i on thomas paine reviews: origins of crisis in ussr - Common Sense

Page 46 Common Sense - Issue 15
conceptual starting point. This is because that which asserts itself to the economic mind
as 'objectivity', or 'objective logic', or 'objective being' is, in Marx, understood as
alienated subjectivity (as specified in Backhaus, 1992). Labour is an alienated subject by
virtue of its social existence as a producer of a perverted world. This means that the
practical-critical activity of labour exists against itself as itself in the form of the
fetishised world of capitalism. The constitution of the world occurs behind the backs of
the individuals; yet it is their work' (Marcuse. 193711988, p. 151). In other words. the
reality i:~ which humans move day in and day out has no invariant character, that is,
something which exists independently from them. It is the social practice of labour which
constitutes, suffuses and contradicts the perverted world of capitalism. Labour does not
exist 'external' to perverted forms. Rather, 'perverted form', including capital's 'cajoling
power', exist in and through labour's social practice. Thus 'subject and object do not
statically oppose each other, but rather are caught up in an "ongoing process" of the
"inversion of subjectivity into objectivity, and vice versa"' (Backhaus, 1992. p. 60
referring to Kofler). Understanding the constitution of perverted forms in this way makes
it possible to see the generic as inherent in the specific, and the abstract as inherent in the
concrete (see Man;. 1973, Intro.). This view involves a way of thinking which moves
within the object (i.e. the social-historical form of human relations) of its thinking.
Dialectics does not proceed to its object from outside but from inside. Dialectical thinking
attempts to appropriate conceptually the contradictory mode of existence constituted by,
and constitutive of, social practice. Dialectical thinking conceptualises itself within, and
as a moment of, its object (Gunn, 1989, 1992). Such a conceptualisation of social
existence seeks an understanding of the apparently isolated facts of life as comprising a
mode of existence of social relations. Dialectics emphasises the unity-in-difference as
between structure and struggle. It does so on the basis of the understanding that 'all social
relations are essentially practical' and that these social relations comprise the constitutive
practical-critical activity of labour.
Any conceptualisation of 'capital' which focuses on its seemingly formal logic (as in
structuralism) disregards the distinctiveness of Marx's theory and espouses. instead, the
reified world of capitalism as the object and purpose of theory. Further, any
conceptualisation which focuses merely on labour's autonomy h m capital disregards the
historically specific form of labour's existence and espouses, instead, a subjectivist
understanding of the ontological constitution of existence to be found - apparently - in the
subjectivity of being which constantly escapes the grasp, and which threatens a
revolutionary disposal of 'capital'. In other words, human practice is seen as a self-
constituting and immediate power, a power which 'capital' has but constantly fails to
subvert. In distinction to the ontological conception of labour, the present paper argues
that it is human practice which produces the perverted world of capital. It is the
contradictory unity of the relation between human practice as comrn&ied work in and
through class which constitutes society in terms of a continuous displacement and recon-
stitution of the 'enchanted and perverted world' of capitalism (Marx, 1966, p. 830). The
constitution of social practice as capitalist reproduction presents the concrete substance of
class antagonism. The removal of 'capital' into the museum of history can go forward
only through the revolutionising of laboufs existence as the alienated subject which
produces capital.
The social relation which constitutes the mode of existence/movement of labour in
capitalist society is the relation between necessary labour and surplus labour, that is, the
class antagonism of capital and labour which constitutes the social working day. The
capitalist mode of existence of labour is characterised by the continuous compulsion to