Reading 'Capital' Today by Schmidt Ingo Fanelli Carlo

Author:Schmidt, Ingo,Fanelli, Carlo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786800855
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Conclusion

Our discussion has proceeded from an anti-determinist, philosophy of praxis perspective, which insists that human and natural history are in principle open-ended. It has nonetheless worked through law, determination and the base-superstructure metaphor instead of dismissing them, and striven for a productive relation with this other major strand of the Marxist tradition. The key, as Marx himself argued, is to deploy the materialist impulse historically rather than ontologically, a level at which it would inevitably revert to idealism (1976: 494). Praxis shares with historicized understandings of law a necessary immersion in a horizon defined by specific social conditions. Without these conditions, praxis has nothing to intervene in, and so loses its defining specificity, its artful and strategic character. Whereas law emphasizes the agent’s determination by concrete conditions, praxis highlights how action addresses and potentially modifies them. The conditions must themselves be established, as the outcome of ongoing struggle. Each moment presupposes and interpenetrates the other, however, such that they are separable only as distinctions within a unity. Insisting on the dialectical character of base and superstructure means conceding a degree of law-like determination to establish the very ground on which praxis works, even as that ground may change. To speak of laws of capital is thus to speak of processes of contestation and the making of the social world. Capital’s discussion of economic laws makes this point admirably.

Marx’s use of law in Capital transposes a natural scientific notion into the human realm without reducing the latter’s defining characteristics. By inflecting this initially mechanistic notion with ironic, logical, historical, phenomenological and dialectical properties, Marx humanizes law but simultaneously uses it to reveal the burden of received and unmastered conditions on social existence. Without naturalizing those conditions, it nonetheless highlights their ability to compel human action involuntarily. Such a determinism-with-immanent-limits is surely worth emphasizing in our individualist age of consumer choice, abstracted democratic illusion and displaced class conflict. At the same time, it is the dialectical Marx who reminds us of the freedom that arises within necessity and shapes how determination plays out in a process whose outcome is not preordained, but which never ceases to struggle against constraint and the horizons of possibility.

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