Marx: Abstract Totality and Social Relationships

The issue of concrete social relationships and the integration of social groupings is almost entirely suppressed in the works of Marx and most Marxists (Calhoun 1982; Alexander 1983). This suppression is partly because of an overemphasis on one of Marx's most fundamental insights: the totalizing drive of capitalist commodity production and capital accumulation.^[41] Marx recognized in a profound way that capitalism was not established on the basis of direct interpersonal relationships. It existed only through the mediation of commodities that were produced and exchanged in the pursuit of capital accumulation. Moreover, as Giddens (1985b, chapter 5) has recently reminded us, a central feature of Marx's theory is missing from competing accounts of industrial society. The missing feature is the dynamism of capitalist production and commodification, and its ceaseless expansion into new lines of production, new areas of life, and new parts of the world.^[42]

Capitalism, according to Marx, must by its nature increase its extension in the world and the intensity or completeness of its domination wherever it organizes economic activity. Capitalism drives the creation of new technology (for both production and distribution), new products, and new markets. As Giddens stresses (1985b), this analysis neglects the coeval rise of the state, which was crucial to the creation and maintenance of a distinct economic sphere. But this does not go far enough. We must both recognize the accuracy of Marx's argument for the dynamic by which capitalism

[41] This is the theme of Volume 1 of Capital insofar as it shows how abstract forms dominate concrete relationships in modern capitalism. (For Marx, one must remember, the concrete is not the simple and the obvious but the complex and in some sense arbitrary sum of many different determinations.) The commodity from encapsulates a new kind of social mediation in which people are knit together in the most determinative ways of their production and exchange of things rather than by direct interpersonal relationships; qualitative particularity is suppressed in favor of quantitative generality. Lukács, more than any other thinker, held fast to this theme—developed in his analysis of reification—as the center of Marxism ([1922] 1971, esp. the chapter titled "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat"). Although he expands the notion of totality to include many other variants of Marxist holism, Jay's (1984) analysis is very helpful on this point. For Lukács, totality is not just a tendency but an essential category that is recognizable from the abstract standpoint of the proletariat as self-moving subject-object. One of the most powerful recent attempts to read Marx's theory in this way and at the level of basic categories is that of Postone (1983). In this work totalization is seen as a historically specific tendency of capitalism.

[42] "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes" (Marx and Engels [1848] 1976, 487).

pushes toward totality and complement it with an analysis of the concrete social relations with which capitalism (like the notion-state) coexists but which cannot be reduced to it. Capitalism, on other words, is not society. It exists in some part precisely in opposition to direct interpersonal relationships. As Marx remarked: "Their own exchange and their own production confront individuals as an objective relation which is independent of them. In the case of the world market, the connection of the individual with all, but at the same time also the independence of this connection from the individual, have developed to such a high level that the formation of the world market already at the same time contains the conditions for going beyond it" ([1939] 1973, 161, emphasis in original).^[43] Commodities confront human beings as objectifications of human activities (in relation to nature, self, and others). Commodities mediate human relationships to create the abstract totality that is capitalism. At the same time, the commodity form reifies human activity and relationships, obscuring the fact that capitalism is the product of human labor and making it appear as an independent object. Both Marx and, especially, Engels were fond of borrowing Carlyle's phrase that capitalism left no other nexus between man and man than "callous cash payment" (e.g., Marx and Engels [1848] 1976, 487; Engels [1880] 1972, 608). Just as capitalism must disregard or even attack the irreducibly qualitative nature of commodities, so it must disregard or attack the qualitative content of human relationships (Marx [1867] 1974, chapter 1; Lukáacs [1922] 1971, 83–148). But capitalism can go only so far in this attack, even in Marx's theory. Commodities tend to the purely quantitative, but they remain physical things and thus have qualities. Similarly, capitalism cannot wholly dominate or eradicate quantitative cultural contents, interpersonal relationships, or purely personal thoughts and affects.

Indeed, it is central to at least one reading of Marx that this should be

[43] "Comparison," Marx went on, takes the "place of real communality and generality: It has been said and may be said that this is precisely the beauty and the greatness of it: this spontaneous interconnection, this material and mental metabolism which is independent of the knowing and willing of individuals, and which presupposes their reciprocal independence and indifference. And, certainly, this objective connection is preferable to the lack of any connection, or to a merely local connection resting on blood ties, or on primeval, natural or master-servant relations" ([1939] 1973, 161). See the similar discussion by Engels ([1880] 1972, 627–28) and in the Manifesto (Marx and Engels [1848] 1976, 486–87). It is, however, above all in Capital, especially in the relationship between Volumes 1 and 3, that we see Marx creating a theory of a mode of totalization that makes social life appear systematically as other than it is, that is, makes capital seem the cause and not the product of human action. If we can identify capitalism with the system-world, it does not just "colonize" the life-world, as Habermas would have it, but constitutes the very severance of each from the other, the compartmentalization of the life-world and the reification of mediated action. (Whether there are other forms of mediation comparably conducive to reification remains an open question.)

so. In this reading one cannot explain the revolutionary transformation or supersession of capitalism solely on the basis of dialectical negation. That is, there must be an alternative, qualitatively separate mode or dimension of existence on the basis of which opposition to capitalism can build. Such a basis may remain outside the domination of capitalism, as in the notion, arguably suggested by Gramsci, of a counterhegemonic culture (Gramsci 1982; Boggs 1984). Or such a basis could be created by capitalism itself. Marx, for example, considered that the very concentration of workers in cities and factories (and the social organization of the factories) might provide the basis for radical mobilization (Calhoun 1983). But there is a tension between this line of reasoning in which Marx expects the coalescence of the working class as a collective actor, subjectively unified on the basis of direct relationships among workers, and Marx's more predominant analysis of how the indirect, abstract relationships of capitalism dominate and destroy direct ones.^[44] In this latter line of reasoning Marx focuses on the purely categorical position of the proletariat as the negation of capitalism; the proletariat is unified by common place in the formal relations of production rather than by qualitative relationships to each other.^[45]

The other side of capitalist totality in Marx's categorial analysis turns out, ironically, to be a kind of individualism. On the one hand, this is the universal individualism of utilitarianism, and Marx critiques aspects of it.

[44] This tension is one that does not much trouble Engels. Where Marx (in Capital ) has seen the anarchy of everyday capitalist economic activity as the superficial inverse of a relentless push toward totality, Engels uses similar language to contrast two levels of concrete social phenomena:

The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits broken through, the producers were more and more turned into independent, isolated producers of commodities. It became apparent that the production of society at large was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy; and this anarchy grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means of aid by which the capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialized production was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organization of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment By this the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. (Engels [1880] 1972, 97)

As a result, Engels can provide a more transition to an evolutionary socialist expectation that socialized production will lead naturally to proletarian solidarity and socialist society. It is this sort of Engelsian account that is revised, domesticated, and appropriated by Bell (1973) and that Galbraith (1978) and others believe they have answered by showing that modern capitalist production is not anarchic but planned, not the reckless pursuit of profit but the carefully modulated pursuit of organizational growth.

[45] In different ways both Lukács and the Althusserian structuralists extend this argument from the pure categories of capitalism even further than Marx did. See Poulantzas: "Social classes are not empirical groups of individuals, social groups that are 'composed' by simple addition; the relations of these agents among themselves are thus not inter-personal relations" (1975, 17).

But, on the other hand, Marx seems to accept this "implicit" individualism as at least a partially accurate description of reality under capitalism: concrete qualitative examples of proletarian social solidarity (such as direct interpersonal relationships as opposed to political commonality or organization) are taken by Marx as nothing other than the residues of the old order. Capitalism is purely formal, impersonal, and quantitative; the working class is unified by the commonalities of a category of individuals.^[46] If any relationships are held to be defining or productive of solidarity, they are the relationships of opposition to the bourgeoisie, the ruling class, not the relationships among workers. Nowhere does Marx endeavor to show that individuals in capitalist society (including capitalists as well as workers) are anything other than quantitatively interchangeable, except in potential.

It is important, however, to keep the issue of human social potential in mind. To the extent that capitalism is the object of analysis, direct interpersonal relationships are of minimal significance. In the pre-Capital writings where Marx envisages a communist future, however, he does not contrast quantitatively interchangeable individuals with an abstract totality. Rather he takes pains to stress that "above all we must avoid postulating 'society' again as an abstraction vis-a-vis the individual. The individual is the social being " (Marx [1844] 1975, 299, emphasis in original). But such a condition is a possible future to be created, not a timeless feature of human nature (other than in potential): "Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich ] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history" (Marx [1939] 1973, 162). Natural law and social contract theorists, Marx says at the same point in Grundrisse, focus their attention on "merely objective" bonds among people and mistake them for the spontaneous relationships that are not possible in the existing state of society. So long as the abstract relationships of capitalism remain determinant, the analysis of concrete relationships will be the analysis of more or less arbitrary epiphenomena. When capitalism and the human self-estrangement of private property are transcended, there will still be a difference between activities that are carried out in direct communality with others and those (e.g., science) that depend less on the immediate copresence of the group but that are nonetheless self-consciously social. But each of these activities will be self-determining in a way impossible under the domination of capitalism:

Social activity social enjoyment exist by no means only in the form of some directly communal activity and directly communal enjoyment, although

[46] This approach is continued in the work of many contemporary "analytic Marxists"; see, e.g., Wright 1985.

communal activity and communal enjoyment—i.e., activity and enjoyment which are manifested and affirmed in actual direct association with other men—will occur wherever such a direct expression of sociability stems from the true character of the activity's content and is appropriate to the nature of the enjoyment. ([1848] 1976, 298, emphasis in original)

In terms of Marx's own political interests, that is, his theory of revolution, there is a tension between his account of the tendency of capitalism to eradicate all interpersonal relationships not created by capitalist commodity production and exchange and the need for a basis of social solidarity in the struggle against capitalism. Marx's few comments on interpersonal relationships other than those constituted by capitalism itself indicate that real communality would have to be postponed to a postcapitalist world. Thus Marx has no substantial theory of social integration under capitalism (as opposed to system integration, in Habermas's sense, or the integration of the capitalist totality itself). Although Marx's account of capitalism is powerful, it is an account not of the experiential or observed world of social relationships—that is, society—but of (1) a factor pushing continuously for certain directions of transformation in those relationships and (2) a form of mediation producing systematic misrecognition of those relationships. Marx's theory of capitalism is a more local or specific theory and a less universal one than is frequently claimed. It cannot be the basis for all sociology. Indeed, in the most literal sense it is not a sociology at all.^[47] Insofar as they are composed of concrete social relationships, even some of the most characteristic institutions of modern capitalism—business corporations, for example—must be explained by factors other than capitalism.

The some extent the aim of this chapter is to explore these other factors. I have offered a preliminary conceptualization of the structures of the indirect relationships that are distinctive to the modern world. Capitalism has in part helped to produce these relationships, but, at least equally, it depends on them. Corporations and large-scale markets are crucial examples. Indirect relationships have been and continue to be furthered by developments in information technology. Each relationship is also subject to a tendency toward reification, which sets it apart from the social institutions that are formed primarily on the basis of directly interpersonal relationships.

The reader should not think that only Marxism suffers from the lack

[47] Of course, taking Marx's theory of capitalism in this narrow sense excludes a good deal of Marx's own work, some of which is more directly sociological. The point is that this sociological part is not based directly on, and is still less deducible from, Marx's categorial theory of capitalism.

of a good account of the role of concrete relationships in social integration, that a good account of social integration is to be found in the whole cloth in some other theoretical corpus, or that my argument is entirely in opposition to Marxist theory. Taking the last point first, my aim is to delimit the application of the most central part of Marxist theory, treating it strictly as a formal of capitalism. Marxism is a theory of capitalism as a form of mediation among human actors (again, considered abstractly as procedures, consumers, and owners), not as a form of social or economic action (as it is for Weber). In this sense capitalism is dynamic and pushes toward totality.^[48] Although it may need improvement, with these limits Marx's theory is powerful and still offers an almost unique insight. However, I insist that capitalism is not a form of society. Marx's theory of capitalism should not be privileged as a theory of all social life. We may grant the claim that it is the tendency of capitalism as a form mediation to increase the extent to which a theory of capitalism will explain other aspects of social life, but many of these aspects nonetheless remain "other." Central among these other aspects for the purposes of this chapter are the various relationships through which members of populations are knit to each other and enable the coordination of social action on a very scale. Much the same could be said for the contents of culture.