Science endeavors to advance our understanding of reality by breaking it down into its elementary parts and explaining their interrelationships. This requires that an author depict the complexity of the real, while using, at least to some degree, terms with which her or his audience is familiar. However, a subject matter’s complexity may limit a science’s accessibility. Moreover, any discourse only a handful of specialists can grasp risks foundering in obscurity.
In striving for a wide audience, Marx used terms specialized to dialectics, the natural sciences, and political economy, as well as terms more familiar to the public. This strategy was shaped by his internal relations philosophy of science (see Israel 1979, and chapters Three and Four) and principles from scientific realism (Sayer 1984, Isaac 1987). These traditions help reveal how a series of “conceptual doublets” operate in Marx’s work. These doublets advance our understanding of the interrelationships between Marx’s overall epistemology, his methods of abstraction, and forms of conceptualization, where his goal is to re-invert our thinking to counter the inverted knowledge he nds in popular and scienti c discourses.
Conceptualization through Realist and Internal Relations Philosophies of Science
Concepts do not exist independently of us, nor do we develop them in a vacuum. Marx (1992c: 29) held that “the ideal is nothing else than the material world re ected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” In other words, interrelationships between concrete realities form the conditions of possibility for concepts. But concrete social realities are changing realities.
So, for Marx (1992j: 80), traditional political-economic “categories . . . are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a de nite, historically determined mode of production.” In his view, “men who establish their social relations in conformity with their material productiv-ity, produce also principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their social relations. . . . Thus these ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products” (Marx 1847: 109–110; emphasis in the original). In the broad view, the only constant is change.
If we accept that “common-sense language, through which people interact in their daily activities, is the basis of epistemological analysis” (Israel 1979: 3), then, by extension, a social science’s language must intersect with everyday language if it is to be intelligible to the average reader. For his part, Marx (1992j: 43) tells us that one way to “discover the various uses of things” is the work of both “history” and “the establishment of socially-recognised standards of measure.” In this approach, social scienti c thinking “involves the transformation of preexisting materials” and descriptions and explana-tions must be “parasitic upon the lay identi cation of social practices. On the basis of these [lay] identi cations . . . social scientists develop theoretical abstractions . . . [and] a dialogue with and a critique of other theories as well”
(Isaac 1987: 66).
Foucault (1984) reminded us that an author is always engaged in a discursive horizon comprised of other people, ideas, and work. Marx also believed that the “biography of a single individual can in no way be separated from the biographies of previous and contemporary individuals:
indeed, it is determined by them” (cited in McLellan 1981: xi). Not work-ing in isolation from either society or other scientists, how far and wide the horizon a scientist’s discourse can extend is partly determined by the
discur-sive network within which they exist and do their work. Having concluded that the concerted in uence capitalism had on knowledge – popular and scienti c – was a mystical and metaphysical inversion, Marx’s goal was a scienti c critique of standard political economy and a revolutionary critique of capital (i.e., an internal relation between his science and his politics).
Intending to broaden his audience while accomplishing both tasks, he needed to engage both popular and scienti c discourses in terms recognizable to the average readers in these camps but at the same time push them beyond prior conditioning.
In this work, Engels (1992: 14) tells us that Marx used “certain terms in a sense different from what they have, not only in common life, but in ordinary Political Economy.” Some of these terms would have been familiar to the everyday reader, e.g., wages, working-day, money, and machinery.
Others were used in a new way, e.g., forces, relations, modes, and processes.
These must be juxtaposed with Marx’s dialectical terms, e.g., contradiction, metamorphosis, expressions, and essence. In trying to re-invert our thinking,
“dialectic has successfully reached its conclusion where everyday knowledge has recognized its imaginary character and its origins in essential relations”
(Eldred and Roth 1978: 12).1 Thus, Marx’s scienti c realism worked with and against bourgeois ideology, popular knowledge, and the dominant scienti c paradigms of his day. This is one reason his work is essentially critical – i.e., if successful, it provides new insight into everyday life and challenges pre-vailing assumptions.
1 “Dialectical thinking thinks about . . . everyday language in a particular way and the starting point and base for Capital is to be found in everyday language itself. But not every articulation of everyday language is relevant to dialectical thinking; dialecti-cal thinking focuses on those articulations which express knowledge about bourgeois society in general, the character of these articulations as knowledge being based on their adequacy to practical living in our society. Dialectical thinking, therefore, has a positive attitude to everyday knowledge even though in the course of the dialectic the character of everyday knowledge is shown to be limited and mystifying. . . . The presentation develops certain categories of analysis in the course of the dialectic, and in order for everyday knowledge to continue its dialectic with the presentation, it must transform its articulation into terms that can be understood by the presentation.
A special language is used by the presentation to articulate its categories and the progress of the dialectic leads simultaneously to an extension of the categories of the presentation and a delimitation of the way everyday knowledge can express itself to the presentation” (Eldred and Roth 1978: 10, 12).
But Marx not only had to satisfy the standards of science in general while engaging the work of political economists, he was also critiquing and pro-viding an alternative to standard scienti c knowledge. Moreover, with no measure to perfectly compare them, Marx’s science would not be uniformly comparable with scienti c conventions, i.e., they are “incommensurable”
(Kuhn 1970). At the same time, with his overall concern to make a case on behalf of the working-class, he needed to satisfy basic scienti c standards.
However, with material conditions working against a clear view of capital, we would only be able to “strip off its mystical veil” when production becomes based on “freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan,” the attainment of which is a “product of a long and painful process of development” (Marx 1992j: 84). Without a sci-enti c dialectic animated by communist activity, the alienating conditions of capitalism undermine accurate knowledge of it. Marx would need help from history in order to be better understood.
For Marx, conceptualization does not start from individual people as personalities nor with individuals as abstract representatives of ready-made ahistorical categories. According to Ollman (1979a: 109), Marx approaches category construction by “conceptually interiorizing [the] interdependence [of objects] within each thing, so that the conditions of [their] existence are taken to be part of what” they are in an ontological sense (Chapter Three).
In internal relationships between phenomena, tensions and mutual interac-tion result in a certain dynamism and “the particular ways in which things cohere become [part of their] essential attributes” (Ollman 2003: 72). Marx’s goal was thus to decipher the relationships among internally tied parts, how they change the whole, and how they are changed with it.
Traditional realism confounds an internal relations philosophy to the extent that it requires precisely conceptualizing objects as clearly de ned separate things, whereas in an internal relations approach the relationships between things take priority. For example, Marx (1992c: 28) tells us his focus is on the
“inner connexion” between phenomena. And Engels (1980: 476) noted that Marx’s “economics is not concerned with things but with relations between persons, and in the nal analysis between classes; these relations, however, are always bound to things and appear as things” (emphases in the original).
What appear as things should not be the place to end one’s abstractions but their multifaceted relationships should be the focus. In respect to this view,
Marx’s approach to capturing relations with precision “intended to supply a series of exible structural concepts” (McLellan 1975: 40).
Abstracting Flexibly and Conceptualizing Precisely
Grasping social relations dialectically requires a corresponding act of concep-tualization. This means that language mediate and be mediated by ontological assumptions of internal relations and the aforementioned epistemological concerns (Israel 1979: 27–29). In response to Lange’s comment that he “move with rare freedom in empirical matter,” Marx (1988c: 528) claimed that “He has not the slightest idea that this ‘free movement in matter’ is nothing but a paraphrase for the method of dealing with the material – that is, the dialecti-cal method” (emphasis in the original). Rather than “a complete and closed system” or “a picture of the universe (an ontology) or dogma or set of laws of any sort,” Marx’s dialectic is used as “a exible tool of analysis” (Sher-man 1995: 235). Therefore, what needs to be shown is how Marx achieved his free movement in matter though exibility in abstraction and precision in conceptualization. These epistemological concerns are as internally related as the objects of study to which Marx’s ontological assumptions direct him (see Chapter Three).
Flexibility in abstraction does not mean that conceptualization involves an
“anything goes” attitude (Feyerabend 1975). Marxist-realism puts forth the principle that “while it is true that we cannot get outside some interpretive framework, this does not license any particular framework” (Isaac 1987: 67;
emphasis in the original). When relations are abstracted out of a whole, their most essential elements are conceptually recon gured in the mind according to their important historical and structural interrelationships. This is how concepts attain their truth in relationship to the conditions from which they are abstracted:
In short, the world consists only in its interrelations. Any thing that is torn out of its relations with the world ceases to exist. A thing is anything ‘in itself’ only because it is something for other things, by acting or appearing in connection with something else (Dietzgen 1906: 75).
Sharing this view, Marx “did not see a thing singly, in itself and for itself, separate from its surroundings” (Lafargue 1890, cited in McLellan 1981: 73).
Marx offers a different form of truth, a relational rather than an ultimate truth.
In translating this view into research practice, “there are different levels of analysis and abstraction which must be combined in order to understand the concrete social world” and the free movement in material must proceed in a way where “these levels of analysis are not reducible to one another” (Isaac 1987: 61). Rigid analytical tools, in exible abstractions, and/or imprecise concepts increase the odds of a mystifying construct, especially should it be abstracted outside of its material-historical relations.
Scienti c abstraction requires logical justi cations and criteria. Analytical philosophy’s dictum of The Excluded Middle is meant to achieve precision by drawing discreet boundaries around concepts. However, if concepts strive to capture both the uid and stable qualities of phenomena, then they “can-not be understood except in terms of [their] interrelations” (Israel 1979: 27).
Here, according to Derek Sayer (1987: 20) . . .
. . . drawing boundaries to concepts – particularly to general concepts – is evidently going to be a problem. The problem is compounded when . . . the relations at issue are viewed as being in the process of constant formation and transformation. . . . Words must be ‘like bats’ [– at once birds, at once rodents –] if they are to be able to grasp this complexity. From the standpoint of this philosophy [of internal relations], one which differs in fundamentals from the whole analytic tradition, to use concepts otherwise would be singularly unrigorous, since it would entail systematically distorting reality.
Because “Marx perceives the elasticity and alterability of concepts” (Zeleny 1980: 19), he “extends his abstractions . . . to include how things happen as part of what they are. . . . [In this way], each of the elements that come into Marx’s analysis includes as aspects of what it is all those other elements with which it interacts and without which it could neither appear nor function as it does” (Ollman 2003: 82, 116). In this philosophy of science, concepts are not invented as free constructions of the mind tested deductively (Popper 1983), but are constructed inductively. If precision is what Marx’s exible methods of abstraction and concept formation re ect, then it is this elasticity and alterability we must understand.
If a system is characterized by inner-connections, mutual dependence, con-tradiction, relations of negativity, and cyclical change, exibility in abstraction is required in order to achieve conceptual precision. Recognizing this helps
us understand seemingly contradictory claims from Marx’s colleagues. From Liebknecht (1901: 77) we hear, “In regard to purity and precision of language, he was of painstaking conscientiousness.” At the same time, Engels (1992:
16) warned readers that it “is . . . self-evident . . . a theory which views modern capitalist production as a mere passing stage in the economic history of man-kind, must make use of terms different from those habitual to writers who look upon that form of production as imperishable and nal.” To reconcile these views, it is necessary to grasp how “dialectic develops in a to-and-fro between presentation and everyday knowledge through which the content of everyday knowledge is systematically taken into account and categories developed” (Eldred and Roth 1978: 12). Starting with the observable world, Marx’s method entails “abstraction from concrete social circumstances which allows a common element amongst phenomena to be focused on” (Fraser 1997: 81–107). This occurs through “a double movement: concrete => abstract, abstract => concrete” (Sayer 1984: 80–81). After the inquiry uncovers data to use in concept construction, these concepts then lead continued inquiries and are changed if and when investigation shifts to different levels of generality.
We will examine this process in some detail below.
Given that “scienti c encounters with reality are necessarily mediated by language and interpretation” (Isaac 1987: 44), Marx’s exible precision (or precise exibility) can be understood as “a deliberate attempt to nd the philosophically appropriate language for expressing the ontological structure of the social world” (Wolff 1988: 20). This demands that the most important and de ning systemic and historical relations are captured within concepts.
Though language should re ect the most important characteristics of social life, material conditions of a constantly changing quality make absolute pre-cision dif cult, if not impossible (even undesirable), to achieve in terms of
nality. Thus Marx’s precision counter-intuitively “consists of demolishing every preconceived and crystallized concept, to stop any atrophying of con-cepts that would impede the capacity of seizing human wholes or ensembles en marche and grasping simultaneously these totalities and their constituent parts” (Bosserman 1995: 50). Any social science that fails to accomplish these tasks would be less precise than is possible.
Dualities and Identity/Difference
Given ontological dualities (Sayers 1980), incorporating exibility into con-cepts is necessary. Marx (1976a: 32) tells us that our experience, “modern
times, one of abstract dualism” (emphasis in the original), tends to bifurcate knowledge. How do Marx’s concepts grasp such dual properties? What sort of duality is Marx talking about? The “identity/difference” abstraction, which brings contrasting features into a single conception, helps us make sense of these questions. Marx (1976a: 88–89) explains:
north pole and south pole are both pole; their essence is identical; similarly, female and male sex are both one species, one essence, human essence. North and south are opposed aspects of one essence – the differentiation of one essence at the height of its development. They are differentiated essence. They are what they are only as a distinct attribute, and as this distinct attribute of the essence. True actual extremes would be pole and non-pole, human and non-human species. The difference in one case [i.e., between north and south poles, women and men] is a difference of existence; in the other [between pole and non-pole, human and non-human] a difference of essences – between two essences (emphases in the original).
Thus, not simply any feature can be brought into an identity/difference abstraction. Some identities abstracted out of a dual-essence are “very super cial” (1976a: 48), “false,” or “fragmentary, patchy” (1976a: 105). For example, Marx (1976a: 6) accuses Hegel of an “unsolved antimony” when he equates as “identical” the “unity of ultimate general purpose of the state with the particular interests of individuals” (emphases in the original). In such an abstraction, it is crucial to establish differences:
The identity Hegel is asserting was at its most complete, as he himself admits, in the Middle Ages. Here the estates of civil society as such and the estates in the political sense were identical. . . . This separation does indeed really exist in the modern state. . . . Or rather, only the separation of the civil and political estates expresses the true relationship of modern civil and political society (1976a: 72; emphases in the original).
If a concept that “where it succeeds seeing differences, it does not see unity, and that where it sees unity, it does not see differences” (Marx 1976b: 320;
emphases in the original), then its “identity is illusory” (Marx 1976a: 82).
Observing identity/difference thus requires abstractive and investigative practices appropriate to the reality in question.
Dualities and identity/difference – where one set of properties is united under a given set of criteria (identity), whereas another set offers a different
but related set of criteria (difference) – resonate throughout Marx’s moments of inquiry. For instance, at the level of production in general (HM), “every social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction”
(Marx 1992j: 531). In capitalism’s circulation of commodities (PE), the “appar-ently single process is in reality a double one” (1992j: 110). Marx (1987e: 514) also explains, “if the commodity has the double character of use value and exchange value, then the labour represented in the commodity must also have a double character.” He thus argued that . . .
The best points in my book are: 1 (this is fundamental to all understanding of the facts) the two-fold character of labour, according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value, which is brought about in the very First Chapter; 2. the treatment of surplus-value regardless of its particular forms as pro t, interest, ground rent, etc. This will be made clear in the second volume especially. The treatment of the particular forms in classical political economy, where they are forever being jumbled up together with the general form, is an olla potrida* [*hotchpotch] (Marx 1987d: 407; emphases in the original).
As an identity/difference, value in capitalism re ects dual relations that can be grasped as both quantitative (costs of machinery, wages, prices, and pro t rates) and qualitative realities (nature, labor-power, surplus-labor, and capi-tal). This abstraction allows the multiple relations within a structure’s cluster of ties to be captured conceptually, which, in turn, produces better analysis and understanding by uncovering the common functions differences serve or different functions a speci c identity serves.
Thus identity/difference is internally related to the abstraction of vantage point. According to whether identity/difference (one side of a relation) or duality (both) is the focus, the researcher is led to differing emphases in data collection, conceptualization, conclusions, and presentation. At one moment of analysis, shared qualities in a set of cases might be of concern (i.e., a focus on identity), such as capital and labor as classes. In this moment, two seemingly separate objects are united in thought because of the similar
Thus identity/difference is internally related to the abstraction of vantage point. According to whether identity/difference (one side of a relation) or duality (both) is the focus, the researcher is led to differing emphases in data collection, conceptualization, conclusions, and presentation. At one moment of analysis, shared qualities in a set of cases might be of concern (i.e., a focus on identity), such as capital and labor as classes. In this moment, two seemingly separate objects are united in thought because of the similar