Sohn-Rethel uncovered
February 21st, 2009
This is part one of David Black’s presentation on the ideas of anti-fascist and Marx scholar Alfred Sohn-Rethel, which was presented at The Lucas Arms in January 2009:
The Capitalism of Philosophy? Sohn-Rethel on Intellectual and Manual Labour – a Critique by David Black
Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1899-1990) describes his book, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology as an enquiry which, ‘to a large extent, is the story of a revolution that never happened. In it re-echo the thunder of the gun battle for the Marstall in Berlin at Christmas 1918, and the shooting of the Spartacus rising in the following winter’. Though not a member of the Spartacus movement Sohn-Rethel took part in discussions at street-corners and meeting-halls, ‘lying under window-sills while bullets pierced the windows.’ At university Sohn-Rethel associated with several future members of the Frankfurt School, including Walter Benjamin and, more importantly, Theodore Adorno. Unable to obtain an academic post because of the slump, Sohn-Rethel found work in an office of big business in Berlin. In 1937 he escaped arrest by the Gestapo, for feeding important economic intelligence to the anti-Nazi underground, and fled into exile. When he reached England he met George Thomson, a leading Communist Party intellectual, who had studied under Frances Cornford, the celebrated Cambridge Greek scholar and Fabian socialist.
Sohn-Rethel’s field of study was Marx’s analysis of commodity production and the circulation of money as it related to his own ‘materialist’ critique of the Kantian philosophy. Thomson, whose field was Ancient Greece, is described by Sohn-Rethel as ‘the only other man I have known who had also recognised the interconnection of philosophy and money, although in a completely different field from my own.’ In 1951 Sohn-Rethel submitted Intellectual and Manual Labour to the Communist publishing firm Lawrence and Wishart, with Thomson’s recommendation, but it was rejected as being ‘too unorthodox’; and bourgeois publishers rejected it for being ‘too militantly Marxist’. Finally in the 1970s books of his were published in Germany and an updated ‘Intellectual and Manual Labour’ appeared as well as his book, Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism.
The Exchange Abstraction and the Autonomous Intellect
Sohn-Rethel, in Intellectual and Manual Labour, quotes Marx on the higher phase of socialism/communism, in which ‘the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished’. Sohn-Rethel writes, ‘But before understanding how this antithesis can be removed it is necessary to understand why it arose in the first place.’ In philosophical terms, this means that in order to derive consciousness from social being, we must presuppose ‘a process of abstraction which is part of this being.’ [57] Sohn-Rethel grounds the emergence of Western philosophy and scientific thought in an ‘autonomous intellect’, which becomes separated from manual labour and production in the civilisations of Antiquity. These new ‘Societies of Appropriation’ displace primitive communal and classless ‘Societies of Production’. In a Society of Production the social order is derived directly from social labour, and there is no appropriation of surplus product by any class of non-producers. In a Society of Appropriation the appropriation operates unilaterally, as in feudalism; or reciprocally, as in commodity exchange, through the abstract medium of money. In reciprocal appropriation the producer’s labour is exploited by the merchant who sells the product at a profit. Once the labourer has been separated from the means of production (on the land or in artisan/handicraft work), then labour-power in the hands of the capitalist industrialist becomes a commodity itself, and all of the wealth that is produced goes through the sphere of circulation. [3-4]
In the form of ‘exchange’ which takes place between humans and nature, time and space are inseparable from natural events such as the ripening of the crops, the breeding of lifestock, the change in the seasons, the human life-span etc. But the social synthesis of commodity exchange enforces abstraction from all of this and produces an ‘extraordinary paradox’: ‘for the objects of exchange are assumed to remain immutable for the duration of the transaction’; and,
‘in the market-place and in shop windows, things stand still… A commodity marked out at a definite price, for instance, is looked upon as being frozen to absolute immutability… time is emptied of the material realities that form its contents in the sphere of use’.
The same applies to space, in the distance the commodities have to travel when being exchanged, which becomes less important with the growth of the global market. [43, 99] The exchange–equation enforces a ‘reifying process’, in which quantity is abstracted over quality in a manner that constitutes the foundation of free mathematical reasoning. This being the case we would expect to find mathematical reasoning emerging at ‘the historical stage at which commodity exchange becomes the agent of social synthesis, a point in time marked by the introduction and circulation of coined money.’ [46-9]
And so we do, in Ancient Greece. But first, Sohn-Rethel traces the autonomous intellect back to Ancient Egypt. He says that, whereas in a society of commodity-production, thinking is rational whilst social production is irrational, in Egypt the irrational beliefs of the priestly ruling class are matched by the planned rationality of the system. The agricultural land worked is methodically irrigated under the supervision of the Pharaoh’s ruling class. The building of massive pyramids for the Pharaoh’s may be irrational, but the technological thinking and social organization involved in their construction is impressive. The people of the Nile Delta are seasonally conscripted into pyramid building and their annual agricultural collective surplus is appropriated by the state. The state organises external trade, which brings in the technology of the Bronze Age for handicraft and other industries. But the Pharaohnic state remains an external appropriating power; its Bronze-age technology and products do not penetrate the subservient farming community, which remains largely a stone-age and communal mode of production.
Sohn-Rethel mentions a sort of primitive steam-engine which was used to animate statues: ‘the action of steam from boiling vessels… was led through long underground pipes to the altar, so that the gods appeared to open their eyelids and their mouths and to let off steam in anger.’ [92] The Egyptian priests do not imagine that steam power might be utilized for productive purposes; rather they see such innovation for its ‘spectacular’ power to delude the masses. The intellectual labour of the elite is power is also used to calculate the tributes and account the debts; so the arts of writing, arithmetic, numeration and geometry all develop for the purpose of appropriation. The introduction of symbolic forms marks the first independence of intellectual labour from manual labour.
The Classical Mode of Appropriation
According to Frances Cornford, ‘abstract schemes of conception’, deeply implanted through centuries of history can, sometimes unconsciously, govern science, metaphysics and the writing of human history. Cornford describes how the early Greek philosophers structured their thought like the system of geometry they inherited from the Egyptians. With determinations based on premises leading to intuitively certain conclusions, geometry as developed by the Greeks ’was the only science with a developed technique, which assured a continuous and triumphant advance in discovery’. Sohn-Rethel points out that Pythagoras’ use of the deductive character of mathematical thought follows the first spread of coinage in the sixth and seventh centuries BC. The Iron-Age in Greece sees the expansion of agriculture, military conquest, chattel-slavery and small scale industry. With the invention and spread of metal coinage, the village commune of the clan society, already in decline, finally disintegrates and cultivable land becomes exclusively private property.
Money provides the new world of exchangeable goods with a Oneness, in which an infinite number of goods are subjected to a single object: a piece of metal whose use value is estranged from it so it can serve as ‘the generally recognized equivalent of all other commodities’ and in its value represent ‘quantitative parcels of social labour in the abstract’. This involves a double abstraction because, underlying this monetary service of the coins, the general commodity abstraction ‘allows for, and indeed enforces the formation of non-empirical concepts of pure thought when the abstraction becomes mentally identified in its given spatio-temporal reality.’ [64-5]
The Eleatic philosopher Parmenides, who is said to have been trained in the Pythagorean deductive method, is seen by Sohn-Rethel as the first exponent of ‘pure thought’ to emerge with ‘a concept fitting the description of the abstract material of money’. Within the poetic form of a mystical tutorial with the goddess, the core of Parmenides’ text is pure, relentless deductive logic of non-empirical abstractions – the first of its kind. Parmenides asserts that Being is thought producing itself and thought is Being thinking itself. The divinity and imperishability of Being require that it should be constituted as the One. Everything is immovable, because movement requires empty space and empty space is nothing and so cannot be. This negated nothing is made concrete in the form of limitation, for it is necessary that Being defines a limit around itself, spherical in shape, so that, though boundless, it will not be incomplete. Parmenides’ idea of Being as thought producing itself and thought as Being thinking itself resembles the idea that money makes objects and objects make money. In the Being constituted as the One we see the imperishability of the coin in relation to the perishable commodity. Sohn-Rethel sees Parmenides’ concept as a self-reference to the material that money ‘should’ be made of (as if money is everything and everything is money) but isn’t and cannot be made of; so, as what ‘should’ be, the concept prescribes itself as the correct way to reason about reality. [71] In Parmenides Sohn-Rethel sees the principles of thought basic to the Greek philosophers. These principles are formed by an abstract composite of conceptual elements which originates in the social synthesis of commodity exchange. [6] Sohn-Rethel argues that all concepts in the history of philosophy have ‘one common and all-pervasive mark: the norm of timeless universal logic’, and need to be understood ‘historically’. [203]
Kant
As the echoes of the gun battle for the Marstall faded, Sohn-Rethel ‘glued’ himself to Marx’s Capital: ‘with a relentless determination not to let go’. Finally,
‘…with an effort of concentration bordering on madness, it came upon me that in the innermost core of commodity structure there was to be found the [Kantian] ‘transcendental subject’… the secret identity of commodity form and thought form which I had glimpsed was so hidden within the bourgeois world that my first naive attempt to make others see it only had the result that I was given up as a hopeless case. “Sohn-Rethel is crazy!” was the regretful and final verdict of my tutor Alfred Weber (brother of Max), who had had a high opinion of me.’ [Preface]
Kant calls his philosophy transcendental, because it shows what is universal and necessary in self-consciousness. Kant agrees with David Hume that the universal forms and categories of reason cannot be grounded in the external world as experienced through the senses. But Kant then turns the table with his argument that the universals are a priori to sensuous experience. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason explains that in our perception of phenomena we find various contents, some experienced as external, some as internal. All of these experiences are subjective, but within them Kant finds a universal element – an Other – which consists of the intuited forms of Space and Time. The categories of the Understanding – such as causality, universality and substantiality - are likewise a priori products of the universalising mental structure. Though we are conscious of being determined by things happening outside of us, the pure, abstract principles of space and time enable us to perceive objects as separate from one another and events as succeeding one another; and the a priori categories of logic enable us to make judgements about what is perceived.
Though transcendental, Kant’s philosophy is not transcendent. Kant doesn’t think philosophy can transcend its own sphere to show the true reality of the thing-in-itself. Kant’s Reason is regulative, not constitutive; it orders the concepts of objects, and gives them unity so they can be applied practically. But Kantian experience is grounded in synthetic unity ‘according to concepts of objects of appearance’, and what is ‘objective’ is only as it appears to the perceiving subject. So because Kant does not wish to strand the subject in either the phenomenal or noumenal world, he attributes the fundamental principle of experience to a ‘transcendental spontaneity’, which is neither a phenomenal or noumenal reality. In transcendental spontaneity the pure forms of intuition and understanding are not static; the forms only exist inasmuch as they are activated by the act of pure apperception, in which the ‘I think’ of the thinking ego is ‘my’ experience.
Sohn-Rethel says that Kant, in establishing how a priori judgements are possible, identifies the possibilities of pure mathematics and pure science, as developed by Newton. The astronomy of Kepler and Gallileo is redefined by Newton as a new science which explains what forces hold the universe in place. Newton cannot explain the nature of active forces he identifies – such as attraction and repulsion in the case of matter - he can only describe their laws, in mathematical, quantitative terms. Kantian dualism – between a posteriori and a priori principles and between mental and manual labour – corresponds to this scientific method:
‘Scientific experiment is often misinterpreted as an activity of manual labour complementing the intellectual labour of the mathematical hypotheses to be tested. But in fact the experiment is constructed to reduce the individual action to little more than reading the data from the instruments’. [38]
Sohn-Rethel’s analysis of Kantianism recalls in some ways Lukacs’ 1923 essay, Reification, which points out that in Kant’s epistemology, the problem of the thing-in-itself is by no means a barrier concrete expansion of knowledge: ‘On the contrary, Kant who sets out from the most advanced natural science of the day, namely from Newton’s astronomy, tailored his theory of knowledge precisely to this science and its future potential.’ Within the phenomenal world Science, like commodity production would be capable of ‘limitless expansion’.
Sohn-Rethel agrees with Kant on the a priori origin of ‘the basic constituents of our form of cognition’ but he doesn’t attribute the a priori to a transcendental spontaneity of the mind. Rather Sohn-Rethel sees the transcendental unity of self-consciousness as an intellectual reflection of ‘the form of exchangeability of commodities underlying the unity of money and the social synthesis.’ In scientific thinking, the individual mind conforms to the elements of the real abstraction produced by the social synthesis. The scientist, in producing viable results, ‘operates intellectually for society excluding a plural in the same way as society and money cannot be more than single at any time.’ [57, 77] Kant, in seeking to establish how a priori judgements are possible, isolates that part of our being in which the transcendental spontaneity of self-consciousness, socialized through the intellectual labour of the understanding, can perform in separation from manual labour. Left unimpeded by religious and feudal institutions, science serves the ‘natural’ division between the educated and laboring classes – the backward German version of the division between labour and capital in political economy. Sohn Rethel says that Adam Smith, asked the question, ‘how is social synthesis possible by means of commodity exchange?’, would answer with the claim that humans produce and exchange commodities by their nature, so social synthesis is achievable if the entrepreneur is left unimpeded by feudal and religious restrictions on property rights. [36-9]
According to Sohn-Rethel, the exchange abstraction, which produces the form of value, actualises intellectual labour as an a priori socialized form of thinking; whilst manual labour, which produces the magnitude of value, is dependent on exchange, and is an a priori de-socialised form of individual, ‘private’ activity. [139] This dichotomy is contrasted with the unity that prevails in ‘communal modes of production’ (Marx’s term) in which Sohn-Rethel says, ‘People create their own society as producers’. [83] Sohn-Rethel says that the ‘logic of appropriation’ cannot change into a ‘logic of production’ until labour is resocialised. [140]
NOTES
What follows is by no means a summary of the book, which features important issues I have not space to discuss, such as Sohn-Rethels’ analysis of the development of mathematics, Taylorism and of the ‘Dual Economics of Advanced Capitalism’.
George Thomson, The First Philosophers: Studies in Ancient Greek Society (1955)
FM Cornford The Unwritten Philosophy 43-6. One chapter, ‘The Marxist View of Ancient Philosophy’, critically reviews the writings of George Thomson and Benjamin Farrington
Cornford op cit 30-1
Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness 131-3
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law – introduction
T Adorno, Three Essays on Hegel 66
I. I. Rubin 1927 ‘Abstract Labour and Value in Marx’s System’ Capital and Class #5 1978
M Postone Time, Labor and Social Domination 177-8
Capital Vol I 266
Marx, Capital I 188-89
Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program Pt1
A Kliman, A new look at the Russian revision of Marx’s concept of ‘directly social labor’ News and Letters Nov-Dec 2005