Yes, the structure of rational argumentation resembles that of a trial. Yes, holding people accountable in the course of an argument is akin to ‘policing’, just as punishing them through the imposition of detrimental normative statuses is akin, in a limited sense, to punishment in the form of physical violence. There is nothing unusual about this analogy: both the legal system and the police system are ostensibly ways of holding people accountable for responsibilities they have freely undertaken, and of penalizing refusal of such accountability.

In reality, of course, both of these systems have been subject throughout history to such a massive degree of manipulation and abuse at the hands of powerful minorities within society that it is understandable why one would be wary of tendencies to idealize and celebrate them. However, there is a big difference between idealizing an existing ‘justice’ system and recognizing the ideal of justice in terms of which such systems should themselves be held accountable. However corrupt such systems may in fact be (and whether this corruption is systemic or merely deviatory), we can only intelligibly describe them as ‘corrupt’ if we presuppose an ideal to which they should be striving and in terms of which they should be measured. There is, in principle, such a thing as a good legal system and a good police force, even if we have rarely, if ever, seen such things in reality.

Not every exercise of power is an abuse of power; there are justified exercises of power. Not every demand that one justifies oneself is the demand of a malevolent and unreasonable inquisitor. I understand why one might experience such demands as oppressive, in cases in which satisfying this demand would require one admit the untenability of one’s own position. This is, in a very distant way, not unlike facing the threat of bodily dismemberment. However, you aren’t actually be oppressed, both because it won’t actually hurt you to admit you were wrong, and because the rules you have violated are not being imposed upon you heteronomously, but are rules you freely accept and agree to play by insofar as you are engaged in a discourse – this goes as much for the regionally specific rules of particular discourses, and the fundamental rules defining any discourse as a discourse, i.e. the fundamental norms of rationality.

It is, ultimately, rather cowardly to ignore an argument in favor of comparing an interlocutor to an inquisitor. Just because many in the past have abused others in the guise of upholding the law does not mean rules should not be enforced, justification should not be demanded, or judgments should not be made. And it is even more cowardly to paint your interlocutor as some sort of pervert for desiring that these functions be fulfilled. Whether or not one’s motives for making a claim are secretly obscene has no bearing on whether that claim is correct.

It might be comforting to exempt oneself from an argument by painting your interlocutor in a negative light because he wants to argue. (!) Who would want to engage with such a judgmental, oppressive, power-hungry sadist? Why can’t that unsavory character understand that we should all be free to express ourselves without having to worry about being judged, or forced to hold ourselves to standards imposed by particularly close-minded and self-important, ethnocentric and condescending others? Quit being so negative!

This may be easy, but sometimes its better to do the hard thing. Sometimes, it is better to bracket considerations of what sort of person your interlocutor might be and just respond to the argument. There is nothing noble about dodging one’s responsibility to give reasons for one’s claims by implying that requests for such reasons are inherently vicious. No one wants to see you tied to the rack, although they certainly do want you to part ways with theoretical commitments that are undeserving of endorsement. Not because they want to see anyone suffer, but because it is the right thing to do, and because doing the right thing will allow all of us to thrive as collaborators in a theoretical community.

Before beginning the substantive legwork announced in the last post, I want to clear something up. I complained about the lack of attention to clarity and rigor in my philosophical work up to this point. While I certainly take responsibility for my immature disregard of these ideals, it would be hard to argue that the canonical figures of Continental philosophy regard them very highly. At best, one can try to claim that some of these figures are rigorous ‘in their own way’, an expression that barely disguises an old fashioned bait-and-switch. Even worse are attempts to devalue these ideals by claiming their very definitions are contestable, or that they are simply rhetorical props masking oppressive, even racist or sexist or otherwise elitist power-plays. Some even go so far as to defend opaque, muddled and ‘fuzzy’ thinking as possessing valuable or even superior methodological resources.

None of these desperate and defensive tactics cuts the mustard. There is nothing mysterious or oppressive about what such argumentative clarity consists in. Of course, no favors are done to champions of such clarity by the “philosophically unilluminating and pedagogically damaging cartesian picture of the achievement of understanding as the turning on of some inner light, which permits one then to see clearly.” Clarity is not that of one’s unabashed access to the Truth, as in some sort of ecstatic mystical communion. It is not a clarity of vision, but clarity of reasoning. Pardon me for quoting Brandom at length, as he is brilliant in marking this difference:

We professors tell our students that it is important to think and write clearly. No doubt it is. But this can be frustrating advice to receive. After all, presumably no students think that fuzzy thinking and fuzzy writing are better than the alternative. [! - RK] The hard thing is to tell the difference. What, exactly, is one supposed to do in order to think or write more clearly? Thinking about meaning and understanding in terms of inference provides some more definite guidance in this area. Thinking clearly is a matter of knowing, for each claim that you make, what else you are committing yourself to by making it, what you are ruling out, and what would be evidence for or against it. You can test the clarity of your thinking by rehearsing sample inferences, so as to test your practical mastery of the inferential vicinity of your thoughts. Of course, you may be mistaken about what really does follow from your claims. But that is just a mistake. So your claim, your mistaken thought is at least clear. And writing clearly is committing yourself to by the claims you make, what you would take to be evidence for or against them, what follows from them, and what they preclude. And once again, this is something you can check for yourself when writing, by asking yourself, for each important consequence you take to follow from one of your claims, how your reader is supposed to know that you take it to be a consequence: what clues have you given to that effect?

This is immensely valuable advice, advice that I wish I’d received (or really, that I wish I’d been open to receiving) a long time ago. This sense of clarity of writing as a clear grasp of the inferential moves one is making with the claims one makes, this is the ideal to which I now aspire in my own writing. Hopefully, in the coming posts, I will do this commitment justice.

[quotes from Brandom, Reason in Philosophy pp. 172-3]

Update: Pete Wolfendale has posted a brief reply to this post, complimenting and expanding on my thoughts here.

Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that I had taken a wrong turn in my philosophical education. I had become deeply mired in the most obscure works of the ‘Continental’ tradition — those of Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, Lacan, and Laruelle — works that, despite their merits, did little to abate the tradition’s bad reputation for lack of argumentative clarity and rigor. I had little concern for argument, preferring to conceive of philosophy more along the lines of fictional world-building. My attitude was premised on the presumption that philosophers need not persuade anyone that such-and-such is really the case, and rather should only imagine possible ways of understanding the world without regard for their validity, if not necessarily for their utility. This is not to say that I never made arguments, even somewhat compelling ones at times, but that I was not explicitly aware of when or how I was doing so. I certainly didn’t believe that I ought to be making them, nor that I ought to have an explicit understanding of the practice of argumentation.

As a result, I cannot look back very proudly on the work I produced as an undergraduate or a masters student. There is some good and some bad, and certainly lots of vague and underdeveloped. For this I do not blame the philosophers I studied or the professors I studied under; I don’t think assigning blame is a worthwhile endeavor. Only I am responsible for the work I produced, and in retrospect, the choices I made led to a product with which I cannot be content. However, I don’t see this as a failure, but as an opportunity to continue my education in philosophy. My path of learning has looped back to the beginning. To move forward, I first have to learn skills that I have come to believe are essential to philosophical thought.

There was a long while during which I engaged in amateur speculation, “armchair metaphysics”, coming up with wild and creative conceptual mappings of the world. The bulk of this speculation has been chronicled here, in fact. There was no clear method involved. I would simply find a compelling idea somewhere and run with it. The thought process unravelled with more rhyme than reason, as I tended to develop thoughts in the most poetically appealing direction, seeking a maximum of both syntactical and semantical musicality. Beyond poetry, I had little regard for the truth of these concept-schemes. Faithful to the Nietzschean fire carried by my favorite thinkers, I regarded claims to and concerns with truth to be highly suspicious, implicitly underwritten by deeply entrenched relations of oppressive and arbitrary hierarchy. Despite the immaturity of my methodological convictions, I had only fallen into this rut contingently, as a deeply flawed means to other ends.

My initial interest in philosophy followed from a question that plagued me increasingly as I passed from adolescence to young adulthood: “why is the world this way and not another?” I did not ask this question in an explicitly metaphysical register at the time, although I would later take it in that direction. By the world, I was really asking about the social world, and specifically its political and economic dimensions. The more that I learned, the more I couldn’t understand why I should be so lucky when so many others aren’t. I don’t mean to paint myself in such noble light; practically speaking, I did little to address inequality of which I am a benefactor. I have been content, if not guiltlessly, to entertain this question as a mere theoretical curiosity; I wanted to understand it, but wasn’t ready to worry about helping change it. I sold myself the bill of goods saying such change is only possible once a truly sufficient understanding is achieved, a very tidy justification for inaction.

It was opportune, then, that my theoretical pursuits became tainted by the aforementioned quasi-Nietszschean poeticism, a surefire means of warding off understanding if there is any. Even my studies of Marx were tainted by it, despite how directly it opposed the scientific spirit in which he wrote. I struggled with this for a long time, as my heart was squarely in the continuation of Marx’s work in both theoretical and practical directions, even as my habits were finely-tuned to undermine progress in either one. All of the approaches I adopted, be they Deleuzo-DeLandian, Lacano-Zizekian, Agamenbian or Laruellean, were all effectively variations of the same basic theoretical bias, which was at its core incompatible with the Marxist spirit. (Let me be clear in saying that I do not believe any of these approaches are necessarily tainted by this bias, and that I hold myself largely (if not solely) responsible for interpreting them this way.)

I understood this subconsciously, and gradually grew more discontented with my basic methodological attitudes. It wasn’t until I met Pete Wolfendale that I began to see an alternative, one that had much more promise for the continuation of Marx’s work. It is no exaggeration to say that in my conversations with Pete, and in reading his blog, I became convinced that those attitudes were due for a complete overhaul. I began to understand that while ‘truth’ can sometimes be a mere ideological prop, and discourse explicitly concerned with truth can be somewhat or even predominately power-laden, these phenomena deserve to be understood as distortions that betray the ideal to which they pretend, and that the solution is not to abandon the ideal and adopt a different approach altogether (one whose ideal is musicality rather than truth, for example), but to counter the pretenders with the genuine article.

Unfortunately, for the bulk of my philosophical studentship I was preoccupied with avoiding such discourse and the skills necessary to understand and engage in it. My understanding of how arguments work and how good arguments are to be recognized and produced is, I’m sad to say, not far beyond that of a second or third year undergraduate. My growth as a philosopher was stunted, right around the time I discovered that insidious brand of soft Nietzscheanism.

Well, I’m going to go about rectifying that. I’m going to resume where I left off, as best I can without institutional support. I’m going to read a lot of things I should have read, for the most part from the analytic tradition. This isn’t because I now believe it is the ‘better’ half of the divide. From those in the know, I’ve come to believe that it is not much better off, and that what it has gained in argumentative clarity and rigor, it has lost in becoming stuck on nitpicking shortsightedness and hyper-specialization. I turn to certain key texts of analytic philosophy in order to acquire the skills I need to move forward with my research, which is not particularly indebted to either analytic or Continental philosophy, but rather to Marx and a select group of his interpreters.

Some months back I started a new blog, The Luxemburgist, to mark a shift from my concern with amateur metaphysics to a more pure focus on Marxism. However, it went quiet not long after, due both to a lack of confidence and a lack of the skills necessary to render my thoughts explicit. Having recognized the problem, I’ve decided to revive Planomenology, mostly for the sake of convenience, as a place to conduct my philosophical re-education in public, in order to solicit the help or advice of anyone who might care to read it, and perhaps to inspire anyone who is hung-up as I was to see there is another way. Hopefully, once I’ve learned enough and built up my confidence enough, I will revive The Luxemburgist. Until then, I’ll be posting here with my thoughts on and problems with a selection of basic texts by Quine, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Kripke, etc, as well as some secondary sources. I will make sure to post links to texts whenever available, so that anyone interested in following along with me can easily do so. Anyway, I’m back.

Smith suggests the rift is a symptom of the deeper divide between the cultures of the natural sciences and the humanities, the latter in its post-modern form having thoroughly purged itself of the trappings of its scientificity and even at times expressed skepticism about scientificity in general. If the humanities, and a fortiori work being done under the banner of continental philosophy, is to reassert itself now as the post-modern identity loses the last of its intellectual appeal and public respectability, it should do so by recognizing the distinct sort of scientificity it ought to pursue, one concerned not with knowledge of objective, attitude-independent truths about the external world, but with what Pete Wolfendale calls the realm of non-objective truths. At its most abstract, philosophy deals with those truths that, while independent of the particular attitudes of individuals and groups, are nonetheless true in virtue of the structure of attitude-having in general, or transcendental truths. The more concrete elements of the humanities, both in the philosophical/reflective and in their practical significance, then deal with the concrete cultural phenomena of that which is true because we take it to be true (for example, that a commodity has a specific value, or that a poem can be considered brilliant).

What is called for is a rescuing of the concept of truth from its post-modern degradation. There is a sense of truth indigenous to the humanities (or human sciences, really) that, when properly distinguished from the sort of truth pursued by the natural sciences, should avoid the problems diagnosed by continental philosophers throughout the 20th century. This does not mean advocating the sort of cavalier repurposing of the concept that Badiou undertakes, as he ultimately only continues the fraught tradition of employing a monolithic notion of truth whose lack of precision does little to overcome the rift within philosophy.

I’ve created a new blog, called The Luxemburgist, the inaugural post of which I’ve cross-posted here. While it may seem strange to create a new blog when I hardly publish here anymore, there is reason behind it. Planomenology was conceived from the beginning as a blog about metaphysics, the name ‘planomenology’ itself being a riff on Deleuze’s metaphysical concept of the plane of immanence. Yet as my philosophical development has progressed, my desire to engage in metaphysical inquiry has waned. This is not due to a skepticism about metaphysics, which I think Pete has shown to be a very important enterprise, but rather a personal shift in convictions and passions toward Marxist political philosophy and political economy.

While political philosophy, and Marxism in particular, has been a concern of this blog from the beginning, I have been until recently beholden to a metaphysical characterization of politics, a tendency that was alternately explicit and implicit. Yet corresponding to my growing disinterest in metaphysics has been a growing skepticism of such metaphysical accounts of politics, a skepticism I owe in large part to Pete’s influence. This culminated in this post, wherein I sought to explicitly abandon the metaphysical interpretation of historical materialism I had long cultivated in favor of one influence by Brandom’s normative pragmatics and Pete’s fundamental deontology.

Having broken with the tendency, I feel increasingly uncomfortable writing under the “planomenology” heading, if only because I want to avoid confusing political philosophy and metaphysics. The Luxemburgist will thus be home to the majority of my writing for the time being, which will have a more explicitly political, political-theoretical, or strategic character. I will keep using this blog to continue conversations initiated here, to keep up with developments in ‘speculative realism’ and the like, and to engage in metaphysical topics if I ever see fit to do so again. I will also use it as my platform in the upcoming SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS event, in which I urge you all to consider participating. (The deadline for submissions is September 17th.) Anyway, here is the post:

I think it is crucial, when dealing with schisms within the radical left, to ask how different parties understand the real process of social transformation and the way in which our conscious, ideal activity is implicated therein. Such sociological questions play a crucial role in grounding explicit political positions, and yet I’d wager they are given far less consideration amongst the most politically committed of us than they deserve. Nonetheless, the importance of these questions does not always go unrecognized. For example, while objections to Marx are often political and strategic in their focus, contesting his advocacy or implicit support of some form of authoritarianism, these are typically supported by deeper ‘philosophical’ issues with the sort of materialism Marx advocates and its stifling sociological implications.

Historical materialism is characterized as deterministic, affording no genuine role for a metaphysically substantial sense of freedom. Rather, human behavior can be explained and predicted in a purely naturalistic manner, requiring no reference to causal input from a scientifically suspect entity like “thought”. For this reason, even when social change is consciously initiated and carried through, the intentions of the individuals involved only reflect a deeper determination that is out of their hands. The only effective revolutionary project is therefore one that defers to the expertise of those able to get a scientific grasp of the necessary unfolding of historical progress.

At this point, Marxism seems to let authoritarianism in through the back door, such that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” can only be actualized in the form of the dictatorship of the scientific elite who are capable of understanding the “will” of the proletariat better than they themselves are. This has, of course, really come to pass in the form of Leninism and all its various deviations. One can be forgiven for thinking that Marxism necessarily leads to Leninism, whether Marx intended as much or not, but this is only true on the basis of a particular, contestable interpretation of historical materialism.

While it is doubtful that most non-Marxist radicals would agree that one’s political and strategic commitments should follow directly from a prior commitment to a particular theoretical understanding of social change, they nonetheless would likely agree that such an understanding should inform the former to some extent. Yet the rejection of historical materialism as such a theoretical understanding is rarely accompanied by affirmation of some other incompatible framework. At best, it is replaced by a set of unsystematized and at times unjustified claims that in their content resemble weak reiterations of Marxist idioms.

My work is primarily concerned with offering a very different account of historical materialism than the commonplace one, an interpretation that is moreover more consistent with Marx’s actual claims. On this reading, Marx’s theory of social change neither explicitly affirms a Lenin-esque authoritarianism, nor does it implicitly lean in its direction, but rather proves to be an incohate Luxemburgism.

This Luxemburgism, the same that is affirmed in the title of this blog, does not refer to Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘underconsumptionist’ attempt at a Marxist theory of economic crises (which is not to say that I find this theory wholly without merit), but to her political position which combines a Leninist demand for the imminent revolutionary activity and a critique of Lenin’s vanguardist authoritarianism in favor of a genuinely democratic form of proletarian collective determination; it is close to council communism and anarchism in its insistence that the only legitimate form of politics is one rooted in the self-organization of workers, but rejects the refusal to engage in the political machinations of the existing State apparatus as well as the categorical exclusion of representative forms of democracy.

To defend the claim that Luxemburgism draws the correct political consequences from historical materialism, we have to get clear what historical materialism entails. The basic principle of historical materialism is that historical periods are to be understood in terms of a certain relatively stable coordination amongst the contemporary material forces of production, the relations of production or the relations people have to the former and to each other as mediated by the former, and the ideological superstructure or relations between people over and above those shaped purely by the material world. This schema accounts for historical change in terms of a change in the material forces of production significant enough to have become out of sync with existing relations of production, and thereby force the latter to readjust. And, because these relations constitute the real basis of the ideal (or ‘ideological’) realm, this entails an ideological shift as well.

The major problem plaguing the interpretation of this principle is an ambiguity as to the character of the determining relation of productive forces to social relations, and precisely where to situate ourselves in terms of this relation. Are we simply passive vehicles driven and directed by our material constitution? There have been roughly three approaches to this question. The first is a straightforward deterministic interpretation, according to which social relations (both productive and ideological) are simply reflections of material forces, bearing no causal efficacy of their own. Yet this would seemingly contradict Marx’s Hegelian emphasis on the analytical importance of the form of appearance, and thus the implied, though yet undetermined, autonomy of the latter. The second emphasizes this relative autonomy, and so to the autonomy of conscious social activity, but does so in an imprecise and haphazard way: it may leave unspecified the precise character of the relation, or it may go so far as to attribute a causal power to appearance, consciousness, thought, etc that is on par with that of materiality. Yet in taking the latter course, one must either strive to show how this causal power can be accounted for in material terms, and thereby reduce social relations to a particular subset of material relations of force, or one must renounce the metaphysical commitment to materialism.

The third approach overcomes these deadlocks by affirming the autonomy of social relations, appearance, the whole ideal realm, while refusing to characterize this autonomy in metaphysical terms. The material relations that constitute productive forces are thoroughly deterministic and causally complete unto themselves; we can characterize them as ‘objective’ because the way they are is independent of the ways in which we understand them. Insofar as we are material entities, we can in principle be thoroughly explained in objective terms, as loci of material force. Yet our self-understanding is by no means limited to such an objective, scientific characterization. First and foremost, implicit in our practical engagement with the world is a rudimentary understanding of what we can and ought to do vis a vis the objects we encounter, including other people. This understanding corresponds to the particular shape taken by material-practical relations at a given time; it is a way of characterizing or representing to ourselves our objective, material situation. While this ideal characterization is derived from our objective situation, it is not itself objective, insofar as it is simply the way in which we take things to really be, and by no means necessarily amounts to an adequate or accurate representation. Moreover, this non-objectivity is not simply due to the failure of representation, but follows from the fact that something is added to the objective state of affairs: normative attitudes as to what ought to be done. (I owe this sense of objectivity and non-objectivity to Pete Wolfendale, whose work has been so significant for my understanding of Marx that my project might be described as simply applying his insights to the interpretation of historical materialism.) This is the case at least as long as people relate to things and to each other in terms of property, such that someone has the right to determine how others ought to behave vis a vis a particular object, how it is proper to treat that object.

Relations of production are the non-objective reflection of objective, material relations. As such, they form the infrastructure for more elaborate sorts of non-objective relations between people. The ideological superstructure is made up of genuinely non-objective modes of understanding, characterizing, or relating to people and things; it is the set of ways of “taking things to be the case” that are not implicit in our material-practical relations, that cannot be traced back to what is objectively the case, but that arise from that addition to the latter of things that are only the case for us, or things that are the case only insofar as we take them to be the case. Such attitude-dependent “facts” are not for that reason invalid. They are socially valid, holding true for the society that takes them to be true, even if they are not objectively valid, or true independent of whether one takes them to be true.

A crucial consequence of this approach is that the whole ideal realm of thought, appearance, and theoretical knowledge is only developed as the explication of the understanding implicit in our material-practical situation. Attitude-dependent normative statuses derive from and supervene on attitude-independent material relations, and superstructural normative statuses supervene on productive relations as the elementary level of normativity. Nonetheless, this supervenience does not invite reduction, insofar as the ideal realm of attitude-dependent normative statuses does not depend only upon objective truths, but also upon socially-valid truths. Socially-valid truths might have some objective content, but this only in addition to their non-objective content. Nonetheless, it can happen that the objective situation changes so drastically as to force a change in socially-valid concepts in a degree determined by the proportion of objective content they bear. So, for instance, a significant shift in the material practical relations by which society continuously reproduces itself would cause a corresponding shift in the implicit understanding we have of those relations, and consequently, in the fundamental norms regulating how we are to practically conduct ourselves in relation to people and things. For historical materialists, this has significant implications for how to understand the real process of social transformation.

Our productive relations are forced to change due to a certain extent of change in our objective situation. Furthermore, superstructural relations will also be forced to change as the crisis increasingly spreads from their smaller objective part to their larger non-objective part. As fundamental non-objective truths are increasingly impinged by the seismic shifts in objective circumstances, the crisis will cascade out into the superstructural truths that cite them as premises. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the validity of concepts is completely relative to contingent modes of social organization. We are capable of tracking the objective structure of the world in a way that is resistant to historical shifts in social organization, employing genuinely objectively-valid concepts. The possibility of such universal concepts depends upon the manner in which we attribute objective validity. Objectively valid concepts are not compromised by changes in the material-practical organization of our objective situation because they do not confuse social necessity — that something ought to be the case because our commitments oblige us to make it the case — with objective necessity — that something must be the case because it is required by its objective structure. Dramatic transformations of the material-practical organization of our objective situations may reveal some allegedly objective concepts to be invalid insofar as they attributed objective necessity to what was in fact an historically contingent shape of social relations, which only appeared to be necessary from a socially-embedded prerogative. Our concepts are vulnerable to revision so long as they attribute objectivity not only to their objective content, but also to the non-objective social necessity they prescribe. (To be more precise, we ought to distinguish between two kinds of revision to which allegedly objective concepts are subject: critical revision on the grounds of confusion of objective and non-objective contents, and scientific revision on the grounds of empirical evidence forces a reevaluation of objective content.)

The very activity of explicitly distinguishing between objective and non-objective validity, and of critically discriminating scientific from non-scientific truth, is itself a historically contingent organization of material-practical relations. It only becomes available at a particular “stage of development”, and depends upon the coordination of the practical reproduction of this activity and the institution of its social necessity. This practice involves the subtraction or “bracketing out” of non-objective contents. Yet such contents are not eliminated; they must be retained in order to institute the social necessity of this practice. What is thus clear is that scientific activity does not have a privileged place over and above the unscientific self-consciousness of the proletariat; rather, scientific activity is only possible on the basis of the critical operation social consciousness performs upon itself, an operation that, once it reaches the science of economy, can only be properly performed by the proletariat.

While Marx may be a determinist, this entails neither the unreality of freedom nor the necessity of subordinating political activity to some scientific authority, be it that of biopolitical technocrats or a revolutionary vanguard. On the contrary, determinism only holds within the objective sphere, from which the non-objective sphere is relatively independent. We can be more or less practically free or unconstrained by social prohibitions and obligations and by historically contingent relations of force without being free from the chains of material causality; nonetheless, freedom can have a real significance for us without also having metaphysical significance. Moreover, scientific authority, while real, is only possible as a consequence of practico-critical activity, an activity that becomes politically revolutionary when it takes the economic structure of society as its object. Far from requiring political activity to submit to scientific authority, the latter is only a status instituted on the basis of the critical practice that discriminates between scientific and unscientific claims. This already amounts to a reversal of Leninist vanguardism.

We must therefore remember that Marx’s determinism is an economic determinism: society is fully determinate insofar as it is material, but its material character significantly includes the practical force exerted by humanity upon its world (labor). Our place in the schema is not on the side of relations of production, determined from without by material forces that constitute the “essence” of which we are the appearance. Rather, we are embedded in productive forces as much as productive relations; the two are merely different ways of understanding the same object, in objective and non-objective terms respectively. Our non-objective “internal” understanding of our practical existence may be subject to change due to changes in our objective situation, but we are ourselves part of and a significant force within this situation, and so change is not something that happens to us, but a movement of which we are a part. Instituting a critical evaluation of the economic structure of society is a historically contingent potential for social organization that we can seize upon, and that has been available to us at least since Marx’s time.

A further consequence that I cannot adequately defend here, and hence will simply assert with the the promissory note of future explanation, is that such critical activity has the effect not only of purifying science of unscientific presuppositions, but also of purging the ideal sphere of illegitimate claims to authority, justified by false appeals to objectivity. Fully realized critical activity (that is, when applied to social science, especially political economy) becomes revolutionary because it involves the practice of ceasing to recognize unjustified authority claims, including property rights. Individual freedoms like the right to property depend upon the collective institution of these rights, and if this institution is to be determined without unjustified forms of authority constricting collective decision-making, there must be a genuinely egalitarian form of productive relations such that all have an equal say in social institutions (economic and otherwise). Unjustified inequalities in wealth, for instance, are an impediment to such egalitarianism, and possessing exorbitant wealth to the detriment of others counts as unjustified form of authority to be critically liquidated. Thus, the same movement that produces a genuinely scientific political economy must also produce a form of social organization wherein a materially-equal population partake in collective determination of social institutions.

Does rejecting Leninist vanguardism means we must also reject the strategic emphasis on the dictatorship of the proletariat? Or is there a formulation of this concept consistent with the interpretation of historical materialism posed above? If the politicization of the proletariat does not require its deference to the “scientific” authority of a vanguard, then this dictatorship should not take the form of a technocracy of the vanguard, and certainly not an autocracy of their executive. Rather, our interpretation would require that the whole of the proletariat become organized through egalitarian collective decision-making processes, and thus collectively act as dictator. Yet this would be nothing but a democracy of the prolateriat. (While one may still retain suspicion of a democracy that is still qualified by its restriction to a particular group, there is nothing in principle that prevents non-proletarians from joining the proletariat; they need only give up their unjustified authority and material advantage and thus become a materially-equal member of society.)

A full elaboration of my interpretation of historical materialism will require a far broader account of the relation of Marx to Hegel and Kant, and how he can therefore be read in light of Robert Brandom’s normative pragmatics, and Pete Wolfendale’s fundamental deontology. (I have ventured a very preliminary attempt at this here.) Nonetheless, I hope this has at least laid the groundwork for an interpretation of historical materialism that does not fall prey to either scientism or indeterminism, and that therefore avoids Leninism and leads instead toward political Luxemburgism.

1) Here, Levi claims that my post is premised on a misunderstanding of his position, itself based on a terminological misunderstanding.

My claim [that Marx says little about normativity] makes sense if we work on the premise that discourses of normativity refer to something highly specific: Kant’s deontological moral theory, and those deeply influenced by Kant’s deontological moral theory such as Habermas and Brandom. If normativity is understood as a synonym for this style of thought, I think my claim is perfectly valid. [...] By contrast, Reid’s rejoinder to my claim makes sense if Reid is not using the term “normativity” to refer specifically to value theories coming out of Kant, but to any discussions of value whatsoever. If this is what “normativity” means, then Reid is quite right to be shocked when I say that Marx does not have much to say about normativity precisely because Marx talks about values all over the the place. Over at Cogburn’s blog I explicitly stated (a couple of times) that I had been taking normativity to be synonymous with Kant style deontological ethics, so I’m somewhat surprised that Reid is attempting to demonstrate to me that Marx has an important place for values within his thought. But perhaps I’m misconstruing what Reid is arguing, as he also seems to be claiming that Marx advocates a deontological moral theory in his thought.

There are a series of problems with these remarks, and I’ll work backwards through them:

1.1) I was not trying to demonstrate that Marx “has an important place for values”, as this point would be a triviality. I was trying to demonstrate that Marx’s materialism is not a reductivism about values, in which values are thoroughly relative to the material situations in which they are produced, and can be exhaustively explained in causal/material terms. (I know Levi does not read Marx this way, but an overwhelming number of his readers do.) Rather, Marx gives an account of the material basis of socially valid ‘entities’ like values in which the former constrains and distorts the latter, but in which the latter has a relative practical autonomy from the former.

1.2) I do not claim that Marx “advocates a deontological moral theory”. This accusation condenses three big problems with Levi’s response:

1.2.1) While Levi admits that he had be confusing talk about the importance of normativity with advocacy of Kantian moral philosophy, he doesn’t seem to understand that he is still conflating what Pete has called ‘fundamental deontology’, which involves explicating a certain set of norms to which we are necessarily bound insofar as we count as rational, with Kantian moral philosophy. While both Pete and I think that there are some important ethical implications to be worked out from these fundamental norms, neither of us think this even comes close to exhausting moral philosophy. At best, it provides a very spare and basic latticework that requires far more fleshing out in relation to concrete ethical and political situations and problems.

1.2.2) While Kantian moral philosophy is far more formalist, roughly claiming that ethical maxims should be derived solely from that which we are in principle obligated to do insofar as we are rational (in other words, that which all rational agents should will to be done), Levi has been characterizing it as somehow tyrannical and oppressive, instructing people what they must do in all situations. This completely elides the absolute centrality of the autonomy of the agent’s will from all forms of coercion, and the principled equality of every agent’s will. Agents should only act on maxims that they can freely decide upon, on the condition that they respect the equal freedom of all other agents. This account has severe limitations, which show up very clearly in its political-philosophical consequences, but how these could be interpreted as oppressive is beyond me. Marx by no means advocates a Kantian moral theory, but that is because he places primacy on collective rational determination over individual rational determination (a move indebted to Hegel), and thus on political over moral questions. In that regard, the Kantian emphasis on autonomy and equality is preserved and strengthened in Marx’s work.

1.2.3) While I think that Marx’s presentation of these concerns remains either implicit or unsystematic, I by no means think he is advocating in an implicit or unfocused way either straightforward Kantian deontological ethics (which I don’t advocate either), or a moral and political philosophy that draws upon a ‘fundamental deontology’ (the latter being what I take Levi to be accusing me of in saying I seem to be reading “a deontological moral theory” into Marx). My point was rather 1) that Marx’s philosophy, specifically his account of fetishism, does not exclude the possibility of fundamental deontology, as Levi implies it does, and 2) that it may turn out a consistent reconstruction of Marx’s philosophy might benefit from, or even require something like ‘fundamental norms of rationality’. I do think that Marx advocates a political philosophy that is influenced by the Kantian emphasis on rational autonomy and equality (by way of Hegel), but this is certainly not to say that he advocates a broadly Kantian moral philosophy, or even the importance of fundamental norms of rationality.

1.3) I don’t have the time to develop this point in detail, but I did want to say that I don’t think Levi is right to characterize Brandom and Habermas as straightforwardly advocating Kantian moral theory. Both are heavily indebted to the Kantian deontological approach to normativity (and to a certain pragmatism this entails), but Brandom to my knowledge does not have much to say about moral philosophy, and even if he did he would certainly be more Hegelian than Kantian about it; and Habermas’s discourse ethics, while perhaps closer to Kant, are a substantial innovation over his work. I’d like to see Levi back up this characterization with some evidence, because he seems to be lumping thinkers together so he can easily dismiss them in a single stroke, and in particular, doing so by assimilating them to the sense of normativity he finds instinctively offensive (Kantian morality). Yet normativity in Kant is not reducible to his moral philosophy, nor is the debt Brandom and Habermas owe to Kant primarily on the moral account. Finally, as I said above, I don’t even recognize Levi’s dismissal of Kantian morality as justified, resting instead on a particularly bizarre mischaracterization, and so even if Brandom and Habermas straightforwardly advocated Kant’s moral philosophy, I wouldn’t see this as adequate grounds for dismissing them either.

1.4) Concluding here, I’ll address a this remark by Levi, which seems to summarize things nicely:

When I refer to deontological models of normative thought, I am referring to something akin to Kant’s categorical imperative. Those familiar with Kant will recall that the categorical imperative states “that we must will the maxim of our action such that we can will it as a universal law of nature.” Kant argues that the categorical imperative is a truth of reason alone, and that in formulating the categorical imperative we must make no reference to either circumstances or whatever personal motivations we might have. Working on this premise, this led me to argue that deontological normative theories risk falling into a form of ideological fetishism.

I am likewise critical of Kantian morality for its neglect of concrete situatedness. Nonetheless, I think two things are being conflated here. Kant is claiming that we should strive to act on the basis of maxims that are justified solely in rational terms, and not through appeal to ‘pathological’ reasons, or what I’ve been calling ‘material interests’. Yet the point of this is that one should act according to maxims one is capable of deciding upon in absence of the influence of things like threats of violence or promises of material gain (bribes, etc). One should be capable of acting because that action is the right thing to do, and not because one will be penalized or rewarded for doing so. The latter are not considered morally good reasons. Similarly, Marx’s political philosophy is focused on the possibility of collective actions that are determined not on the basis of the material interests of a certain group (class), but on what is good or right in general. (Whether this latter point means ‘for rational agents as a whole’, or ‘for rational agency itself’, is another question, but I tend to think Marx leans toward the latter.) The point of Marx’s critique of fetishism is precisely that it takes what are in fact the material interests of a certain group to be in the rational interests of all groups. (The twist Marx’s gives to this error is that it leads to a situation in which the material interests of a certain group, the proletariat, really do overlap with general rational interests, and thus their victory would entail the dissolution of social organization based on the primacy of material interests (class). I should also clarify a potential ambiguity: in using the term ‘rational interests’, I do not mean ‘interests that are rationally defensible’, but ‘interests one has insofar as one is a rational agent’.) I think that the Kantian account of morality is vulnerable to such fetishism in that it does not adequately emphasize the possibility of mistaking material for rational interests in this way, and insofar as it neglects the social (and hence political) character of rational determination (and thus in a sense the primacy of the political over the moral), but this vulnerability does not mean the Kantian account is based on fetishistic distortions in the way that classical political economy is. In short, the Marxian critique of fetishism is based on the same sort of separation of rational interests from material or ‘pathological’ interests as the Kantian account, and differs in emphasizing the more insidious forms in which the latter can infect the former, and on the primacy of collective over individual rational determination. While Kant is very much at risk of ‘falling into ideological fetishism’, specifically insofar as his account of the relation between material and rational interests in insufficiently nuanced, Levi’s approach has already fallen into the ideological trap insofar as he tries to collapse the distinction. I’ll come back to this point later when discussing the nature/culture question.

2) Levi contests my reconstruction of the commodity fetishism argument. Yet in doing so, he doesn’t show why my account of Marx is wrong; he simply restates the positions that I’ve argued are incompatible with Marxism.

2.1) Levi begins by saying the following:

Reid contends that I don’t understand what fetishism is within a Marxist framework. Needless to say, I think he’s mistaken. In the context of his analysis of commodity fetishism, Marx argues that commodity fetishism emerges when social relations between people are expressed as objective relationships between things. For example, rather than seeing value as arising from a particular form of production, we instead treat value as an intrinsic property of the thing itself.

I completely endorse the last two sentences, and my account of fetishism is nothing but a fleshing out of this claim. Marx is arguing that we should sharply distinguish between properties we ascribe to objects that have only social validity from those that have objective validity. Yet Levi follows this assertion with claims that are plainly incompatible with Marx’s argument.

By treating the moral law as preceding social relations rather than as arising from particular types of social relations, these forms of moral thought risk fetishizing norms and obscuring the manner in which norms are reflective of particular forms of social relations.

The first thing to note here is that Levi is using the term ‘preceding’ ambiguously. To say that something is a priori is not to say it is chronologically or temporally prior, but rather to say it is logically prior, or that it is presupposed by something else. In this case, the fundamental norms of rationality are presupposed in all particular forms of rational social relations. Now, in the fifth section of my previous post I sketched an account of how the historical character of historical materialism is irreducible to temporality, and while that account is still problematic and incomplete, Levi does not try to show why it is wrong, but simply ignores it, continuing to treat apriority as equivalent to ahistoricity. This neglects that I have tried to show, be it in a preliminary manner, how a priori norms, while irreducible to any particular historically-specific culture, are historical in the sense that they are relative to rational social relations. Levi is, on the other hand, the one who is at risk of fetishizing norms insofar as he is leaning toward suggesting they are either reducible to the material conditions from which the arose, or that they are objectively embedded in those conditions. Either way, he would thereby attributing objective status to something that has only social validity, and thus fetishizing it.

2.2) Levi goes on to say:

Rather than beginning with an abstract normative framework and analyzing the world in terms of that framework, Marx instead begins with the analysis of social relations and examines how particular normative frameworks emerge from those social relations.

There are two problems here.

2.2.1) The approach I would advocate, and I believe this is true of Pete as well, does not begin from an ‘abstract normative framework’, but from concrete discursive practices, only to show how fundamental norms are implicit in these practices.

2.2.2) While Marx does not directly advocate such a resort to ‘fundamental norms’, and he does indeed try to show how norms emerge from social relations, this is precisely in order to show how those norms have certain social validity. What Marx rejects is not the claim that some norms might have universal social validity (indeed, I have argued that he must implicitly suppose as much), but that social validity can be grounded in appeals to objective validity. (Nicole Pepperell has persuasively argued that in Marx’s analysis, even categories with apparently universal validity are only available as explications of contingent practical forms of relating to the world. Yet while she might not go as far as I want to in this regard, she recognizes that this practical grounding does not amount to the invalidation of these categories, lest historical materialism amount to nothing but historicist relativism. Following the concluding argument in my last post, I’d go on to say there is a universal necessity of theoretical categories that is compatible with their contingent practical genesis, but this will require more argumentative defense than I can give here. I can point to a rather clear instance in which Marx suggests as much, from the Introduction to the Grundrisse:

[I]s Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish? But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.

Marx does not want to say, e.g. Greek art is only valid for the ‘specific social system’ from which it arose, but that its validity can transcend this specificity. Understanding the socio-practical basis of this transcendence is at the heart of the Marxist problematic.)

3) Levi criticizes my characterization of Latourian “a-modernism”:

I think Reid simply mischaracterizes both my own understanding of the relationship between nature and culture, as well as Latour’s. The situation is not entirely unambiguous in Latour, but the entire issue revolves are the thesis that there are two entirely distinct domains of being, such that on the one hand we have the domain of culture that consists entirely of meaning, values, freedom, signs, and mind, while on the side of nature we have purely material entities governed by causal laws alone. The key point, is that the modernist vision argues that we should maintain these realms as entirely separate, such that we never discuss the realm of natural objects in when analyzing the cultural and we never discuss the domain of culture when dealing with natural objects. The basic lesson of Latour’s critique of modernity is not that there is no distinction between natural objects and cultural objects, but rather that we live among tangled networks of culture and nature where natural objects play a key and significant role in social formations and where social formations play a key and significant role in how we investigate nature.

The important contribution of modernism, as I understand it, is not some kind of unbridgeable gap between nature and culture, but the insistence that we be capable of talking about ‘culture’, specifically the aspect of culture that includes the activity of talking about…, in non-objective terms. So whether or not Levi and Latour maintain some sort of distinction between the two domains, they fall foul of my particular criticism so long as they undermine the possibility of such a non-objective self-characterization of cultural production. This is precisely what occurs when one understands ontological claims as being explanatorily prior to epistemological ones. Without such a non-objective account of thought/discourse, it becomes impossible to properly distinguish between practical and objective validity; the former at best is regarded as a species of the latter, whereas the reverse is in fact the case. If one cannot draw this distinction, one has automatically fallen prey to fetishization, or the ascription of objective validity where only practical validity holds.

4) Levi has often brought up the issue of what the libidinal motives behind certain positions, such as those that afford particular emphasis to the analysis of normativity, and subsequently accused the latter of arising due to a desire for control, etc. First, I should note, as Pete has, that such considerations are fundamentally irrelevant to considerations of the veracity of a claim. Yet even playing at his game, we can note that a very different desire can, and likely for the most part does, give rise to such positions: the desire to limit the legitimacy of authority to claims rooted in an independently verifiable account of the structure of the world, or more fundamentally (and it may be that the former type requires the latter), in collective social determination equally inclusive of all rational agents.

At least since “speculative realism” became a catchword in the philosophy blogosphere, the relation between science and metaphysics has become a renewed concern. Commitment to “realism” seems to oblige some form of deference to the objectivity of scientific discourse, while commitment to “speculation” requires a relative autonomy of philosophical claims. If we are to avoid the Scylla of engaging so liberally in speculation that our claims become unjustifiable, and the Charybdis of relinquishing the legitimate concerns of metaphysics entirely over to science, we must clearly and explicitly address the character of the relation between these fields. In this spirit, Pete Wolfendale, Nick Srnicek and myself have put together a cross-blog event inviting submissions that attempt to tackle this problem.

Here is the announcement:

We are caught at the nexus of two different historical trends. First, we accept that with regard to certain questions, empirical science is the arbiter of truth. This is not to say that science is a unitary body of knowledge, but that the only standpoint from which to challenge the authority of scientific theories is from within science itself. Secondly, we accept the bankruptcy of positivism. There is more truth than that over which empirical science has dominion. Metaphysics is something other than science. Nonetheless, we cannot admit that metaphysics is completely beyond science’s authority. We cannot do this without also denying that in some sense, they have the same object – reality as it is in itself. We must thus acknowledge that there is a relation between science and metaphysics, wherein the one must somehow constrain the other, even if this constraint is somehow mutual. The question is then what exactly is this relation, and what are these constraints?

We invite submissions of 1500-2500 words on this general topic. Issues that could be addressed are:

- The methodological constraints science places on metaphysics.

- The metaphysical implications of specific aspects of modern science.

- The positive contribution of metaphysics to scientific inquiry (both in general and in particular).

- The nature of naturalism (e.g., methodological vs. substantive naturalism).

- The nature of materialism (e.g., materialism vs. physicalism).

- The necessity of concepts such as nature and matter.

- The viability of mathematical ontology (e.g., Badiou, Meillassoux, etc.) and the relation between mathematical and empirical science.

- The role of the philosophy of science in general and its relation to both scientific practice and metaphysical inquiry.

I posted a comment on Levi Bryant’s recent post responding to some criticisms offered by Pete Wolfendale. You can read the exchange there if you’re interested, but I wanted to focus on something Levi said there, and on a comment he made in a parallel thread on Jon Cogburn’s Blog, as I think it offers a good opportunity to begin explicating the manner in which my understanding of Marx, and philosophy in general, has evolved in the last few months. I’m going to write in more detail about these changes in some upcoming posts, so this will serve as a kind of introduction.

While I think a lot of these changes have been strongly foreshadowed in what I was doing before, it’s been my recent exposure to the work of Robert Brandom and Pete’s interpretation of it that has served as the catalyst. I’m still working through the consequences, which have been very far reaching and hence have been a big part of my relative absence from blogging (that and my relocation back to the US), but this post should mark my return, and in some ways a reboot of this blog (thus the change of appearance).

I should also state from the outset that I don’t cite any of the textual evidence to which I implicitly refer in making these claims about Marx, mostly because this post has already grown very long and I want to keep it as concise as possible. Nonetheless, I think the evidence is ample, and I will be citing it explicitly in some upcoming posts in which I will flesh out these ideas in more detail.

1. Introduction: Marx and Normativity

The role of normativity in Marx’s philosophy is certainly a contentious and difficult issue to work through, but I think properly cashing it out will have enormous benefits for our understanding of the philosophical significance and the political implications that work might have. So what is this role? I’ll take as my point of departure the remark Levi Bryant made at Jon Cogburn’s Blog, where he says:

What I find perplexing is when normativity becomes the master-signifier of a philosophical discourse or that around which an entire philosophical discourse is organized, such that all other issues are subordinated to discussions of norms. That’s the sort of philosophical discourse that I find suffocating and claustrophobic. It’s the difference between say Habermas and a thinker like Kant or Marx. Kant and Marx, of course, both have a lot to say about issues such as freedom and the former has a lot to say about normativity. But in my view, it’s omnipresent in either figures discourse. This is especially true in the case of Marx, where there’s hardly any discussion of norms at all.

I’m having some trouble figuring out the line of reasoning at work in this comment, but the point I’m particularly interested in is the concluding remark about Marx, namely, that Marx barely discusses “norms”, which I take to mean normative concerns in general and not merely the norms themselves. Levi seems to suggest, however, that while Marx does deal with normative concerns, specifically freedom (assuming Levi accepts that freedom is a deontic matter and not an alethic one, which the context appears to indicate), their treatment is “omnipresent”, which I take to mean that it is at work in the background throughout Marx’s explicit treatment of concerns that are not primarily normative. In other words, Levi seems to prefer leaving engagement with normative concerns an implicit affair, rather than making it the explicit concern around which the majority of one’s work is organized, as its “master-signifier”. (I’ll leave aside for the moment that explication of a concept by no means need entail its systematic centrality.) So, when Levi says that in Marx “there’s hardly any discussion of norms at all”, he means explicit thematization, even while normative matters are implicated in discussions of non-normative matters.

I’m not certain why one would prefer to leave such treatment implicit, rather than either explicating it or excising it altogether. It may have something to do with Levi’s avowed aversion to the signifier ‘normativity’, which he claims is an extra-philosophical matter of reflex. If this is the case, then the preference itself would only incidentally be of philosophical interest, if at all. Yet in another comment, he seems to offer something more like an argument for this preference:

My point was that Marx does not begin from the standpoint of a deontological model of normative reasoning based on universal and a priori principles from which norms are derived and then applied to particular circumstances. For Marx, norms always arise historically through specific social processes. Of course everyone evokes norms of one sort or another. What I am critiquing are these law based models that are made the focus and foundation of philosophical discourse.

I’m not quite sure what Levi means by “law based models” of normativity, and how these are meant to conflict with “historically specific” ones. The laws imposed by a state, for example, are all thoroughly specific to historically-situated practices of legislation, adjudication, and enforcement, but they are not for that any less “law based”. Moreover, I don’t know how one could have an understanding of normativity that isn’t “law-”, or at least “rule-based” (assuming one makes the distinction), in that norms qua norms are simply rules for pragmatic conduct. One can understand rules in terms of the symbols that signify them and the social practices that manifest them, but one would not be thereby engaging with normativity as such. I think Pete has laid out a pretty strong case for this distinction in his post “Dissecting Norms”.

Nonetheless, this comment seems to indicate the Levi was running two things together: explicit vs implicit treatments of normative concerns, on one hand, and accounts that treat norms as a priori and ahistorical vs those that treat norms as a posteriori and historically-specific, on the other hand. Now, there is no necessary reason why one of the latter approaches necessitates one of the former presentational strategies. Assumedly, if one were giving norms a priori status, one would want to be explicit about it, whereas if one did not regard them as so foundational, one would be less concerned with such explicit treatment. Yet Levi seems to suggest at least that 1) any explicit treatment of norms affords them a priori status, and perhaps also that 2) Marx only treats norms implicitly, and this is evidence that he would refuse any a priori status of norms.

The first claim is certainly suspect, not only because Levi himself is making explicit claims about normativity without advocating their apriority, but also because it fails to be sufficiently nuanced in its characterization of explicit treatments of normativity. For example, as Pete has shown very convincingly in his aforementioned post (among others), advocating for the apriority of certain norms does not entail commitment to the apriority, nor to the ahistoricity, of all norms, nor of the majority of norms. Nor does such advocacy hamstring one’s ability to relate normative matters to concrete historical analysis of the material-practical conditions in which norms are manifest. I’m unaware of any salient rejoinders to these arguments by Levi or anyone else, so please correct me if I’m wrong, but otherwise the burden of proof would be on Levi at this point.

The second claim, which I’m not sure is one Levi wants to explicitly make, but which is implied in the cited comments, is certainly not necessary to uphold that Marx would deny apriority to norms. Indeed, the commonplace interpretation of Marx would lead one to believe him to be clearly opposed to such status. Yet commonplace interpretations are generally misleading. Unfortunately, Marx is not completely straightforward on the matter, but I would argue that this in not because Marx only treats norms implicitly, but because his engagement with normative concerns is relatively unsystematic, especially when one considers the entirety of his oeuvre. Nonetheless, I believe that through a combination of explication and rational reconstruction, we can show that Marx has a clear position on normative concerns, and moreover that this position does not exclude out of hand a priori norms such as the “fundamental norms of rationality” that Pete defends. Indeed, I’ll go so far as to argue that Marx’s position ultimately requires reference to some fundamental set of norms if it is to be genuinely scientific, and if it is to militate for political change grounded in rational collective determination rather than particular material interests.

(I hope Levi will excuse me if I anticipate his reaction, one which I’ve heard from him before, that this Marx is unrecognizable and counter-intuitive. I recognize that this is not the commonplace understanding we have of Marx (although it does resemble Habermas’s Marx to some extent), but I will begin here to put forward arguments, which I will be developing in more detail in the future, that this counterintuitive portrait is both more faithful to the spirit of Marx than those with which it is incompatible, and that there is strong textual support for such a reading. It is cliched to note that Marx is one of the most distorted and misrepresented figures in the history of philosophy, but the fact is that we won’t get far with Marx if we are not prepared to argumentatively defend our interpretations of his work, and so counterintuitive impressions are not only not worth much, they are virtually irrelevant.)

Before I continue on, I want to contest one more point in Levi’s comments, which is that Marx barely gave any explicit treatment to normative concerns. As I said above, I believe is treatment is more unsystematic than it is non-explicit. Indeed, I believe Marx’s work, at least his philosophical and political-economic writings, are almost exclusively concerned with normative matters. It would not be a stretch to characterize these works as motivated by two basic projects: 1) the question of what constitutes a legitimately scientific discourse, especially in the field of political economy; 2) the question of how to motivate political conviction not grounded in material interests (wealth, security, survival, etc), but in a genuinely egalitarian mode of collective determination. In the former case, this involves denouncing the confusion of (pseudo-)entities that have only social existence (values, capital, the commodity form, relations of production) with entities that have objective existence (those involved in the material forces of production, namely, the physical exertion of laboring bodies and the means and materials they employ). In the latter case, this involves the philosophical conviction that the proletariat is poised to initiate a revolutionary reorganization of society that, unlike previous upheavals, which were motivated by the material interests of an oppressed class, has no such class-based bias, but on the contrary involves the dissolution of class itself, and hence social organization as involving antagonisms between groups with fundamentally incompatible (or contradictory) material interests.

Needless to say, both of these projects are defined by explicitly normative problems (legitimation of scientific claims on one hand, motivation of political commitments on the other). And insofar as Marx’s work can almost exhaustively be divided amongst them, it can be characterized at any point as an explicit treatment of either or both of these problems. Nonetheless, Marx does not speak about normativity in the same language that we do, in that the modern, highly developed vocabulary employed in contemporary discourse was not available to him. He does, nonetheless, employ a vocabulary very close to the German Idealist tradition in many places, especially Hegel, which I follow Brandom as understanding in terms of a principle concern with normativity. (Certainly if Marx is rejecting anything about Hegel, it is his tendency to transpose logical concepts into metaphysical ones, a tendency in which Brandom seems to have no interest.)

There is one more preliminary concern with the role of normativity within Marx’s project, which is evident when we consider the perennially problematic character of the relation between the scientific and political projects Marx is pursuing. How would a properly scientific understanding of materiality relate to political motivations and convictions? Interpretations of Marx by both his proponents and detractors have historically fallen into one of two camps, characterized by voluntarist and determinist conceptions of the relation. The former camp emphasizes and the latter more or less denies the autonomy of subjective political engagement from alethic necessity and the scientific predictability it allows for. I think both interpretations are based on misunderstandings, and hence both should be rejected.

The determinist approach follows a roughly Althusserian periodization of Marx’s work, according to which only his early ‘humanist’ writings deal with the political project, which becomes irrelevant with the emergence of the scientific project in his mature works. This can either take the weak form of claiming that a clear scientific understanding of the economy is the best means of motivating change, whose necessity would become evident to those who can grasp it, or the strong form that such motivation is unnecessary because change will only occur when material forces are ripe, and subjective convictions are ineffectual epiphenomena of these forces. Yet both variants of the determinist approach are flawed. Weak determinism falters in assuming that empirical claims can serve as sufficient reasons for political change, thus denying that political determination is to some extent attitude-dependent. If this were the case, collective determination would reduce to reading the imperatives for social organization off of nature, and communism would collapse into technocracy. (As I will argue later, Marx’s historical materialism is strictly opposed to this sort of teleological approach.) Strong determinism also fails, in that it attempts to reduce the deontic modality that characterizes the motivating force of political reasons and commitments to the alethic modality of material causality. I won’t rehearse here all the arguments against conflating or collapsing these two modalities, but I will point out that such reductionism undercuts the very possibility of the scientific approach, insofar as science – like all rational discourse – is a normative affair.

Voluntarist approaches vary, but are generally characterized by some attempt to argue against the reduction of subjective convictions to their material base. Recently, many of these approaches have taken a strongly Negrian flavor, which in some manner attributes a material (or otherwise immaterial but objective) character to something like the creative will or life-force of the masses, and then finds a place for it within the scientifically-intelligible infrastructure. (This approach clearly owes at least something to Sartre’s version of Marxism, which he infused with his ontologization of subjective freedom, as well as to the tradition of French spiritualism, likely as filtered through Deleuze.)

In a certain respect, I have a greater affinity for the voluntarist approach, in that it recognizes the necessity of reserving some sort of autonomy for the subjective and inter-subjective over and above the alethic modal necessity testified to by materialist science. Yet while it avoids the clumsy mistake of the determinist approach, it only does so by making an even more grievous error, one which reintroduces into marxism a mistake whose correction was the distinctive point of departure of Marx’s early work, which set him apart from the other Young Hegelians.

In the next section, I will clarify how Marx does not fall into either the determinist or voluntarist camp by explicating his parallel rejection of both ‘abstract materialism’ and ‘contemplative materialism’ (which have strong family resemblances to determinism and voluntarism, respectively), in contrast to which he proposes his own position of historical materialism. The remainder of the post will explain in greater detail how historical materialism is premised on a strict separation of the normative and the natural (and hence of deontic and alethic modalities), and what implications this has for the concepts of ideology, normativity, and historicity.

2. Contemplative, Abstract, and Historical Materialism

At different points in his career, Marx defines his version of materialism in opposition to other variants of materialism, most notably Feuerbach’s, which he characterizes as “contemplative materialism”, and the “abstract materialism” of natural science when it attempts to explanatorily encompass the realm of socially-valid truths.

Feuerbach’s position is distinctive for advocating a secular and materialistic basis of politics in opposition to a religious basis that derives its authority through appeal to some purportedly objective entity like God, whose objectivity is nonetheless immaterial and hence exempted from naturalistic explanation. Feuerbach attempts to denounce the alleged objectivity of such immaterial entities by leading them back to their source in an objectively real material entity, namely man. The immaterial creations of man, such as God, are not real but ideal, and hence it is not from the non-objective ideality but from its real essence and source – the essence of man as creator of idealities – that such political claims derive authority. (At this point I must note that I do not take this to be a faithful portrayal of Feuerbach’s position itself. I’m only doing my best to reconstruct Marx’s characterization, which very well could be a mischaracterization, of Feuerbach’s position.)

Feuerbach, as with other ‘contemplative materialists’ that follow loosely the same approach, errs in conflating man as a natural and material entity with the socially-constituted normative character of man. Feuerbach treats man as the originator of idealities without recognizing that it is only as an agent in the ideal, normative realm that he has this capacity. The capacities for ideation cannot be straightforwardly traced back to an essence of man that he possess as an objective attribute in the same manner as ‘having to hands’ or ‘being a mammal’. Contemplative materialism dispels the ascription of objectivity to one sort of ideal entity, an immaterial one like God, only to ascribe objectivity to another ideal entity, be it an ostensibly material one like man’s essence or “species-being”.

Marx rejects this move as a continuation of idealism by other means, and the whole stage of Marx’s work which is typically characterized as ‘immature’ and ‘humanist’ is better understood as working out the consequences of this insight, attempting to avoid the confusion of the socially- and objectively-valid or the ideal and material. Marx does not simply want to reduce the ideal to an ostensibly material base, which Feuerbach had already tried to do, but instead to account for the social validity of the ideal in materialist terms without surreptitiously importing some ideality into the material realm. The latter approach undermines materialism from the outset insofar as it predicates objectivity of something that cannot be accounted for in materialistic terms (be it an immaterial objectivity like God or an ‘material’ objectivity like species-being). (This still begs the question, which will be raised explicitly below, as to what sort of ‘account’ such a materialistic account of ideality can provide, and whether it is supposed to be explanatorily exhaustive, and thus effectively reductive, or not.)

Marx’s criticism of ‘abstract materialism’ is similar to that of contemplative materialism. This criticism is very briefly sketched in the fourth footnote to Chapter 15 of Capital, Volume 1, after a recapitulation of the critique of Feuerbach:

The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.

While Feuerbach errs in importing an ideal entity into the objective realm in order to explain ideality in objective terms, abstract materialism simply attempts to employ the same explanatory methods used to explain objective reality (i.e. the natural sciences) to account for the ideal, thus extending these methods “beyond the bounds” of their legitimate use. This is a more straightforward variant of what we currently recognize as reductionism. Yet because socially valid entities are not material, and hence not objective, they are cannot answer to a methodology that deals with objectivity, explaining it in material terms. Whereas Feuerbach ascribes objectivity to certain ideal entities in order to explain other non-objective ideal entities, abstract materialists implicitly ascribe objectivity to all ideal entities in trying to explain them in terms of non-ideal objective entities. Both therefore conflate the ideal and material, albeit in different ways.

We can thus see that Marx is neither a reductionist nor an epiphenomenalist about ideality, in that he holds that it is not amenable to materialistic explanation and that it obliges a unique explanatory approach. Yet this does not yet spell out what this latter sort of explanation is, nor how it relates to the former. It does, however, provide us with adequate resources to explicate Marx’s theory of ideology, by way of which we will begin to approach the problem of providing a materialist account of the ideal that does not conflate it with the material.

3. What is Ideology?

This leads me back to the comment by Levi which inspired this post in the first place:

from a Marxist historical materialist point of view– and here my own “normative” commitments come out –arguments of the sort Pete is making are doomed to always be ideological fetishes insofar as they eternalize that which is contingent and historically specific, failing to give an account of how these norms emerge for specific systems… Pete is being accused of reifying the transcendental and illicitly generalizing it when the transcendental is, in fact, system specific.

I have several problems with these assertions. First and foremost, I think they misconstrues the analysis of fetishism. Levi claims that Pete is fetishizing certain norms (whether these are norms that Pete is arguing about, or those that govern the argument by specifying what it is to argue about his subject matter, isn’t clear, although in the case of fundamental deontology I suppose they coincide) because he attributes them ahistorical and “generalized” status. I understand the objection about historicity, and will address it below, but I’m not sure I understand what Levi means by “generalization” and “system-specificity”. Transcendental norms, and norms more generally, are “system-specific” in the sense that they are only binding on, and moreover only exist for, subjects that belong to the space of reasons. Norms are not generalized in that they don’t apply to any entities other than reason-liable subjects; norms do not apply to animals and inanimate objects, for example. (Levi might mean that all norms are historically contingent, and hence that no norms can apply to all subjects by virtue of being subjects – I deal with this objection in section 5 below.)

My second objection is that I think Levi is again running two things together – the genesis of norms qua norms, and the genesis of the material-practical conditions of their manifestation. We can talk about the historical emergence and specificity of most norms (excluding, if we accept Pete’s argument, the fundamental norms which are binding on all subjects insofar as they are rational), but this cannot be understood as an emergence from materiality or a material genesis. New norms emerge from the revision, correction, clarification and explication of the existing set of (implicit and explicit) norms. We can also talk about the material genesis of the practices that manifest these norms and the activities that perpetuate and alter them. Yet these are different accounts, referring to different subjects matters, and while there are certainly enlightening relations to be discovered between them, they should not be conflated. While non-transcendental norms are historically contingent, they are not so in the same sense that their material conditions of manifestation are, nor is the historicity of the former a consequence of the historicity of the latter. I’ll go into more detail on this matter, and how it relates to historical materialism, in the next section.

The third objection, which leads back to the points established in the previous section, concerns the way Levi characterizes reification. The ironic thing about Levi’s comment is that it accuses Pete of “reifying the transcendental” because he fails to predicate system-specificity of it, when treating the transcendental as materially situated in this way is precisely what reification consists in. Reification is treating a social phenomenon – such as set of norms, or any other attitude dependent entity – as if it were an objective phenomenon, and thus ascribing objective validity to claims that can only really have social validity. Of course, norms are system-specific in the sense that they are only (socially) real insofar as they have appropriate conditions of manifestation, up to and including transcendental norms whose material condition would simply be any entities whatsoever capable of acting as rational agents. Yet this manifestation, which is only the case for us, is not to be confused with objectification, in which case norms would be present in their objective condition in-itself. Norms appear to be manifest in the symbols that signify them and the practices they coordinate (or more precisely, we act as if they are so manifest), but this manifestation does not extend beyond its pragmatic significance for the community of subjects engaged in the practice of giving and asking for reasons.

I’m not sure if the sense of system-specificity Levi is working with wants to go so far as to argue that norms have objective existence, but given his broader ontological commitments I’d imagine he’d have to hold something like this position. Yet this is very similar to the move for which Marx criticizes Feuerbach: ascribing objective existence to something that by right can only claim socially-valid existence. Indeed, reification is more correctly understood not as the generalization of norms beyond the specific systems to which they apply, but as their objectification, or the conferral of objectively-valid existence on them. While both generalization and objectification can be understood as making claims about norms that extend beyond legitimate bounds, the former is too vague to capture Marx’s precise complaint – which concerns over-extension as the ascription of objective existence to something non-objective – and falls foul of this same complaint if it is to be understood as restricting claims one can legitimately make about norms to claims one can legitimately make about their material conditions of manifestation, a move which effectively treats norms as objective and thus reified.

An “ideological fetish” is the product of reification in this regard: it is the hybrid produced by the conflation of norms and their material conditions of manifestation. By this definition, we can see that not only does Pete not exhibit normative fetishism – insofar as he advocates the strict separation of that which has a purely socially-valid existence from that which has material and objective existence – it is Levi who seems to understand norms fetishistically, in his implicit claim that they are materialized in their conditions of manifestation and thus are as equally objective as these conditions. Pete has formerly diagnosed this very tendency in far greater detail, although without realizing its remarkable proximity to Marx, using the term ‘hybridization’ instead of reification and ‘empirico-normative hybrid’ instead of fetish.

This explication has the additional benefit of more clearly spelling out the incompatibility of Latour and Marx. Marx is paradigmatically modern in Latour’s sense, in that he advocates a pure and unambiguous separation of the “cultural”, or that which can only claim socially-valid existence insofar as it is dependent on our attitudes about it, and the “natural”, or that which has objectively-valid existence insofar as the truth of claims made about it are independent of our attitudes about it. Ideology is, in one sense, the conflation of these two spheres, and fetishes are the hybridic offspring of the objectification of the ideal, or the attribution of naturalness to the cultural. I suspect that Levi will object to this characterization of Marx, although I’m remiss to see what grounds there might be for such an objection, as even a cursory reading of “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret” will reveal the primary concern is the conflation of social and objective validity.

Levi’s Latourian commitment to the unreality of the distinction between the natural and cultural is perhaps what led him to characterize fetishism as a matter not of the conflation of these two spheres, but of the ascription of ahistoricity to something historical. While I do not deny that the latter sort of ascription should be highly suspect from a Marxist point of view, the question of historicity is secondary with regards to that of the social or objective character of the entity whose historicity is in question. As Pete shows quite clearly in the above-linked post, the ascription of objectivity to something that cannot be accounted for in material terms has the result of making that thing appear dislodged from historical specificity, insofar as we cannot give a causal account of its genesis. Thus, while an ideological fetish may have the false appearance of ahistoricity, this is only a side-effect of the reification that produced it, not its primary characteristic. This leads us into the sticky question, alluded to in the second objection above, of the distinct senses of historicity said of the objective and normative realms, and the problem of their relation.

4. Ideology, Politics, and Class Struggle

Marx certainly wouldn’t be content to grant that that which has socially-valid existence is simply ahistorical. Yet as should be clear from the former section, the historicity of the social realm cannot be collapsed into that of the natural realm. Unfortunately, it is at this point far from clear how the historical character of the social relates to that of the natural, and how to understand the relation between manifestation and genesis of norms.

The historical genesis of natural entities, and thus the material conditions of manifestation of socially-valid entities, is fully accountable in causal, natural-scientific terms. Social entities themselves, on the other hand, while presumably historically accountable, are not causal but normative. We can account for their historical genesis by referring them to historical processes of their explication, clarification, and revision in accordance with experience (in the Hegelian sense as that which reveals the necessary inconsistencies within a given conceptual scheme).

‘Experience’ in this sense provides one important joint at which problems of the historicity of norms and practical conditions intersect, especially relevant for questions of scientific inquiry. For example, certain experiential challenges to our existing theoretical schemata are only possible at specific stages of material development, at points in which we have developed more adequately precise instruments and techniques than those on which we’d previously relied. Thus, questions about the material history of social practices, including the economic support of scientific and technological advancement, have certain relevance to questions about the history of conceptual revision within scientific discourse.

The relation between these two realms isn’t limited to questions of experience, but also extends to those of the interplay between political and ethical norms and the material relations between groups and individuals in which they are manifest. These even have a certain priority over the former type, in that economic support of scientific enterprises depends upon whether science is deemed an enterprise worthy of collective commitment (although the agent of this decision is not necessarily a genuinely collective agency, as is obvious from history; it could just as well be an aristocracy or oligarchy). These sorts of questions are at the heart of Marx’s work as a critique of ideology. Ideology is not simply, as defined above, the reification of norms, or the ascription of objective validity to merely socially-valid claims, but also involves the manner in which material pressures in the practical constitution of society can lead to such irrational distortions of its normative dimension.

Just as the material limits on possible experiences restrict the progress of scientific inquiry, so can the material organization of conditions of manifestation lead to the limitation and distortion of the norms that manifest through them. Ideology, while including the intra-normative problem of fetishism, is more fundamentally a matter of the material relations between individuals and how these impact the normative relations between them as rational agents, specifically when there is some imbalance or asymmetry in the power dynamic (or correlatively, the wealth dynamic) between these individuals. For Marx, the economy or ‘economic foundation’ is not a matter of markets, prices, and commodities, but of this material organization through which life is sustained, reproduced, enriched and impoverished. The economic foundation determines ‘in the last instance’ the social (normative) relations of production (through which socially-valid entities like commodities and prices come into being) because it exerts certain non-rational limitations, constraints, and influences upon the latter.

The form of influence that most interests Marx is ‘class struggle’, in which the material interests (survival, security, and ultimately prosperity) of social groups are basically incompatible or antagonistic, and grow more and more contradictory as society develops. Whichever group is disadvantaged by this incompatibility will naturally want to overturn the material relations that are currently existing, while the benefiting group will want to maintain these relations. Yet Marx’s account is not fundamentally about material interests, but about rational interests as well – this is clear when we recognize that the victory of the proletariat is not just another victory of the material interests of one group over those of another, and thus the perpetuation of class struggle, but the dissolution of class and thus of group-specific material interests as the organizing principle of social relations.

I can’t go into great enough detail on why Marx sees capitalism as the last class-based mode of production, but I can hint at it. While previous modes of production of course involve normative relations between individuals, and to some extent rational relations at that, the latter were far too underdeveloped and hindered by irrational appeals to authority founded either in divine or natural law, or else sheer force. Capitalism, having emerged roughly alongside the Enlightenment, was roughly contemporaneous with the rapid development of not only the rational basis of activities like science, but also the critique of rationally unjustifiable forms of authority. Capitalism was the first mode of production in which a rational organization of society, whose principle would not be material but rational interests, became a prominent ideal. (Whether this is a coincidence or not is a matter that will have to be addressed at another time.) Nonetheless, despite the ostensive appeal to rational organization, this ideal was hindered by the lingering class struggle. To maintain their dominant position, the bourgeoisie had to infect rational discourse (including discourse about rationality) with all sorts of fetishistic distortions, such that their material advantage at the expense of the proletariat could appear rationally justifiable. (Of course, treating this as if it were a conscious decision by a group of conspirators is misleading. These distortions are better understood as gradually accruing due to the constraints and influences of material wealth and force upon the development of the normative sphere.) Among these distortions was the ‘scientific’ defense of this social organization by the bourgeois political economists.

The Marxist argument is that the possibility of a rational basis of social organization is ideologically compromised. However, as the material contradictions become more and more exacerbated, their irrational influence on the rational sphere should become more evident, and thus the possibility should arise for a critique of this ideological contamination, both in the science of economy and the political ideals of society. This accounts for the possibility of Marx’s critical standpoint, which constitutes the basis from which rational resistance can be offered to the irrational ideological defense of the material imbalance in society.

Thus, I think we can characterize Marx’s aspirations as involving the conviction that, insofar as a rational social relation depends upon symmetrical recognitive relations between all rational agents, such that agents are all equal qua agents, none possessing authority over others that cannot be rationally justified, this should extend not only to the formal equality of agents qua agents, but the material equality of agents qua individuals. (‘Materially inequality’ is intentionally undetermined at this point; I wouldn’t say it is anything as strong as ‘equality of outcome’, especially considering the difficulty of devising a quantitative measure capable of equivocating over both qualitatively distinct outcomes, and the distinct preferences of individuals. Nonetheless, it should at the very least mean that no individual can be unjustifiably denied means of subsistence and improvement, and that accumulations of wealth must in turn be rationally justifiable.) This is the rational basis of communism as a classless society, or one in which material interest is thoroughly subordinated to (collective) rational interest.

The Marxist account is one of progress, wherein society has gradually elevated itself from being organized strictly in terms of material interest, to aspiring to a rational organization, be it one that is still thwarted. This account requires that norms are not only subjectively and intersubjectively determined, but that some norms hold necessarily by virtue of the structure of rationality. If this were not the case, then it would be hard to see what basis there would be for a social organization based not any the specific interests of any group, but on the interests of all rational agents qua rational agents. In other words, the possibility of communism requires that there is a sense of rationality that is independent of individual- and group-specific attitudes. I will try to defend this point a bit more in the penultimate section, but it obviously has a long way to go. Nonetheless, I think I’ve at this point done enough to show that fundamental norms of rationality might be necessary for a systematic reconstruction of Marx’s position. I still have to address the question of whether the possibility of such norms is consistent with Marx’s broader theoretical commitments.

If norms are socially-valid, they either ought to answer to the collective determination of the whole community of rational agents (even if they in fact only answer to a specific segment of that whole), or else be valid by virtue of being necessarily implicated in the very structure of rationality (even if ideological distortions in fact undermine rational consistency). Ideology is operative when certain actions are not rationally defensible, that is, they cannot answer to either the whole community of rational agents, nor to the structure of rationality itself, and so they instead appeal to an allegedly ‘objective’ authority, insulating norms from revision by attributing to them objective validity. At different historical stages, we become more able to throw off such distortions and opt for more rational discourses. This is what makes the ideal of science something Marx can aspire to – for science is not itself possible without a sufficient excision of fetishistic ‘objective’ idealities. Insofar as we have gradually opted for rational over irrational bases of social organization, and gradually purged our rational discourse of ideological distortions, we have made progress.

5. Objective and Non-objective Historicity

Now that I’ve laid out how historical materialism differs from both contemplative and abstract materialisms, it should be more clear how it avoids both the voluntarist and determinist interpretative options. It is not a determinism because it insists on the autonomy of the deontic normative realm of social validity from the alethic causal realm of objective validity that constitutes its material condition of manifestation. This autonomy is both explanatory, in the sense that explanation of the material base is insufficient for explaining the normative superstructure (the former’s determining power over the latter being of the order of a last-instance constraint), and pragmatic, in the sense that rational motivations for acting are irreducible to material interests, or put otherwise, the norms governing the correctness of our actions and statements cannot be read off of the behaviors and utterances in which they manifest. And it is not voluntarism, because the basis of this autonomy is not ontological, in that it does not subscribe to the objective status of normative concepts like will, freedom, creativity, etc.

Rather, this presentation should allow us to see that the proper way of relating the scientific and political projects in Marx’s work is through a concept of rational progress, according to which society has gradually shed most of the ideological distortions that, by infecting rational discourse with irrational appeals to authority (or non-ideological, purely repressive appeals to brute force, although the two have always historically be intertwined), both hindered the possibility of objective science and burdened society with an unjustifiable asymmetrical recognitive structure based upon the preservation of material inequalities. It is Marx’s conviction that by purging the science of political economy, or the science of the material constitution of social existence, of the fetishism that so thoroughly pervades it, the bourgeoisie would be deprived of the last bastion of ideological appeal through which it guards against a rational transformation of social relations. He further believes that, while the material relations within capitalism have progressed to the point of enabling such scientific progress (and hence his own discourse), this is not sufficient to carry through the further material transformations necessary to rationally reform the political constitution of society as well. Thus, a scientific critique of political economy is a necessary but insufficient condition of a rational critique of the existing political superstructure, which requires a further transformation of the material obstacles holding it back.

We’ve also seen why historical materialism is a materialism, in that it wants to avoid both explicit and implicit ascription of objective status to ideal entities, instead reserving objective claims exclusively for claims about material entities. Yet I’ve so far only hinted at why this historical materialism is also historical materialism. I’ve already drawn a vague distinction between the historicity of material existence and that of the normative realm, but this needs to be fleshed out a bit more.

To begin doing so, I’d like to distinguish two senses in which something has a ‘history’. The first is a weak sense (and ultimately I’d want to withhold extending the concept of ‘history’ to this case, but it makes sense to do so here) in which something has a past, and is thus both temporally situated and has a definite temporal genesis. Everything that is material is weakly ‘historical’ or temporal in this sense. The second is a strong sense, in which something has a history if we can reconstruct the timeline of its genesis by selecting a series of events that have narrative significance for this genesis. This history is not the actual past in which something came about, but the way we narratively reconstruct that past in terms rendered meaningful in that they can account for the sufficient conditions of that thing’s genesis. We can see, moreover, that implicit within this sense of history as an account of certain past events with narrative existence, is a further sense of progressive significance, wherein the thing whose history we are telling is the standard against which previous states of affairs are measured, such that the initial state is minimally compliant with this standard, and the final state is maximally compliant (insofar as it provides the standard itself). (We can of course from here imagine more complex narratives that either abstract from all actual states a thing has undergone and posit a more perfect or ideal state, and/or continue that history beyond whatever actual or ideal state is held up as the standard of progress, but these are outgrowths of the simple form of narrative I’m working with.)

While something analogous to narrative significance is found within objective temporality itself (which I’d call causal significance), this should not be confused with narrative significance, in that the latter involves a subjective act which arbitrarily selects some entity as a progressive standard, and then artificially reconstructs the objective timeline in terms of this arbitrary selection. Without making such a selection, it would be hard to say whether we could render the causal significance objective events have for each other intelligible at all (I wouldn’t go so far as to make this claim now, but it is a possible implication). The more important question here is whether we should make the leap of extending progressive significance beyond its role in narrative historicizing, and claim that it is somehow more than analogously related to causal significance. This is a teleological move, in that understands our selection of standards of progress within the objective world as honing in on something with objective significance, such that causality really progresses toward some entity as its final cause. Teleological accounts of progress would therefore see the progressive significance we ascribe to causal phenomena as reflecting something essential about that phenomena itself, amounting to more than a socially-valid convention we employ in rendering the massively complex causal temporality of the world intelligible.

Contemplative materialism and most forms of idealism would ascribe objectivity to these purely ideal standards, and so can tell a progressive story about the world as it is in-itself, and thus about telos of the world. Marx, on the contrary, wants to restrict such standards to socially-valid status only, and thus rejects teleological accounts of the objective world. Progressive significance is thus not a feature of the material realm itself, but only of the way materiality figures for us, within our explanations of it. Materiality is thus historical in the weak sense of being temporal, having a past with causal significance, but this is only analogously reflected by the progressive significance involved in the stronger sense of narrative history.

In contrast to the teleological account of historical progress, historical materialism should advocate an expressivist approach, wherein progress is a real feature of the ideal, socially valid realm. To understand this approach, we must first specify in the above terms what sort of historicity the normative realm has. Whereas the material realm has temporal historicity, and can only be analogously described in terms of narrative historicity, the normative realm is the exact inverse, having narrative historicity while only describable in temporal terms analogously. It may seem strange at first to say that norms are atemporal, but this matter is cleared up if we recognize that temporality is defined here is a matter of causality, and thus materiality, and that norms, being non-material, are not situated in the causal networks composing space-time. We can talk about the temporality of norms analogously by indexing them to their temporally situated conditions of manifestation, but the genesis and change of norms, while bound in relations of reciprocal influence with these conditions, is not itself temporal insofar as it is not causal. The history of norms does not have any causal significance at all, but it does have progressive significance.

If norms have a purely narrative historicity, it is because they only exist in terms of the narratives we tell ourselves, narratives which (at least according to a broadly Brandomian-Hegelian model) implicate the whole history in which norms pass from implicit to gradually more explicit states. To say these norms ever existed in some objective temporal realm independent of our attitudes is to reify them. Norms only ever exist in one or another narrative reconstruction, and while the various narratives intersect in interesting ways, they cannot be understood as being about something independent of narrativization. Narrative reconstructions of normative historicity do not interpret something temporal in terms of an imputed narrative significance, as norms do not exist outside of the socially-valid narrative significance they have for us. Norms are not external to their histories, or to the roles the play in a given narrative reconstruction, as they just are their narrative significance. Moreover, because standards of progress are ideal, and thus can only really apply to purely ideal entities, they therefore really apply to the history of norms, which consequently are really, and not only analogously, progressive. Indeed, while running together progressive and causal significance produces a suspect teleologism, we can account for the historical genesis and change of norms depicted in any given historical narrative in terms of the expressively progressive passage from implicitness to explicitness. Norms just are the histories through which they progress from more implicit to more explicit articulation, and these histories just are the narratives we create about the normative significance of our actions and statements.

The expressivist account of normative historicity is thus a progressivist account, in which norms become more explicit and their formulations become more rational over time (although, again, this ‘over time’ is internal to the narrative, and only analogously indexed to the actual past in which the norms were manifest). This runs directly against another commonplace interpretation of Marx which imputes to him teleologism, in which we are to read the necessity for social transformation off the material situation, rather than out of the socio-practical realm of norms. (Pete’s post, “Dissecting Norms”, which I linked to above, concludes with a very strong refutation of such teleologism, which he sees in one of Levi’s earlier discussions of Marx.)

The point of all this is that, while the ‘fundamental norms of rationality’ may be ahistorical in the sense of being already implicit in all rational discourse and action by virtue of its being rational, and thus are not relative to a given temporal-historical situation nor to a particular narrative-historical account, they are nonetheless thoroughly historical in the sense of only existing for historical narratives. They are not historically specific in the sense of being valid only for some specific historical period, but they are characterized by narrative historicity in that they do not exist apart from the activity of rational reconstruction of a progressive narrative (even if they are necessary and universal features of such historical accounts).

To repeat the arguments of the introduction, Levi seems to demand not only that these norms be localized in a particular narrative, but that this narrative be collapsed into the material-temporal situation in which it is manifest. This strikes me as distinctly non-Marxist move, in that it thereby collapses the socially-valid into the objectively-valid, a move to which ideology critique is directly opposed. But even if Levi wants to make the weaker claim that these norms, while not being temporally-specific in an objective sense, are nonetheless specific only to certain historical narratives, and thus cannot be generalized for all such accounts, he resists teleologism only to fall into historical relativism. If the norms of rationality can only belong to some specific narratives, this threatens to make rationality not a standard of progress that allows for the possibility of objective science and a genuinely emancipatory and egalitarian politics, but only a convention belonging to particular social constellations. Such a relativism about the structure of rationality therefore undermines the very ideals guiding Marx’s work. Nonetheless, we can resist this move by realizing that historicity is not equivalent to historical specificity.

Historical materialism is a progressivism regarding both science and politics, but because it insists on the division between the normative and the natural, this progress must be understood as expressive rather than teleological. The appearance of progress is only an effect of a rational reconstruction which supposes that something always implicit has become gradually more explicit. Yet while this appearance is only for us, because the whole normative realm is likewise for us, it has as much social-validity as the norms themselves. The point about the historical non-specificity of the norms of rationality is not that they have some objectively atemporal status (like all norms, they are non-objective), but that they must be implicit in every possible rational reconstruction, insofar as it is rational. The rational historical progress of any set of norms from implicit to explicit status depends upon the norms of rationality themselves being implicit. These norms are thus not historically specific, nor are they temporal, but this does not mean they are exempt from historicity. In this regard, they do not conflict with historical materialism, and insofar as they constitute the fundamental standards of social progress, they distinguish historical materialism absolutely from historical relativism.

Marx does think we have definitely improved upon our social conditions of existence, and that the achievement of communism will consummate this progress. Yet the bourgeois political economists also advocate a sense of progress, claiming that both the capitalist mode of production and the economic theories through which we understand it (although strictly speaking, the latter is included in the former) are the final consummation of a long process of development. What distinguishes Marx from his bourgeois opponents on the issue of progress is the manner in which they conceive the standard by which history is judged as being either progressive or not. For the latter, the current mode of production and its concomitant theoretical self-reflection is the telos of history, the best possible organization, and thus the ‘end of history’. For Marx, however, we cannot in this manner extricate the standard from its historical embeddedness. We may take the current state as the standard through which we evaluate history, but we can only do this in recognizing that future states will likewise hold themselves as standards against which we will be judged, and so too will our progressivist reconstruction of history. (This is how I understand Walter Benjamin’s critique of the concept of progress, which I will describe in more detail in a future post). This accountability or capacity to be held responsible by future generations is part of the fundamental structure of rationality.

Marx’s further critical move is to say that insofar as any given social organization is regarded as an ahistorical telos, attempting to exempt itself from critical evaluation, it thereby attempts to protect the existing state of affairs, which begs several questions: who would benefit from this insulation? Who is in a material position that is threatened by such a critical prerogative? And who is in a material position that is not threatened by such criticism, but on the contrary, threatened by the lack of criticism? Nonetheless, as I have shown above, appealing to an ahistorical telos falls foul not primarily because it appeals to something ahistorical, but because it treats something ideal as objective (the appearance of ahistoricity is only a ‘beneficial’ side-effect of this move).

Historical Materialism is historical not because nothing is exempt from material historicity (temporality), but because materialism itself is situated in an expressively progressive trajectory according to which the development of materialistic science is concomitant with the development of rational basis of social organization.

6. Conclusion

In the preceding I’ve shown how normative issues are not only not foreign to Marx’s work, but central to it. I’ve reconstructed the account of fetishism, which turns out to be primarily a matter of separating out norms from their reifying objectification. I’ve further tried to explain the historicity specific to both the natural and normative realms, and how this allows us to clarify the sense in which historical materialism is a historical materialism, as distinct from both teleologism and historical relativism.

I have no doubt that Levi, and many others, will find this interpretation of Marx to be counter-intuitive. Nonetheless, it is the most consistent reading of his oeuvre I can offer, and it furthermore helps clarify many issues that have plagued marxists for more than a century. Finally, I just want to say that while I am highly critical of the interpretation of Marx Levi champions, I hope he and others take this critical spirit as intended, out of solidarity in a common conviction to the importance of his work. I would do all marxists an injustice if I were not ruthlessly critical of approaches that seem to squander the critical force that binds me to those convictions.