes forward must, themselves, be placed at issue if theory is to be on guard against taking ideological categories at their face value at the very moment when, reflexively, it interrogates itself. Thus, categorially, nothing is (or can be) given in advance of the interrogation of truth-criteria which practical reflexivity mounts. There is therefore no one set of terms which count (in advance) as constituting “valid practical reflexivity”. In other words practical reflexivity is the opposite of a “method” or “methodology” which can be established prior to, and independently of, a project of social inquiry in any given case. Practical reflexivity is thus an approach rather than a method: but it is an approach which changes everything. To see the point of practical reflexivity is to accomplish a “Gestalt-shift” after which nothing in social theorising can ever look the same.

Practical reflexivity is not a method which can be “applied”; or, rather, if we are to talk of its “application” then we must say that it is to be applied inter alia to itself. How is this possible, without vicious circularity or, as Hegel expresses it, without attempting 'to know before you know'?24 The answer to this question lies in the unique relation between first-order theory and second-order metatheory which practical reflexivity involves.

We have seen how the requirement of practical reflexivity comes into view whenever theory asks after the validity of its truth-criteria or categorial terms. Traditionally, reflection on truth-criteria is seen as going forward at a metatheoretical level distinct from that of first-order theorising, for vicious circularity seemingly results if categorial validity is made a topic for first-order theorising itself. Thus, for example, vicious circularity is certainly in play when Althusser declares that 'theoretical practice [or 'science'] is... its own criterion, and contains in itself definite protocols with which to validate the quality of its product, i.e., the criteria of the products of scientific practice'; for the application of this thesis is restricted (as it must be if it is to be plausible) to sciences 'once they are truly constituted and developed' whereas, of course, the real question is that of what the criteria for identifying a 'truly constituted' science might be.25 The ascent to a meta-level of theoretical reflection is supposed to (and indeed succeeds in) avoiding this cicious circularity by distinguishing between theory and theory which reflects on theory – much in the fashion of Russell's theory of logical types.26 But, if the danger of vicious circularity is averted, a further danger – that of an infinite regression of meta-levels – looms; for a theory which reflects on the theory which reflects on theory would be needful to establish this latter's categorial validity... and so on, without hope of halt.

Practical reflexivity avoids both vicious circularity and infinite regress by showing how reflection on a theory's categorial validity can go forward within the first-order theory itself. So to say, the same body of practically reflexive first-order theory can play both “metatheoretical” and “theoretical” roles. That there is no division between discrete “metatheoretical” and “theoretical” roles is entailed by the notion of practically reflexive social theory because to ask after the social and practical constitution of ones categories just is to develop, already, a first-order social theory; and, conversely, to develop a first-order social theory just is to arrive at results which can, and must, be applied “in the first person” to ones own theoretical self. For this reason, the requirement of practical reflexivity does not merely impinge at the start of ones social theorising – as, so to say, the first “methodological” chapter of ones thesis or book – but rather accompanies one's theorising throughout and, indeed, just is one's theorising seen from a different (a reflexive) point of view. Non-practical reflexivity admits of construal or theorising at a distinct meta-level; specifically practical reflexivity admits of no such construal because it locates the theorist, and the constitution of his or her categories, within the social world which the first-order theorist explores.

Hence the infinite regress of ascent through meta levels is halted or, rather, never gets started or comes into play. But what of the vicious circularity of knowing (categorially) 'before you know'? Vicious circularity would indeed be entailed if practical reflexivity amounted to the recommendation that social theory be conducted heedless of questions pertaining to truth-criteria, those questions being in some way “automatically” answered by simple inference from first-order theorising itself. Such a recommendation is, in effect, Althusser's. It also seems to be Marx's when, in one of his weakest passages, he claims that 'One has to “leave philosophy aside”..., one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality'.27 But the recommendation entailed by our earlier discussion is, rather, that first-order theorising be imbued throughout, and at every stage, with a practically reflexive awareness or attitude. Ones practical reflexivity and ones social theorising develop, as it were, together and hand in hand. Each – practical reflexivity and social theorising – just is the other (so that infinite regress is avoided); but also each is the other seen in a different light and so the vicious circularity entailed by an “Althusserian” approach is overcome. First-order social theorising, when informed by practical reflexivity, does not “automatically” answer categorial questions: rather, it is developed with an eye to these questions and with a view to showing how they might be resolved. Vicious circularity is avoided because practical reflexivity affects the first-order results at which first-order theorising arrives. This might seem like a dogmatic an a priori theoretical closure; on the contrary, however, bringing practical reflexivity into play represents a categorial openness superior to any other just because it refuses to take the validity of any categories whatever simply as read. Precisely here, we should stress again that practical reflexivity presupposes, not an oppositional, but an interrogative theoretical stance: it leads to opposition where it turns out that theoretical 'appearances' contradict the practical reality of which they form a mediating part (i.e. where alienation prevails). No oppositional commitment is presupposed. Were an oppositional commitment presupposed then, in effect, we should be claiming to know in advance of knowing the results to which one's theorising would lead. Either vicious circularity would be entailed or one's first-order theorising could never gain purchase on the categorial validity of the theory informing one's oppositional stance – and so the infinite regression to higher and higher levels of meatheory would be unleashed.

The claims raised in the present section of this paper require, of course, a discussion that is a good deal more extensive than, here, I have been able to attempt. The general conception offered is that of a theorising which advances, simultaneously and in the same movement, on a reflexive (categorially interrogative) and a first-order front. An analogy and point of reference for such theorising might be found in Scottish eighteenth-century “common sense” philosophy, which locates a capacity to address issues of categorial validity (a capacity, in other words, for “critical theory”) within the first-order experience and self-awareness of, so to say, everyman rather than in the privileged meta-awareness of a philosophical elite.28 In sum, practical reflexivity amounts to more than being on guard against categorial error and ideological delusion. It also offers, programmatically, an approach to the question of how claims as to the validity of one's categories and truth-criteria might be discursively redeemed. As we have seen, Marx casts practical reflexivity in precisely this categorially redemptive role when he declares, in the eighth of his 'Theses on Feuerbach', that 'theoretical mysteries' – by which I understand inter alia the 'mystery' of category-validation – can find their solution 'in human practice and in the [reflexive] comprehension of this practice' (CW, 5, p. 5). The following through of this programmatic statement lies outwith this paper's bounds. All that we have established, here, is that practical reflexivity provides purchase on the manner in which, minus infinite regress and vicious circularity, the question of category-validation might be addressed. And, indirectly, this proposal returns us to Hegel and the unity between true theory and mutually recognitive practice.29 For it may be – and here the allusion is to “consensus” accounts of truth30 – that the 'human practice' which a practically reflexive account of redeemed truth-criteria must invoke is the practice of an emancipated society – in other words, the practice of mutually recognitive freedom itself. In order to have purchase on the issue of validating categories, the “common sense” of everyman must needs be the public and interactive sensus communis of an emancipatory and non-alienated social world.

Taken from richard-gunn.com/marx-and-marxism

• 1Relevant passages by Hegel include his Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press 1977) pp. 44, 104 and (especially) 490-1; also his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences para. 382.
• 2 Cf. Marx/Engels Collected Works (Lawrence and Wishart 1975-) [henceforward: CW, 3, pp. 326-46.
• 3See N. Lobkowicz Theory and Practice (Notre Dame 1973) Part III; D. McLellan The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (Macmillan 1979); L. S. Stepelevich (ed.) The Young Hegelians: An Anthology (Cambridge University Press 1983).
• 4As my introductory comments indicate, I consider that Marx's interpretation of the Young Hegelians is open to question. When present paper refers to the Young Hegelians, this is generally to the Young Hegelians as seen through Marx's eyes.
• 5K. Marx Grundrisse (Penguin Books 1973) pp. 100-1; cf. CW, 4, p. 193. Further passages which deploy the theory/practice distinction against Young Hegelianism occur at CW, 3, pp. 181, 302, 313; 5, pp. 5, 24, 77-8, 126, 173, 237, 282, 286, 384.
• 6I use the term “common sense”, here, with the meaning here given it by Gramsci: see A. GramsciSelections from the Prison Notebooks (Lawrence and Wishart 1971) pp. 134, 323ff.
• 7K. Marx Capital Vol. 1 (Penguin Books 1976) p. 167. The qualification apparently is needful because, in the passage cited, 'scientific discovery' may possibly refer only to the view, shared by Marx and the “classical” political economists, that labour-time is the content of value – and not to the analysis of the form of value which Marx regarded as his own, novel, contribution (ibid. pp. 173-4). In this case, the circumstance that an ideological category retains its grip even in the face of scientific discovery and insight might be due to the incompleteness of the discovery concerned.
• 8The distinction between the two passages is that, in 1844, Marx thinks of the unity of theory and practice in terms of, so to say, a “united front” between discrete social groups (namely, Left-Hegelian intellectuals and the working class) whereas, in 1845, a much closer integration (whatever its precise character) is envisaged both in conceptual and political terms.
• 9Capital, Vol. I, pp. 283-4. A difference between these two passages, dating from 1844 and 1867 respectively, should be noted: the former invokes not merely consciousness in general but self-consciousness, and thereby points towards a notion of free self-determination, while the latter invokes only consciousness of purposively-addressed goals. The former implies that, as humans, we choose our purposes while the latter is compatible with, although it does not entail, the view that our purposes are predetermined. Are humans distinct from animals because we choose our purposes whereas they do not, or (surely a less plausible view) because we alone act in a purposive way?
• 10In Marx's view, theory's estrangement from practice – its understanding of itself, in the manner of traditional philosophy (CW, 3, p. 331), as a practice-independent 'realm of its own' – has its roots in contradictions and estrangements which obtain within practice itself. See 'Theses on Feuerbach', IV, and also CW, 5, p. 45 which signals this point by referring to the emergence of the distinction between mental and manual labour.
• 11See L. Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations (Basil Blackwell 1968) p. 8, para. 19.
• 12This formulation endorses the notion, criticised by Althusser, of a totality as a unity which is present (wholly present) in each of its moments: see L. Althusser and E. Balibar Reading Capital (New Left Books 1970) p. 96 and passim. For reasons which it falls outside the present paper to discuss, I consider that Althusser's objection to the effect that such a conception of totality is reductionist misses its mark.
• 13See T. W. Adorno et al. The Positivitist Dispute in German Sociology (Heinemann 1976) p. 134; cf. p. 162.
• 14G. Lukacs History and Class Consciousness (Merlin Press 1971) pp. 19-24.
• 15Selections from the Prison Notebooks pp. 404-5, 436.
• 16See note 22, below.
• 17A. Kojeve 'The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel' Interpretation Vol. 3 (1973) p. 115.
• 18J.-P. Sartre Critique of Dialectical Reason (New Left Books 1976) p. 47.
• 19See e.g. Capital, Vol. I, pp. 174-5; also K. Marx Theories of Surplus Value, Part Two (Lawrence and Wishart 1969) pp. 266-7.
• 20Capital, Vol. I, p. 280; cf. Grundrisse pp. 239ff.
• 21Grundrisse pp. 247, 674.
• 22M. Horkheimer 'Traditional and Critical Theory' in his Critical Theory: Selected Essays (Seabury Press n.d.) p. 229.
• 23V.I. Lenin Selected Works (Lawrence and Wishart n.d.), Vol. 2, p. 47; cf. the critique of “spontaneism” - in bourgeois society, spointaneity will be spontaneity conditioned by bourgeois ideology – at p. 62.
• 24Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences para. 41.
• 25Reading Capital p. 59.
• 26The classic statement is the third essay in B. Russell Logic and Knowledge (Allen and Unwin 1956). The line of argument sketched in the remainder of this paper is indebted to G. E. Davie's interrogation of Russell in his The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect (Polygon Books 1986), Part 3.
• 27CW, 5, p. 236. The passage is weak because refusing to philosophise in no way resolves the problems, including that of categorial validation, which philosophy has traditionally addressed. And if a problem is badly formulated this is not shown by choosing to ignore it. Arguably, Marx lapses into this mistake by taking philosophy to address theorising on the latter's own, allegedly practice-independent, terms and concluding that a break with philosophy tout court and a more 'empirical' mode of theorising (CW, 5, pp. 331, 37) becomes needful (as supposedly practice- independent) is to be theoretically assessed. However, a more promising account of the implications of the thesis of the unity of theory and practice for philosophy – one more in keeping with the eighth of the 'Theses on Feurbach' as construed in the final paragraph of the present paper – is sketched at CW, 3, p. 181: philosophy can only be transcended by actualising it in practice. Here, echoes of Hegel's linking of truth to mutual recognition sound.
• 28See G. E. Davie The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect ch. 10; also his The Social Significance of the Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Dow Lecture, University of Dundee, 1973) and his 'Berkeley, Hume, and the Central Problem of Scottish Philosophy' McGill Hume Studies (1981).
• 29Hegelian theory is, without doubt, practically reflexive. In the sixth chapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel tells the story of the history in which – or, rather, at the end of which – he himself stands. His eighth chapter, on absolute knowledge, states explicitly that 'until spirit has completed itself...as world-spirit [i.e. until it has completed itself historically] it cannot reach its completion as self-conscious [i.e. truthfully self-aware] spirit' (Phenomenology of Spirit p. 488). Thus Hegelian truth has practical preconditions, viz., the appearance at the end of history of a mutually recognitive audience who, as free, are capable of acknowledging it. Truth thus appears when its post-historical 'time' has come – and when it can exist in, and for, a mutually recognitive 'public' (ibid., pp. 3-4, 44). On this condition, it 'is at once exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned and appropriated by all' (ibid., p.7). Thus the Phenomenology reflects on the emergence, at the end of history, of the practical totality (that of mutual recognition) of which it itself, as true, forms the theoretical moment; in doing so, it reflects on its own categorial validity as well.
• 30See e.g. T. McCarthy The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (Polity Press 1984) pp. 291-310; M. Hesse Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Harvester Press 1980) ch. 9; also the remarks on 'objective', or categorially valid, theorising in relation to 'universal' subjectivity in Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 445.

NOTES ON 'CLASS'

Richard Gunn

(Common Sense, No. 2, 1987)

1. It is much easier to say what, according to Marxism, class is not than to say what class is. A class is not a group of individuals, specified by what they have in common (their income-level or life-style, their 'source of revenue' [1], their relation to the means of production, etc.). The proletariat, for example, is not to be defined as a group 'as against capital'. [2] Nor is a class a structurally and relationally specified ”place” in the social landscape (a place which individual may ”occupy” or in which, as individuals, they may be 'interpolated', [3] etc.). The difference between ”empiricist” and ”structuralist” Marxisms, which respectively treat classes as groups of individuals or as ”places”, is in this regard a trivial one. For want of a more convenient term I shall refer to the view which treats classes either as groups or as places as the 'sociological' conception of class.

2. Marxism regards class as, like capital itself (Marx 1965 p. 766), a social relation. That which is a relation cannot be a group even a relationally specified group; nor can it be a place (relationally specified place) in which a group may be constituted, or may stand. Setting aside such views, we can say that class is the relation itself (for example, the capital-labour relation) and, more specifically, a relation of struggle. The terms 'class' and 'class-relation' are interchangeable, and 'a' class is a class relation of some particular kind.

3. In other words: it is not that classes, as socially pre-given entities, enter into struggle. Rather class struggle is the fundamental premise of class. Better still: class struggle is class itself. (This is how Marx introduces 'class' in the opening sentence of The Communist Manifesto.) That 'class struggle' is intrinsic to 'class' is Marx's point when he stresses that existence 'for itself' – i.e. the oppositional, struggling existence – is intrinsic to the existence of class (Marx 1969 p. 173).

4. I shall refer to the conception of class as a relation (a relation of struggle) as the 'Marxist' conception of class: here, more than convenience dictates the terminological choice. Notoriously, the sociological conception of class faces the embarrasment that not all individuals in bourgeois society can be fitted, tidily, into the groups which it labels 'capitalists' and 'proletarians'. This embarrasment is produced by the conception of classes as groups or places, and to escape this embarrasment, sociological Marxism has recourse to categories like 'the middle classes', the 'middle strata', etc.: such categories are residual or catch-all groups and, in short, theoretical figments generated by an impoverished conceptual scheme. The Marxist conception class, on the contrary, faces no such difficulties: it regards the class-relation (say, the capital-labour relation) as structuring the lives of different individuals in different ways. The contrast in this regard between the Marxist and the sociological conceptions of class can be illustrated, very roughly, as follows:

(See the illustration above.)

Not least, this illustration is rough because the difference in the ways in which the capital-labour relation structures the lives of individuals in bourgeois society is as much qualitative as quantitative: a spatial diagram can only be ”undialectical”, abstracting not only from qualitative distinctions but also from the 'sheer unrest of life' (Hegel 1977 p. 27) – the unrest of struggle – which characterises a class-relation in any given case. (The model for such spatial diagrams is the Figurae of Joachim of Fiore, which become no longer necesary once the spiritual intelligence they summon has come into its own: cf. Reeves 1976 p. 13.)

5. What qualitative forms can the structuring of lives by the capital-labour (once again, a relation always of struggle) take? The form to which Marx especially attends is that of exploitation/expropriation. Other forms include inclusion/exclusion (Foucault), appropriation/expenditure and homogeneity/heterogeneity (Bataille) and incorporation/refusal (Marcuse, Tronti):[4] the list is phenomenologically rich, and open-ended.

6. One difference between the Marxist and the sociological views, as illustrated above, is that on the Marxist view the 'pure' worker (situated on the extreme left-hand side), whose social being is (unlike all the ”intermediate” figures) in no way divided in and against him or herself, is in no way methdolologically privileged. Neither is the 'pure' capitalist. Both, rather, are merely limiting cases and, as such, they are seen only as figures comingled with other in a diversely-structured crowd. The sociological view, on the other hand, treats the 'pure' worker and the 'pure' capitalist as methodological pillars between which the web of intermediate classes is slung.

7. The difference is important because, acoording to Marx, the 'pure' worker does not exist. This is not at all because of a relative decline in the numbers of the ”traditional working class” (however this theoretically suspect group be defined). On the contrary, it is because the wage relation itself is a bourgeois and mystifying form (Marx 1965 Part VI): whoever lives under its sign – even, and especially, the fully-employed producer of surplus-value -lives a life divided in and against itself. His or her feet remain mired in exploitation even while his or head (which is tempted to construe this exploitation in terms of ”low wages”, i.e., in terms which are mystified) breathes in bourgeois ideological clouds. [5] Accordingly, the line of class-struggle runs through the individual by whom surplus-value is produced (as with, say, the figure standing second-to-the-left in the diagram in para. 4, above). Here, again, there is no embarrasment for the Marxist conception of class which is interested in the specific ways in which the capital-labour relation structures, antagonistically, particular lives. But the non-existence of a proletariat in all its purity can only bring the sociological conception of class to the ground.

8. A further evident difference between the two schemes is that the Marxist one speaks of a single class-relation (namely, the capital-labour relation) as obtaining in existing society whereas the sociological scheme acknowledges as many such relations as there are possible link-ups between social places or groups. For this reason, the 'sociologists' accuse the 'Marxists' of reductionism. In fact, it is against the sociologists themselves that the charge of reductionism may properly be brought. The sociologists want to situate each individual, unequivocally and without remainder, in one or other of the specified groups or places: a ”cross categorial” individual cannot be allowed to appear in the picture which the sociologists draw. The point of the sociologists' proliferation of middle classes, middle strata, new petty bourgeoisies, etc., is to find some pigeon-hole to which each individual may be unequivocally assigned. Hence precisely the ways in which, in class terms, individuals are divided in and against themselves – the numerous and complex ways in which the geological fracture-line of class struggle lies through and not merely between individuals – enters theoretical eclipse. Hence sociologists' reductionism. The Marxist conception of class, by contrast, brings experiental richness of this (self-)contradictory life-texture into full theoretical and phenomenological light. The charge that Marxism reduces the lived experience of individual subjectivity to a play of impersonal and sheerly objective ”class forces” [6] is least of all applicable when 'class' is understood in its authentically Marxist sense.

9. A related point is that the Marxist conception, unlike that of the sociologists, does not construe class in terms of the bearing of this or that social role. From his early essay 'On the Jewish Question' onwards, Marx castigates, as alienated and unfree, any society wherein role-definitions (or a ”social division of labour”) obtain. Far from inscribing role-defintions as a methodological principle, the Marxian view of class depicts the individual as the site of a struggle – of his or her own struggle – which brings not only the ”universal” (role-bearing and socially homogenous) but also ”particular” (unique and socially heterogeneous) dimensions of individuality into play. Neither in theory nor in practice do role-definitions such as ”proletarian” or ”bourgeois” (or indeed ”man” or ”woman” or ”citizen”) represent Marx's solution; on the contrary they figure as one among the problems which 'class' in its Marxist designation is intended to resolve.

10. As between the Marxist and the sociological conceptions of class yet another area of difference is, of course, political. The sociological view advertises a politics of alliances between classes and class-fractions: moreover it ascribes to the 'pure' working class a privileged – a leading or hegemonic – political role. No question of such alliances arises on the Marxist view. Nor does the 'pure' working class (the employed as opposed to the unemployed, the direct producers of surplus-value as opposed to the ”indirect” producers, the proletariat as opposed to the lumpenproletariat, those whose labour does not) have a politically any more than a methodologically privileged place: for no such ”places” exist. Nor is there any question of ascribing to ”rising” as opposed to ”declining” classes a monopoly of revolutionary interest or force: such specifications only make sense when classes are seen as places or as groups. Finally, the whole notion of a vanguard party (plus its diluted variants) is overturned since the distinction between ”advanced” and ”backaward” class-elements disappears along with the sociological conception of class itself. In sum: what has traditionally passed as 'Marxist' politics is in fact sociological, and authentically Marxist politics amounts to politics in an anarchistic mode.

11. If classes are not groups or places but relations of struggle, then insofar as revolutionary conflict takes the form of a conflict between groups (but it always does this imperfectly and impurely) this has to be understood as the result of class struggle itself. It is not to be understood sociologically as, for example, an emergence of pregiven classes – at last! - into their no-less-pregiven theoretical and political 'truth'. The question before the individual is not on whose side, but rather on which side (which side of the class relation) he or she stands; and even this latter question is not to be understood as a choice between socially pre-existing places or roles. Not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, class struggle remains inherently unpredictable. The Marxian conception of class focuses sharply the issue of choice with which class struggle confronts us and in doing so it disallows appeal to any role or place or group in which (according to sociology) we already stand prior to whatever self-determining commitment we choose to make. It disallows this not least because it depicts us as torn by the force of the class struggle in which, in a class society, we are always-already consciously or unconsciously engaged.

12. Whoever wishes, can derive sociological wisdom from Marx's texts. Certainly, and especially in his political writings, Marx was not always a Marxist: for example the 'two great camps' conception of class espoused in the Communist Manifesto results from constructing the Marxist conception of class in an out-and-out sociological sense. Nonetheless, unless the Marxist conception of class were in fact Marx's the circumstance that Marx wrote Capital would be unintelligible. It was Marx himself who, long before his critics and revisionists, pointed out that as capitalism developed the numbers of the 'middle classes' could be expected to grow (Marx 1968 pp. 562, 573); and yet he writes a book, entitled Capital, in which a single class-relation (the capital-labour relation) is the theoretical 'object' addressed. This conundrum can be resolved only by taking his remark about the middle classes to be sociological, and by reading the main argument of Capital as Marxist in the above-specified sense.

13. The sociological conception of class, whenever it wishes to establish Marxist credentials, always becomes economic-determinist. This is so because the only ”indicator” of class-membership ('class', here, being seen as once again a place or group) which Marx's writings supply is that of a common relation to the means of production. Besides being related to the means of production, however, individuals are class-members (or who are class-interpolated) find themselves related to the state and to ”ideology” to say nothing about their local church or football team or pub. Hence, at once, the sociological conception of class generates a schema of discrete social 'levels' or 'practices' or 'instances' (Althusser) and must address the question of how these levels are related. The answer is well-known: in the last instance 'the economic movement...asserts itself as necessary'. [7] In the last instance, in other words, sociological Marxism amounts to an economic determinism with, to be sure, long and complex deterministic strings. To claim, as Althusser does, that such a theory (because of its complexity) is no longer economistic is like claiming that a machine is no longer a machine in virtue of the number of cogwheels its motor drives.

14. With the Marxist conception of class, everything is different. Marx's distinction between class 'in itself' and 'for itself' is to be taken as distinguishing, not between societal levels (cf. Footnote 5, above), but between the sociological and the Marxist conceptions of class itself: if a class only becomes such when it is 'for itself' then political struggle with all its unpredictable ramifications and developments and expenditures is already built into what sociological Marxism treats as the economic ”base”. Whereas sociological Marxism attempts to unite levels which it assumes to be discrete, and on the basis of this starting-point and problem can only upon causalist and external relations of however 'structural' (Althusser) a kind, Marxist Marxism moves in the opposite direction and draws distinctions within a contradictory totality, i.e. within an internally and antagonistically related whole: 'The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence the unity of the diverse (Marx 1973 p. 101). As diagram in para. 4 makes clear, the totality of the class-relation which is specific to, for example, bourgeois society (the capital-labour relation) is present – wholly present, though in qualitatively different ways – in each of the individuals who form that society's moments or part. The essential thing was said long ago by the early Lukács: 'It is not the primacy of the economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality' (Lukács 1971 p. 27).

15. Along with 'the point of view of the totality', a wholly novel conception of class politics is brought into play. Once ”politics” is seen (as it is by the sociologists) as a discrete social level the litmus test of the existence of class 'for itself' becomes the formation of a political party of a more or less conventional – which means: a bourgeois – kind. Seen thus, even a vanguard party amount to a variation on a bourgeois theme. However it is not Marx, but rather bourgeois society, which distinguishes between the levels of political state and civil society – cf. 'On the Jewish Question' – and prescribes the former as the arena wherein social groupings in their maturity (which is to say their conformity) may compete. The Marxist conception of class, or in other words 'the point of view of totality', rejects precisely the narrowness of the conception of politics which the sociological conception of class entails. On the Marxist view, the category of politics becomes as wide as the forms which class struggle (and thereby class itself) unpredictably takes. Not merely is no issue excluded from the political agenda; the notion of political agendas is itself excluded since any such agenda excludes and marginalises whatever does not fall within some theoretically pre-established political domain.

16. The above notes claim neither to completeness nor to the provision of a defence at all points of the conception of class which they have attempted, schematically, to restate. Rather, their aim has been to make clear something of what a Marxist understanding of class entails. As regards evaluation of this understanding: the suggestion may be hazarded that the only possible line of critical questioning which seems fertile is that which asks whether the capital-labour relation is the sole such relation of struggle which, in all its richness, structures our lives. And here there can be no question of supplanting Marx: other such relations (sexual and racial relations, for example) are mediated through the capital relation just as, for its part, it exists as mediated through them. Inquiry as to which such relation is ”dominant” remains scholastic unless embarked on in concretely politcal (which is also to say phenomenological) terms. Both politically and methodologically, the great superiority of Marxist over the sociological is that it frees Marxism from every taint of the determinism which Marx castigated as amongst the most murderous features of capitalism – the tyranny of 'dead' labour over 'living' labour, or in other words of the past (as in all deterministic schemes) over the present and the future – and to which from start to finish his best thinkin stands implacably opposed. This is so because the single theme of Marxian ”class analysis” is the finely-textured and continually and uninterruptedly developing struggle which, for Marx, is the existence of class per se.

Acknowledgements

This paper owes much conversation with John Holloway. Filio Diamanti made me realise that my understanding of 'class' required clarification before discussion of it could even begin.

Notes

1. This much at least is clear from the final, fragmentary, chapter of Capital vol. III (Marx 1971 pp. 885-6).

2. Marx (1969) p. 173.

3. Cf. Althusser (1971) pp. 160-5.

4. See Foucault (1979) Part Four, ch. 2; Bataille (1985); Marcuse (1968); Tronti (1979).

5. The view that the ”ideological” mystification inherent in the wage-form leaves the class-purity of the worker uncontaminated depends on treating production and ideology as discrete social 'levels' or instances; so too does the reading of Marx's distinction between class 'in' and 'for' itself which is rejected in para. 14, below. On the notion of 'levels' see para. 13. In passing, it is worth noting that the conception of ideology as a discrete level (however specified) remains wholly mysterious, if only because social existence without remainder – for example gender distinctions, architecture, work-discipline and scientific knowledge – carries with it an ”ideological” charge.

6. For a discussion of this charge see Sartre (1963).

7. Engels to J Bloch September 21-22 1890 (Marx/Engels n.d. p. 498). Althusser's distinction between 'determining' and 'dominant' instances represents a permutation of the same theme.

References

Althusser L. (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New Left Books)

Bataille G. (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 (Manchester University Press)

Foucault M. (1979) Discipline and Punish (Penguin Books)

Hegel G.W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press)

Lukacs G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness (Merlin Press)

Marcuse H. (1968) One-Dimensional Man (Sphere Books)

Marx K. (1965) Capital Vol. I (Progress Publishers)

Marx K. (1968) Theories of Surplus Value Part II (Lawrence and Wishart)

Marx K. (1969) The Poverty of Philosophy (International Publishers)

Marx K. (1971) Capital Vol. III (Progress Publishers)

Marx K. (1973) Grundrisse (Penguin Books)

Marx K./Engels F. (n.d.) Selected Correspondence (Lawrence and Wishart)

Reeves M. (1976) Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (SPCK)

Sartre J-P. (1963) The Problem of Method (Methuen)

Tronti M. (1979) 'The Strategy of Refusal' in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (CSE Books / Red Notes)

In both Hegelian and Marxist thought, the concept of mediation figures as a central dialectical category. That the category does theoretical, and revolutionary, work is clear. What is less clear, to myself at any rate, is what might be termed the conceptual geography of the category itself. It is this conceptual geography which, as a preliminary to further discussion, the present paper attempts to clarify. A more pretentious title for what follows might be 'Prolegomena to a Reading of Marx'.

To mediate is to bring about a relation by means of a relating (an “intermediate”) term. A mediation is the relating term itself. To count as a mediation, a relating term must be more than a mere catalyst or external condition (however necessary) of the relation: rather, it must itself be the relation. It must constitute it, in the way that for example – and the example is offered merely heuristically – a rope linking two climbers is constitutive of the relation in which they stand.

If a mediation is, thus, the relation which it establishes, it does not follow that just any relation counts as a mediating term. A mediated relation is distinct from a relation for which, to render it intelligible or accurately describe it, no reference to a relating term need be made – for example, a relation of juxtaposition. A relation of this kind is an immediate relation (which, for its part, may be catalysed or necessitated in this or that way).

Within the conceptual field of mediation, as so far outlined, various possibilities exist. Two (or more) terms may be related (mediated) by means of a third, or further, term; or a single term may be related (mediated) to itself by a second term. Where a single term is mediated to itself, the relation between it and its mediation may or may not be reciprocal. Where it is reciprocal, there exist two terms each of which is the other's mediation, and each of which is mediated by the other to itself. This gives an idea of the internal richness of mediation's conceptual field: either there may exist two (or more) terms plus their mediation; or there may exist a single term plus its mediation; or there may exist two terms each mediating, and mediated by, each other. The first of these three possibilities is, perhaps, the one with which the notion of mediation is most commonly associated. (It is closest, for example, to dictionary definitions of 'to mediate'.) However, the third possibility is quite explicitly invoked by Hegel when he envisages a situation in which each of the two terms 'is for the other the middle [the mediating] term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself' (Hegel 1977 p. 112). The example he gives is that of a mutually recognitive relation between individual self-conscious subjects.

A further, and all-important, step is taken in exploring the concept of mediation when it is noticed that the process of mediation may be such as to bring about not merely a relation, but an internal relation: it is exclusively such instances of mediation which concern Hegel and Marx. (In the case of a single term which is mediated to itself, the corresponding possibility is that the process of mediation “totalises” discrete aspects into an internally related whole.) Prior to the mediation, that which is mediated may or may not have been internally related (or self-related). But, even supposing that it was, the mediation may establish a fresh internal-relatedness (or a fresh totalisation). If a (fresh) internal-relatedness or totalisation is established by the process of mediation, then the following is the consequence. Since (a) an internal relation is constitutive of the terms which it relates, and since (b) a mediation is itself – as already indicated – the relation of the term(s) concerned, we can say: in such cases, the mediation is the mode of existence of the related term(s). This can also be expressed – Marx and Hegel so express it – by saying that in such cases the mediation is the form or appearance of the term(s) which it internally relates.

Combining this notion of mediation as the mode of existence (form, appearance) of what is mediated with the third possible shape of mediation indicated earlier, a further possibility emerges: two terms may be the mode of existence of one another. And such is indeed the case, for Hegel, with two mutually recognitive self-consciousnesses: in Hegelian usage, the expression 'recognition' carries with it a specifically constitutive force. This being so, it follows that a recognitive relation between individuals in no way requires mediation through a discrete “third term” –
for example social institutions (or in Hegel's term 'spiritual masses') such as state and civil society (Hegel 1977 pp. 300-1) – separate from, and standing over against, the individuals concerned. The Hegel of the Phenomenology is in fact emphatic that the existence of 'spiritual masses' entails alienation, and that mutually recognitive (or non-alienated) social existence is possible only when no spiritual masses or social institutions exist: mutually recognitive self-consciousness 'no longer places its [social] world and its ground outside itself' (Hegel 1977 p. 265). Thus it is that being alive to the various possible shapes of mediation – in particular, the refusal to equate mediation as such with the first of the three possibilities above indicated – allows us to discern what is in effect an anarchist stratum in Hegel's thought. And the emergence of Left Hegelianism out of Hegel becomes intelligible at the same stroke: for example, Marx's 'On the Jewish Question' appears as a restatement of the critique of 'spiritual masses' which the Phenomenology contains. In the Philosophy of Right, by contrast, Hegel reinstates spiritual masses: individuals are seen as mediated to one another via the discrete “third term” of social institutions, most notably and most famously the institutions of civil society and the state. In virtue of this reinstatement, Hegel opens himself to the criticisms delivered by Marx in his Hegel-critique of 1843. The same point may be stated differently: the Hegel of the Phenomenology emerges as the Philosophy of Right's most trenchant critic.

The expressions “form” and “appearance”, introduced earlier, require further elaboration. I should like what I have said to be taken as (in the sense which is relevant here) defining them: the form or appearance of something is its mode of existence. This definitional sense is not, of course, the sense which “form” and “appearance” receive in ordinary language: there, form is understood as opposed to content and appearance is understood as opposed to reality or essence – as though something's form or appearance might be removed or altered without thereby effecting an essential change in the nature (the content or reality) of the “something” itself. In other words, the ordinary-language usage of “form” and of “appearance” is dualistic.

By contrast, their definitional sense (the sense which is relevant so far as mediation is concerned) is non-dualistic. What this involves is made clear by Hegel in his treatment of the relation between appearance and essence. According to Hegel 'essence must appear', i.e, the appearance is the essence's mode of existence: 'Essence...is not something beyond or behind appearance, but, just because it is the essence which exists, the existence is appearance' (Hegel 1892 papa. 131). The relation between appearance and essence here envisaged is non-dualistic inasmuch as it is in and through its appearance that the essence is. Essence stands out ahead of itself as appearance, and it is as thus standing ahead of itself that it exists: “appearance”, in other words, is to be understood not as a passive noun (an inert veil or cover) but as an “appearing”, i.e., in a sense which alludes to the activity of the verb. This thought is one which Hegel derives from Ancient philosophy. For Anaxagoras, similarly to Hegel and in contradistinction to Parmenides' dualistic counterposing of appearance to reality, 'Appearances are a glimpse of the obscure' (Kirk and Raven 1963 p. 394). Anaxagoras's saying is not to be understood as affirming that appearances comprise, so to say, a thin rather than a thick veil. Rather, his thought is that it is in the nature of what is not appearance – namely, being – to reveal/conceal itself or, in other words, to appear in the sense of standing (obscurely) forth. And, in fact, Marx's concepts of fetishism and of mystification register, so far as social being is concerned, an exactly parallel point.

I have dwelt on the non-dualistic meaning of the term “appearance” because this meaning is decisive for how Marx's Grundrisse and Capital are to be read. Famously, Marx speaks of penetrating through appearances to reality and urges that capitalist society appears to those who live in it in systematically misleading ways (e.g. Marx 1973 pp. 247, 674; 1976 p. 421; 1966 p. 817). Such passages are misunderstood if they are read – and of course they have been so read – as counterposing appearance to reality in a dualistic fashion, or as affirming that appearance is less real than the reality it fetishistically reveals/conceals. From the Grundrisse, it is clear enough that capitalism's appearance in terms of freedom, equality, property, etc. is a real moment in capitalist production relations taken as a whole. Marx drives this point home when he contends that social relations which appear as 'material relations between persons and social relations between things' appear 'as what they are' (Marx 1976 p. 166): this passage is unintelligible – it must seem as though Marx is endorsing a fetishised perspective – unless appearance is understood as the mediation (the mode of existence) of the relation in which the producers of commodities stand.1
If, despite all this, a dualistic understanding of the appearance/reality relation is forced upon Marx then the consequence is either determinism (reality is seen as causally conditioning an appearance which is distinct from it) or reductionism (not the appearance, but only the reality, is supposed finally to exist). Once appearances are understood as mediations no such consequences are entailed. Regarding fetishism and mystification, Marx's point is not that we can be mystified about reality, or even that we can be misled by reality, but that mystification – or “enchantment” – is the mode in which capitalist reality exists. So to say, capitalism exists as its own self-denial.

It may seem as though such a view inscribes mystification so deeply in capitalist social reality that the emergence, from capitalism, of revolutionary theory and practice becomes all but impossible. But precisely the opposite is the consequence if, as we shall see, capitalist appearances are modes of existence of relationships which are antagonistic through and through. It is the non-dualism of the appearance/reality relation which allows antagonisms to be matters of experience – to be 'glimpsed', in Anaxagoras's meaning – in however self-contradictory and distorted a way. Once appearance is dualistically severed from reality, by contrast, antagonism is placed outwith the domain of experience and the basis for a politics of revolutionary self-emancipation is undermined.

As with “appearance”, so with “form”. Marx's characteristic mode of questioning is always to ask “Why do these things take these forms?” (e.g. Marx 1976 pp. 173-4). The “things” concerned are production relations which are always, except in communist society, class relations, i.e., relations of struggle: in existing society it is the capital-labour which is “formed” – which gives form and is re-formed – in varying ways. Marx's project is 'to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized' (Marx 1976 p. 494). The “forms” concerned are the commodity-form, the value-form, the money-form, the wage-form, the state-form, etc. If “form” is understood dualistically, i.e. as opposed to content which is distinct from it, then once again (for reasons parallel to those given in connection with “appearance”) either determinism or reductionism results. In the event, however, forms are to be understood as mediations (as modes of existence, or appearances) of the class relation – under capitalism, the capital-labour relation – and hence of the struggle in which that relation consists. (On the centrality of class struggle to all the categories of Capital, see Cleaver 1977: every single category in Marx's critique of political economy is designed to contribute to the description of the mediations – the modes of existence – of class struggle, and this is one reason why Capital is to be seen as presenting a critique of political economy rather than a rival political economy on its own behalf.)

It is worth noticing that all of the mediations set forth by Marx stand to be mediated in their turn: for example, exchange-value is the mediation (the mode of existence or appearance) of value, and is for its part mediated by the money-form. For Marx, as for Hegel, no process of mediation is definitive: mediated terms may themselves call for remediation, and far from being static or merely “structural” the process of mediation and remediation is one in which the praxis of class struggle – and therefore capitalism's response to labour's insurgency – is inscribed. Better: mediation and remediation are at issue in class struggle, inasmuch as mediations are forms of class struggle. As usual, it is the categories which thematize activity – here, the activity of struggle – which are given primacy by Marx. Understood thus, the concept of mediation explodes all deterministic readings and establishes revolutionary subjectivity at the very centre of Marx's work.

This being so, there can be no question of revolutionaries having to intervene from outside (like Leninist vanguardists) in inert social structures in order to conjure struggle into existence or to generate praxis from process, since it is as mediations of struggle and as at issue in struggle that social “structures” and social “processes” exist. In this sense, for Marx as for Hegel (and in opposition to every variety of bourgeois or pseudo-Marxist sociology), a social world 'is not a dead essence, but is actual and alive' (Hegel 1977 p. 264). It follows that the politics entailed by a reading of Marx in the light of the category of mediation is, with Luxemburg, a politics of spontaneism: but in the Marxist tradition Luxemburg's category of spontaneism has been understood no less confusedly than the category of mediation itself. At the close of the present paper, I shall offer brief comment on what I take the category of spontaneism to involve.

An additional virtue of the concept of mediation is that it makes possible a theorising of the relation between class struggle and struggles of other kinds. For example, the relation of class oppression to sexual oppression has been a topic of notorious difficulty in both feminist and Marxist thought: sexual and class oppression are intertwined, but of course sexual oppression is older than the capital-labour relation. The necessary insight here is to the effect that capitalist valorisation is not a closed dynamic. i.e., not merely one which destroys, externally, all 'patriarchal and idyllic' pre-capitalist forms (although just such a view seems to be implied in, for example, the Communist Manifesto's opening pages). Rather, it is to be seen as an open process of totalisation which is always ready to incorporate – viciously, voraciously – whatever in pre-capitalism can serve its purposes and lies ready to hand. It incorporates such elements as its own mediations, and in so doing re-“forms” them (understanding “form”, here, in the definitional sense specified above). In this way, capitalism re-forms the family and transforms sexual relations within the family into a “form” of the capital-labour relation itself: the nuclear family comes into being cotemporally with industrial capitalism (Shorter 1976). The sexual relation becomes a mediation of the class relation and vice versa. Women's unpaid labour in the nuclear family serves as a free subsidy to capital so far as the reproduction of labour-power is concerned.2
Thus, sexual emancipation presupposes, but is not reducible to, class emancipation (and vice versa). This analysis is the opposite of reductionist because it construes the process whereby capital re-forms sexual relations as one of struggle and implies neither that all of existing sexual oppression is a consequence of this re-formation – although it is all affected by it – nor that sexual oppression will be automatically terminated once the capital-labour relation is destroyed.

In passing, it can be noted that capitalism's continuing employment of pre-capitalist relations is crucial not merely for any concrete understanding of the capital- labour relation's mediations but also for an understanding of the sources of legitimacy upon which capital may draw. (An example is racist legitimacy, bound up with a heritage of anti-semitism and slavery, so far as the capitalist state is concerned. Amongst other things, this heritage makes it possible for capital to organise a flow of “immigrant” labour-power to and fro across the state's boundaries and in accordance with valorisation's needs.) To see capitalist valorisation as a closed and sheerly self-sustaining dynamic, and capitalist legitimacy as stemming solely from the exchange relation, is to downplay its capacity for incorporating, as its own mediations, that which is or was non-capitalist – and so to underestimate the strength (deriving from flexibility) of that to which revolutionary struggle is opposed. The sheer 'formalism' of the exchange relation would supply capitalism only with a weak legitimation; the 'substantial' sources from which it can derive strong – but nonetheless always problematic – legitimation are both older and more “irrational” and mythic than a Marxism impressed with the hegemony of liberal values would suppose (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969). Sometimes, fascism is analysed as an archaic throwback to times before capitalist rationality prevailed; if this is accepted, however, the conclusion must be that all capitalist states are fascist on precisely this score. The advantage of the category of mediation, here, is that it allows us to break away from the image of a “pure” capitalism overlain and sullied by what Stalinist Marxism terms 'survivals' from a pre-capitalist past. On the contrary to such views: the strength of capital is its capacity to re-form pre-capitalist relations as its own mediations and thereby to translate them into modes of existence of itself.

What I have said about “form” sheds light on yet another contentious area of Marxist theorising, this time an area of a methodological kind. One of the central topics addressed in Marx's 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse manuscripts is that of the relation between categories which are (in their designation) abstract and categories which are concrete, and we learn that, instead of starting from the concrete and abstracting from it, we must start from the abstract and show how the concrete is composed out of it – the concrete, here, being viewed as 'the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse' (Marx 1973 p. 101). I shall not attempt to explain all the issues raised in this complex passage, but only to draw out a distinction between two ways in which the abstract/concrete relation can be understood.

Abstracting from the concrete involves abstraction in what may be termed an empiricist sense: the more I abstract, the further I move away from (concrete) reality and the less real – the more purely conceptual – my abstractions become. Marx is for his part willing to employ abstraction in this sense, as when he remarks that 'all epochs of production have certain common traits, common characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction...' (Marx 1973 p. 86). But he adds at once that 'there is no production in general' (Marx 1973 p. 86), in the sense that production is always historically specific, and one of his objections to vulgar political economy is that it confuses abstraction in its empiricist meaning with abstraction in a sense which the notion of mediation brings to light. In this latter sense, that which is abstract can be a mode of existence (a form) of that which is historically specific and no less real than any other aspect of the concrete totality in which it inheres. Mediations, in short, may be either abstract or concrete or a (contradictory) unity of the two. The example which Marx gives of abstraction as mediation is labour, which 'achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society' (Marx 1973 p. 105) wherein value-production obtains. The 'dual character' of labour (Marx 1976 pp. 131ff.) as abstract and concrete – as productive of value and of use-value – is one among the mediations of the capital-labour relation itself. Confusing abstraction in the empiricist sense with abstraction in the sense of mediation allows the political economists to construe that which is specific to capitalism (in the present example: abstract labour) as intrinsic to production under all social formations whatever. This confusion is one aspect of the fetishism of categories to which Marx is constantly opposed.

Once again, we arrive at a point which is decisive for how Marx's own critique of political economy is to be read. To be sure, the first volume of Capital discusses “capital in general” in abstraction (more or less) from the questions posed by the existence of “many capitals”, and even at the end of Volume Three we still have to 'leave aside' the conjunctures of the world market, credit and so forth (Marx 1966 p. 831). But this in no way entails that the value-form, abstract labour, surplus-value, etc. – in short, all the central topics of Volume One – are less real than the topics approached as the arguments of Volume Three unfold. Value and labour precisely as abstractions, in the sense of mediations or modes of existence of the capital-labour relation, do real (and murderous) political and exploitative work. The mediations which Volumes Two and Three of Capital add to those of Volume One – the remediations, in other words, of these former mediations – in no way subtract from the importance of the story (the story of the capital-labour relation as a relation of class struggle) which Volume One tells. Nor is it a matter of a “pure model” of capitalism – which exists no more than does 'production in general' or a Weberian 'ideal type' – being moved “closer to reality” by successive stages. To be sure, Volume Three approaches 'step by step the form which they [the 'various forms of capital'] assume on the surface of society...and in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves' (Marx 1966 p. 25): but just here it is important to keep the sense of “forms” and of “appearances” as mediations clearly in mind. For example, “many capitals” is the mode of existence of “capital in general” and, minus the 'practical truth' – the real social existence – of “capital in general”, the intelligibility of “many capitals” disappears. The point here is more than a textual one. If Volume One is treated as presenting a “pure model” of capitalism (an abstraction in the empiricist sense), then Marxism's emphasis on class struggle – the struggle inscribed in the capital-labour relation – evaporates; both in theory and in practice, one finishes up endorsing the mystified 'ordinary consciousness' of capitalist social relations and the fetishism in which (as Volume Three demonstrates) that consciousness is steeped. To read Marx as an empiricist – as employing only an empiricist concept of abstraction – is to read him as a reformist, and both his political and his theoretical challenges are evaded at a single stroke.

One way of summing up what has been said concerning Marx is to see it as articulating further the possible shapes of mediation discussed above. For it will be apparent that, for Marxism, one application of the concept of mediation as mode of existence (as form or appearance) is of key importance, namely, the application of this species of mediation to a situation wherein, prior to mediation, an antagonistic – or self-antagonistic – relation characterises the to-be-mediated terms. Indeed the antagonism may be one strong enough to destroy the terms, as in the Communist Manifesto's scenario of 'the common ruin of the contending classes'. Hegel tells us what a mediation of antagonistic terms can mean: it can mean that each antagonistically (or self-antagonistically) related term achieves the 'power to maintain itself in contradiction' (Hegel 1971 para. 382), or in other words in its antagonism (which is not at all to say that the antagonism is removed outright or abolished). Suppose, now, that a mediation of this kind brings about an internal relation between, or within, the antagonistic term(s): in such a case, the mediation is the mode of existence not merely of the term(s) themselves but of their antagonism. The antagonism concerned is not removed, but on the contrary is sustained and set on a new footing, inasmuch as (qua mediated) it no longer consumes and destroys or undermines itself. Thus, for Marx, mediations of the contradictions inherent in the commodity-form (the central contradiction is between use-value and exchange-value, and its mediation is money) 'does not abolish these contradictions, but rather provides the form [read: the mode of existence] within which they have room to move' (Marx 1976 p, 198).

In this example, mediation allows not only the antagonistic terms but their antagonism to remain in being. Money, as the mediation of the commodity, is not just superadded to the commodity but is the mode of existence of the commodity itself: 'The riddle of the money fetish is...the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes' (Marx 1976 p. 187). In the absence of this mediation, use-value and value would remain merely juxtaposed, in the sense that use-value production, as a condition of all social existence, is by no means merely value- production and indeed points beyond it. Not the least aspect of the fetishism of commodities is the circumstance that use-value production, as a universally imposed condition of human existence, is established, through mediation, as related internally to value. Hereby, fetishistically, the existence of capitalism becomes inscribed in the ineluctibly given order of things.

Antagonism, of course, returns us once again to class struggle: if the various moments of capital are mediations (forms, modes of existence) of class struggle, then they are mediations which sustain this struggle not merely within the (broad) limits of the avoidance of 'common ruin' but within the (narrow) limits of a capital-imposed order of things. If this is so, then it seems that neither set of limits can become an issue for class struggle – social existence can involve risks neither per se nor for the powers that be – as long as these mediations are in play. And yet, since it is as an antagonistic relation – the capital-labour relation – which they mediate, it is as forms of struggle that capital's mediations always-already exist. The “play” of mediation is thus the play (the risk-taking praxis) of struggle itself. Risk, that is, is intrinsic to social existence and remains so even when it exists in the mode of being denied.

And this returns us to the topic of spontaneism, touched on above. The presence of antagonism in capital (and as capital) allows us to say that, in capitalist society, mediation always and only exists as the possibility of, so to say, going into reverse gear. Mediation exists as the possibility of demediation. Putting matters in this way allows us to avoid what would be a new form of reductionism, namely, a discovery (an uncovering) of class struggle as a level of pristine and authentic immediacy which lies under mediation's shell. Reductionism would be involved here inasmuch as immediacy would be counterposed to mediation, in a dualistic fashion, as the latter's essence and truth. In fact, what lies under mediation's shell is nothing: or, rather, the whole metaphor of a “shell” (together with its famous “kernel”) is inapplicable since the mode of existence of class struggle is the process of mediation and the possibility of demediation itself. This means that the antagonistic contradiction of mediation/demediation is intrinsic to class struggle, as Luxemburg lucidly sees: 'On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing society. On the one hand, we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectical movement through which the socialist revolution makes its way' (Luxemburg 1970 pp. 128-9). This 'dialectical', or in other words contradictory and self-contradictory, movement is the movement which the term “spontaneism” connotes. In no way does spontaneism conjure, magically and romantically, a surging groundswell of immediacy which will eventually carry before it the web of mediations whose putative truth it is and to which it is externally juxtaposed. On the contrary, the contradiction inscribed in mediation is inscribed in the challenge to mediation as well, and there is no space of immediacy located outside of mediation which might supply a foothold or point of departure from which revolutionary challenge could spring. Spontaniesm connotes demediation and not the conjuring of immediacy, as Luxemburg (unlike her critics) already so sharply sees.

These two things are true: mediation exists as the possibility of demediation; and there is no immediacy, not even in revolution's camp.

If this is so, then the project of revolution (the project of demediation) always contains something paradoxical and, as it were, ironic and playful (it is demediation “making its play”). What Adorno says of the dialectic of identity and non-identity applies to the dialectic of mediation and demediation as well: 'I have no way but to break imminently, and in its own measure, through the appearance [read once again: the mode of existence] of total identity' if non-identity is to come to light (Adorno 1973 p. 5), since it is as modes of existence of one another that identity and non-identity obtain. Indeed, more than analogy relates Adorno's defence of non-identity to the theme of mediation/demediation, since a good part of revolutionary struggle turns on the articulation of that which is particular and nonidentical and hence marginalized with respect to the conformism that any social order entails. This is most evidently the case with sexual politics but holds equally for class politics as well. In Georges Bataille's terms: heterogeneity is to be rescued from the homogeneity which, for example, the bourgeois exchange relation presupposes and enshrines (cf. Bataille 1985 and, on identity and the exchange relation, Adorno 1973). But rescuing particularity and heterogeneity and nonidentity must involve paradox since universality, homogeneity and identity are inscribed in the very conceptual ordering whereby any rescue-attempt must be thought through (to say nothing of the organisational forms which revolutionary practice may find itself driven to adopt). 'The concept of the particular is always its negation at the same time; it cuts short what the particular is and what nonetheless cannot be directly named, and replaces it with identity' (Adorno 1973 p. 173). As with the concept of particularity, so with the concept of demediation: in order to remain in play, it is called upon always to think against itself. And if there remains something opaque about the category of demediation, so be it. Transparency would announce it merely as a fresh mediation, and so close the conceptual space within which the figure of 'revolutionary subjectivity' finds itself able to appear.

Acknowledgements

Kosmas Psychopedis convinced me of the importance of mediation and my poor understanding of it. In the course of many discussions, Werner Bonefeld helped me to see issues at stake.

References

Adorno, T. W. 1973: Negative Dialectics (Routledge and Kegan Paul)

Bataille, G. 1985: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 (Manchester University Press)

Cleaver, H. 1977: Reading 'Capital' Politically (Harvester Press)

Dalla Costa, M., and James, S. 1976: The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Falling Wall Press)

Hegel, G. W. F. 1892: Logic [Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences Vol. I] (Clarendon Press)

Hegel G. W. F. 1971: Philosophy of Spirit [Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences Vol. III] (Oxford University Press)

Hegel G. W. F. 1977: Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press)

Horkheimer, M., and Adorno, T. W. 1969: Dialectic of Enlightenment (Allen Lane)

Kirk, G. S., and Raven, J. E. 1963: The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge University Press)

Luxemburg, R. 1970: Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (Pathfinder Press)

Marx, K. 1966: Capital Vol. III (Progress Publishers)

Marx, K. 1973: Grundrisse (Penguin Books)

Marx, K. 1976: Capital Vol. I (Penguin Books)

Negri, A. 1984: Marx beyond Marx (Bergin and Garvey)

Shorter, E. 1976: The Making of the Modern Family (Collins)

Taken from richard-gunn.com/marx-and-marxism

• 1Here, I speak of the mediation of a relation whereas, previously, I have spoken of the mediation of terms. What may seem like a confusion is only a verbal difficulty, which may be resolved in one of two ways. Either the expression 'term' may be understood in a broad fashion, so as to include relations as one species of term. (In this case, the relation between commodity producers is mediated to itself through the commodity form.) Or the commodity producers themselves may be understood as the 'terms' which the commodity form mediates or relates. Nothing turns on which of these alternative resolutions is adopted, and the expression 'mediation of a relation' can be understood as shorthand for this either/or.
• 2See Dalla Costa and Jones 1976. In her notes to the 1976 edition of this work, Dalla Costa mistakenly says that women's housework is productive not merely of use-value (the use-value of labour-power) but of value and surplus value as well. If this were so, it would destroy her own argument: women's housework would increase (instead of holding down) the value of labour-power, and capital would have an interest in decreasing the amount of housework which women do.

Mediation is one of Marx's concepts which is very much neglected within the 'marxist' discourse. Nevertheless, I think it is one of the most important concepts within marxism. The concept 'mediation' challenges academic marxism and it provides a conceptual framework for the politics of marxism (see Bonefeld 1987).

Before I go into further detail on 'mediation', I want to concentrate briefly on the 'nature' of marxist concepts.

The marxist categories are abstractions of the concrete and complex reality of capitalism. These abstractions decode the "innermost secret, the hidden basis of the relations of sovereignty and dependence" (Marx 1966, p. 791-2). 'The concrete is concrete because it unites diverse phenomena. The concrete is the unity of variety' (see Marx 1973, p.101). Marx's concept of abstract and concrete is thus the methodological metaphor for the continuity of the discontinuous development of the concrete within the abstract and vice versa (see Bonefeld 1987), The analytical abstraction from the concrete leads ''towards the reproduction of the concrete by way of thought" (Marx 1973, p.101). This "is the only way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in mind" (Marx 1973, p. 101). Thus, the idea of the world “is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought” (Marx 1983, p.29). Only after the development of the substantial abstraction of the innermost secret of the reality can the real movement of the material world be presented appropriately. These abstractions conceptualise the determining relation of capitalism in order to understand its 'perverted and enchanted world' (Marx 1966 p.830). The abstract categories are abstractions from the concrete in order to comprehend the concrete. The only existence of the abstract is within the concrete.

The marxist concepts contain the unifying dynamic of the process of antagonism, which in no case eliminates the antagonism of capitalism (see Negri 1984). This antagonism is the antatonism of labour and capital. The marxist categories contain the reciprocal recognition of labour and capital as an intrinsic relation of struggle. This applies for all the marxist categories. The rnarxist concepts have to be open to the changes in the composition of the social relations which occur during the process of transformation. This is ever more obvious, since it is marxism that analyses the permanent decomposition and recomposition of bourgeois society as a structurally given mediation of its social antagonism and thus as a means of its existence (see Bonefeld 1987). In this sense, the analysis of the hidden laws of capitalism leads inherently to the analysis of the mediation of class antagonism: the modus vivendi of the crisis-ridden development of the capital-labour relation.

The marxist concepts thus contain the analytical perception of the 'hidden laws' and the inherent possibilities of change, both within capitalism (re- and decomposition of form of social relations)' and against capitalist mode of production. Thus, they contain the possibility of 'barbarism and socialism' (see Luxemburg). Marxist conceptions thus contain the notion of the 'possibility' and 'unpredictability' of the development of the capital relation. Marxist categories conceptualise the variety of phenomena as implicit forms of the presence of labour within capital, and thus struggle. The concepts entail the capital labour relation as a relation of subject and object of historical development (see Lukács 19711 ). The categories therefor contain their own negation: they are forms of thought which seek to comprehend the development of the antagonistic social relation and thus to understand history as object and result of struggle.

MEDIATION

The concept of mediation has to be seen within the above outline. The 'determinate abstraction' (see Negri 1984) promotes an analysis of what is mediated. Whereby the mediation itself is inherently contradictory due to its generation as a structurally necessary mode of existence of the organisational presence of labour within capital.

The term mediation inherently contains its own negation which I shall refer to as de-mediation. This term seeks to comprehend the constitution of class through struggle. The term de-mediation will be discussed later.

Concentrating on the term mediation, it contains the analytical penetration of the reality of capitalism as a complex diversity of phenomena. The term mediation is open to the structurally given crisis-ridden transformation of the mode of existence, although the basic pattern remains: the capital relation of necessary and surplus labour.

The recognition of class struggle as the motor of history is basic for the understanding of 'mediation', all-the more because the social antagonism of the capital-labour relation is the relation which is mediated. Economic, social and political phenomena have thus to be seen as object and result of struggle. The historical materialisation of former struggle confines and conditions class struggle (see Marx 1943).

According to Marx, antagonistic relations express themselves always in forms (value-form, state form) (see Marx 1983, p. 106). 'Form' is the 'modus vivendi' (Marx 1983, p. 106) of antagonistic relations. The mediation of antagonistic relations in certain 'forms' does not 'sweep away' (Marx) the inconsistencies of antagonistic relations. Form, and thus mediation, “is generally the way in which real contradictions are reconciled” (Marx 1983, p. 106). Thus, the term mediation refers to the form of existence which allows the antagonistic relations to “exist side by side” (Marx 1983, p. 106).

Thus, it is within 'form' that antagonistic relations can articulate themselves. For this reason I would follow Marx in speaking of the 'perverted and enchanted world' (Marx 1966, p. 830) as a form of existence. Form mediates the existence of antagonisms as a condition of their own existence. As such, the existence of antagonism is a mediated existence, or, with reference to Marx, a fetishized reality. This reality is the material world of capitalism which is based upon class antagonism, which is reproduced by class struggle, which is shattered by crisis (itself also a form of capitalism) and which is dynamically and constantly transformed due to the presence of labour within capital. The mode of mediation is the sole existence of class antagonism.

The totality of phenomena is the material world of antagonism, that is its mode of existence. The relations of production as well as political power relations have thus to be seen as forms of existence of antagonistic relations. The historically changing mode of existence (or appearance, form) has to be grasped as the maerial world of the capital relation which bathes all social, normative and political phenomena in a certain colour (see Marx 1973, p. 107).

Thus, the fetishized world of capitalism is no closed system precisely because it is the form of the capital-labour relation and because it has to be reproduced by class struggle. It is only through struggle that the form of mediation is reproduced and the fethishization of society perpetuated. Contrary to deterministic approaches, this fetishized reality is the reality of captialism as a necessary form of mediation of antagonism. Thus, the enchanted world of capitalism cannot be dismissed as a cover of the veiled reality of truthful laws of capitalism. The only existence of abstract general laws is the cover itself. As such, capitalism exists as a 'totality' of social phenomena within which the antagonism is mediated, with which the antagonism is reproduced and without which capitalism wouldn't exist. The 'determinate abstraction' (Negri 1984) of the enchanted and perverted world of capitalism does not create a hidden reality of capitalism, which is separated from its cover, and from which the false reality of freedom and equality can be deduced as a 'appearance' which is (necessarily) 'wrong' as opposed to 'true' (the hidden laws). The determinate abstraction, conversely to structuralist approaches, depicts the so-called 'cover' as the material existence of class-antagonism.

The concepts of 'Das Kapital' and of the 'Grundrisse' compose the enchanted world in the process of thinking. These concepts thus categorise the mode of existence within which the class antagonism is inscribed and operating, and which is the material world of capitalism. The concept of surplus value, for example, does not exist as an abstract concept of Capital Volume I with which an understanding of the 'concealed' reality should be achieved. It is rather the existence of surplus value production which composes the reality of capitalist exploitation within and through the material world of capitalism, this latter being the mediated mode of existence of antagonism.

The continuity of capitalism resolves itself in the crisis-ridden development of the capital-labour relation. This dynamic development is mediated through the discontinuity of captial's mode of existence, that is, its form of control and its form of pervertion. This permanence of change is mediated by crisis. The transformation of the mode of existence of surplus value production is the historical mediation of the capital-labour class antagonism. The crisis-ridden de- and re-composition of the mode of existence is thus the historical mediation of the achieved form of the material world of capitalism. History is a process of class struggle whose dialectical contradiction is inscribed in the relation of subject and object. Thus, history has to be conceptualised as a totality within which 'kernal and skin constitute the unity' (Labriola 1974, p. 151).

Summing up the argument, the 'enchanted and perverted world' is the only existence of capitalism. The mode of existence is neither cover nor surface. The mode of existence is the mediation of class antagonism. It is the capital-labour relation which illuminates the colour of the social phenomena whose totality constitutes the "concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse" (Marx 1973, p. 101).

DE-MEDIATION

Due to the organisational existence of labour within capital, the mediation of the capital-labour relation is permanently driven into crisis-contradiction-de-mediation and further transcendence.

The mediation of antagonism is thus in a constant process of reproduction-contradiction-crisis and transformation. Fetishized reality does not exist as a closed system. The mediation of class antagonism does not sweep away antagonism and inconsistencies, precisely because it is the mode of existence of antagonisms. The existence of antagonsim in a concealed form (see Marx 1966, p. 817) has to be reproduced by the intercourse of capital and labour: that is struggle.

The fetishized reality has constantly to be reproduced by struggle. As such, it comes constantly into conflict with experience. Thus, it is not only the academical mind which understands the determinating cause of the mode of existence. However, the existence of the abstract in the concrete unifies class conflict and promotes the perception of class antagonism and the understanding of the 'interrelated relation' 'to the popular mind' (see Marx 1966, p. 817). As such, the fetishized reality of capitalism is far from being a closed system whose existence can only be grasped by an intellectually inspired vanguard party acting from 'outside' and administering the 'misled' masses.

The presence of labour within capital constantly de-mediates the mediation of capitalism. Struggle constitutes the de-fetishization of the enchanted and perverted world of capitalism. 'The dialectical relation between subject and object in the development of history' (see Lukács 1971, p. 61) is explicitly elaborated within the marxist method of determinate abstraction and tendency (see Negri 1984, p. 13). It is this dialectical relation between subject and object which provides the understanding of de-mediation as a form of demystification, denuciation and critique of capitalism. All of these forms of de-mediation are intrinsically bound to the practice of destabilisation, decomposition and destruction. Thus, the unity of theory and practice which is explicit for the politics of marxism dwells on the antagonistic class relation of capitalism.

De-mediation thus refers to the constitution of class through struggle. Struggle inherently contains both the reproduction of mediation and the destruction of mediation. Struggle possibly demystifies equality as a mediation of capitalist exploitation, it possibly denounces freedom as a mediation of domination and it possibly criticises 'rights' as a moment of exploitation and destruction (see Gunn 1987).

The activity of labour against its existence as proletarian labour entails the de-mediation of its own experience as wage-labour or, in other words, the recognition of itself as variable capital. Thus, the unifying dynamic of the process of surplus value production continually drives its mediation into contradiction and into de-mediation.

DE-MEDIATION AND MEDIATION

"On the one hand, we have the mass, on the other, its historic goal, located outside the existing society. On the one hand, we have day-to-day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectical contradiction through which the socialist movement makes its way" (Luxemburg 1970, p. 128-129).

Mediation and de-mediation are consistent and permanent features of the course of class struggle. The constitution of class through struggle promotes tendencies of de-mediation which are explicitly part of the 'dialectical contradiction' articulated by Luxemburg: day-to-day struggle and socialist revolution. In this context the interwoven process of mediation and de-mediation refers to the possibility of emancipation and the possibility of defeat, that is, the possibilities of socialism and of the transformation of struggle into a new mode of mediation. Luxemburg seems to take this on board when she speaks about the inherent possibilities of socialism and barbarism (see Luxemburg 1970 p. 268, 327). The de-mediation of capitalism is a force inscribed in the dialectic relation of class antagonism. De-mediation thus includes its negation: mediation. The dialectic relation of struggle thus inherently involves the effort to reverse de-mediation by transforming the mode of existence of antagonism. Marx discusses this reciprocal action inherent in the dialectical relation of class antagonism on various occasions. This reciprocal action of antagonism is conditioned by the results of former struggle. Within marxist discourse the relation of mediation and de-mediation is discussed as the reciprocal action of subject and object within the development of history (see Lukács) or as determinate abstraction and tendency (see Negri 1984). The two following examples should clarify this argument: The constitution of class through struggle is seen as productive for the development of the state in the same way as strikes are for the implementation of new machinery (see Marx 1969). Against the 'revolts of the working-class' within production the implementation of new machinery is used as a 'weapon' (Marx 1983, p. 411) to establish control over labour. Struggle thus reproduces capitalism and transforms its mode of existence. Thus, the constitution of class and the transformation of the mode of existence of the capital-labour relation are closely interwoven.

Mediation and de-mediation are concepts which seek to understand the course of struggle. They are dialectically interwoven concepts within which the development of class struggle is inscribed. Thus, they conceptualise the dialectical process of subject and object during history: de-mystification and de-composition, destabilisation and new order of control, practice and counterpractice. In this way, mediation and de-mediation refer to the reproduction of the enchanted world through struggle, which inherently involves the transformation of the capitalist mode of existence and the permanence of primitive accumulation (see Bonefeld 1987).

The permanent and dynamic effort of capital to restructure its control over labour is the precondition of the stability of the capitalist system and vice versa. As for labour, it is the action of destabilisation which immediately leads to the action of destruction (see Negri 1979). The historical form within which the transformation is promoted is crisis, so that the process of mediation is consistently the object and the result of struggle.

The capitalist modes of existence are constantly de-mediated and mediated by the hidden law of their determination: class antagonism and class struggle. Hence, the alternative of socialism and barbarism.

References:
Bonefeld 1987 Open Marxism, in Common Sense no. 1

Gunn 1987 Rights, in Edinburgh Review No. 77

Labriola 1974 Über den historischen Materialismus, Frankfurt

Lukács 1971 Geschichte und KlassenbewuBtsein, Luchterhand

Luxemburg 1970 Speaks, New York

Marx 1943 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, London

Marx 1966 Capital Vol III, London

Marx 1969 Theories of Surplus Value Vol I

Marx 1973 Grundrisse, Manuscripts of the Critique of Political Economy

Marx 1983 Capital Vol I, London

Negri 1979 Sabotage, Munchen

Negri 1984 Marx Beyond Marx, Notes on the Grundrisse

• 1I do not, however, share Lukács's messianic belief: in the proletariat as the historical executor of history's essence.