So, what has happened since last Wednesday? Last Wednesday, we saw how Europe became accustomed to the new time discipline. But we also saw how they became accustomed to isolating abstract value from its material form of appearance and to experiencing their world and value in the world as a quasi-natural structure bearing them forward in time. As we learned from I Kant, this structure has gotten “under our skin” so to speak; it has actually taken hold of our bodies and minds. It is not only apparently structuring our experience and understanding; it actually forms the structure of our experience and understanding. It does not only appear to be bearing us forward. It actually is bearing us forward. What this means is that we should not be looking here for a deeper, more real or more natural “actual” world beneath a world of appearances.
This week we take up A Smith, GWF Hegel, and K Marx. On some level, A Smith and I Kant seem to be of two completely different worlds. I Kant is reconstructing a comprehensive set of interpretive categories through which we can grasp how it is possible for anyone to reflect critically not only upon the structure of the material universe (the world of appearance or experience), but also upon moral experience and judgment (or aesthetics or taste or culture). A Smith by contrast appears profoundly disinterested in critical reflection. Rather does he appear completely taken by understanding how economic growth – and continuous economic growth – is possible. So is there any relationship between A Smith’s problem and I Kant’s?
Yes, there is. But to appreciate this relationship we need to take a couple steps back and take a look at the mercantilist or quasi-mercantilist system at which A Smith is taking aim. According to this system, wealth is still identified with the commodity’s material form of appearance in general and with the national Exchequer’s volume of precious metals in particular. We need to think here of the wealthiest nation in Europe at the time, of Spain, and of its depredations in the New World. Based solely on its command of the material form of appearance, Spain is an inconceivably wealthy nation. And, yet, as everyone in Europe surely knew, it was not wealthy, but poor. Or we can think of France and of the French physiocrats who are inclined to associate wealth with the land and with its productivity; after all, the earth is the only renewable and (potentially) endlessly productive resource. Thus the French were inclined to associate wealth with the land in general and more particularly with agriculture. (One can see traces of this attachment to the material form of appearance throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; as an American, I think here about the large land-holders in the southern U.S. and about their incapacity to “see” or “consider” the army of abstract labor without which their considerable land holdings aren’t worth squat.
A Smith turns his readers’ attention away from this material form of appearance to the real foundations of wealth: abstract labor time expended. Herein, just like I Kant, A Smith appreciates why our focus on the material form of appearance – on experience if you like – is a distraction from the forces through which our world is actually integrated.
There is, however, a second factor that we need to bear in mind when comparing A Smith and I Kant. A Smith is writing from the heart of what is already the Third Cycle of Capital Accumulation (following the Genoese and the Dutch). There is no need for A Smith to speculate or hypothesize about comprehensive social, political, or economic integration, about the production of wealth, or about economic growth. A Smith is “living the dream.” I Kant, by contrast, is living on the periphery of Empire. And, although Prussia surely feels the effects of this hegemon across the North Sea and Channel, I Kant’s contact with the Third Cycle is largely literary. For I Kant, the comprehensive integration of the world is a theoretical problem. He is not thinking about the production of wealth. He is thinking about the production of knowledge. And, yet, by taking a couple of steps back, we can see how the world that I Kant is theorizing, in which abstract value pulls free from its material body (or, if you prefer, in which abstract labor pulls free from its material form of appearance), is the same world that A Smith is theorizing, where labor in the abstract is the source of all (again abstract) wealth and power.
So, what of GWF Hegel and K Marx? Where do they fit in? Here, GWF Hegel is the central figure because he is equally fluent in the language of critical idealism, of I Kant, and the language of the French and British political economists. So, where does GWF Hegel’s problem lie? It lies on several levels simultaneously. For, on the one hand, he does not buy the transcendental form that I Kant gives to freedom and ethics. On the other hand, he also does not buy the purely individual, partial, or private character that the political economists give to wealth. Yes, wealth is composed by the decisions of private economic actors. But, Hegel observes, they do not make these decisions in a vacuum. They are born along within a comprehensive, integrated, rational system without which all of these individual actions and decisions give rise not to order, but to chaos. So, if these decisions and actions take place within a comprehensive, integrated system, how is it possible for purely private, isolated individuals within this comprehensive system to grasp the whole? These individuals must not be anywhere near as private or as isolated as the political economists believe they are.
More importantly, if these individuals do grasp the whole, then where does this capacity, this knowledge, sit within the entire system? Where does it come from and what is its function within the system?
Here is where GWF Hegel shifts gears. Knowledge – the actual interpretive categories that grasp this comprehensive integration – must be generated by this integration. There is thus a correspondence between the interpretive categories and the material world itself. But there is more. Those who are completely embedded in this material world – those who are dependent on it – are incompetent to grasp how all of the elements fit together. To grasp the whole requires that an individual actively pursue grasping the form of the whole; and this requires independence and freedom.
Here GWF Hegel is directly appealing to Aristotle. The responsible political class cannot have a material interest in private enterprise, in oikonomia, without undermining its capacity to grasp the whole. For this reason, the responsible political class must rise above all individuality and particularity. It must rise to become the universal class – above all individual business, religious, social, or cultural particularities. What is more, it is only when this universal class truly grasps and orchestrates the whole – through universal law, regulation, and institutional arrangements – that society realizes its full potential, its full efficiency, making it possible, eventually, for all social actors to step aside and install machines in their place; therein claiming their freedom.
But, finally, there is K Marx. It is K Marx who recognizes that GWF Hegel’s totality is itself historically specific, that the comprehensive integration that it composes also constitutes the unique form of social domination peculiar to this regime of practice. This historicization and particularization of the capitalist totality does not invite us to step outside of capitalism, but to comprehend it from within so that we might step through it and on to an other side, where social actors are no longer dominated by abstract labor time expended.