Dance of the Dialectic

ing vantage points that bring out the differences between two or more aspects of an interactive system also highlights the asymmetry in their reciprocal effect. Granted such reciprocal effect, production was said to play the dominant role on all five levels of generality on which Marx operates. But it is only by abstracting production as a vantage point that its special influence on other economic processes and on society as a whole on each level can be seen for what it is. As Marx says, with the level of class societies in mind, the existence of the ruling class and their functions "can only be understood from the specific historical structure of their production relations" (My emphasis) (Marx, 1963, 285). Along with his abstractions of extension, Marx's abstractions of vantage point play an equally important role in establishing the flexible boundaries that characterize all his theories. In Marx's division of reality into objective and subjective conditions, it is by abstracting a vantage point first in one and then in the other that he uncovers the more objective aspects of what is ordinarily taken to be subjective (extending the territory of the objective accordingly), and vice versa. Together with the aforementioned theory of identity, it is changes in the abstraction of vantage point that enables Marx to actually see objective and subjective conditions as "two distinct forms of the same conditions" (Marx, 1973, 832). Likewise, it is by abstracting a particular vantage point that Marx can see aspects of nature in society, or the forces of production in the relations of production, or economic in typically non-economic structures, or the base in the superstructure, and then vice versa, adjusting the abstraction of extension for each pairing accordingly. Looking at the relations of production from the vantage point of the forces of production, for example, even the cooperative power of workers can appear as a productive force (Marx and Engels, 1964, 46). Marx's various class divisions of society, based as we saw on different abstractions of extension for class, are also discernible only from the vantage point of the qualities (functions, opposition to other classes, consciousness, etc.) that serve as the criteria for constructing a given classification. That is, if class is a complex Relation made up of a number of different aspects, and if the composition of any particular class depends on which ones Marx includes in his abstraction of extension and brings into focus through his abstraction of level of generality, then his ability to actually distinguish people as members of this class depends on which aspect(s) he abstracts as his vantage points for viewing them. It also follows that as Marx's vantage point changes, so does his operative division of society into classes. In this way, too, the same people, viewed from the vantage points of qualities associated with different classes may actually fall into different classes. The landowner, for example, is said to be a capitalist in so far as he confronts labor as the owner of commodities, i.e., functions as a capitalist vis á vis labor (rather than as a landowner vis á vis capitalists), whenever he is viewed from this traditional capitalist vantage point (Marx, 1963, 51). Viewed from the vantage point of any one of his qualities, the individual's identity is limited to what can be seen from this angle. The qualities that emerge from the use of other vantage points are ignored because for all practical purposes, at this moment in the analysis and for treating this particular problem, they simply don't exist. Hence, people abstracted as workers, for example—that is, viewed from one or more of the qualities associated with membership in this class—where the object of study is capitalist political economy, are presented as not having any gender or nation or race. People, of course, possess all these characteristics and more, and Marx—when dealing with other problems—can abstract vantage points (usually as part of non-capitalist levels of generality) that bring out these other identities. Given Marx's flexibility in abstracting extension, he can also consider people from vantage points that play down their human qualities altogether in order to highlight some special relation. Such is the case when Marx refers to the buyer as a "representative of money confronting commodities"— that is, views him from the vantage point of money inside an abstraction of extension that includes money, commodities, and people (Marx, 1963, 404). The outstanding example of this practice is Marx's frequent reference to capitalists as "embodiments" or "personifications" of capital, where living human beings are considered from the vantage point of their economic function (Marx, 1958, 10, 85, 592). The school of structuralist Marxism has performed an important service in recovering such claims from the memory hole to which an older, more class struggle-oriented Marxism had consigned them. However useful decentering human nature in this manner is for grasping some of the role-determined behavior that Marx wanted to stress, there is much that is volunteerist in his theories that requires the adoption of distinctively human vantage points, and only a dialectical Marxism that possesses sufficient flexibility in changing abstractions—of vantage point as of extension and level of generality—can make the frequent adjustments that are called for. If Marx's abstractions of extension are large enough to encompass how things happen as part of what they are, if such abstractions of extension also allow him to grasp the various organic and historical movements uncovered by his research as essential movements, then it is his abstractions of vantage point that make what is there—what his abstractions of extension have "placed" there— visible. The movement of the transformation of quantity into quality, for example, is made possible as an essential movement by an abstraction of extension that includes both quantitative changes and the qualitative change that eventually occurs. But this transformative process is not equally clear or even visible from each of its moments. In this case, the preferred vantage point—not the only one possible, but simply the ideal—is one that bridges the end of quantitative changes and the start of the qualitative one. Viewing the cooperation among workers, for example, from the vantage point of where its transformation into a qualitatively new productive power begins provides the clearest indication of where this change has come from as well as where the process that brought it about was heading. The movement of metamorphosis, we will recall, is an organic movement in which qualities associated with one part of a system get transferred to its other parts. In the case of the metamorphosis of value, the main instance of this movement in Marx's writings, some of the central relationships that constitute value get taken up by commodity, capital, wage-labor, etc. Only an abstraction of extension that is large enough to include its different phases as internally related aspects of a single system allows us to conceive of metamorphosis as an internal movement and of its subsequent stages as forms of what it starts out as. But to observe this metamorphosis and, therefore too, to study it in any detail, we must accompany this abstraction of extension with an abstraction of vantage point in the part whose qualities are being transferred. Thus, the metamorphosis of value into and through its various forms is only observable as a metamorphosis from the vantage point of value. As regards contradiction, Marx says, as we saw, "in capitalism everything seems and in fact is contradictory" (Marx, 1963, 218). It is so—in reality, and with the help of Marx's broad abstractions of extension, which organize the parts as mutually dependent processes. But it seems so only from certain vantage points. From others, the incompatible development of the parts would be missed, or misconstrued, or, at a minimum, seriously underestimated. The vantage point from which Marx usually observes contradictions is the intersection between the two or more processes said to be in contradiction. It is a composite vantage point made up of elements from all these processes. Of course, if one has not abstracted differences as processes and such processes as mutually dependent, there is no point of intersection to serve as a vantage point. What we've called the double movement of the capitalist mode of production can be approached— that is, viewed and studied—from any of the major contradictions that compose it, and in each case —given internal relations—the elements that are not directly involved enter into the contradiction as part of its extended conditions and results. In this way, the vantage point that is adopted organizes not only the immediate contradiction, but establishes a perspective in which other parts of the system acquire their order and importance. In the contradiction between exchange and use-value, for example, the relations between capitalists and workers are part of the necessary conditions for this contradiction to take its present form and develop as it does, just as one result of this contradiction is the reproduction of the ties between capitalists and workers. Given the internal relations Marx posits between all elements in the system, this makes capitalists and workers subordinate aspects of the contradiction between exchange and use-value. The whole process can be turned around: adopting the vantage point of the contradiction between capitalists and workers transforms the relations between exchange and use-value into its subordinate aspects, again as both necessary preconditions and results. The actual links in each case, of course, need to be carefully worked out. Hence, contradictions can be said to overlap; they cover much the same ground, but this ground is broken up in various ways, along a variety of axes, based on as many different foci. Even when the shift in vantage points appears to be slight, the difference in the perspective opened up can be considerable. For example, take the contradiction between capital and wage-labor on one hand and that between capitalists and workers on the other. The vantage point for viewing the former is the intersection of two objective functions, while the preferred vantage point for viewing the latter is where the activities and interests of the two classes who perform these functions intersect. Each of these contradictions contains the other as major dependent aspects (neither capital nor capitalists could appear and function as they do without the other, and the same holds for wagelabor and workers). Yet, though both contradictions can be said to cover more or less the same ground, the different perspectives established by these contrasting vantage points allows Marx to distinguish how people create their conditions from how they are created by them, and to trace out the implications of each position without dismissing or undervaluing the other—all the while presenting both contradictions as undergoing similar pressures and in the process of a similar transformation. Marx's laws offer still another illustration of the crucial role played by the abstraction of vantage point. As was pointed out earlier, all of Marx's laws are tendencies arising from the very nature of whatever it is that is said to have them. In every case, it is Marx's abstraction of extension that brings the various organic and historical movements together under the same rubric, making how things happen a part of what they are, but it is his abstraction of vantage point that enables him (and us) to actually catch sight of them as a single tendency. The law of the falling rate of profit, for example, is a tendency inherent in the relation of profit to the "organic composition" of capital, which Marx understands as the ratio of constant to variable capital (or the investment put into the material means of production as compared to that put into buying labor power). With the proportion of investment going to constant capital because of technological development always on the rise, less and less of any given investment goes to buy variable capital. But only labor power creates value, and therefore surplus-value. With a constantly decreasing proportion of investment involved in producing surplus-value, therefore, the rate of profit as a percentage of total investment must also go down (Marx, 1959b, Part 3). Like all tendencies in Marx's work, this one too is subject to counter-tendencies, both on the same and on the other levels of generality (state subsidies, inflation, devaluation of existing capital, etc.), which are often strong enough to keep the tendency for the falling rate of profit from appearing in the balance sheet of businessmen at the end of the year. To observe this tendency, therefore, and be in a position to study the constant pressure it exerts on the concentration of capital (another law) and through it on the entire capitalist system, one must follow Marx in abstracting an extension for profit that includes its relation over time to the organic composition of capital, and view this Relation from the vantage point of this composition (granted, of course, the capitalist level of generality on which both of these are found). Without such abstractions of extension, level of generality and vantage point, one simply cannot see, let alone grasp, what Marx is talking about. With them, one can see the law despite all the sand thrown up by counter-tendencies. Hence, the irrelevance of various attempts by Marx's critics and followers alike to evaluate the law of the falling rate of profit based on analyses made from the vantage point of one of its possible results (the actual profits of real businessmen), or from capitalist competition, or some other vantage point located in the marketplace. All the laws in Marxism can be described, studied, and evaluated only inside the perspectives associated with the particular vantage points from which Marx both discovered and constructed them. VIII The Role of Abstractions in the Debates over Marxism It will have become evident by now that it is largely differences of vantage point that lay behind many of the great debates in the history of Marxist scholarship. In the New Left Review debate between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas on the character of the capitalist state, for example, the former viewed the state chiefly from the vantage point of the ruling economic class, while the latter viewed what are essentially the same set of relations from the vantage point of the socioeconomic structures that establish both the limits and the requirements for a community's political functions (Poulantzas, 1969; Miliband 1970).4 As a result, Miliband is better able to account for the traditional role of the state in serving ruling class interests, while Poulantzas has an easier time explaining the relative autonomy of the state, and why the capitalist state continues to serve the ruling class when the latter is not directly in control of state institutions. The debate over whether capitalist economic crisis is caused by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall or arises from difficulties in the realization of value, where one side views the capitalist economy from the vantage point of the accumulation process and the other from the vantage point of market contradictions, is of the same sort (Mattick, 1969; Baran and Sweezy, 1966).5 A somewhat related dispute over the centrality of the capitalist mode of production as compared to the international division of labor (the position of World System Theory) for charting the history and future of capitalism is likewise rooted in a difference of preferred vantage points (Brenner, 1977; Wallerstein, 1974). So, too, is the debate over whether bourgeois ideology is mainly a reflection of alienated life and reified structures or the product of the capitalist consciousness industry, where one side views the construction of ideology from the vantage point of the material and social conditions out of which it arises and the other from that of the role played by the capitalist class in promoting it (Mepham, 1979; Marcuse, 1965). Earlier, in what is perhaps the most divisive dispute of all, we saw that those who argue for a strict determinism emanating from one or another version of the economic factor (whether simple or structured) and those who emphasize the role of human agency (whether individual or class) can also be distinguished on the basis of the vantage points they have chosen for investigating the necessary interaction between the two (Althusser, 1965; Sartre, 1963). To be sure, each of these positions, here as in the other debates, is also marked by somewhat different abstractions of extension for shared phenomena based in part on what is known and considered worth knowing, but even these distinguishing features come into prominence mainly as a result of the vantage point that is treated as privileged. The different levels of generality on which Marx operates is also responsible for its share of debates among interpreters of his ideas, the main one being over the subject of the materialist conception of history: is it all history, or all of class history, or the period of capitalism (in which earlier times are conceived of as pre-capitalist) (Kautsky, 1988; Korsch, 1970)? Depending on the answer, the sense in which production is held to be primary will vary as will the abstractions of extension and vantage point used to bring this out. Finally, the various abstractions of extension of such central notions as mode or production, class, state, etc., have also led to serious disagreements among Marx's followers and critics alike, with most schools seeking to treat the boundaries they consider decisive as permanent. However, as evidenced by the quotations that practically every side in these disputes can draw upon, Marx is capable of pursuing his analysis not only on all social levels of generality and from various vantage points but with units of differing extension, only giving greater weight to the abstractions that his theories indicate are most useful in revealing the particular dynamic he is investigating. The many apparently contradictory claims that emerge from his study are in fact complementary, and all are required to "reflect" the complex double movement (historical—including probable future—and organic) of the capitalist mode of production. Without an adequate grasp of the role of abstraction in dialectical method, and without sufficient flexibility in making the needed abstractions of extension, level of generality, and vantage point, most interpreters of Marx (Marxists and non-Marxists alike) have constructed versions of his theories that suffer in their very form from the same rigidity, inappropriate focus, and one-sidedness that Marx saw in bourgeois ideology. In an often quoted though little analyzed remark in the Introduction to Capital, Marx says that value, as compared to larger, more complex notions, has proved so difficult to grasp because "the body, as an organic whole, is more easy to study than are the cells of that body." To make such a study, he adds, one must use the "force of abstraction" (Marx, 1958, 8). Using the force of abstraction, as I have tried to show, is Marx's way of putting dialectics to work. It is the living dialectic, its process of becoming, the engine that sets other parts of his method into motion. In relation to this emphasis on the force of abstraction, every other approach to studying dialectics stands on the outside looking in. The relations of contradiction, identity, law, etc., that they study have all been constructed, made visible, ordered, and brought into focus through prior abstractions. Consequently, while other approaches may help us to understand what dialectics is and to recognize it when we see it, only an account that puts the process of abstraction at the center enables us to think adequately about change and interaction, which is to say—to think dialectically, and to do research and engage in political struggle in a thoroughly dialectical manner.6 4. Both thinkers seriously modified the views expressed in these articles in later works (Miliband, 1977; Poulantzas, 1978), and these revisions too can be explained in large part through changes in their abstractions of vantage point. 5. There are still other Marxist interpretations of capitalist crises (as, indeed, of the state) that are also largely dependent on the vantage point adopted. Here, as in the other debates mentioned, it was enough to refer to a single major cleavage to illustrate my claim regarding the role of abstractions. 6. Not all of the important questions associated with dialectics have been dealt with in this essay. Missing or barely touched on are the place and/or role within dialectical method of reflection, perception, emotion, memory, conceptualization (language), appropriation, moral evaluation, verification, wisdom, will and activity, particularly in production. I am painfully aware of their absence, but my purpose here was not to provide a complete overview of dialectics but to make it possible for people to begin to put it to work by deconstructing the much-neglected process of abstraction, which, along with the philosophy of internal relations, I take to be at the core of this method. My next volume on dialectics, which focuses on the process of appropriation as Marx's preferred abstraction for knowing, being, and doing in their interaction with one another, will try to make up for these lapses. It will also contain a more systematic treatment of the moments of inquiry and exposition, as forms of activity under appropriation, as well as a critical survey of some important contributions to dialectical method that have been passed over in the present work.