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2020 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

8. Marx, Berkeley and Bad Abstractions

verfasst von : Patrick Murray

Erschienen in: Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Patrick Murray draws a historical line, starting from Berkeley’s critical phenomenology, passing through Hegel, and ending in Marx, where he sets up a treatment of what he calls ‘bad abstraction’, and how this relates to the notion of abstraction in Marx. He then finds a second division that goes from Berkeley to Marx, passing through Samuel Bailey. Neither Berkeley nor Bailey, though critics of political economists for dealing with abstract ideas, understood value as the expression of the social nature of wealth. They were both held prisoner by the bad abstractions that the capitalist mode of production generates. The author then reviews Marx’s way of dealing with these bad abstractions in his works, both in Philosophy and in Political Economy, concluding with thoughts on the problem of what would be the meaning of ‘abstract’ in abstract labor.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Marx: The Method of Political Economy as an Ontological Critique

Nächstes Kapitel On Capital as Real Abstraction

One aim of the present chapter is to argue that taking an interpretive perspective ‘from Berkeley to Marx’ provides a valuable vantage point on modern philosophy and political economy. In his Interpreting Modern Philosophy, James Collins discusses the significance of ‘reforming the from-to perspectives’ on modern philosophers (Collins 1972: 212–231).

Marx comments on the match between Berkeley’s philosophy and his nominalist theory of money: ‘Very fittingly it was Bishop Berkeley, the advocate of mystical idealism in English philosophy, who gave the doctrine of the nominal standard of money a theoretical twist’ (Marx 1970a: 78–79).

On Marx’s relationship to Bailey, see Chapters 6 and 17 of Murray (2016).

See Chapter 18 of Murray (1988).

We may wonder if Berkeley, with his talk of observing that certain colors, tastes, smells and so on ‘go together’, leading us to ‘account’ such a ‘collection’ as ‘one distinct thing’, may remain closer to Locke’s account of experience than he might like. On Hegel’s critique of Locke for putting simple ideas ahead of objects, see Schuler (2014).

See Chapter 11 of Murray (1988) and Chapters 8 and 9 of Murray (2016).

We may wonder if Marx is too clever. Is Marx imposing on Hegel by viewing him through the lens of his incipient critique of the practical bad abstractions of value and capital?

On these topics, see Murray (1988: 45–51).

Marx attributes Ricardo’s ‘inability to grasp the specific form of bourgeois production’ to his ‘obsession that bourgeois production is production as such’ (Marx 1968: 529).

Jürgen Habermas misreads Chapter 7 in this way. Consequently, he wrongly attributes to Marx a conception of labor (conceived of as instrumental or purposive-rational action) as ‘in principle solitary’ (Habermas 1971: 137). This misstep led Habermas away from Marx’s critical theory of value and capital toward a neo-Weberian critique of instrumental action.

See Chapter 14 of Murray (2016). Martha Campbell, in correspondence, points out that the phrase ‘fetishism of the factors of production’ should be corrected to ‘fetishism of the capitalist revenue forms, interest, rent, and wages’.

See Chapter 4 of Murray (2016).

Postone (1993) and Murray (1988), among others, follow Rubin in this reasoning.

‘Practically abstract’ labor must produce useful things for which there is demand in order to produce value, but how it is useful is a matter of indifference.

Real abstraction in capitalism is not restricted to the circulation of money and commodities: it pervades the capitalist mode of production. One of the first interpreters to introduce the idea of real abstraction as a description of processes in capitalist society, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, did limit it to exchange (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 77–78). For a criticism, see Postone (1993: 178).

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Titel: Marx, Berkeley and Bad Abstractions
verfasst von: Patrick Murray
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39953-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-39954-2

Copyright-Jahr: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_8