Hum Stud DOI 10.1007/s10746-016-9411-7 THEORETICAL/PHILOSOPHICAL PAPER
Marx and Paci on the Question of Appearances (Or, Reading Capital as a Phenomenology) Christopher Duarte Araujo1
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract The following essay argues that Marx’s method of critique, conception of science, and mode of presentation in Capital are all phenomenological in the sense first articulated by Enzo Paci in The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man. In Capital, Marx places the phenomenological problem of appearances at the centre of his criticism of political economy. His analysis begins with the way in which things typically present themselves in a capitalist society, but this is merely the starting point for a systematic critique which tries to reveal the innerconnections and exploitative social relations hidden beneath those estranged outward appearances. Marx presumed that this phenomenological approach was the most appropriate method for demystifying the ‘naturalized’ semblance of the capitalist economy. According to Paci’s reading of Capital, the task of Marxian critique is to show these superficial appearances for what they really are: i.e., reflections of the reified reality of modern life. Keywords Enzo Paci Karl Marx Phenomenology Appearances Reification The reform of consciousness consists only…in analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself. —Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge
& Christopher Duarte Araujo
[email protected] 1
York University, 34 McKelvey Drive, Thornhill, ON L3T 5X7, Canada
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Introduction: Marx, Phenomenology, and the Problem of Appearances While often neglected nowadays, the question of the connection between Marx and phenomenology once commanded considerable attention from philosophers such as Marcuse, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Kosik. They recognized that the ‘crisis’ of twentieth century Marxism was also one of method, and that only a more phenomenological form could hope to resolve it. As such, they brought the categories, concepts, and themes of phenomenology to bear upon the problems of Marxism. Yet, although Phenomenological Marxists reconsidered Marxism phenomenologically, far less effort was expended in exploring the explicitly phenomenological dimensions of Marx’s own thought. This synthesis between phenomenology and Marxism remained artificial insofar as it failed to recognize these preexisting elements within Marx’s writings. Phenomenology does not need to be introduced into Marxian thinking entirely from without because it also grows organically out of Marx’s critique. Enzo Paci, an Italian Marxist who studied under the Husserlian phenomenologist Antonio Banfi, deserves renewed attention in contemporary English-language scholarship precisely because he was the first to recognize the directly phenomenological character of Marx’s writings. Although underappreciated today, Paci’s insightful work in The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man ought to be regarded as the fundamental starting-point in secondary literature for any discussion of Marx as a phenomenologist. Building upon the original (but insufficiently acknowledged) contributions of Paci, this paper will defend the interpretative position that Marx’s conception of science, mode of presentation, and method of critique exhibit all of the necessary elements of a phenomenology. The phenomenological attitude that Paci identifies in Marx’s writings underpins his whole criticism of alienation, reification, and fetishism, denaturalization of the abstract categories of political economy, and demystification of the historical coming-into-being of capitalist society. In this essay, I will suggest that Marx’s critique of political economy in Capital should therefore be re-read as a sort of phenomenology. We will find that, right from the outset of the text, he situates what is essentially a phenomenological question of ‘appearances’ at the centre of his criticism of capitalism and political economy. By starting out from this question of appearances, he revived one of the perennial problems of all philosophy, classical and modern. From Zeno, Democritus, and Pyrrho to Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel, philosophy has always found it necessary to return anew to the phenomenological problem of the relationship between appearance and reality, consciousness and existence. If, as Husserl (1970) defined it, phenomenology is just the careful consideration of the ‘‘correlation’’ between the ‘‘appearance and that which appears,’’ as well as of the relationship between the ‘‘appearance of a thing in its actual and possible alteration[s],’’ then Marx’s mode of presentation and method of critique are most certainly ‘phenomenological’. Drawing upon elements of the interpretative framework first developed by Enzo Paci, this paper demonstrates that Marx’s conception of science and critique of political economy are grounded in a phenomenological approach oriented toward
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trying to demystify and denaturalize the fetishized appearances of capitalism. The ‘‘tension guiding the entire analysis,’’ as Paci (1972) insists of Marx’s mode of presentation in Capital, is the ‘‘search for what is hidden beyond the appearances’’. Hence, while Marx’s critique of political economy begins from the initial semblance of modern life, we will discover that, through the course of Capital, he attempts to reveal that this is an estranged outlook which corresponds exclusively with the reified reality of capitalist society. These upside-down appearances reflect the topsy turvy world of the capitalist mode of production, where the subject and predicate really have undergone a fantastic reversal—what Paci, following Marx, refers to as the ‘real inversion’ of the labour process. The productive powers of social labour continually subsumed by capital assume more and more an alien form vis-a-vis the individual workers whose powers they are. Living labour comes to confront its own previously objectified labour as an external objectivity. But these ossified and naturalized appearances, which were represented by political economy as if they belonged to the aeterno modo of human social life, are products of history for Marx, not nature. By disclosing the historically constructed character of social reality, and by working to denaturalize the consciousness of that reality, Marx’s phenomenological critique seeks to dissolve its initially opaque semblances so as to allow the exploitative social relations concealed beneath them to appear as what they really are.
Appearances in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy and Conception of Science Capital takes up this epistemological problem of appearances as the very starting point for its critique of political economy. The first chapter opens with these words: the ‘‘wealth of societies in which a capitalistic mode of production prevails’’ initially ‘‘appears as’’ just an ‘‘immense collection of commodities’’. Since the ‘‘commodity appears as the elementary form of wealth’’ in a capitalist society, Marx’s ‘‘investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity’’ (1990). To be clear, he is dealing here not just with the cell-form of the capitalist economy, but with its initial appearance before an unreflective consciousness. Now, it is certainly true that the ‘‘commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing’’. And insofar as it is a use-value, whose qualities satisfy needs/wants of this or that sort, there is in fact ‘‘nothing mysterious about it’’ (Marx 1990). But this simply means for Marx that the commodity-form remains, at this introductory stage of the presentation, a ‘‘social hieroglyphic’’ whose essential ‘‘secret’’ still needs to be ‘‘decipher[ed]’’ through continued critique and sustained analysis (1990). Marx seems to have been well aware here of the fundamental premise of all phenomenology: namely, that not everything appears in the initial appearance of things. In fact, he tells us that a more critical ‘‘analysis’’ of the commodity-form ‘‘brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’’ (1990). As Enzo Paci explains, Marx’s Capital, when understood as a kritik of political economy, assumes the form of a phenomenological investigation right from the outset. ‘‘Marx wants to decipher the
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hieroglyphic, beginning with the ‘mystery’ of the fetishism of commodities. The critique of economics aims at discovering what is hidden behind the enigmatic character of the fetishism of commodities’’ (Paci 1972). Hence, Marx’s mode of presentation in Capital begins with the immediate appearance of capitalist society, namely, with the initial consciousness of its most elementary form (the commodityform), but this starting point is merely the point of departure for a much more systematic analysis of what he sees as the ‘bourgeois’ consciousness of political economy and the estranged everyday experience of the wage-worker. With the first steps in this inquiry, the simple commodity-form suddenly splits apart and comes to ‘‘appear to us as a two-sided entity’’—that is, as both use- and exchange-value. And, when we come to ‘‘consider the matter more closely, it will appear that the labour which is contained in the commodity is two-sided also’’ (Marx 1976). The dualism of the commodity—on the one hand, its properties as a use-value in the metabolic intercourse with nature, and, on the other, its mysterious non-sensuous social substance as a bearer of exchange-value—is determined by the equally dual character of the wage-labour embodied or objectified in it. Hence, only after having peeled back layer after layer of these more or less superficial appearances can Marx move on to begin to reveal that the commodity is therefore no simple thing, as it indeed initially appeared to be, but, rather, that it is an enigmatic compound form which conceals an exploitative relationship. Paci is justified in arguing that this method of immanent critique employed by Marx is part of an attempt to break down the basic fetishism surrounding the thingified appearance of the commodity (and, later in the text, the mystifications surrounding money, interest, rent, surplus-value, capital, etc.). Marx tries to slowly unravel these estranged appearances in order to show what they actually amount to according to him: namely, reflections of the reified reality of capitalist society, of a society where relations really are reduced to things. This is the sense in which Capital, as a phenomenological Kritik of the capitalist economy, is to be understood as a ‘science’ (Wissenschaft). When Marx afforded a ‘scientific’ status to Capital, he did so not in the positivistic sense, but in the distinctly Hegelian spirit of the expression. Hegel (2001) had lectured of how it was the ‘‘business of science’’ to gradually reveal the implicit ‘‘work of the reason,’’ which is already concealed within ‘‘the thing, to consciousness’’. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘Sense-Certainty,’ the form of consciousness with which Hegel begins his presentation, is shown to be an unreflective mode of thought. The higher stage which organically supersedes it, ‘Perception,’ proves to be an inadequate and one-sided sublation. Hegel’s unfolding presentation progresses in this manner until at last readers arrive at the universal form of consciousness, the only form congruent with ‘Absolute Knowing’. All of these different ‘‘moments’’ of development therefore ‘‘appear’’ (in the Phenomenology) as ‘‘shapes of consciousness’’ and phenomenal grades of existence. The ‘‘Science of this pathway’’—the Phenomenology of Spirit itself—can be nothing other than the ‘‘Science of the experience which consciousness goes through’’ (Hegel 1977). Marx’s project in Capital is similar in this specific respect to Hegel’s Phenomenology. It is a scientific form of critique inasmuch as it constitutes itself as a ‘science of experience’—but, in this case, the estranged experience of everyday
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life in a capitalist society. Marx methodically tries to unveil, step by step, what he regards as the superficial layers of appearance, revealing the essential innerconnections which lie hidden beneath their false semblances. In the ‘Preface’ to the French Edition of Capital, he informs his French audience, unfamiliar with this dialectical mode of presentation inherited from Hegel, that the ‘‘method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous’’. He forewarns that readers will be ‘‘unable to move on at once’’—a ‘‘disadvantage’’ which could not be ‘‘overcome’’ by him because there is ‘‘no royal road to science’’ (Marx 1991). In other words, the difficulty of Marx’s mode of presentation and method of critique— a difficulty which he felt could not be avoided, and which we cannot avoid if we are to understand him—stems from its ‘scientific’ character in this distinctly Hegelian sense of the term. In The Function of the Sciences, Paci (1972) goes further by suggesting that Marx’s method of immanent critique is effectively ‘scientific’ not only in this Hegelian sense, but also in the sense later elaborated by Husserl. To be sure, it would anachronistic to conflate Hegelian philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology. Neither should we collapse their methodologies into Marx’s. There are ontological, historical, and political dimensions to Hegel’s system, and to Marx’s, which are largely absent from Husserl’s epistemological project (albeit not entirely, especially in later works such as the Crisis and Vienna Lecture). Yet, notwithstanding the many points of distinction, there are also definite points of contact between the Hegelian and Husserlian methods. These parallels allow us to more adequately appreciate, on the one hand, the phenomenological character of Marx’s method directly appropriated from Hegel, and, on the other, Paci’s ‘Husserlian’ reading of Capital as a phenomenology. Like the Phenomenology of Spirit, Husserlian phenomenology also claims to be a ‘science’ of the forms of consciousness and structures of human experience. The Sense-Certainty with which Hegel begins the Phenomenology of Spirit is superseded by Perception, Perception by the Understanding, and so on. All of the configurations of consciousness, or successive ‘shapes of spirit,’ are shed one by one as the movement in its totality progresses toward Absolute Knowledge. Husserl’s procedure, while arguably less schematic than Hegel’s, nonetheless also refers us to a transition from the false certainty of an unreflective ‘‘natural-attitude’’ to apodictic truth (Husserl 1970). Through the self-critical act which he defines as the phenomenological reduction, or epoche´, Husserl (1970) supposed that we could suspend and bracket our own unreflective experience of the world, subjecting the prejudices of that ‘‘natural-attitude’’ to scientific scrutiny. Just as Marx’s mode of presentation and method of critique in Capital cannot be fully appreciated without reference to Hegel, Paci’s interpretation of Marx’s Capital as a phenomenology cannot be fully understood without reference to these Husserlian ideas. The points of comparison between the Hegelian and Husserlian methods also allow us to grasp why Paci treats Marx as a ‘phenomenologist’ in both senses of the term (Paci 1972). It explains why he insists that Marx’s conception of ‘science’ is not positivistic, but dialectical and phenomenological (Paci 1972). The critique of political economy does not claim to assume the form of a ‘‘natural
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science,’’ nor did Marx believe that economics was a discipline suitable to the ‘‘methods of any given natural science’’ (Paci 1972). Such an epistemological framework is foreign to the sort of phenomenological investigation which Marx undertakes in Capital. Instead, we have seen that his ‘‘analysis’’ of capitalism ‘‘begin[s]’’ with its ‘‘inverted’’ appearances, but, step by step, it tries to create the ‘‘awareness that the capitalist situation is distorted’’. It seeks to ‘‘discover and reveal…that which is implicit,’’ i.e., what remains ‘‘covered and hidden’’ by the fetishism of commodities and reification of social relations (Paci 1972). The analysis proves to be scientific in a phenomenological sense if it ‘‘lead[s] appearance back to reality and reveal[s] the real situation’’ (Paci 1972). In other words, Paci understands Marx’s Capital as a phenomenological critique of the superficial appearances of the capitalist economy, and of the ‘natural-attitude’ assumed by the estranged experience of that society. Marx, writes Paci (1972), starts from the way things actually appear from the capitalist viewpoint, which [through critique] yields the reality of capitalist society and the endured alienation. Marx begins his analyses with actual society and with the recognition that exchange relations are given as the fetishism of commodities. This means that the relations of production…[are studied by beginning with the way they] appear typically…[so as to discover] not what they claim to be, but…what they are behind the ideologies and appearances, behind their ‘phenomenal forms’.
Outward Appearances and Innerconnections in Marx’s Critique of Crude Materialism The previous section of the paper has defended the interpretative position that the mode of presentation to Marx’s critique of political economy in Capital follows the same basic procedure laid out in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Each of the false forms of appearance are said to veil the essential innerconnections which, through critique, organically leads the analysis to the next stage in the presentation. This is why, as Paci claims, Marx begins with the immediate consciousness and initial experience of the cell-form of the capitalist economy— the commodity—but gradually tries to disclose the exploitative social relation obscured by its thingified semblance. For Marx, science cannot remained satisfied with analyzing these surface appearances divorced from such hidden innerconnections. Rather, critique must strip these phenomenal forms of their mere externality, and grasp the inner totality of concealed relations which produce such mystifications in the first place. Appealing to Hegel’s conception of ‘science’ and doctrine of internal relations in Capital, Marx (1991) claimed that if the ‘‘form of [the] appearance of things’’ was in every case immediately identical with their ‘‘essence’’—that is, if all the ‘‘inner connections,’’ instead of ‘‘remain[ing] hidden,’’ were plainly revealed to consciousness—then ‘‘science would be superfluous’’. He had elaborated this point
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in an earlier letter to Engels when he noted that the ‘‘vulgar economist’s way of looking at things stems, namely, from the fact that it is only the direct form of manifestation of relations that is reflected in their brains and not their inner connection. Incidentally, if the latter were the case what need would there be of science?’’ (1990). Marx (1989) also tells us elsewhere that the ‘‘vulgar conceptions’’ entertained by these crude materialists is ‘‘very different from the urge of political economists like the Physiocrats, Adam Smith and Ricardo,’’ since the latter tried to get to the bottom of things and ‘‘grasp the inner connection of the phenomena’’. Consider, in this light, Marx’s remarks to Kugelmann on the vulgarization of the ‘science’ of economics after Smith and Ricardo. Were such a discipline truly constituted as a systematic science, he believed it would have to be concerned with illustrating that the phenomenal forms of value and the everyday experience of exchange relations are by no means immediately identical with the intrinsic laws of value, as the latter only manifest themselves through the blind necessity of the marketplace. [The] vulgar economist has not the faintest idea that the actual everyday exchange relations can not be directly identical with the magnitudes of value. The essence of bourgeois society consists precisely in this, that a priori there is no conscious social regulation of production. The rational and naturally necessary asserts itself only as a blindly working average. And then the vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, as against the revelation of the inner interconnection, he proudly claims that in appearance things look different. In fact, he boasts that he holds fast to appearance, and takes it for the ultimate. Why, then, have any science at all? (Marx 1988) In the above, it is clear that Marx’s conception of science and critique of the crude materialism of certain vulgar economists is epistemologically rooted in a phenomenological analysis of the relationship between innerconnections and outward appearances, between the essence of things and their external phenomenal forms (in this case, between the phenomenal modes and underlying laws of value). Not only does this phenomenological attitude underpin his critique of the ‘vulgar’ economists, their theories of value, and the trinity of ‘fictitious’ commodities (land, labour, and capital), but it also informs for that same reason his whole criticism of the reification of social relations and fetishized character of capitalist society. The political economists’ conceptions of the form of revenue and the sources of revenue are the most fetishistic expression of the relations of capitalist production. It is their form of existence as it appears on the surface, divorced from the hidden connections and the intermediate connecting links….The distorted form in which the real inversion is expressed is naturally reproduced in the views of the agents of this mode of production. It is a kind of fiction without fantasy, a religion of the vulgar. In fact, the vulgar economists… translate the concepts, motives, etc., of the representatives of the capitalist mode of production who are held in thrall to
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this system of production and in whose consciousness only its superficial appearance is reflected. (Marx 1989) According to Marx (1998), both the consciousness of the capitalist and the consciousness of the crude economist discovers nothing but affirmation in this negativity—which should not be surprising since these are the ‘‘forms of illusion in which they move about’’. This is the ‘‘religion of the vulgar,’’ as he calls it in the above. So satisfied are they with these estranged appearances, that they find themselves completely ‘‘at home’’ in a ‘‘topsy turvy world’’ where everything is turned upside down and passes over into its opposite. This is why Marx repeatedly criticizes these sorts of economists for reducing social relations between individuals to things, while animating things themselves with a personified life of their own. As he expressed it elsewhere, the ‘‘crude materialism of the economists who regard as the natural properties of things what are social relations’’ is ‘‘just as crude an idealism, even fetishism, since it imputes social relations to things as inherent characteristics, and thus mystifies them’’ (1993). But what has really happened here, concludes Marx, is that political economy has merely ‘‘reproduced’’ in an ideological form—for example, in its treatment of the trinity of ‘fictitious’ commodities—the superficial appearances of the ‘‘real inversion’’ which takes place in the ‘‘everyday life’’ of the wage-worker. In his analysis of this trinity of fictitious commodities, Marx repeats the phenomenological approach which he took up in his earlier treatment of the fetishism of the commodity-form. The ‘‘mystery’’ of the trinity formula is one which Marx works to ‘‘bring to light and phenomenologically transform’’ (Paci 1972). Vulgar economics actually does nothing more than interpret, systematize and turn into apologetics the notions of agents trapped within bourgeois relations of production. So it should not surprise us that precisely in the estranged form of appearance of economic relations that involves these prima facie absurd and complete contradictions— and all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence— that precisely here vulgar economics feels completely at home, these relationships appearing all the more self-evident to it, the more their inner connections remain hidden….Thus it does not have the slightest suspicion that the trinity from which it proceeds…completes the mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the reification of social relations….[It is] the bewitched, distorted and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre….[It is a] false appearance and deception, this autonomization and ossification of the different social elements of wealth vis-a-vis one another, this personification of things and reification of the relations of production, this religion of everyday life…and nothing else is possible from the bourgeois standpoint….[T]he actual agents of production themselves feel completely at home in these estranged and irrational forms…for these are precisely the configurations of appearance in which they move, and with which they are daily involved. It is equally natural, therefore, that vulgar economics, which is nothing more than a didactic and more or less doctrinaire translation of the everyday notions of the actual agents of production…finds the natural basis of
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its fatuous self-importance established beyond all doubt precisely in this trinity, in which the entire innerconnection is obliterated. This formula also corresponds to the self-interest of the dominant classes, since it preaches the natural necessity and perpetual justification of their sources of income and erects this into a dogma. (Marx 1991)
The Innerconnection between the Abstractions of Political Economy and the Real Inversion This passage from the ‘Trinity Formula’ section of Volume III of Capital speaks to the fact that Marx regarded these fetishized appearances as being rooted in a real process of estrangement. These upside down appearances are a reflection, in both ordinary consciousness and in economic theory, of the ‘real inversion’ which takes place everyday between subject and predicate in the capitalist economy. In this sense, the absurd abstractions and fictions of political economy, e.g., the trinity of commodities, actually possess for Marx a certain historical objectivity and social validity, but exclusively for this topsy turvy world of capitalism. They are ‘‘only valid for this particular form of production’’ (Marx 1990). As he tells us in the below, these abstract categories are ‘‘socially valid, and therefore objective,’’ but only for historically arisen relations resting upon the exchange between capital and wage-labour (Marx 1990). However, what Marx regarded as the ‘bourgeois consciousness’ of much of economics managed to mystify this fact by treating this historically determined form of production as if it were governed by the eternal laws of nature, as if it were the aeterno modo of human society. By respecting this specific stage of production as if it were the final term of human development in history, the ‘crude’ economists invariably saw the alienation of labour as just as much an everlasting feature of life as is the objectification of labour in genere. But Marx himself argued that the abstract categories of political economy represent, precisely in the form of this ahistorical abstraction, only the hitherto most highly developed relations and universalizing forces of production. Their abstract character is itself a reflection of the abstract and homogeneous wage-labour embodied in commodities, and which, when objectified as such, necessarily confronts the worker as an alien objectivity. Here, previously objectified labour appears to be independent of and opposed to the living labour whose expression it is—capitalism is, to paraphrase Marx, the reign of the dead over the living. As Paci (1972) explains, political economy’s ‘‘abstract categories reflect an objective society,’’ and they ‘‘function as if they were concrete’’ in this specific society, precisely because the ‘‘worker really lives as if he were an abstraction’’—that is, by conceiving and treating his or her own social relations as if they were merely ‘‘physical relations’’ between lifeless things. This fetishism, writes Marx (1990), conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly. If I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen because the latter is the universal incarnation of
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abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots bring these commodities into a relation with linen, or with gold or silver (and this makes no difference here), as the universal equivalent, the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society appears to them in exactly this absurd form. The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms of this kind. They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production, i.e.[,] commodity production. In the last section of the paper, we examined how so-called ‘vulgar’ economics and the ‘bourgeois consciousness’ of political economy found itself at ease with this estrangement which occurs within the wage-labour process. Yet, Marx (1990) claimed that he was not being moralistic or polemical in his condemnation of the capitalist class and of the uncritical economists. This finds some confirmation when he insists that it is not simply the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, nor the bourgeois consciousness of crude political economy, which ‘naturalizes’ the contradictions of capitalism and reaffirms its reified reality. Marx is quite clear that the social relations between producers also turn around to confront the producers themselves as if they were natural forces belonging intrinsically to capital. The ‘‘producers’ own social movement possesses for them the form of a motion of objects under the control of which the producers lie instead of controlling the motion’’ themselves (Marx 1976). The productive power of social labour appears to the individual labourers to be transferred into the general power of capital over them. In this reification, the social relations between producers are reduced to ‘external relations’ between objects, while the objects which they produce, and the material means by which they produce them, appear personified as if they somehow had a life of their own. And, far from being a mere appearance, Marx regarded this as the essential character of the capitalist mode of production. ‘‘It appears so,’’ but, in this instance Paci (1972) insists, ‘‘this appearing becomes a reality’’. The abstract categories of political economy are, to remind the reader, socially valid and historically objective—that is, so long as we restrict our attention to a consideration of specifically capitalist relations of production. Hence, as Paci (1972) recognized, the aforementioned trinity of ‘fictitious’ commodities, although composed of ‘‘abstract categories,’’ nonetheless ‘‘functions as if it were real….[T]he abstract functions as if it were concrete, and, in spite of being abstract, it leads to serious consequences: social relations appear and function as if they were things, while they are not things….The products of labour…are personified…while they are not persons’’. For this reason, Paci (1998) argues that Marx’s critique of political economy parallels Whitehead’s criticism of the natural sciences. The ‘crisis’ of the natural sciences which both Husserl and Whitehead referred to is, for Paci, a subset of the larger crisis of capitalism that Marx identifies. As they are currently constituted, both the natural and economic sciences are founded upon the same ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’—except that with Marx, unlike Whitehead, these ‘personified abstractions’ (‘‘Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre’’) are a
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reflection of the real reification and real abstraction which occurs in the everyday life of the worker. As Paci (1972) explains of the critique of political economy in Capital, in analyzing the abstract categories of economics and upside down appearances of capitalism, Marx always returns to the real inversion which takes place in the concrete dialectic between subject and object within the production process. ‘‘Separated from the subjects, these objective conditions become autonomous and acquire a kind of subjectivity. They become personified….For the workers—subjects turned into objects—working conditions become personified as if they were subjects themselves…really become persons, while workers become things…Therefore, we have a reversal (Verkehrung) of the subject into an object’’ (Paci 1972). This reification of relations, and, from the other side of the syllogism, personification of things, speaks to the systematically self-mystifying nature of the capitalist mode of production—a mystification which, we have already read Marx allege, is merely ‘reproduced’ in the ideological assumptions of crude economic theory. Paci’s interpretation is confirmed further by Marx’s claim that these upside-down appearances correspond with a real topsy-turvy world, with an actual ‘‘twisting and inversion’’ of the subject-object dialectic as it takes place within the labour process (Marx 1993). Again, then, these ‘appearances’ are no mere ‘‘illusions,’’ no simple figments of the imagination which can just as easily be conjured away by it. The ‘‘form of existence as it appears on the surface, divorced from the hidden connections,’’ is the ideologically ‘‘distorted form’’ of the ‘‘real inversion’’ and real abstraction which takes place in the process of production everyday (Marx 1989). However, for this very same reason, Marx (1993) argued that these ‘‘estranged outward appearances’’ do not simply conceal, but may also readily reveal to rational critique that this is a ‘‘real (phenomenon)’’ and not something which occurs ‘‘merely in the imagination of the workers and the capitalists’’. Now, whether this assumption is well grounded lies beyond the immediate scope of this interpretative paper. Indeed, whether Marx’s phenomenological method, or whether phenomenology in general, can denaturalize our naive attitude toward the mystified givenness of things in a capitalist society is a problem which can only find its potential resolution in the practice itself. The possibility cannot be substantiated in a purely a priori fashion, apart from the lived experience of trying to overcome the capitalist economy, in the same way that it is impossible to learn to swim without the experience of first getting into the water. Having said that, though, my own preliminary judgment is that a plausible case can be made that both Marx and Paci seriously underestimated the extent to which subjectivity could be undermined by continued estrangement, effectively reducing the horizons of political possibility. Paci also failed to recognize that deep-seated psychological barriers to development, intensified by the conditions and culture of a capitalist society, further complicate Marx’s whole phenomenological project and, more generally, any attempt at demystification.
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It is my opinion that these dimensions of the human personality need to be more adequately accounted for in any neo-Pacist retheorization of Phenomenological Marxism. Following Marx, Paci assumed that the ‘‘reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness’’ by ‘‘explaining to it the meaning of its own actions’’. However, therein lies the rub. It begs the question of how consciousness, still ‘‘unintelligible to itself,’’ can undergo a process of transformation at all. How is it possible for the ‘‘mystical consciousness’’ to undergo an act of ‘‘awakening’’ itself ‘‘out of its dream about itself’’ (Marx 2005b)? The efficacy which Marx ascribed to his method of critique in Capital is underpinned by certain assumptions about the capacity for radical self-transformation, the significance of which can be registered in his conception of ‘revolutionary praxis’. Whether all of these assumptions are justified is therefore not simply a theoretical, but, above all else, a practical question for Phenomenological Marxism. However, as a strictly interpretative claim, Paci is quite right that, from the outset of Capital, Marx must have presupposed the capacity of critique to demystify the estranged experience of capitalist society. This can be discerned from his method of criticism, mode of presentation, and conception of science. In Capital, he attempts to undermine the estranged semblances of capitalism by disclosing the essential innerconnections—the exploitative social relation—which he sees as being concealed by the reification itself. Since he believed that the mystification which takes place here is a direct result of a real reversal between the subject and object of the production process, Marx assumed that such a method of internal critique could also disocclude these perverse appearances, unveiling the social relationships hidden behind them. As Paci (1972) explains of Capital, [c]ommodity relations appear as personal relations and personal relations appear as relations among things. What is important for Marx is to unveil what is hidden behind this false appearance, which is presented in society as a factual and insuperable reality. We must analyze this reality, since it is where, paradoxically and contradictorily, capitalist society can exist only by making the producing workers live in contradictions, which are not revealed as such. The contradictions are hidden…according to the reversal of the subject into the object. The abstractions and enigmatic paradoxes of capitalist society are abstractions that function and live as if they were reality….[If] I want to begin from things are they are, I must assume them to be real, since they actually appear as insurmountable laws. However, I must show that actually they are only apparent forms and abstractions that can be overcome….This ‘phenomenal’ existence must be investigated and rediscovered by departing from the actual abstraction that appears as reality. What is needed is a phenomenological analysis: this is what Marx performs in Capital. Commenting on this passage from The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, Smart (2013) argues of Paci’s reading that the ‘‘point of departure’’ for Marxian ‘‘analysis’’ is the ‘‘actual abstraction assuming the form of reality,’’ but which, after having traversed through the course of the presentation, is ‘‘unveil[ed]’’ by critique to have been a ‘‘false appearance’’ all along. As Paci (1972) himself repeats later in the same work, Marx’s interrogation of the
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categories of political economy ‘‘unveil[s]’’ and ‘‘leads us back to the real operations and contradictions which are hidden by the capitalist abstractions’’. As soon as these ‘‘abstract categories operating in their phenomenal forms are disoccluded’’ by the critique of reification and fetishism, Marx’s presentation of ‘‘the phenomenal is transformed into the phenomenological’’ (Paci 1972). The ‘‘analysis is phenomenological’’ because it has ‘‘brought to light what political economy as a science has hidden’’. The ‘‘same thing happens when an ideology is examined: the reality hidden beyond the ideological construction is eventually discovered,’’ which ‘‘explains why what has remained hidden was hidden in the first place’’ (Paci 1972). Paci (1972) argues that only through this sort of critique is ‘‘philosophy as ideology is negated’’; only in this way can the social ‘‘sciences’’ recover their essential ‘‘function’’ and ‘‘meaning’’ for a ‘‘new human society’’. The final aim of Marx’s critique of political economy is therefore not merely to bring into consciousness the awareness of the innerconnections between these estranged appearances and the real inversion of capitalist society, but, rather, to do away with the mode of production which gives rise to these mystifications in the first place. When understood as such a phenomenology of praxis, as part of the ‘‘constitutive praxis of a new human society,’’ the ultimate purpose of Marx’s critique is the practical abolition of capitalism’s ‘‘inherent contradictions’’—namely, via the ‘‘return of the subject’’ from reification and the ‘‘negation’’ of its previous ‘‘reversal into the object’’ (Paci 1972). In such a socialist society, no longer would the social powers of individuals appear ‘‘contraposed’’ to them as an alien and ‘‘extraneous power,’’ but, instead, Marx envisions that they would assume a ‘‘transparent’’ intersubjective appearance as the expression of their own ‘‘human relationships’’ with one another (Paci 1972). The analysis must study capitalist society and must begin with its data. Since capitalist society is inverted, the analysis is forced to follow a movement opposite to the real one….[Marx] moves from the abstract to the concrete….But the analysis is correct if it is aware of this abstraction into which it is forced….It discovers the contradictions of a capitalist society, because it discovers that the capitalist use of science, unaware that it reflects an inverted movement, is a mistaken one….He begins with the analysis of the abstract which functions as if it were concrete, and he discovers that this contradiction is transformed into a praxis which is aimed at the constitution of a society free from fetishized abstractions. (Paci 1972) As such, for Marx these alien appearances and abstract categories, when exposed to a probing phenomenological analysis and rigorous critique, really do tell us something fundamental about the relationship between the ‘‘standpoint[s] of capital and wage labour’’. He tries to disclose that the root cause of this reified reality is that living labour ‘‘appears from its own standpoint as acting…in such a way that, as it realizes itself,’’ it ‘‘simultaneously repulses this realization from itself as an alien reality’’. The ‘‘realization process is at the same time the de-realization process of [wage] labour’’ because it creates not a ‘‘being for it,’’ but a ‘‘being for others,’’ an ‘‘other-being,’’ i.e., ‘‘its own not-being or the being of its not-being—[the being] of
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capital’’ (Marx 1993). Thus, from the standpoint of the consciousness of the wagelabourer, critique reveals that the ‘‘realisation of labor appears as loss of realisation,’’ its own ‘‘objectification as loss of the object,’’ and ‘‘appropriation as estrangement, as alienation’’ (Marx 2005b). Of course, unlike some of the political economists, Marx did not represent this real inversion of subject and predicate as the everlasting or nature-given form of human social life. On the contrary, he regarded objectification and alienation to be identical only from within the narrow historical horizons of the capitalist economy. [T]his fact [of objectification] appears from the standpoint of capital not in such a way that one of the moments of social activity— objective labour— becomes the ever more powerful body of the other moment, of subjective, living labour, but rather— and this is important for wage labour— that the objective conditions of labour assume an ever more colossal independence…confront[ing] labour in more powerful portions as an alien and dominant power….The emphasis comes to be placed not on the state of being objectified, but on the state of being alienated…[because] the monstrous objective power which social labour itself erected opposite itself as one of its moments belongs not to the worker, but to the personified conditions of production, i.e., to capital….[T]his twisting and inversion is a real (phenomenon), not a merely supposed one existing merely in the imagination of the workers and the capitalists. But obviously this process of inversion is a merely historical necessity, a necessity for the development of the forces of production solely from a specific historic point of departure, or basis, but in no way an absolute necessity of production; rather, a vanishing one, and the result and the inherent purpose of this process is to suspend this basis itself, together with this form of the process. The bourgeois economists are so much cooped up within the notions belonging to a specific historic stage of social development that the necessity of the objectification of the powers of social labour appears to them as inseparable from the necessity of their alienation vis-a`-vis living labour. (Marx 1993)
Overcoming the Naturalism of the Capitalist Economy This paper has explored how the phenomenological problem of appearances figures into Marx’s concepts of alienation, reification, and fetishism, as well as into his critique of the crude materialism of ‘vulgar’ economics, including its theories of value, abstract categories, and three ‘fictitious’ commodities. The essay also briefly registered that Paci sees these ideological forms of consciousness as assuming roughly what Husserl had referred to as a ‘natural-attitude’ toward the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, Marx himself (1993) argues in several instances that the economists ‘naturalize’ economic categories which are products of social history, not nature. They eternalize conditions which find their historical confirmation only for social relations resting upon this transitory mode of existence. As Paci put it in the Phenomenological Diary (1998), phenomenology in general
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rejects all naturalism. Capital is a phenomenology which likewise resists any such ‘‘naturalization of social relations’’; social relations cannot be ‘‘reduced to naturalistic relations’’ for Marx (Paci 1972). He repudiated the naturalistic tendencies of political economy in order to recover what is hidden beneath the ossified appearances that it holdsfast to (Paci 1972, 1998). Marx explicitly sought to denaturalize and demystify such appearances through critique. In particular, Paci (1972) finds that the critique of political economy in Capital is always ‘‘on guard’’ against the sort of ‘‘naturalism’’ which tends to mystify the ‘‘fact of bourgeois society…along with its genesis,’’ and the ‘‘possibilities for changing it’’. Smart (2013) explains that, for both Marx and Paci, the task of Kritik is therefore to reach ‘‘beyond the ideologies…whose [historical] origins have been forgotten’’ so as to ‘‘reveal’’ that the ‘‘transformation of social relations into natural relations’’ is a direct result of the self-mystifying character of capital. One of the ways in which Marx tries to accomplish this task is by demonstrating that the capitalist mode of production is not the aeterno modo of the human metabolism with nature; instead, it is merely the relatively recent outcome of modern European history. As Paci (1972) expresses it, the ‘‘abstract naturalism’’ of classical political economy effectively ‘‘ignores [this] history and fails to realize that social relations are historical,’’ and that the very ‘‘categories of economics are founded on [that] real history’’. Marx wants to show, by contrast, that the ‘‘allegedly eternal scientific laws of political economy’’ are really just ‘‘historical operations’’ (Paci 1972). To be sure, Marx’s presentation proceeds from some of the same assumptions as political economy, but, in the course of his investigation, these ideological presuppositions are suspended one by one. Volume I of Capital even begins with the immediate appearances of modern society, temporarily pushing aside this historical question of the coming-into-being (and, still more, speculations about the possibility of the passing away) of the capitalist mode of production. He accepts its surface appearances as pregiven. He starts from the prima facie standpoint offered by political economy, presupposing along with it all the laws of capital and categories of classical economics. In this way, his mode of presentation and method of critique draws out the essential elements of capitalist society and examines them in their purity—that is, instead of dealing with categories, conditions, and relations which, although chronologically prior, are conceptually ‘derivative’ to the logic of capital. However, having performed this phenomenological maneuver by temporarily ‘bracketing’ the question of the historical becoming of capitalism, Volume I concludes by speaking to the historical genesis of these essential elements and, more importantly for Marx (1990), to the real possibility of their suspension in the future. This is why, in the Grundrisse, he claims that this sort of historical analysis does not simply show that the ‘‘merely historical form’’ of the so-called ‘‘natural laws of capitalist production’’ presupposes the dissolution of ‘‘earlier historical modes of production,’’ i.e., modes of precapitalist life which were governed by economic ‘laws’ all their own. In addition to this, it also shows, through the ‘‘correct grasp of the present’’ as a dialectic, that these ‘‘signs of its becoming’’ in history also ‘‘point’’ to the immanent possibility of the ‘‘suspension of the present form of production,’’ offering ‘‘foreshadowings of the future’’ and indications of a ‘‘new state of society’’ which will overcome its inherent contradictions (Marx 1993). All of this
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demonstrates that the question of ‘appearances’ plays an important role in Marx’s conception of capitalism as a stage of estrangement operating within a larger dialectic of negativity. Not surprisingly, therefore, this same question also arises in connection with his theory of class-consciousness. Indeed, Marx hoped that his own critique of political economy in Capital would contribute to the educational (Bildung) process required to develop the sort of classconsciousness able to see through all of the aforementioned mystifications, and, so, become the basis for the emergence of a new revolutionary intersubjectivity. The development of class-consciousness among workers implies the increased capacity to pierce through these false semblances. The so-called ‘natural laws’ of capitalist society, which Marx (1990) reveals to be by no means laws of nature common to every epoch in history, really are experienced as if they unfolded according to a blind and uncontrollable ‘‘process of natural history’’. Yet, these laws only appear to be part of an external process of natural necessity because, in Marx’s judgment, the present form of society is incapable of mastering the internal operations of its own economy. A higher social formation is only actualizable through a form of intersubjectivity which has already overcome, or is in the advanced stages of overcoming, this naive attitude toward the inner workings of the capitalist economy. And the ‘‘veil’’ is only fully ‘‘removed’’ in a society of ‘‘freely associated’’ individuals, whose ‘‘conscious’’ relations with one another take on a totally ‘‘transparent and rational form’’ (Marx 1990). As Paci (1972) elaborates, the current conditions are naturalized and ‘‘appear fetishized by the theory of the impossibility of overcoming capitalist contradictions’’. These ‘‘contradictions, which are not revealed as such,’’ constitute the seemingly ‘‘insurmountable laws’’ of an ‘‘insuperable reality’’ (Paci 1972). The ‘‘process of becoming-conscious of the crisis’’ of capitalism is absolutely integral to an ‘‘intentional praxis which is oriented toward the overcoming of such a crisis’’ (Paci 1972). Since this all ‘‘takes place within bourgeois society, the becomingconscious of the realities of bourgeois economics is from the beginning the discovery of the possibility of their being overcome’’ (Paci 1972). This self-critical ‘‘act of becoming-conscious leads us back to the world in which we actually live,’’ opening-up the horizons of political ‘‘possibility’’ and the praxical prospects for ‘‘actually overcoming the real endured contradictions’’ (Paci 1972). Precisely because these ‘‘phenomenal forms function as if they were real,’’ the ‘‘phenomenological analysis’’ provided by Marx’s Kritik of political economy in Capital is itself ‘‘essentially a praxis’’ of this sort, i.e., a ‘‘real negation of that which is apparent and illusory,’’ by facilitating a ‘‘return to a subject who becomes aware of the specific situation’’ in which they are embedded (Paci 1972). Because he believed that theory itself could become a practical force in the world, Marx’s ‘‘critique’’ of the estranged appearances of capitalism is an attempt to transform philosophy into a mode of ‘‘concrete praxis…aimed at the transformation of the real’’ (Paci 1972). Again, whether Marx’s assumptions about the effectiveness of his method of critique are well founded is a question which falls outside of the immediate limits of this interpretative defence. The efficacy of phenomenology to demystify the estranged appearances of the capitalist economy can only be proven in the result, in the radical act of praxis itself. However, as a purely interpretative matter, Paci’s
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reading of Marx is confirmed by the textual evidence considered in this paper. Marx presupposed the power of critique to overcome the naturalism of capitalist society. This is why, from some of his earliest works onward, he called for a ‘‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’’ (2005b). He assumed that the ‘‘critic’’ could ‘‘start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness, and, from the forms peculiar to existing reality, develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal’’ (2005b). In the critique of political economy in Capital, we have seen that he starts out from the consciousness of the immediate appearances of the commodity-form, and he goes on to try to unveil the estranged relations which lie concealed within it. This is a fundamentally ‘phenomenological’ mode of presentation and ‘scientific’ method of critique because Marx assumes that the ‘‘reform of consciousness consists only…in awakening it out of its dream about itself’’. What is needed is the ‘‘reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself’’ (Marx 2005b). In Capital, Marx worked from the same assumption that, by ruthlessly criticizing the contradictions of the capitalist economy in this phenomenological manner, he could help his readers see through the veil of mystification. Just as the coming-into-being of the ‘‘slave’s awareness’’ and ‘‘consciousness of himself’’ as an individual signals the beginning of the end to the dialectic between lord and bondsman, Marx believed that so too would the proletariat’s growing ‘‘recognition’’ and ‘‘awareness’’ of itself as a class foreshadow the impending ‘‘doom’’ of relations based upon the capitalist mode of production. The material on which it works is alien material; the instrument is likewise an alien instrument; its labour appears as a mere accessory to their substance and hence objectifies itself in things not belonging to it. Indeed, [the activity of] living labour itself appears as alien vis-a`-vis living labour capacity, whose labour it is, whose own life’s expression [Lebensa¨usserung] it is….Thus labour capacity’s own labour is as alien to it— and it really is, as regards its direction, etc.,— as are material and instrument. Which is why the product then appears to it as a combination of alien material, alien instrument and alien labour— as alien property, and why, after production, it has become poorer by the life forces expended, but otherwise begins the drudgery anew, existing as a mere subjective labour capacity separated from the conditions of its life. The recognition [Erkennung] of the products as its own, and the judgment that its separation from the conditions of its realization is improper— forcibly imposed— is an enormous [advance in] awareness [Bewusstsein], itself the product of the mode of production resting on capital, and as much the knell to its doom as, with the slave’s awareness that he cannot be the property of another, with his consciousness of himself as a person, the existence of slavery becomes a merely artificial, vegetative existence, and ceases to be able to prevail as the basis of production. (Marx 1993)
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Concluding Remarks In the course of this paper, we have seen that Marxism and Phenomenology are by no means antithetical to one another. Not only is phenomenology compatible with Marxism, but I have defended the interpretation that Marx’s own analysis of alienation, fetishism, and reification, as well as his conception of science, mode of presentation, and method of critique, are all essentially phenomenological in the manner first elaborated by Enzo Paci. Paci’s original contribution to the development of Phenomenological Marxism lies in his recognition that Marx’s critique of the so-called science of economics in Capital was itself already a phenomenology. In Capital, Marx begins from the immediate appearance of modern society. Through critique, however, he tries to reveal that this estranged outlook corresponds with, and finds its only confirmation in, the real inversion which takes place in the capitalist economy and in the wage-labour process. This becomingconscious through critique of the crisis and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production was itself a phenomenological act of praxis on Marx’s behalf—one which allowed him to think beyond the narrow horizons and occlusive limits of such relations. Resolving the contemporary crisis within twenty-first century Marxian thinking requires revitalizing the phenomenological spirit of Marx’s own writings. Both the recovery and the rethinking of the meaning of ‘Marxism’ requires that we therefore return, along with Marx, to one of the perennial questions of all philosophy: namely, the question of appearances. Instead of finding itself ‘at home’ in this estranged world of appearances, critique must strive to unmask the innerconnections and the real inversions that give rise to the fantastic fetishism in which social relations appear to be thingified, while the things themselves seem to be endowed with relations all their own. As such, what is required is a method of critique capable of ‘‘analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself’’. What is required, in other words, is a Marxism that is phenomenological in form, and a phenomenology that is Marxist in content.
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Marx and Paci on the Question of Appearances… Marx, K. (1991). Capital: A critique of political economy (Vol. III) (D. Fernbach, Trans.). London: Penguin Books. Marx, K. (1993). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (M. Nicolaus, Trans.). London: Penguin Publishers. Marx, K. (1998). Capital: A critique of political economy, Vol. III. In E. Untermann (Ed.), Marx and Engels: Collected works (Vol. 37, pp. 827–897). New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (2005a). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. In Jack Cohen, et al. (Eds.), Marx and Engels: Collected works (Vol. 3, pp. 229–346). New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (2005b). Letters from the Deutsch-Franzo¨sische Jahrbu¨cher. In Jack Cohen, et al. (Eds.), Marx and Engels: Collected works (Vol. 3, pp. 133–145). New York: International Publishers. Paci, E. (1972). The function of the sciences and the meaning of man (P. Piccone & J. Hansen, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Paci, E. (1998). Phenomenological diary (L. Bianchi, Trans.). Bompiani I Satelliti. http://www.yorku.ca/ lbianchi/paci/diary_ver_02.html. Accessed July 26, 2015. Smart, Barry. (2013). Sociology, phenomenology and Marxian analysis: A critical discussion of the theory and practice of a science of society. New York: Routledge.
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