I agree on the issue of probabilistic laws – sometimes I need to explain this, as there’s a certain tendency to read Marx’s references to laws mechanistically. Obviously not a clarification you need :-) – but, as I said, a bit of triangulation is involved in these discussions. Similarly with the term “emergence” – I agree with you that this term is often treated in ontologistic ways, and that a great deal of unproductive confusion often clouds its use – my intention above was simply to gesture metaphorically – I might have used the term “structure” instead (and thus introduce a similar set of problems and concerns ;-) ). In either case, my intention was to try to provide some reference points for the type of reading of Marx I am attempting – for the sorts of claims I’m trying to make.

As it happens, these reference points are probably not useful in this particular discussion, because your questions weren’t being offered from a place where those shorthand phrases would have been meaningful.

I am engaging in what, on one level, are a set of somewhat pedantic domestic squabbles over the meaning of this particular bit of text. These domestic squabbles do have broader ramifications (although still bounded to the particular concern of how to pick out what “capitalism” is, as an object of analysis, and how to understand its practical constitution in collective practice). But much of what I’ve written above has been, if this makes sense, an attempt to gesture very quickly to where I am in the household, so that other inhabitants can come yell at me face-to-face, rather than storming around the house, opening doors only to find that I’m not standing behind them. This sort of domestic dispute, to be clear, isn’t at all the only sort of conversation I’m hoping to have here – otherwise, I wouldn’t put this sort of material up on a blog. I’m just explaining why my earlier gestures at definining my position might have been less than useful.

I’ll back up and try to approach from a different direction – with the concern that we may be trying to have different sorts of conversation. In the post above, I was trying to clarify a very small portion of Capital – a portion that gets cited a lot, and that tends to get interpreted in specific ways. It’s an important bit of text, but it’s not the entirety of Marx’s argument. More importantly, it’s not a metatheoretical argument that seeks to make general claims about abstract objects like the “study of man” or “economics” or “society”. It’s a very specific argument about one particular implication of the ways in which the reproduction of capital plays out in specific sorts of social practices.

There is a tendency to read Marx’s argument about the “fetish” as an argument about the sort of abstraction that takes place in the course of market exchange. Your latest comment gives an extended example of one of the sorts of “abstraction” that is sometimes said to take place in the interactions that comprise a market – your example hits on the notion that a market is something like a “system” that coordinates the consequences of individual actions, independently of the intention of the individuals engaging in those actions. It is not unusual for critics of Marx to read Marx as himself a critic of the “systemic” character of markets. Read this way, Marx looks a bit like a romantic critic – someone who wants to get rid of the “alienating” dimensions of the systems sphere, and take us back to the days when social interactions were “intersubjective” and meaningful (Habermas seems, for example, to read Marx this way – and therefore to dismiss him as a romantic, utopian thinker).

Part of what I am trying to do, on a textual level, is to show that the argument about the fetish simply isn’t an argument about the “systemic” character of the market. The form of “abstraction” Marx is criticising in this section of Capital isn’t this sort of abstraction. In the process, of course, I then need to try to explain what sort of abstraction Marx is trying to talk about instead. My argument (and I’m simplifying all through this comment, so apologies again…) is that the “abstraction” Marx is trying to pick out is a sort of historical pattern that unfolds over time. At this point in the text – and this is one of many reasons my account here will remain a bit murky – the nature of this historical pattern has not been very completely specified: Marx has made only a few gestures about tendencies to enforce the adoption of higher levels of productivity, combined with tendencies not to phase out the need for human labour inputs, and a few other, similarly gestural and underdeveloped, moves.

The focus of this chapter isn’t yet to develop a full argument about the nature of the pattern being analysed, still less an argument about the pattern is constituted by social actors who aren’t trying to create a pattern (so, in terms of your comments on emergence: Marx will attempt to show how something might “emerge” – but not yet – he’s trying to do something else at this point in the text). The focus of this chapter is, instead, to begin to mount a case (which will then continue to be developed in future chapters) that there is a tendency (or, perhaps more adequately, a risk) that social actors will tend to read certain qualitative traits that (in Marx’s argument) derive from the qualitative properties of this enacted pattern, off into intrinsic “supersensible” properties of people and things. The “fetish” is this particular misstep. Marx suggests that this misstep makes it intuitive for social actors to perceive tthe “self”, “society”, “history”, and “material nature” in certain distinctive ways. The argument here is practice theoretic – he is beginning to show how we act out certain ways of being in the world that then find expression in various more explicit forms of theory – without anyone needing to make any sort of conscious or deliberate decision to bring this situation about, and yet without this situation being in any way “intrinsic” or inevitable.

It may sound intuitive or obvious that there should be a category for types of entities that are neither “intersubjective” in the sense of constituted in some sort of meaning-giving form of communicative interaction, nor “natural” in the sense of intrinsic. This dichotomy is, however, quite strong in a great deal of social theory – particularly if the category of the “natural” is expanded to encompass elements of social practice that we are aware have been created, but that we believe are technically required in order to maintain, i.e., a certain level of complexity, or size of population, or similar. Marx is trying to set up for an argument that these sorts of technical necessities, as well as more naive forms of naturalisation, derive from confusions that result from a failure to grasp how certain sorts of historical patterns are generated in practice.

I can’t develop the point to any plausibility in this context, and I also haven’t given enough information even to explain what sort of difference it might make to a social theory to try to underscore the point that Marx doesn’t equate capitalism with “the market” – I’m attempting here just to gesture at the sort of problem that’s being addressed. I might still be floating well to the side of what you’d like to discuss – we’ll see how we go.

I have to go straight from hitting post into a meeting for the rest of the day, so no proofing of this – hopefully that won’t confuse things even more than they might otherwise have been. ;-)

Take care…

I’m not sure that the distinction between “hard necessity” and more probabilistic forms of laws is an important one. Quantum mechanics deals with irrecucibly probabilistic laws, but it’s still a mechanics, a system of external necessity. There are (probabilistic) laws regarding how the “wavicles” will behave, and the wavicles operate in strict conformity to them (with all variance being due to sheer randomness in how the waveforms collapse, which randomness is itself part of the laws). The wavicles themselves do not influence the laws. This sort of model is clearly inadequate when discussing things like sociological or economic phenomena; geisteswissenschaftlich “laws” are related “symbiotically” to the people whose doings they describe, and vary with changes in time, place, etc just as people do.

I can sympathize when it comes to the problem of older authors using terms we are nowadays more squeamish about. Hegel too speaks of “laws” and of “necessity” when discussing civil society, though the context makes it clear that he’s concerned with an entirely normative, contingent sort of law & necessity. (This is, of course, not the only place in which Hegel’s choice of words is less than ideal for contemporary purposes, and the problem is one generally confronted when dealing with historical figures.)

I’m not sure why the sorts of “necessities” Marx is concerned with wouldn’t be normative ones. I’m also not sure what to make of your denial that agents are not “(individually or collectively) intending” to bring them about. There are all sorts of interesting phenomena that come into view when you get a lot of different agents all acting around & with one another, and these seem to be the sort of thing Marx is concerned with. That they might come about needn’t have been anyone’s intention, nor need they take the form of an explicit rule (a convention) once they are brought to light, but they are still inexpressible without resort to normative vocabulary, including both de re and de dicto attributions of intentions to agents.

As an example, consider a simple economic situation: Alvin can either produce widgets at a rate of 30 per day and geegaws at a rate of 10 per day, or geegaws at a rate of 100 per day and widgets at a rate of 2 per day. Betty can either produce widgets at a rate of 50 per day and geegaws at a rate of 2 per day, or geegaws at a rate of 40 per day and widgets at a rate of 10 per day. Suppose widgets and geegaws are useless by themselves; only a pair of a widget and a geegaw is worth anything. Suppose that the more of these pairings either party has, the happier they are, and neither one cares a lick about how happy the other one is — suppose each one’s only de re intention is to make him/herself happy. It is easy to show that each will best satisfy their intention by having Alvin produce 100 geegaws per day and having Betty produce 50 widgets per day, and then exchanging widgets for geegaws so that both parties end up with 26 widget/geegaw pairs per day, which is 16 more pairs than either could produce on their own.

By exchanging their products, Alvin & Betty both act in such a way as to maximize the happiness of both of them, though neither intended to make the other happy. And neither did they make each other happy through an explicit convention — that there was greater mutual happiness in the end result of the transaction than would have been possible without it is something that was not established by a convention, nor was it intended by either party; it is a matter of indifference to both parties, and so if there was any such convention neither would have any reason to pay attention to it. Nor is this fact expressible without reference to the normative statuses of Alvin & Betty; that trade was in their mutual interest is something which was entirely dependent on Alvin & Betty having the desires etc. which they had. If they had not desired widget/geegaw pairings, but were equally satisfied with both individual widgets and individual geegaws, then trade would not have been in the interest of both of them; Alvin’s happiness would be maximized by simply holding on to his 102 products, and he would have no incentive to interact with Betty; Alvin would not have acted so as to increase Betty’s happiness, nor Betty Alvin’s.

So “the happiness of both was increased by the pursuit of the self-interest of each” was true without being intended, without being a convention, without being independent of the agents’ particular normative statuses, and without there being any element of randomness or probability involved. This isn’t a trivial result, either, since it might have prima facie seemed plausible that for either party to increase the happiness of both of them, they would either have to have intended to do this, or at least not intended solely to increase their own happiness; it might have sounded plausible that pursuit of my self-interest was necessarily opposed to “the common good”. I think this sort of finding is irreducibly normative, non-lawlike, non-random, is irreducible to any individual’s psychological states, and is contingent on what is the case in many other contingent matters from which it can often be derived (thus giving it a sort of contingent necessity, []). The geisteswissenschaften can thus seem really weird if your model for “scientific knowledge” is something like Newton’s physics, Darwin’s biology, mechanistic psychology, or the other modern paradigms of “Topics we have firmly established our knowledge on”.

I think talk of “emergence” refers to an area that can be a locus of philosophical confusion, but does nothing to clarify the matter. What “emerges” seems like it has to have come from somewhere, or else it came from nowhere. But surely this is a confused idiom; an “emergent phenomena” is not like a jack-in-the-box. Certain vocabularies are not usefully employed, and then they become useful to take up; this is all there is to such topics as “the emergence of the mental from the biological”. Trying to treat “emergence” as an ontological matter is like trying to carry a cello by the strings — it’s not good for the instrument, and you won’t be able to get a good grip.

I’ve rambled on a bit, but this seemed like the most direct way to approach the topic. As I said, I’ve hardly read any Marx, so I’m having to come at the issue sideways. I suspect that Marx (on your reading, at least) sees that certain approaches to “the study of man” are blind alleys, but I’m not yet sure what his alternative approach amounts to.

My impulse is to say we might need to spend a bit of time talking back and forth to figure out whether we have the same sort of problem in mind. I’ll take a stab – caveat that it is very late here, and so my judgement about how to approach your question might not be the sharpest at this exact moment… ;-)

Marx is trying to talk about unintentional order – about what might in contemporary terms be called a problem of emergence. The vocabulary he has at his disposal for expressing this, unfortunately, is the vocabulary of “law”. I’ve written occasionally before about how the terminology of “law”, for Marx, doesn’t mean some sort of hard necessity – he’s gesturing at something more like a probabilistic tendency, an unintentional regularity that becomes manifest in social practice, even though social actors are not (individually or collectively) intending to bring this specific tendency about. This sort of “law” doesn’t quite occupy the space of causal necessity – at least as this is ordinarily conceived – since it’s constituted (Marx would argue) contingently (transformably) in social practice – but it also doesn’t occupy the space of a normative law, as it isn’t constituted intersubjectively. Marx is trying to address the question of why long-term historical patterns of certain sorts might arise, if these are not due to “natural” laws, and if they are also not due to overt social convention.

One implication of his argument, I would think, is that the intuitive dichotomy between natural law and social norm misses a third possibility – a possibility he thinks is particularly important to thematise in order to grasp the reproduction of capital. Reflexively, he would also want to explain why it is tempting to see natural law vs. social norm as the available options for thematising regularity – and why it might be more difficult to think “emergent” regularities…

In the passage above, I was using the vocabulary of “law” because Marx uses this vocabulary in the passages I’m summarising – in other contexts, moving less quickly through this argument, I would spend more time translating Marx’s vocabulary into more contemporary terms (apologies: this series of posts that I classify under the “Marxes” category are sort of notes to myself, and therefore tend to shorthand a great deal – it’s not ideal for public posting, but the discussions that come up are still useful for me). The quick summary above was just gesturing at the peculiar sort of critique Marx offers of, for lack of a better term, synchronic empiricism: Capital returns over and over again to the point that certain phenomena cannot be seen if you look at an object either as that object is frozen at a certain point in time, or as it stands isolated from various sorts of practical relationships. Readings of Marx that flatten categories like “value” into categories of market exchange are often missing this dimension of his argument, and are thinking he is trying to talk about a very different sort of abstraction than I think he’s trying to talk about with these specific categories. So, with someone like Lukács, Marx’s argument is interpreted as a critique of the ways in which the qualitative sensuous diversity of goods comes to be flattened into a quantitative measure: my point was that Marx certainly does discuss this, but the category of “value” is attempting to grasp something else.

Apologies if this is really unclear or doesn’t hit your question: I’ve been up for close to 24 hours :-) – and have been running for much of that time, so this may not be an ideal state in which to respond… ;-)

I ask because it’s easy to forget that there are non-random non-lawlike causal relations between events (such as when I open the fridge because I’m thirsty), and it would be interesting if Marx forgot this, like so many other philosophers have. I don’t know that anything interesting would follow from it, necessarily, but I’d find it interesting in and for itself.

That it might lead to interesting problems somewhere or other is something I suspect because of Davidsonian/McDowellian concerns. If Marx held reasons and causes apart, this might be a serious problem with his thought. I suspect this might be the case, not having read much of Marx at all, because I’m inclined to think that economic relations develop neither randomly nor by law – they are a normative matter, part of the “space of reasons”. An actor’s beliefs and desires include beliefs about objects (and their value) and desires to perform transactions & transformations of various sorts, etc., and I’d've thought that economics was concerned with (generally rarefied) subsets of these and what they entail about how agents interact with one another, with non-agental objects, etc. And since the space of reasons is distinct from the “space of laws” (what Sellars called the “space of nature”), so too would economics be (ironically) non-nomic. Any “law of economics” would be a “law” in the sense that “If you go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line, the Sicilian will win” would be an ironclad law, if true outside of fairy tales.

I took this to be the manner in which Hegel developed from the “mere” individual subjects of the family to the relations of civil society & the state, and why the rational phenomena brought to light by “political economy” at first seem “incredible, since everything seems to depend on the arbitrary will of the individual” (PoR ss189). Individuals are free to do as they please, and are struck by arbitrary, contingent wants, and so it could seem impossible that there is anything reasonable/universal/necessary in their actions — but it isn’t so. Even this subjective willing is a moment of Absolute Spirit; man’s satisfactions of his natural desires are themselves something geistisch and not (merely) natural. Note that in the “system of needs” we are concerned with what is worthwhile or not — as an example, see the addition to 192: “To this extant, everything particular takes on a social character; in the manner of dress and times of meals, there are social conventions which one must accept, for in such matters, it is not worth the trouble to seek to display one’s own insight, and it is wisest to act as others do.” Surely there are no laws concerning when I eat or what I wear, and equally surely this is not a random matter. Even the necessity spoken of here (”one must”) is transparently non-lawlike — “one must” dine at the same time as others because it’s hard to find a good restaurant that’s open at 4 AM. And naturally there’s nothing lawlike about the convention, either; if others in society begin to dine and accommodate dining at 4 AM, then dining at 4 AM becomes a perfectly viable option. All of this can be comprehended rationally, but this is not a matter of discerning laws of any sort; one comes to understand the wisdom in “acting as others do” by grasping that this is the most convenient way to achieve one’s particular ends.

This has all been irrelevant side-talk if “lawlike” was merely meant to clarify “non-random”. In that case, since no particular laws have actually been mentioned, it would be presumptuous of me in the extreme to grouse about treating as “laws” what is non-nomic, since the “laws” in question might merely be of the “Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line” sense.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve read Bertell Ollman. He insisted on the relationality of Marx’s categories. But in general I was trained by a series of anti-positivists who always focused on interaction, context, and interpretation.

I assume that by impersonal, unintentional processes you mean something like ’structures’; perhaps even what Bourdieu called ’structured structuring structures’. Or in the full sense of dynamic interactivity, ‘habitus’. We make the world but not in conditions of our own choosing, and all that. I don’t mean to complicate your thought process here, just to indicate that your analysis is for me, at least, flowing into some broader conceptual rivers.

And by “pervasive forms of misrecognition” I’m supposing you’re linking back in part to the youthful feuerbachian critique of religion? Is ‘value’ something like ‘God’ in being a way we alienate our own power into an apparently-external agency? So in each case the possibility that’s opened up is that we could reclaim that power consciously.

This for me brings in Durkheim as the middle term between Marx and Bourdieu (Lukacs just looks like a mistake from this perspective). _The Elementary Forms of Religious Life_ elaborates this argument on the misrecognition of contingent social creations, enactments, performances (rituals) as ’signs’ of something transcendant.

Thanks N!