Finelli -Comentario Sobre Chris Arthur

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Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/156920607X192075

Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 6174 www.brill.nl/hima

Abstraction versusContradiction: Observations onChris Arthurs Te New Dialectic and Marxs Capital

Roberto FinelliDipartimento di Scienze Filosofiche, Universit degli Studi di Bari

[email protected]

AbstractTis intervention concerns the different statute of abstraction in Marxs work. By means of acritical confrontation with Chris Arthurs work, Finelli presents his thesis of the presence of adouble theory and fuction ofabstraction in Marxs work. In the early Marx, until the GermanIdeology, abstraction is, in accordance with the traditional meaning of this term, a product of themind, an unreal spectre. More exactly, it consists in negating the common essence belonging tolabouring humanity and projecting it, as alienated universal, into the idea of philosophy, into thestate of politics and into the money of the market. In the later Marx, the nature of abstraction is,rather than mental, practical. It is directly related to the quantity without quality of capitalistlabour, and it is the product of the systemic connection of machines to labour-power. In contrastto Arthur, Finelli maintains that practical abstraction in the Marx ofCapitalis not located in the

zone of exchange and the market, where there is the mediation of money. On the contrary, it islocated in the zone of production, which, for Marx, is a social ensemble not mediated by moneybut by relations of technological domination.

Keywordsabstraction, formal determination, presupposed-posited, opposition-contradiction, abstraction-emptying out, dissimulation.

1. Die Formbestimmung: a new category of a new Marxism

From the simple to the complex: this motto synthesises the evolutionismwith which Engels conceived his vision of history and the method of knowledgethat follows from it. Chris Arthur correctly defines this as a linear typology,

because history, for Engels, is constituted on the basis of something elementarywhich, in the course of different social epochs, is progressively modified andrendered more complex, but without ever being annulled and negated, despitedevelopment occurring through dialectical contradictions. It is easy to hearthe echo of the evolution dear to positivism and of an empiricist epistemologylinked to the natural sciences in this historicist continuity. For Engels, one of


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62 R. Finelli / Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 6174

its clearest examples is to be found, as we know, in the law of value. In hisopinion, its validity as measure of exchange reigns from the natural peasanteconomies of primitive communities until the fifteenth century. It is valid,that is, for that entire great historical period during which since the worker

was proprietor of the means of production, and given the very minor scale ofproduction and commerce anyone had direct experience of the time ofnecessary labour, often while making a product, as a (single and simple)element, themselves, Tis historical period of simple commodity productionin which the measure of value is visibly the time of labour since [L]abourand labour alone: to replace tools, to produce raw material, and to process it

is seen and perceived as a factor of production1

progressively gives way, withthe establishment of the capitalist economy, to money as the decisive measureand calculus of the value of commodities.2 Tus we know that, for Engels,commodityvaluelabourmoneycapital is an historical progression

which is mirrored in the logical progression, of the same order with whichMarx supposedly constructed Capitalby employing a simplistically materialistgnoseology, based on the reflection of the real in the logical-mental. Tus theexpository structure of Marxs Capital, its logical method, is nothing else butthe historical method, only stripped from disturbing fortuities.3

Fortunately, Arthur is very acute on this point. In order to understand Marxand his mature work, it is necessary to dismiss all of this from the outset. It isnecessary to break the coupling of Marx and Engels inherited from the offi cial

iconography and give them back all of the theoretical autonomy that is due tothem. Tat is, we need to go beyond those interpretations (which are, in myopinion at any rate, very nave) that have claimed that the doctrine of historicalmaterialism was a joint production. In fact, the system of exposition ofCapital this is the crucial point is not diachronic, as Engels claims, but,rather, synchronic; in the words of Arthur, it is not linear, but systematic. Inmy words, I would say that the time of Marxs Capital, the time of expositionand of the succession of its chapters, is not expressed in terms of spatial

1. Engels 1998, p. 879.2. Te most important and most incisive advance was the transition to metallic money, the

consequence of which, however, was that the determination of value by labour-time was nolonger visible upon the surface of commodity exchange. From the practical point of view, money

became the decisive measure of value. . . . In a word: the Marxian law of value holds generally . . .for the whole period of simple commodity production that is, up to the time when the lattersuffers a modification through the appearance of the capitalist form of production. . . . Tus, theMarxian law of value has general economic validity for a period lasting from the beginning ofexchange, which transforms products into commodities, down to the 15th century of the presentera (Engels 1998, pp. 8812).

3. Engels 1969, p. 514.


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R. Finelli / Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 6174 63

representation by means of the symbol of a chain and the succession of itslinks, the one after the other, but, rather, by means of the figure of a sphereand of its double movement, centripetaland centrifugal; the first which leadsfrom the superficial to the internal and the second which goes from the internalback to the superficial, re-read and re-signified on the basis of the order andthe arrangement of the internal.

Arthur has understood well that Marxs Capitaldefines a socio-historicalreality conceived as a totality, because, in capitalism, there is a single dominantfactor, a single Subject that pervades, organises and orients all of reality,articulating and connecting it according to its needs. And, as Lukcs taught us

in History and Class Consciousness (when he wrote and thought before hiscapitulation obtorto collo to the Marxism of the State), a scientific practicethat begins with the category of totality must necessarily refer to Hegel.

Arthur thus correctly argues that Marxs model in Capitalis Hegels Scienceof Logic(it is also the Phenomenology of Spirit, in my opinion). In particular,he argues that:

i) Te transition in the first chapters of Capital is not that historicaltransition from simple commodity production to capitalist production; rather,it is that of the transition, in the actuality of contemporary society, from themost evident sphere of exchange and of the commerce of goods to the morehidden sphere of the production of capital;

ii) Capital as self-valorising value is the total subject of modernity, whichhas as its goal only its own infinite growth.

iii) Since a totality cannot be given and exhausted in a material andparticular content, it follows that what is valid in the system of capital as atotality isform or the determination of form. Formal determination, for Marx,expresses the functions that come from the self-reproductive logic of thecapitalist totality, that is, the totality of social relations necessary for theproduction and reproduction of capital. Tese, precisely because they arerelations, cannot ever be expressed by something material and finite, butorganise and give sense to every material and finite content. It is, therefore,fundamental, in order to comprehend Marxs critique of political economy, todistinguish the formal determination from the material determination.

iv) Capital is a complex of formal determinations abstracted from theheterogeneity of commodities and the concreteness of the different labourprocesses. It produces a single homogenous product, constituted by its ownself-valorisation. Due to the fact that it is constituted by abstractions, it ishomologous to the Idea of Hegel and articulates its development exactly likeHegels Science of Logic.


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v) Just as in Hegels Logic, the initial categories are not suffi ciently determinedand cannot explain themselves, thus the categories or initial determinations ofform of Marxs Capital must be explained by introducing subsequent andsuccessive categories. After all, a totality cannot ever exhaust itself in thedeterminations of form with which it initially appears and is presented to themost immediate human experience. Te initial categories become thosesuccessive categories by means of their internal dialectic, that is by means ofthe dialectic of their contradiction, because they do not succeed in coinciding

with themselves and reproducing themselves. Tus the value-form and labour-value, as a quantity of abstract and socially-necessary labour, can be adequately

comprehended only with the transition from circulation to production, in theconfrontation with and in the relation between capital and labour-power,when capital itself penetrates, with real subsumption, the whole process ofproduction and living labour counts only as a supply ofworking time.

Te fundamental reason why I am in agreement with Chris Arthur is that hehas understood the extent to which Capitalis not amaterialisttext, as it hasgenerally always been interpreted (except for the structuralist exaggeration of

Althusser), and how much it is instead a spiritualist[spiritualistico] text: inthe sense that die Formbestimmungis, for Marx, the true subject of modernhistory and capitalist society.4Formal determination, in as much as it concernsa form, is invisible, something not directly perceptible, unlike material

determination. Among other things, it should be added that the conceptofformal determination appears only at the beginning of Marxs work, inhis doctoral dissertation (Te Difference between the Philosophy of Nature of Democritus and Epicurus), and later disappears, cancelled by the weight ofhistorical materialism and by the claim of Marx and Engels to explaineverything on the basis of matter and material production. Te concept ofFormbestimmungre-appears in Marxs writings only with the GrundrisseandCapital, when the object of research obliges Marx, in spite of himself, to eclipsehistorical materialism and to confront a system organised by a principle oftotality and of totalisation, which has very little to do with matter.

And yet, in my opinion, Chris Arthur does not truly tackle the fundamentalquestions. He does not completely understand how much, for Marx, precisely

according to the Hegelian lesson, the formal principle which is the subject ofCapitalis really capable of being a principle of totalisation, and therefore of

4. [ranslators note: the adjective spiritualistico in this context derives from the establishedItalian translation of Hegels Geistwith Spirito, both of which are only inaccurately rendered intoEnglish with spirit.]


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pervading and organising effectively, fundamentally, all of reality with its needfor production and reproduction. Arthur affi rms that, in some respects, matter,the concrete, is nevertheless irreducible to the abstract. Tat is the case withabstract labour, the substance of value, which, being precisely aFormbestimmung,a social determination, cannot ever be incarnated in a concrete labour, in aparticular physical labour.

It is a mistake is to identify the abstract labour that is the substance of valuewith the supposedly abstract character of the modern labour process in itsphysicalform.5

Te different concrete labours can come closer, in the simplification and in thestandardisation of their performances

to the content of the concept of abstract labour. . . . But even the simplestmotion still has somequality, it can never be abstraction as such.6

It seems to me, that is, that Arthurs reasoning on the abstract on the abstractas formal determination continues to be in some way influenced by thetradition of English empiricism, according to which an abstraction cannotever be completely real. For this position, it is a case forever, in capitalism, ofastruggleand of acontradiction between subjects and the world of the concrete,

on the one side, and the Subject and the world of the abstract, on the other.I believe, instead, that, in Marxs Capital, the relationship of abstract-concrete is not to be read in the manner of opposition-contradiction. Accordingto this perspective, the abstract would be an hypostasis which dominates theconcrete and particular subjects from the exterior and from on high, violatingthem and forcing them to follow its logic. Such a way of conceiving that nexusreturns us to a Marxism of contradiction whose horizon of meaning ishumanist and anthropocentric. Te Marxism of contradiction (which is theMarxism of historical materialism) is founded upon the presupposition inhistorical and social activity of a subject very different from the subjectivity ofCapital. It begins with the humanistic subject, proletariat or working class,

presupposedin history as collective human subject, which constantly reproduces

such a collectivity by means of labour, and is able to re-appropriate suchcollectivity for itself, subtracting it from the alienation to which it is submittedby the private relations of property and of distribution of wealth. In short, the

5. Arthur 2002, p. 43.6. Arthur 2002, p. 44.


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Marxism of contradiction is based on the ontological primacy of the labouringsubject as concrete collective agent, and on the irreducible opposition betweenthe (taken-for-granted) communitarianism of the productive forces and theprivate restriction of the relations of production.

2. Te circle of presupposed-posited and the dialectic of emptying-out

Te systematic logic that Chris Arthur himself valorises, however, does nottolerate the existence of presupposed elements. If they persist in some measure also

in a theoretical systematic plan, they refer to merely dogmatic assumptions, ofa metaphysical or moralistic nature (like precisely that of the communitariannature ofhomo faber, or, in the words of the young Marx, of the menschlichesGemeinwesen). Systemic logic is instead a logic of the presupposed-posited, in

which Capital is the totalising subject that progressively rewrites in itsaccumulative logic the entire pre-existing external world on both the historicaland the natural levels. Te logic of totalisation, in fact, does not tolerate anypresupposed [Vorgesetztes] element if it is not posited [Gesetztes], that is,produced and re-signified by the totalising subject.

For these reasons, I believe that the nexus abstract-concrete in the Marx ofCapital but certainly more so in the Marx of the Grundrisse must not beread through the category ofopposition-contradiction, but rather, through that

ofabstraction-emptying out[svuotamento]: in the specific sense that the abstractoccupies and itself invades the concrete, filling it according to the exigenciesof its expansive-reproductive logic. At the same time, however, it leaves it asemblance, an exterior surface of concreteness. Tis new interpretativeparadigm needs to be drawn out from Marxs texts. It posits the abstract andthe concrete in connection not through contradiction but through abstraction emptying-out. Among other things, it makes Marxism very relevant forinterpreting postmodernity, because it allows us to understand clearly how,under the superficialisation-externalisation of the world that characterises so-called postmodernity, there is fundamentally a deepening, at the more interiorlevel of reality and of society, of abstract wealth and its accumulation.

I believe that postmodern society should be interpreted, not as rupture and

discontinuity, but, rather, as the deepening and the more complete realisationof modern society. It is completed by means of the extension and the unfoldingon the part of the subject constituted by impersonal and abstract wealth intoall of the collective and private environments of life: a colonisation which isdissimulated and negated through an hysterical over-determination of thesurface which, coloured and embellished, always has to display the contrary of


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that which it is. It is precisely in this nexus of emptying-outconcealmentdissimulation (and not in contradiction, which always refers to a presupposedsubject) that the true function of dialectical negation must be identified. Tisoccurs in the case of postmodern mental-informational labour, in which,given that it is essentially information which is worked on, the active andcreative participation of subjectivity is valorised and emphasised to themaximum, with all of the individuality of its psychic resources; while theelaboration of information refers in reality to the function of choosing betweenalternatives already preconstituted and predetermined, obeying programmesand work plans already conceived and signified by others, and placed in that

great artificial brain externalto our mind that is the informational machine.Expressed in other terms, this is the way real abstraction presents itself, as mentallabour that is merely discursive-calculative and devoid of intentionality or personalappropriation, appearing as dissimulated in its superficial appearance, turnedupside down into its opposite of creative and personalised labour.

Properly seen, the intensification of the production of capital, in an ever-greater production of real abstraction, is therefore accompanied by an effect ofinvisibility: more exactly, a game of overturning of opposites, a dialectic ofessence and appearance, for which real abstraction, even though it becomesever more real and present, does not appear, paradoxically, as the subject of theeconomic process. Instead, machines, labour and human knowledge appear asits protagonists, liberated from and less constrained by effort than has ever

occurred in the history of humanity. It is a dissimulation of the abstract in theconcrete that occurs through an overdetermination of the concrete; that is,through the taking up by the concrete of a dynamic, a value, an energy whichdoes not derive from the concrete but which, nevertheless, coincides with itsappearance and its activity. Tis is the fetishism of the concrete in as much asit is the invisibility of mediation, of the relations which establish the concrete,

which give expression to it and which make it move in determinate ways. Andsuch a process of the emptying-out of the interior and the intensification ofvisibility of the exterior is, as has been said, completely ascribable to the natureof abstraction and to its intrinsic extra-sensoriality and invisibility. It isnecessary, in short, to force Marx, but not in the sense of placing words andtheoretical categories in his mouth which are not his own; rather, in the sense

of producing conflict in the system of social science which he constructs bymeans of real abstraction and the circle of the presupposed-posited, as well asthe reflexive, methodological and epistemological conscience which Marxhimself possesses. It is also necessary to affi rm resolutely that the historicalsubject posited by Marx is a non-material subject, or, rather, an invisible subject.Nor is it perceptible except through its effects, how it distorts and manipulates


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the concrete world. We cannot fail, that is, to refute the materialist conceptionof history of the same Marx, as an all-too-general theory of history, whichmoves from a presupposed subject [homo faber] and which claims to affi rm,

with the simplicity of the eolic-constructivist metaphor of structure andsuperstructure, the predominance of economic relations in all societieshitherto. But we also need to argue, inversely, that the primacy of economicrelations in the determination of all these aspects of social life is valid only inmodern society and maximally in postmodern society inasmuch as onlycapital is a totalitaristic subjectof socialisation.

Furthermore, the emptying-out of the concrete on the part of the abstract

and the simulacrum-effect7

which follows from it belongs not only to thesphere of production but, ever more, to that of consumption too. Leavingbehind an anthropology of precarious survival, the quantitative multiplicationof commodities and an ever-more widespread accessibility to them has beenaccompanied, in the capitalist intensification of postmodernity, by theirprogressive, qualitative drying-up. Food commodities, for example realisingon the level of orality (in the Freudian sense) that which the theoreticians ofthe Frankfurt school had already perceived and comprehended fifty years agoregarding the loss of the aura are becoming ever more tasteless and lackingin quality: like the chickens sold in supermarkets that taste like rubber, like thedifferent species of fish reduced to uniformity more by the chemical food with

which they are fed than by Linnaean taxonomy, or like the fruit and vegetables,

removed from the alternation of the seasons and assigned to the time-without-time of cultivation in greenhouses; in short, like all the commodities destinedfor mass consumption, whose use is without taste and sensuous intensity merely repetitive, essentially replaceable, designed not to secure satisfactionand identity for the people who consume them, but to secure the capitalist

wealth which is incorporated in them and is accumulated by means of them.Te sphere of consumption, of that zone which once was still defined asprivate, thus experiences ever more the decline of feeling, of taste, of sensualemotion, giving way to boredom, to insignificance and quantitativeindifference. Te consumption of those fictions or soap-operas that make upalmost all television broadcasts, in their ever-more marked contempt for anyprinciple of reality and of every verisimilar connection of cause and effect

even in their superficial brilliance and their apparent production of meaning testify well enough to the appearance without content of the world ofcommodities. For the commodities of mass consumption, goods of quantity

7. Regarding the culture of the simulacrum, it is impossible not to consider JamesonsPostmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. See Jameson 1991.


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without quality nevertheless need to have a colour, a superficial appearance inorder to strike and seduce that ideological and deceitful organ par excellence

which is our eye, in as much as we are forced to be mass consumers. Tefrivolous colouring of the form of commodities is accompanied therefore by ahuman subject ever more emptied of affectivity and emotion; even more sothe more mass consumption seems finally to realise the egalitarian andprogressive principles of democracy.

3. Te non-superimposability of the Science of LogicandCapital

All of what has been said up to now leads therefore to a connection betweenHegels Science of Logicand Marxs Capitaldifferent from that proposed by

Arthur. As we have seen, Arthur insists on the permanence and the effi cacy ofcontradiction. My hypothesis is, instead, that the analogy between Hegel andMarx is to be found in the fact that both begin from an ontological cleavage, adualism in reality, and that both seek progressively to find the place ofmediation and unification of this dualism. For Hegel, the cleavage opensbetween Beingand Nothingness; all the subsequent transitions aim to find theplace of their synthesis. For Marx, the cleavage in the world of commodities isgiven between usability and exchangeability; he, too, seeks a progressiveunification between the world of the concrete and the world of the abstract.Te place of unification is in production where individual labour-powersupplies only abstract labour and where only the composition of abstractlabours under capitalist direction produces concrete use-values. It is only inproduction that the abstraction of exchange-value becomes practically true,8as Marx says, because the abstract is the result of the real praxis of a multitudeof individuals. But this signifies that, in the sphere of circulation,paceArthur,exchange-value is only in the background, because what appears in theforeground are individuals and commodities as use-values to be exchanged.

8. Consider in this respect Marxs well-known affi rmation from the Introduction to theGrundrisse(Notebook M): Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of societyin which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific

kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, butlabour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general. . . . Here, then, for thefirst time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the categorylabour, labour as such, labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. Te simplestabstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and whichexpresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achievespractical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society (Marx 1993,p. 106).


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Exchange-value appears as a mere means which must serve the primary goal:individual consumption. It is for this reason that exchange-value is external touse-value: when there is one there is not the other.

Tus, as occurs in the first book of Hegels Logic(the sphere ofBeing), forMarx too, the different determinations of reality in the sphere of circulationdo not mediate one another and are not synthesised with one another but leap,each passing into the other, because precisely where there is the one there isnot the other.9 Only with abstract production does there emerge a subject thatis genuinely real, in as much as it is internalised in the activity of individuals.

And there, through the abstract activity of the many, the concrete is produced

(sphere of mediation or of the concept in Hegel). Further, we return, departingfrom this new subject which is capital, to read the sphere of the superficial,where the subjects seem to be things and individuals (sphere of essence inHegel, where profundity is dissimulated in the superficial).

But, here, the analogy between Marx and Hegel stops. Hegels Logic, in fact,operates by means of the power of negation-contradiction: beginning withBeingwhich, through its initial indeterminateness, negatesitself and turns intonothingness, into absolute negation; this then becomes the dynamic factor ofevery subsequent transition of categories. In my view, it is that initial transitionthat Hegel does not succeed in making, because he falls back on hypostasisedcategories of ancient metaphysics, like those, precisely, ofBeingor of absolutenon-Being. Marxs Capital, on the other hand, moves from the co-presence of

the two levels ofusabilityand exchangeability, which do not have anything todo with absolute nothingness. Teir field of relation refers to a connection ofthe concrete to the abstract, which, in production, manages to realise itself asinterpenetration through the colonisation and emptying-out of the concrete.Terefore, beyond the analogy of a process of totalisation which, from theinitial fissure between two principles of reality needs to posit itself as a singleprinciple-subject, the difference between the theoretical paradigms of Marxand Hegel is profound and substantial: the one is based on the power ofgeneralisation and universalisation of the negative, the other on the power ofuniversalisation of the abstract.

In opposition to Arthur, I believe that the form of value in Marx is socialfrom the beginning (but social in a strong sense), because the substance of

value is alreadysocial: that accumulation and depositof abstract labour, whichis the allocation of a labour-power managed and signified in capitalist terms. Ibelieve, that is, that to refute the historical existence of a simple mercantilesociety means to refute the possibility of the single individual ever being a

9. See Lonard 1974, pp. 3740.


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protagonist of choices and personal actions in capitalism. For this reason, it isthe relation of domination in production, where there is not mediation andexchange, which founds and explains what further happens in the democraticsphereof circulation, where there is mediation and exchange. It is surplus-value,that is, which explains value and not vice versa. It is production that explainscirculation and not vice versa. Otherwise, we go back to making the marketthe location of meaning and decisions. We fall back into an individualisticcontractualism and we do not see that, on the contrary, the sphere of circulationis the appearance of democracy which, under the pressure of the activity ofindividual subjects, distorts the violence of the connections of classes in the

production of capital.In short, it seems to me that Chris Arthurs valuable and intelligentexposition stops short at a certain point and is not carried through to its logicalconclusions. Defending systematic logic, he correctly overturns the relationbetween circulation and production. However, he does not allow the abstract,the subject-capital, to make itself fully and suffi ciently real, and attributes to ita formal dimension which is certainly social but which, at the same time,maintains strong characteristics of ideality. Tis is due to the fact that Arthur

wants to uphold, not an analogy, but ahomologybetween the Science of Logicand Capital, according to which Capital is supposed to proceed and developlike the Idea in Hegel. But the reality of capital and its abstract wealth islabour, the supply of labour by labour-power, unintentional and imbued with

meaning by the other; while the reality of the Idea of Hegel is a thought whichmakes itself ever more conscious and present to itself.

4. A new definition of wealth

In conclusion: I maintain that today the critical truth of Karl Marx not theMarx who is the theoretician of productive man and of his Prometheanism,but, rather, the Marx who is the theoretician of the abstract and its force ofuniversalisation is becoming ever more the objective reality and principle ofour social being. Rather, only today is it becoming true, in the fullness of itsdiffusion and penetration into all of the areas of our individual and collective,public and private, life. In other words, the theory of abstract labour and thetheory of the accumulation of wealth connected to it which many criticsfrom diverse tendencies have held against Marx as a merely subjectivehypothesis, as a merely mental abstraction and generalisation is beingconfirmed, in the diffuse and generalised reality of everyones life-praxis, as anabstraction completely real rather than merely mental, because it is preciselyproduced and reproduced by the effective behaviour of us all. Tepresupposition


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of Marx returns or, rather, begins to be true in the light of a something likea memory of the future,10 according to my way of seeing things, because it is

positedby the daily life-praxis of millions of human beings.Tis vision of social being founded on the movements of a real abstraction

intentionally proposes atotalitaristictheory of capital: or a vision of capital,which takes its cue from its being essentially quantitative, as a productive factorwhich is tendentially universalising and, due to that, oriented towards themanipulation-assimilation, according to its logic, of the whole anthropological-natural context within which its production is contained.

Only a social subject can attempt to oppose the impersonal force of such a

subject of socialisation with a different economic and life-project, or, rather,only a totality of groups and social subjects in whose labours the demandfor concreteness and individualisation is more potent than the seductionof forms of identity that are only abstractly those of the group-collective.Here, too, starting with certain anthropological simplifications and dogma-tisms of the young Marx, the ethical-political tradition of the Left has generallyremained subaltern to the domination of abstraction, proposing a subjectivity

whose positive value of unity and community was exposed to another degreeof inarticulation and symbiotic indifferentiation.11 Te class, the proletariat,communism have been values and locations, ideal and real, conceived onthe basis of the principle of abstract equality alone, or of an equality notvivified and made concrete by differences. It therefore ended up reflecting,

in itself, precisely that same abstraction which it wanted to combat andeliminate.

An abstractly materialist anthropology begins from the primacy of the bodyand of material needs in the life of the human being, and, consequently, fromthe labour necessary to satisfy them. It refuses to traverse and mediate thematerial need with that immaterial need for the recognition of the most properand incomparableidentity of every human being by another, which traces thefrontier of the new continent of human experience brought to light bypsychoanalysis and only in part anticipated by the anthropology of HegelsPhenomenology of Spirit. Tis was done by Marx in his rush to commit hisparricide of Hegel, relying upon Feuerbachs much less rich and articulatedhumanism and delivering to the tradition of communism a simplified and

abstract anthropology, an anthropology of poverty based on the satisfaction,in the first instance, of the physical neediness of the human being.12 Tis had

10. In a different context, this expression appeared in a work by W. R. Bion,A Memoir of theFuture. See Bion 1990.

11. On this point, see Finelli 2004.12. Such an anthropology of poverty that links the evolution of human societies and history


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the consequence that the theoreticians and bureaucrats of real communismdeduced from it, namely, that a primary and irrenounceable condition ofcommunism should be material equality; it did not matter if it was furnishedthrough an authoritarian discipline and institutions like the party-state,because the realisation of that objective was supposed to have primed thedevelopment and maturation of the new society.

For such an anthropology of penury, linked to the primordial fears ofhumanity, it was obvious that the development of the productive forces (inother words, the acceptance of the capitalist organisation of labour) and theextremely rigid equality and conformism in the distribution of produced

goods were indispensable principles of the very concept of communism. Nowall that is over, and the very idea of communism and even the legality of usingthis term has been placed in doubt. o rethink communism means to conceivea new anthropology which starts from the users of the abstract, from the newlabour-power, and from the consumers consumed by abstraction and thebarbarisation of their conditions of life. It needs to be a new anthropology thatknows how to articulate difference together with equality, the right of everyoneto see their own strictly unrepeatable singularity recognised, respected anddeveloped. It means therefore to try to propose a new definition of wealth andof the development of the productive forces, founded not only on thedevelopment of the capacity of production of goods but also on the liberationof the differences of individual subjectivities. Tat is, a definition of future

wealth, centred not only on the production and distribution of use-values butalso, and maybe essentially, on the production and distribution of possibleforms of self-relation, conditioned and mediated by the relation of non-recognition or recognition by the other.

Regarding all of this, however, it will obviously be necessary to discuss atlength, particularly if the discussion is assisted and solicited by innovative andthorough texts like that of Chris Arthur.

ranslated by Peter Tomas

solely to physical-material needs is the other face of that omnipotent absolutenessof praxis whichcharacterises the thought of the young and mature Marx, before the science of Capital, and

which is expressed in an only apparently contradictory way and exactly in the same context inwhich the materialist conception of history was formulated in an absolutely negative evaluationof labour, inasmuch as it is an activity which degrades the essence, universal and free, of thehuman being to a mere instrument of existence, or of the reproduction of the individual andanimal body. Tere remain very explicit examples of this gentlemanly perspective incidental tothe materialism of the first Marx for whom it is really only the human being who undertakesfree practical-sensible activity, liberated by labour in the 1844 Manuscriptsand Te GermanIdeology. Te Italian theorist Franco Rodano clearly understood well this gentlemanly inflectionof Marxs anthropology in his Lezioni di storia possible. See Rodano 1986.


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References

Arthur, Christopher J. 2002, Te New Dialectic and Marxs Capital, HMBook Series, Leiden:Brill.

Bion, Wilfred R. 1990,A Memoir of the Future, London: Karnac.Finelli, Roberto 2004, Un parricidio mancato. Il rapporto tra Hegel e il giovane Marx, urin:

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Finelli -Comentario Sobre Chris Arthur