Reading Capital: Part II Continued (Chapter 9 Part II: The Effectivity of a Structure)

Marx’s key concept, then, is mode of production. “By producing his key concept of the mode of production, Marx was indeed able to express the differential degree of material attack on nature by production, the differential mode of unity existing between ‘man and nature,’ and the degree of variation in that unity” (174).

But the mode of production reveals not only the significance of considering the material conditions of production, but also reveals the significance of the relations of production.

-(b) relations of production Besides the material conditions of production, here we have the social conditions of the latter. “These new conditions involve the specific type of relations between the agents of production which exist as a function of the relations between these agents on the one hand and the material means of production on the other” (174). Why did I quote that? Believe it or not, it’s hard to say it better.

Furthermore: “the social relations of production are on no account reducible to mere relations between men, to relations which only involve men, and therefore to variations in a universal matrix, to inter-subjectivity (recognition, prestige, struggle, master-slave relationship, etc.)” (174).

Thus the social relations of production involve both human beings and the material conditions of production. Thus the opposition sometimes made between relations between men and relations between things is untenable: relations of production implies both, and trying to de-fetishize relations by reducing them to exclusively human relations comes at the cost of a type of subjective idealism.

History is articulated by the specific combinations of laborers and means of production. In other words, the means of production (object and instruments of production) and the agents of production (direct agents whose labor-power is set to work, indirect agents who own means of production but do not toil) combined in a specific, determinable way is the mode of production of a particular age. Thus we arrive at a concept of history.

The relations of production necessarily entail a particular superstructure (state, ideology etc.) but cannot be defined without a concept of that superstructure: in other words, they mist be located in a structural whole (KO) and cannot be found by examining bare facts. Thus we cannot identify the economic level of a society without constructing a concept of it and its inclusion within the whole. Marx’s determination of the economic by relations of production thus implies an entire structural topology in which other levels exercise a certain degree of effectivity within the economic itself (178-9). We should try to think this spatially, visually, to get a metaphoric hold on a difficult concept.

We can now also see that human beings are assigned their place by the structure: in other words, we must think of conditions producing individual acts, rather than vice versa. The real “subjects” of history are the relations of production, as relations not really subjects at all.

Thus Marx’s KO differs radically from that of Political Economy. Marx’s KO=production which entails the structure of the conditions of production=mode of production which is a structure involving both material and social conditions, and which allows us to arrive at the specific economic concepts governing an era—in the capitalist mode of production, surplus-value : “The fact that surplus-value is not a measurable reality arises from the fact that it is not a thing, but the concept of a relationship, the concept of an existing social structure of production, of an existence visible and measurable only in its ‘effects’…”

Thus, it is necessary to construct a KO because the social whole must be understood in terms of the effectivity of a structure on its elements. The structure is not a fact or a thing, and thus requires a concept. This goes a little further toward answering the question posed in Part I: how does a KO grasp its RO? We can think of a RO structure more or less corresponding to a KO structure, or we can see the RO as the phenomena whose law the KO structure tries to enunciate. If the former, we have a classical correspondence epistemology with all of its uncertainties; if the latter, we seem to require a practical justification, which Althusser has already rejected. A science is self-justifying. But how can this be if we maintain the distance between ontology and epistemology Althusser seems to want to insist upon?