MATURE MARX: THE CASE AGAINST AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL BREAK
by Jan Mayer

"The philosophers have only INTERPRETED the world
differently, the point is, to CHANGE it" -

1

This quotation, taken along with Marx's other theses on Feuerbach,

such as his critique of "contemplative materialism" as stopping at

isolated man or human essence conceived of outside the aggregate

of social relations and objective activity, sums up his attitude to

idealist philosophy in general, as well as his dissatisfaction with

Feuerbach 's anthropological humanism. His was from the beginning
2

a "revolt against the rule of thoughts. , an attempt to turn

Hegel on his head" as he stated in his critique of Hegel's Philosophy

of Right; that is, to rescue what were valuable insights from

idealism and to put these in the context of a materialist philosophy.

The Left Hegelians such as Feuerbach thought that merely by re-

interpreting the world they would solve the problems of idealist

philosophy; Marx's intent was not only to criticize philosophy but

to criticize and to change the real world.

Marx's sea thing attack on idealism was prompted by the way in

which material existence and social consciousness were treated.

In Hegel, they were mere epiphenomena, emanations of the progress

of the World, or Absolute, Spirit or Mind through various stages of

its development to its ultimate state (the thesis-antithesis-synthesis),

The "really real" to Hegel was not "real individuals, their
o

activity and the material conditions under which they live , not

real flesh and blood men, but an abstraction which existed purely

in the transcendental realm of reason. Marx's materialist

antidote to Hegel's idealism was found through political economy.'*

It is the purpose of this short essay to examine the ways in

which this element is retained and developed throughout Marx's career

and to argue that despite various more systematic and scientific

reworkings, many of the important categories of analysis were

retained. There are both continuities and discontinuities between

the "early" and the "mature" Marx, but no epistemological break,

contrary to what has been argued particularly by Althusserian

structuralists. These lines of development are especially evident

in the following items: Marx's method, including dialectics; his

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treatment of the conditions underlying alienation; and related to

this, the way in which he perceives the structure of capitalist

society and works his way from "surface phenomena" such as markets,

competition, etc. in the early works, to a mature analysis of the

hidden mechanisms underpinning them.

There are three important and central components in Capital

which not only represent an advance over Marx's earlier analysis

of capitalism but also serve as keys to the continuities at the

heart of Marx's concerns. These three interconnected concepts are:

the relations of production, surplus value, and the commodity.

The "relation" may be thought of as a basic unit of reality:

it is a unity of contradictory parts, and the notion of "contra-

diction" and "totality" are joined in Marx's use of the dialectical

method. The mode of production subsumes two types of conditions:

means, or forces, of production, and social relations of production;

the relations of production under capital unite two antagonistic

social actors, the capitalist and the labourer, who are of necessity

in conflict because of their relationship in the creation and

appropriation of surplus value. It is through the historical

conditions which make this appropriation possible that the worker

is exploited and his labour alienated from him as labour- po^er
,

an abstract commodity which has the unique property of producing

values greater than itself which then enter into the exchange

process and add to the accumulation of capital, under the control

of the capitalist who has rights of disposition over capital and

labour. The "commodity" (in the special sense intended by Marx)

is a unique product of capitalism, combining within itself the unity

of use-value and exchange-value, with exchange-value becoming the

dominant force in the development of the capitalist mode of pro-

duction. Together, surplus value aid the commodity are keys to

understanding the structure of capitalist society, taken in context

with the social relations of production. These concepts will be

elaborated upon in the course of the ensuing discussion.

Let us first exanine the concept of alienation as it is used

in the early economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and through this

analysis, indicate in what form the concept remains in Marx's

mature political economy. It may be recalled that Marx had

objected to Feuerbach's analysis of religion as being a projection

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Mature Marx

and reification of man's reflection of himself in an idealized form,

a creation not recognized by its creator. This was for Marx too

psychological a model and said nothing about the relationship between

man and his material conditions which were at the basis of all such

idealized productions of which religion (the separation between

man and his creation, the creation standing over against him as

an alien force) was the exemplar. It is at this point that Marx's

anthropology or ontology (the nature of man and being), his

materialist philosophy and his borrowed categories of political

economy converge to produce an explanation of alienation.

It is because man is an "active, sensual being" in nature

that man necessarily realizes himself and his fellow actors only

in and by acting on nature—by producing the means of his subsis-
tence. Through this activity man refines his human capacities and

produces objects which reflect himself (man thus "makes" himself

and, in co-operation with others, makes a human, social world).

However, under certain historical conditions, the connection

between productive activity and the objects of production are lost,

and these objects come to take on a separate, hostile existence:

under the conditions of division of labour and private property.

Those who control the means by which men produce their world

control both the men and their products; under capitalism, therefore,

the worker becomes separated from these and as a consequence, becomes

estranged from his fellow men, from himself, and from his true

human nature or "species-being".

Thus the concept of alienation refers to an objective set of

conditions caused by particular material arrangements. They

involve a producer, a means and an object of production, and an

appropriator of these in a set of property relations. These are

the elements which appear in rudimentary form in the early writings

of Marx. In his mature works, he develops in detail the mechanisms

which link appropriation, exploitation and accumulation— and the
word alienation, but not the sense of the concept, disappears.

Marx wrote the Manuscripts in 1844, the _German Ideology in

1846, and he subsequently repudiated most of what he had written

as "unscientific." In 1851 he began more intensive study of

Ricardo although had not yet developed the full implications of

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surplus value. The notebooks towards a critique of political economy

(the Grundrisse) were written between 1857 and 1858 and are generally

acknowledged as representing a "watershed" between Marx's early and

mature works. Contained within them are the elements which would

later appear in Capital , and it was at this time that Marx realized

his previous analysis had dealt only with the appearances, the

"surface phenomena" of political economy and the structure of

capitalist society.

Earlier, he had treated labour as any other commodity--now

he realized its special nature, and this was linked to the creation

of surplus value which now was to become the basis of the theory of

capitalist accumulation. The extraction of surplus value under the

conditions of capitalist domination becomes the motor of the process

in which the world comes to be dominated by impersonal exchange

relationships. Labour- power , as an abstract general category, and

money, become the universal solvents by which all things are

reduced to equivalents, made mobile and exchangeable, and make the

growing accumulation of capital possible.

These conditions, however, presuppose historical developments

whereby all personal ties, as in feudalism, have been sundered;

persons and things have become freed to enter into a system of

exchange relations, and a formally free labour force created to

enter into contractual relationships with capital, exchanging labour-

power for wage-money. However, this is an unequal exchange ev^n if

on the surface it appears equal, since labour- power, the unique

commodity, creates wealth which is under the control of capitalists.

By causing the worker to labour part of the day for the capitalist

and only part of the day for himself, conditions are created in

which stored-up value adds to the wealth- accumulating capacity of

capital when the circuits of production and circulation are com-

pleted. Hence, as the worker creates more wealth, he becomes more

impoverished relative to it--capital, embodying the creative power

alienated from him. stands as an alien power over him which grows

with the growth of capital. Accumulation becomes an end in itself,

and the commodity becomes "fetishized"

.

It is thus in his analysis of th? turning of labour into the

commodity labour- power by its separation from the labourer that

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Marx's analysis of surplus value relates to his earlier analysis of

alienation-- the term is now "exploitation." Earlier, Marx saw the

relationship between man and his world as one in which productive

activity mediates between the individual and the external world as

the means by which he appropriates objects. Under capitalism,

labour and other elements become "abstractions" (that is, the

links are severed). Alienation implies the breakdown or sundering

of a unity of interconnected elements (as Oilman, in his 1971 book

Alienation, points out). In Capital , it is now evident that as

activity goes through its metamorphosis into value, to be expressed

as money, commodities, etc., these become fetishized and take on a

life of their own, expressing in distorted fashion the original

relation. Man's relationship to his world (which includes other

men) is now mediated by the abstractions created under capitalism,

just as capitalists and labourers, or buyers and sellers in the

marketplace, now relate to one another only indirectly, through the

mediation of exchange-value. Private property (which Marx originally

saw as the cause of alienation) is now recognized by him as only one

form of value and that more fundamental are the conditions which

create surplus value and exchange value.

Let us now turn to an examination of dialectics, another

element in Marx's development which exhibits both continuity

between early and late works and was also from the very beginning,

entirely different from Hegel's idealist- philosophy use of it.

Marx's dialectics is both historical-materialist and treats contra-

dictions differently—he does not merely "turn Hegel upside down"
by converting idealism to materialism. In his early usage, Marx

corrected Hegel by making history "march on its feet" instead of

in the airy realm of Pure Reason; his principal concern was with

the contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat and the way in

which modes of production develop historically through the conflictual

supercession of previous forms and social relations. In the mature

works, Marx adds to this the notion of contradiction within capital

itself, as between productive forces (as they develop through the

socialization of accumulation and production in large-scale units),

and the private ownership of those forces, that is, as Godelier p.its

it, between two structures, production and ownership.

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Dialectics did not originate with Hegel but in Greek usage,

the combined "dia" and "logos" meaning "to reason by splitting in

two", of phenomena which are split, their elements in clashing

opposition . From the beginning, there was implied in the notion

of dialectics a world in flux, moving, changing and transforming

into its opposite. The world is conceived of as a unity of opposites

in contradiction with one another, even if at any particular "moment"

appearances seem static and in harmony. This conception was adopted

both by Hegel and by Marx. However, Marx rejected Hegel's progress

of an "independent objective Mind" and posited instead the movement

of history through human subjects actively creating and changing

their world. There is no ultimate reality which transcends passive

humans and proceeds in mechanical and subjectless fashion; rather,

to Marx, contradictions and conflicts which move history are within

and between human actors and structural elements which they have

created but which nevertheless condition and limit them at any

one point.

This unity in contradiction which is material reality also has

production as its basis, grasped via the categories not of phil-

osophy but of political economy. Components are related together

internally in a totality, a set of circumstances which are the

products of historical processes and which determine at any point

the conceptual status of elements within that totality. It is for

these reasons that the starting point of the scientific method in

Marxian political economy must be fundamentally different from that

of Idealist philosophy. As Nicolaus comments:

"Unlike Hegel's Logic, and unlike Marx's own initial
attempts earlier, th~is beginning begins not with

a pure, indeterminate, eternal and universal ab-
straction, but rather with a compound, determinate,

delimited and concrete whole..." ("Foreword" to the

1973 Pelican Grundrisse ; and see "The Method of
Political Economy", Marx, Grundrisse )

A significant example in the mature Marx's work of the particular

and "delimited" concrete entity is the commodity as central to

understanding what is unique and crucial about the mechanisms of

capitalist society. It makes possible the analysis of value which

contains within it the unity of two contradictory elements, use-

value and exchange- value, with the latter dominating, just as there

is in capitalist society as a whole a "unity in domination" of

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capital and labour, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Beginning the

analysis with a particular concrete entity such as the commodity,

illustrates that the unity of production and consumption is not

direct and immediate, but is part of a process linked to other

conditions, as Nicolaus points out. In other words, we are not

concerned with the universal qualities of production and consumption

as they would be useful in analysing any and all societies, but

rather, with historically specific ones, those under conditions

which create and sustain capitalist society. The commodity

represents the essence of the uniqueness of the historical product,

capitalism, because it contains within it all of the other

contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.

As Marx proceeded with his detailed study of political economy

in the Grundrisse notebooks, Nicolaus (1973) observes, his

methodological approach changed: one must not work up from simple,

general, abstract relations to complex particular wholes, but from

the particular to the general, an essential difference between

idealist and materialist dialectics. This has implications for the

role of "abstraction" as a methodological procedure. As Keat and

Urry (1975) point out, Marx was not a positivist—he wished to lay
bare the internal structure of the capitalist mode of production

and society, hidden workings which are related together internally

and not readily observable in appearances or isolated "social facts":

his was a "realist" conception. Social reality could therefore be

understood only by examining both parts and whole, both concrete

facts and abstract categories, by a process of moving back and forth

between them in order to reach closer and closer approximations to

the nature of this reality in its historical specificity. The

process of abstraction involves a reduction of pheno.nena to their

"pure form" in order to grasp how particular processes are worked

out and interrelated (and to separate out residues of previous

forms which have not yet been superceded). Thus, for example,

the significance of the spinning jenny cannot be understood unless

we know the context in which it is located in the relations of

production; similarly, labour takes on a particular meaning because

of the social relations in which it is embedded: the subordination

of labour to capital and the domination of the commodity form of

value.

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The contention made by such theorists as Althusser that there

was a break between the early "ideological" and "philosophical" Marx

and the mature "scientific" Marx is, therefore, misleading, as well

as incorrect. Marx was throughout his career both a materialist

philosophically and an empiricist scientifically (and it could be

added, an "Enlightenment child" who did not see the problems with

scientificity that concern us today). The early Marx was interested

in uncovering the false or reified nature of notions by relating

them to the material conditions of existence; the mature Marx with

examining the hidden mechanisms of capitalism. At both points in

his development, he was therefore interested in what was in the

world of appearance not readily apparent but hidden and examinable

only through scientific categories. Philosophy (as a bourgeois

activity) was for Marx unscientific; the nature of reality, society

and history had to be examined scientifically--it could be said,

then, that as he developed he merely became more scientific, more

systematic.

Although he recognized individuals as the creators of their

social world and history, at no point did he ever begin from pur-

posive action of individual actors. He did not begin, that is, from

presuppositions of a psychologistic utilitarianism, but began, rather.

from the structured unity in which actions were to be understood.

Unlike functionalism, however, this unity was one of inherent con-

tradictions, and it is this point which links the notions of

"dialectics" and "totality." Thus, Marx's theoretical and methodo-

logical approaches separate him from both idealism and utilitarianism

on the one hand, and also from positivistic social science and

functionalism on the other.

To sum up, there are a number of continuities (despite differ-

ences in terminology and focus) which link the ^arly and mature

Marx, despite some discontinuities which may legitimately be con-

sidered of a developmental kind:

1) Society is the product of struggle between man and nature and

between groups of men, with material conditions (economic

organization, means of subsistence) as the focal point of this

struggle.

2) Since "man makes himself" through his activities, knowledge of

society must be concerned both with action and with objective

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conditions in which actions occur; they are not merely

epiphenomenal of a hidden "ultimate reality."

3) Society is a structure of interrelated parts in which social

processes containing contradictory elements generate conflicts

—

society and history are therefore to be analysed in dynamic and

dialectical terms in the context of specific objective conditions.

4) "False consciousness," "alienation", or "reification" are

processes which contribute to masking the true nature of social

relations, products and society from their creators and arise

because of those social relations and products in particular

societal contexts. Philosophy, religion, and the "fc-tishism of

commodities" are examples of masked and misunderstood processes.

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