In this chapter I investigate the ontological and epistemological assumptions that inform Marx’s selection of empirical domains and his approach to studying them.1
Internal Relations and the Force of Abstraction
A philosophy of internal relations animates Marx’s outlook (Ollman 1976, 1979a, 1993, 2003, Sayer 1987, Gould 1978). At a broad level, this philosophy assumes that everything is connected with everything else. A more re ned assumption that social phenom-ena are the products of both historical processes and social structures also underpins this philosophy. This view has several implications. First, ontologically, his-tory and structure are interior to each other; historical change becomes an inherent property in structural relations, just as structural relations are a central fac-tor in hisfac-torical development. Second, epistemologi-cally, it follows that knowledge of history is requisite for knowledge of social structure (and vice versa).
And therefore, third, abstractions carved at the level
1 Several arguments in this chapter can be found elsewhere (see Paolucci 2001a, 2005).
of “society” can obscure such temporal-structural considerations and distort our knowledge of them.
These assumptions guide Marx’s research practices. Modern society is understood as a conglomeration of changing phenomena accompanying a structure that de nes it. Its periods of transformation are understood as products of real institutional processes – often in antagonistic relationships with one another – contained in that structure. Parts of the social system are thus interiorized into the whole in their mutual relations. However, though history and structure are ontologically related, epistemologically, abstraction must pull them apart and, albeit temporarily, treat them as distinct. Empirical research begins here. In historical analysis, both necessary structural relations and contingent historical events are important; in structural analysis, regular social phenomena are examined in terms of the institutional relations interior to various social systems along with the limitations and determinations mak-ing up their regular practices. Here, contmak-ingent phenomena are abstracted out of view, only to be brought back in later (more below and in chapters Four through Six).
These three issues – an ontology of society, a vision of epistemology, and how to relate one to the other – overlap in Marx’s abstractive practices. Begin-ning with an “organic whole,” the broadest units of analysis are assumed to be large enough to require abstracting out of it in order to grasp any part or parts of it, or any more general properties it may possess. We look at, con-ceive, and examine parts of totalities, questioning the extent to which this or that part is an essential element of the system under examination. Towards this end, each part is initially abstracted in relative isolation from each of the others. As research continues, parts are re-abstracted in their relations to other parts – as they are related to, function with, or against, each other. Sensitivity to emergent qualities of a formation is necessary to avoid reifying them into static frameworks and/or to avoid confusing transitory facts with essential characteristics.
Abstraction is a way focusing on one set of qualities, while ignoring others, much like relationships between vision, the retina, and the brain. Our eyes pick up more information than we can absorb, so the brain sorts out those things of greater importance. In producing knowledge, we often do this inten-tionally with agency with our minds. For example, music, poetry, cookbooks, gardening manuals, and astrology are all methods of abstracting. Their
vari-able utility does not negate the fact that each is a product of abstraction. What makes an abstractive method scienti c is its empirical, systematic, and meth-odological character. What identi es social-scienti c abstraction is the way ontological assumptions (e.g., the existence of supra-individual level realities) translate into epistemological practices. What makes Marx’s social-scienti c abstraction unique is that the philosophy of internal relations extends itself into his epistemology, making his ontology and epistemology intermesh, or what I call an “onto-epistemology.” His rst step in moving from ontology to epistemology was grasping social systems as “totalities” and then abstracting from them in empirical research.
All science abstracts parts out from a “totality” for attention while ignoring other parts of the same. Marx used totality as a composite of interrelation-ships where everything takes part in the meaning of everything else, though the whole is too complex to grasp conceptually at once. Several interpreta-tions of this usage have followed. Louis Althusser (1969, 1971), attributing a one-sided structuralist position to Marx, depicted totalities as existing over and above individual agency. Bertell Ollman (2003: 72) tells us that, in the internal relations approach, totality “is a logical construct that refers to the way the whole is present through internal relations in each of its parts.” Also in this tradition, Carol Gould (1978: xx–xxi) explains that “Marx begins from what he calls a ‘concrete whole,’ that is, a given and complex subject mat-ter, of which we only have an amorphous conception. . . . He then proceeds to analyze the concrete whole to discover fundamental principles or conceptual abstractions from which one can derive a comprehension of its workings and the interrelations within it.” Evidence supports the approach of Ollman and Gould. For example, here are Marx and Engels (1976: 53–54) breaking down a totality:
This conception of history thus relies on expounding the real process of pro-duction – starting from the material propro-duction of life itself – and compre-hending the form of intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production, i.e., civil society in various stages, as the basis of all history;
describing it in its action as the state, and also explaining how all the differ-ent theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, morality, etc., etc., arise from it, and tracing the process of their forma-tion from that basis; thus the whole thing can, of course, be depicted in its
totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like the idealist view of history, to look for a cat-egory in every period, but remains constantly on the real ground of history;
it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice.
This approach allows Marx to begin with a construct large enough so that when he examines anything within the totality it is unnecessary for him to appeal to explanatory phenomena outside the abstractions the totality allows him to carve and the material available there for observation. His task is not to explain all of this totality nor does recourse to totality explain anything.
Marx’s more modest goal is an examination of a totality’s parts and their interrelations. These interrelations change the qualities of that same totality over time. The assumption of totality thus accepts that no nal conclusion for all time, place, and circumstance is possible or necessary. This does not, however, render a science of society impossible.
Naturalism
Marx’s approach to uniting his ontological and epistemological assumptions is often understood as a form of “naturalism.” In his dissertation’s discus-sion of philosophical approaches to nature, Marx (1975c: 68) argues that “Our life does not need speculation and empty hypotheses” and that “the study of nature cannot be pursued in accordance with empty axioms and laws.” The assumption that natural science must be grounded in observations of the real is the same assumption to be held for studying social relations:
If abstract-individual self-consciousness is posited as an absolute principle, then, all true and real science is done away with in as much as individuality does not rule within the nature of things themselves. But then, too, every-thing collapses that is transcendentally related to human consciousness and therefore belongs to the imaginative mind. On the other hand, if that self-consciousness which knows itself only in the form of abstract universality is raised to an absolute principle, then the door is opened wide to superstitions and unfree mysticism. . . . Abstract-universal self-consciousness has, indeed, the intrinsic urge to af rm itself in the things themselves in which it can only af rm itself by negating them (Marx 1975c: 72–73).
Understanding human life through a projection of an abstract universal indi-vidual apart from nature obscures our fundamental connection to nature as animals and a species. “Man is the immediate object of natural science. . . . The social reality of nature, and human natural science, or the natural science about man, are identical terms” (Marx 1988a: 111; emphasis in the original). In this onto-epistemology, “The rst premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human beings. Thus the rst fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature” (Marx and Engels 1976: 31). Social relations – not human nature – are the grounds for a naturalistic social science.2
Social production relies on appropriating nature in a reciprocal relationship with human’s biological constitution as a species in their “particular historico-social contexts” (Soper 1979: 78). In such a view, a historico-social scientist “treats the social movement as a process of natural history” (Marx 1992d*: 27). Because of their character as a species, wholly separate onto-epistemologies between natural and social science are unnecessary, even distorting. Distinctions between conditions of possibility and biological limitation make the institu-tional arrangements in a form of social organization, and how they compel humans to relate to nature and each other, the facts we must grasp. As an epistemological consequence of this ontology, human labor, its products, and struggles over the conditions of both play a central role in Marx’s research.
This way of thinking about society and how to study it is a form of natural-ism that contrasts with two types of naturalnatural-ism that should be avoided. First, at the level of historical materialism in general, the “naturalistic mysti ca-tion” refers to the idea where the limits imposed on individuals and society by ruling class relations are mistaken for limits imposed by human nature
2 “To describe man’s social activity, his spiritual, cultural, and intellectual achieve-ments in naturalistic terms, that is, as a natural phenomenon, we have to conceive of the human individual as a social being, always living and acting in co-operation with others. The manifestations of the individual’s life are in fact the manifestations of social life; the individual becomes what he is by association and interaction with other individuals. Man’s spiritual, cultural, and intellectual advance is a natural process of self-creation accomplished in the course of social evolution. By acting in common with others upon his environment, man not only changes the environment but himself and his social relations with others as well. Thus he makes his own history, although he does not make it as he pleases. History is an objective, natural development, in which nothing is derived from extra-social and extra-historical factors, from an autonomous development of ideological forms, human mind, or objective spirit of which is ‘real’,
‘empirical men’, are but the bearers” (Jordan 1967: 300).
(see Mills 1985–86). Second, as applied to political economy, Marx (1847:
120–121) critiqued the standard view of modern economists, in whose eyes
“There are only two kinds of institutions . . . arti cial and natural. The institu-tions of feudalism are arti cial instituinstitu-tions, those of the bourgeoisie are natu-ral institutions.” Bourgeois ideology assumes that its institutional framework overcomes past human alienation, bringing true freedom into being. History, for all intents and purposes, is over. By contrast, Marx sees bourgeois society as the height of alienation. When this alienation is overcome real history can begin. By using scienti c principles within his historical materialist moments to inform to political economy, Marx believed he could expose the arti cial-ness of capitalist institutions and, at the same time, explain their historical development. To do this, Marx had to abstract out the relationships between the human individual, the species as a whole, and the historical systems that have contained them.
The Relation of Human Individuals to their Species
Three broad ontological assumptions informed Marx’s research as he went from developing his historical materialist principles to in-depth political-economic study: one on the status of the human individual, another on the essence of humans as a species, and a nal one about social universals.
Eschewing a theory of a universal nature, Marx (1978b: 145) did not nd the source of “the human essence” to be an “abstraction inherent in each single individual,” but rather it was to be found in “the ensemble of social relations.”
This ensemble consists of our biological genotype, the form of society in which we live at a particular moment in its development, the family structure domi-nant in that society, the gender roles to which we are expected to conform, the place in the class structure into which we are born, socialized, passed up, down, and/or across. Our biological capacities are therefore dependent on social relationships for their development. If there is an abstract nature of the human individual it is as a social creature and all that this implies. These assumptions see the human animal as a collective species-being:
Man is a species being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object (his own as well as those of other things), but – and this is only another way of expressing it – but also because he treats himself as the actual, living species, because he treats himself as a universal and
therefore a free being. . . . The universality of man is in practice manifested precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life; and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life-activity. . . . Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being (Marx 1988a: 75–76).
Aware of their social relationships, humans construct formal and informal educational practices to pass on their society’s knowledge and skill sets to new generations. Thus, our dependence on social relations for the acquisi-tion of social and intellectual skills such as language, sex/gender norms, and laboring roles collectively express our species being, where “Human nature is the true community of men” (Marx 1975j: 204; emphases in the original).
Species being traits are neither immutable nor in nitely malleable, but have both xed and relative features. Individual character traits within the species are analogous to the relation of an alphabet to speci c organization of words and ideas, i.e., the general structure of alphabets and genes are relatively con-stant, whereas the actual outcomes in language, norms, and/or actions as squeezed through social relations are variable. The distinction is important and con ating them distorts our knowledge of each, i.e., humans as individ-uals and as social creatures share general forms while containing different contents. Thus, some desires “exist under all relations, and only change their form and direction under different social relations,” whereas other desires originate “solely in a particular society, under particular conditions” (Marx and Engels 1976: 255). Some human wants function to “maintain . . . life and reproduce it,” but with human “development the realm of natural neces-sity expands, because his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production increase, by which these wants are satis ed” (Marx 1909: 954).
What we call “human nature” is thus hooked into the development of the spe-cies as a whole, making it transformative rather than static (see Sayers 1998).
The epistemological consequence is that Marx founded his research on few assumptions about human nature.
Marx objected to conventional uses of universal theory – social or indi-vidual – as a mode of explanation for two primary reasons. First, for him,
“an explanation which does not provide the differentia speci ca is no expla-nation” (Marx 1976a: 12). Because “generality and explanatory force tend to run in opposite directions” (Ruben 1979: 76), Marx rejects Hegel’s tendency
toward “atomism” because “A ‘view’ cannot be concrete when its matter is abstract” (Marx 1976a: 79; emphases in the original). Second, “human nature” is a species-wide historical accomplishment, only knowable at the end of social development, not something to be conceptualized beforehand (as is often done in economics, religion, and philosophy). Thus, Marx (1975i:
175) held that all criticism begins with a religious critique because religion
“is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality” (emphases in the original). Humans placed in different modes of production have some powers and capacities that go unrealized because they are either repressed or because the social relations necessary for their expression have not yet come into being. Other species traits emerge over time through social development. Founding social theories on a uni-versal human nature (i.e., an abstraction), therefore, “fails to see how the dominance of certain kinds of behaviour in our society is required by and produced by the prevalent kind of social relations” (Norman 1980: 43). If any social relation played that role for Marx, it was that humans must labor to produce a world in which to live. Because of this “emphasis on constitutive labor . . . Marx makes use of any universal category in only the most restricted sense” (Thomas 1976: 19–20). Before examining the role “constitutive labor”
plays in Marx’s onto-epistemology, we must grasp this “restricted sense” in which he uses universals.
Social Universals
Marx (1992j: 80) objected to the tendency for societal knowledge to posit its social relations as “natural, self-understood forms of social life.” Thus, he does not generalize the contents of his society as universal but constructs a set of conceptual forms applicable across societies in general, i.e., all histori-cal societies have had a mode of production (form), but no speci c mode of production (content) has been common to them all. In rejecting the “Natural Individual” as an “illusion . . . common to each new epoch to this day” (Marx 1973: 83), “Marx not only identi es a set of structural categories, such as pro-duction, he also identi es the broad dynamics of social life” (Horvath and Gibson 1984: 14). In this base-superstructure model, the means of production are abstracted as raw materials and tools and technology (nature transformed by human labor). The forces of production include these elements as well as
direct producers (peasants, slaves, proletarians). The relations of production encompass the direct producers plus nonproducers (chieftains, lords, owners, capitalists) as well as juridical and legal relations (armies, law, police, courts).
The entire mode of production is the sum of the means, forces, and relations of production. This is the base. Politics and the state center on nonproducers’
creation and use of juridical and legal relations in pursuit of their interests in the class struggle, broadly construed. Ideological discourses are articulated in religion, art, education, and science (e.g., cosmologies, standards of beauty and abstract meaning in literature, lore). Thus, the superstructure is composed of all that is contained in politics, the state, and ideological discourses. Not sim-ply re ections of the base, these are nevertheless shaped, in uenced, and, in part, determined by it. “The totality of human society is thus represented by the preceding elements and relations. These comprise, for Marxist scientists, tools with which we can begin to isolate a part of the social whole for analysis
creation and use of juridical and legal relations in pursuit of their interests in the class struggle, broadly construed. Ideological discourses are articulated in religion, art, education, and science (e.g., cosmologies, standards of beauty and abstract meaning in literature, lore). Thus, the superstructure is composed of all that is contained in politics, the state, and ideological discourses. Not sim-ply re ections of the base, these are nevertheless shaped, in uenced, and, in part, determined by it. “The totality of human society is thus represented by the preceding elements and relations. These comprise, for Marxist scientists, tools with which we can begin to isolate a part of the social whole for analysis