June 27, 1998

Is Marxism Reductionist?

The short answer is no.

Marx undertook the study of the succession of historical relations which produced the commodity form and the bourgeois political economy. In amassing such a body of data, Marx himself was led into many of corners of the human experience and endeavor, and to assert that he reduced them all to the economic is simply to miss the point of his investigation of their interrelations. Therefore, his focus on economics is to be likened to the search for and subsequent sublation of a single sine qua non, in order to liberate additional possibilities.

That said, Marx grew out of the milieu of religious and philosophical criticism of the Left- and the Young-Hegelians. His critique of political economy was inspired by Hegel’s early negative theology and Feuerbach’s anthropological critique of religion, the objects of which studies were later diagnosed superstructural, which is best understood as the whole of human nature, whatever is not blind nature and bare survival. Marx was interested in these relations of production because he was interested in “solving” Hegel’s subject-object problem: society’s economic endeavors are those relations at the very nexus between human and blind nature: nature is the means of bare survival.

Food is the first “commodity” despite the fact that its dual nature is not comprised of exchange and use values in their traditionally Marxist senses; but human nature and blind nature can be imposed upon fruit, as an aspect of nature’s own circuit of exchange (accumulation of nature’s stock through the production and distribution of reproductive capital) and homo sapiens’ consumption of fruit as use value (consumption).

This is what Marx was getting at in the first paragraph of The Critique of the Gotha Program, his marginal notes to the Program of the German Workers’ Party. “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.” The relation of man to tree would be the first relation of “production” (man : nature), and this, if reductionist, is also historically prior and economically fundamental to whatever other relations homo sapiens may enter into when it organizes itself into society (i.e., whatever other superstructural relations come into being).

So Marx intends to go all the way down to the very bottom of things, historically and conceptually. To dismiss him as reductionist, one has to dismiss the analysis of the entire human society as based on this initial relations of man to nature as a means of survival. In other and more ominous words, one has to reify those relations and man’s own existence as a part of nature into irrelevant oblivion. In other words, Marxism is not reductionist for the very reason that it is, in the face of those separate spheres of superstructural manifestation of fundamental relationships.

One last attempt: Marx’s saying that the intellect does not form the mode of production, but vice versa, seems to indict and convict him once and for all. Society, human nature, has been in existence for long enough to allow most of us to have forgotten that there was ever anything other than an industrial mode of production and, at best, a job for everyone. Only if we succumb to the sublime forgetting which allows mankind conceptually to replace nature with its ad-hoc accumulation of social structures and institutions (“second” nature, which is hardly “intellectual” in the best sense of being thought out in advance, that is, planned, but just thrown together for the most part) can one allow oneself to dismiss Marx’s claims without becoming a Marxist oneself.

marx marxism reductionism labor.theory.of.value