Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Intellectual and Manual Labour

Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour argues that the “real abstraction” of commodity exchange makes possible “ideal abstraction” in cognition. In a radical version of the Marxist base-superstructure argument, Sohn-Rethel claims that abstraction must first exist in reality before it can appear in a pure form in the intellect. Mirroring Marx’s “critique of political economy,” Sohn-Rethel’s “critique of epistemology” attempts to prove that Kant’s a priori categories should not be grounded in the timeless transcendental subject but rather in the historical development of human society. In brief, Sohn-Rethel maintains: “(a) that commodity exchange is an original source of abstraction; (b) that this abstraction contains the formal elements essential for the cognitive faculty of conceptual thinking; (c) that the real abstraction operating in exchange engenders the ideal abstraction basic to Greek philosophy and to modern science.” At the center of Sohn-Rethel’s argument is the idea of “real abstraction.” Abstraction is typically treated as unique to human consciousness; the concreteness of reality is set in opposition to the abstractions of human cognition. Sohn-Rethel’s radical proposal is that there can be abstraction outside of and before the mind’s abstraction. In fact, this “real abstraction” is a condition for the development of intellectual abstraction in a pure form. Situated squarely within Marxism, Sohn-Rethel asserts that commodity exchange is precisely such a real abstraction. In societies oriented toward commodity production, the “the social synthesis”—“the network of relations by which society forms a coherent whole”—is accomplished through the abstraction of commodity exchange. As the universal equivalent that makes possible this social synthesis, money must exhibit a high level of abstraction so as to function in the exchange of any commodity with any other commodity that may appear on the market. But the “money abstraction” merely makes conspicuous the real abstraction hidden in all commodity exchange. Sohn-Rethel argues, “The form of commodity is abstract and abstractness governs its whole orbit.” First, the commodity functions as a bearer of value that is abstract. “The economic concept of value . . . is characterized by a complete absence of quality, a differentiation purely by quantity and by applicability to every kind of commodity and service which can occur on the market.” Next, exchange and use “must take place separately at different times. This is because exchange serves only a change of ownership, a change that is, in terms of a purely social status of the commodities as owned property.” “There, in the market-place and in shop windows, things stand still. They are under the spell of one activity only; to change owners. They stand there waiting to be sold. While they are there for exchange they are there not for use.” So “[w]herever commodity exchange takes place, it does so in effective ‘abstraction’ from use. This is an abstraction not in mind, but in fact.” Of course the individuals involved in exchange usually have specific use values in mind, but the action of exchange itself remains abstract. “The consciousness and the action of the people part company in exchange and go different ways.” Exchange abstraction enters consciousness only later in the form of money: “In money the exchange abstraction achieves concentrated representation, but a mere functional one – embodied in a coin. It is not recognizable in its true identity as abstract form, but disguised as a thing one carries about in one’s pocket, hands out to others, or receives from them.” Sohn-Rethel continues to investigate the exchange abstraction in order to specifically locate the origins of Kant’s a priori categories in commodity exchange rather than in the human mind. He shows that “the act of exchange has to be described as abstract movement through abstract (homogeneous, continuous and empty) space and time of abstract substances (materially real but bare of sense-qualities) which thereby suffer no material change and which allow for none but quantitative differentiation (differentiation in abstract, non-dimensional quantity).” He concludes, “The unvarying formal features of exchange . . . constitute a mechanism of real abstraction indispensable for the social synthesis throughout and supplying a matrix for the abstract conceptual reasoning characteristic of all societies based on commodity production.” The “conversion of the real abstraction of exchange into the ideal abstraction of conceptual thought” is first evident in ancient Greece, where the development of exchange and coinage created the conditions for Parmenides’ pure logic. Much later, real abstraction made possible Galileo’s work on “inertial motion” and modern science. With modern science, “intellectual labor” is separated from “manual labor.” Rejecting Kant’s argument about timeless a priori categories one more time, Sohn-Rethel claims, “The basic categories of intellectual labour . . . are replicas of the elements of the real abstraction,” that is, commodity exchange. The “mechanistic thinking” of science normatively prescribes how nature should act and allows intellectual labor to “yield a knowledge of nature from sources totally alien to manual labor.” At this point, Sohn-Rethel goes back and offers a more detailed history from ancient Egypt to the present of the social synthesis, showing how the development of real abstraction led to changes in ideal abstraction. In capitalism, the capitalist is responsible for production. The capitalist purchases everything needed in the production process, but does not partake in that process. As a result, long before automatic machinery is introduced in history the production process must function in an “automatic” manner. “From the perspective of the capitalist entrepreneur the essential characteristic of the production process for which he is responsible is that it must operate itself. The controlling power of the capitalist hinges on this postulate of the self-acting or ‘automatic’ character of the labour process of production. This all-important postulate of automatism does not spring from any source in the technology of production but is inherent in the production relations of capitalism.” The capitalist therefore depends on the abstract power of science to acquire control over the production process. In other words, the real abstraction of commodity exchange makes possible the ideal abstraction of science, which is now increasingly applied to the production of commodities themselves. This trend is most evident in Taylorism, which, instituting a strict division between mental and manual labor, abstractly analyzes the labor process and then forces the worker to attempt to conform to that abstraction in reality. However, machines are more suited to carrying out actions determined by abstraction, so there is the gradual move toward full automation. But as both Marx and Paolo Virno have noted, the growth of science-based automation socializes labor and threatens to burst the limits of the capitalist mode of production. Sohn-Rethal writes, “Technological devices, in substituting for the workers’ personal attributes, emancipate the subjectivity of labour from the organic limitations of the individual and transform it into a social power of machinery. Thus the electronics of an automated labor process act, not for the subjectivity of one worker only, but for all the workers employed in its previous manual stage. Automation amounts to the socialization of the human labour-power.” “We thus have the result that now man would, in principle, have at his disposal production forces which in themselves embrace in their physical reality the socialization which in the ages of commodity production had grown up in the intellectual work of the human mind – that is, in science.”