Summary: Was the birth of philosophy in Ancient Greece a reflex and projection of the

generic forms of capitalist exploitation, such as exchange-value, money and the commodityform? Did commodity fetishism and reification exist in Antiquity or are they historically
specific to capitalism? If the entire history of philosophy is branded with class-exploitation, is
the Hegelian dialectic redundant in critical theory? David Black, introducing one of the themes
of his forthcoming book, The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism, evaluates Alfred SohnRethel's anti-philosophical critique of capitalismEditor

Contra Sohn-Rethel: On the Philosophical

Roots of Anti-Capitalism
David Black
February 17, 2013

Sohn-Rethels exceptionally radical view parallels can be found, if at all, in Lukcs

Reification essay, in Blochs Thomas Mnzer and in some passages in Benjamin theorises a
capitalist order which is primordial vis--vis knowledge and being, an order that cannot be shown
as a subject-matter, topic, theme or problem of philosophy because it is philosophy itself.i
Gaspar Miklos Tams
'Real Abstraction'
Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1899-1990) spent his formative years in Germany amongst the radical
intellectuals who were to found the Institute of Social Research (later known as the Frankfurt
School), notably Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, In 1937, he fled Germany, where he had
been active in the anti-Nazi underground and took up residence in England. Despite his originality
as a Marxist theoretician, Sohn-Rethel found his works rejected for publication by Horkheimer,
then by the British Communist Party and finally by the British academic presses. His major work,
Intellectual and Manual Labour: a Critique of Epistemology, was eventually published in the
nineteen-seventies, when New Left students of the Frankfurt School recognized its importance.

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In Intellectual and Manual Labor, Sohn-Rethel comments on Marxs speculation in the Critique of
the Gotha Program about the vanishing of the antithesis between mental and physical labor in the
higher phase of a future socialist/communist society: But before understanding how this antithesis
can be removed it is necessary to understand why it arose in the first place. ii
Sohn-Rethel grounds the emergence of Western philosophy and scientific thought in an
autonomous intellect, which became separated from manual labor in the Mediterranean
civilizations of Antiquity. Ancient Egypt developed geometry and symbolic forms in writing as
means for appropriating the surplus product of a subservient class. In Greece mathematics, science
and philosophy were further developed, and in a more systematic manner. These civilizations are
formulated by Sohn-Rethel as societies of appropriation which displace communal and classless
societies of production. In a society of production, the communal order is derived directly from
social labor and there is no appropriation of surplus product by any class of non-producers. In a
society of appropriation, the appropriation operates either unilaterally, as in Ancient Egypt and
medieval feudalism, or reciprocally, as in the exchange of commodities through money, which
began in Greece and eventually became universalized in modern capitalism. In Greek Antiquity,
abstract thought was actualized when the social nexus of exchange relations was facilitated by
gold and silver coinage. This real abstraction produced, for the first time in history, the
cosmology of pure abstractions the One, the Many, Being, Becoming, etc. -- that we find in the
pre-Socratic philosophies of Parmenides and Heraclitus. Sohn-Rethel argues that the fundamental
unity of the being of things, which philosophers attempted to establish as an ontological or
transcendental character of reality, is really a mode of exploitative relations. Thus the nexus of real
abstraction is seen as having two sides which reflect one another: the commodity-form of
exchange-value mediated by money; and the norm of timeless and objectively deceptive
universal logic. Sohn-Rethel proceeds to argue that all concepts in the history of philosophy
including the transcendental categories of Kants pure reason and the absolutes of Hegels dialectic
are marked by this idealist timelessness, which also happens to characterize the status of the
commodity in the process of exchange

In Kants transcendental unity of consciousness the possibility of knowledge and experience is

grounded in a priori forms and categories. Sohn-Rethel's materialist critique of epistemology
seeks to overturn this Kantian synthetic unity by means of a methodological postulate. His move
is is not however, entirely at odds with neo-Kantian scientific method. For in neo-Kantian
sociology the objective validity of the sphere of facts and values is conferred by the power of
society or culture. For Emile Durkheim, the social conditions for the possibility of knowledge and
experience in human communities are actualized by the moral or coercive force of the collective
being, acting as a sui generis, transcendent objectivity. But a sociological a priori, unlike Kant's
transcendental unity of apperception, is external to the mind, and therefore has an object-like,
causal relationship to thinking. Because, in neo-Kantian thought, the nature of the precondition
(social being) is nevertheless transcendent and underivable, it cannot be a fact itself; therefore it
is like God or Freedom in Kant's practical reason a postulate introduced to make values

intelligible. But, as Gillian Rose points out, once a social origin of the categories is admitted it
becomes impossible to explain the relation between the unconditioned and conditioned without
using the very categories of the conditioned (such as cause) which need to be justified by the
precondition.iii
Sohn-Rethel seems to think that he can avoid this dilemma through recourse to materialism.
This is not to say that Sohn-Rethel subscribes to a vulgar dialectical materialist orthodoxy. He
asserts that the reality Marx opposes to forms of consciousness is not matter but social
existence; in order to derive consciousness historically from social being, we must presuppose a
process of abstraction which is part of this being.iv Sohn-Rethel and his co-thinkers, George
Thomson (1903-87) and Benjamin Farrington (1891-1974), argue that in Greek Antiquity, the
ideology of philosophical idealism emerged in class struggle. The idealism of the ruling class
was pitted against a materialism representative of the artisans of the lower orders, whose
practical, scientific outlook had already established the categories of analysis, such as cause.
But this methodological postulate of a putative pre-Socratic materialism, rendered dormant until
its renovation by Marxian materialism, rests on questionable historical validation. According to
Farrington, the atomistic philosophy of Epicurus was scientifically true and Anaximander was
saying the same kind of things that an up-to-date writer puts forward to-day in a scientific
handbook of the universe, with conclusions drawn from observation and reflection. These
claims were challenged at the outset by Thomson's former tutor at Cambridge, Francis Macdonald
Cornford (1874-1943), in a forgotten essay entitled The Marxist View of Ancient Philosophy:
What sort of observation could have taught Anaximander that the earth is a cylindrical drum,
three times as broad as it is high; or that the fixed stars, the moon, and the sun, in that order, are
respectively distant from the earth by 9, 18, and 27 times the diameter of the earth?
Thomson claims that following the Peloponnesian War, Athenian thought was divided between
those who supported the city-state (who were rich, such as Plato) and those who were prepared to
see it fall (who were not rich). Cornford comments, The implication that the abolition of the citystate would have entailed the abolition of social inequalities, including slavery, is hard to justify in
the light of history.v
Kant and Hegel on Form and Content

Sohn-Rethel says that the capitalist logic of appropriation cannot change into a socialist logic of
production until desocialized labor is resocialized and people create their own society as
producers.vi The problem is that he thinks the only thing preventing social labor from becoming
directly socialized is the exchange relation; a society is potentially classless when it acquires the
form of its synthesis directly through the process of production and not through exchangemediated appropriation.vii Sohn-Rethel was doubtless highly critical of the divisions and
inequalities in Russian communism between mental and manual workers. Note his insistence that,
to the conditions of a classless society we must add, in agreement with Marx, the unity of mental

and manual labor, or as he puts it, the disappearance of their division. But this goal is ungrounded
in Sohn-Rethels critique. His statement that the struggle against the division between intellectual
and manual labor formed a central issue in the construction of socialism in China since the
victory of the proletarian cultural revolution betrays a Kantian dualism between ought and
is, if not a lapse into Maoist voluntarism.viii
Sohn-Rethel tries to circumvent the relation between Hegel's idealism and Marx's materialism
by insisting that Kantian dualism reflects the realities of capitalism more faithfully than Hegels
anti-epistemological approach, which Sohn-Rethel sees as an attempt to draw all of the social
antinomies and contradictions into the immanency of absolute spirit. George Lukcs seems to
concur, in saying that the Kantian critical philosophy springs from the reified structure of
consciousness in the modern world. He adds however, that the problems and solutions of the
Ancient Greek philosophy, embedded in a society wholly different from capitalism, were
qualitatively different from those of modern philosophy: Greek philosophy was no stranger to
certain aspects of reification, without having experienced them, however, as universal forms of
existence.ix
Although commodities and money existed in the trading periphery of Greek Antiquity, the
commodity-form as described by Marx in Capital was is no sense the active social mediation.
Sohn-Rethel misses Hegel's critique of major errors in Kantian thinking; a critique which provides
Marxism with some crucial arguments against political economy. To take just one, Hegel argues,
contra Kant, that form is by no means external in relation to content. For in the opposition of form
and content, the content is not formless. As Isaac Rubin observes:
From the standpoint of Hegelian philosophy the content itself in its development gives birth to
this form, which was contained within this content in concealed form. From this standpoint, the
form of value also must arise of necessity from the substance of value, and consequently we must
view abstract labor as the substance of value, in all the fullness of its social features which are
characteristic for commodity production.x

Raya Dunayevskayas 1949 essay, Notes on Chapter One of Marxs Capital in relation to Hegels
Logic, seems to concur with Rubin on the issue of form and content: the illusory nature of the
commodity fetish cannot be overcome by simply counterposing essence to form i.e., opposing
concrete, useful labor, conceived as the source of all value, to the phenomenal form and
phantasmagoria of exchange-values. For to do so would fail to comprehend their interpenetration
and opposition in a single commodity acting as an equivalent. Use-value becomes the phenomenal
form of its opposite, value. Concrete labor becomes the mere matter of the form under which
abstract labor manifests itself. Private labors are socialized by the general value-form which
allows for, and requires, the existence of the money-form.xi The general value-form reduces all
actual labor to expenditure of labor-power in a bad infinity of unlimited growth and
accumulation of capital. Under the thumb of capital, labor is substance, not subject. Labor is not
actualized as subject in a conflict between good use-value and bad exchange-value. Labor,

as the proletariat, only becomes a subject in its self-abolition and uprooting of value-production.
Marx says that the life-process of society does not strip off its mystical veil until it is consciously
regulated by freely associated producers according to a settled plan.
Praxis in Aristotle, Hegel and Marx
According to Sohn-Rethel and Thomson, the fetishism of commodities which they see as false
consciousness, rather than an objective structuring power of capital -- existed in Greek
Antiquity.xii But this view of fetishism, as a transhistorical phenomenon stemming from the
illusions in acts of exchange, is hard to square with Marx's position that his investigation of the
commodity the simplest social form in which the product of labor in contemporary society
manifests itself is historically specific.xiii This might help to explain why Marx, in Capital
Volume Three, says that the polis of Greek Antiquity had more in common with primitive
communism, than with capitalism and feudalism. For in both the polis and primitive communism,
it was the actual community that presented itself as the basis of production, and it was the
reproduction of this community that was productions final purpose.xiv Aristotle conceived of a
social hierarchy of (in top-down order) Theoria (Theory and Philosophy), Praxis (Activity or
Action) and Techn (Production). Whilst philosophy and praxis which together comprise the
Realm of Freedom have no ends outside themselves, production, performed largely by slaves,
has its ends outside of itself. Hegel, in his philosophic conception of the modern (post-French
Revolution) world, attempted to dissolve the barrier Aristotle put between freedom (as praxis) and
unfreedom (as production) and make them the two sides of spirits historical self-objectification,
united in the concept of free labor. Marx, like Aristotle, conceived of a society with no end outside
itself. But whereas for Aristotle the self-sufficient community of the polis was a community of free
men ruling over slaves and women, for Marx, socialism/communism would be a self-sufficient
entity of human power as its own end; that is, in the words of August Blanqui (whom he much
admired), a republic without helots. And whereas in Hegels philosophy of history, the dialectic
is one of self-consciousness and consciousness, for Marx it is that of laboring humanity. Hegel was
unable to see the commodity fetishism in industrial production which the class struggles of the
nineteenth century were to illuminate for Marx. Therefore it is hardly surprising that Hegel
conflated modern abstract labor with labor as praxis.

Rosa Luxemburg says that at the moment the Greeks entered history, their situation was that of a
disintegrated primitive communism.xv Was it, then, any accident that communism made its first
appearance in philosophy amongst the elite of Platos Republic, at the very time it was being
extinguished, in its primitive forms, throughout the Greek world? Richard Seaford, in Money
and the Early Greek Mind, argues that the western metaphysical tradition developed under the
influence, not only of money, but also of the social forms and practices which preceded monetized
society, however remote. Although philosophy involves unconscious cosmological projection of
the abstract substance of money, it does not, as Sohn-Rethel supposes, consist of it.xvi

Even granted that Hegels Logic represents the logic of capital it does not necessarily follow that
Hegels philosophy represents the value-form. Just as the internal duality of Hegel's Logic is
expressed in the contradiction between the Theoretical and Practical Idea in the Absolute, so
capitalism is riven with an internal instability that intimates a realm beyond capital wherein
human power is its own end.


Gaspar Miklos Tamas, The Uniqueness of Capitalism and the Normative Content of a Socialist Political
Philosophy (2008) http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/society/events

ii Alfred

Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (London: Macmillan,

1976), p. 57.Sohn-Rethel, IML, p. 57.

iii Gillian

Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, (London: Continuum, 2000), pp. 15-17.

iv Sohn-Rethel.,

p. 57.

v F.M. Cornford, The Unwritten Philosophy, pp. 120-26. Benjamin Farrington, Science and Politics in the
Ancient World (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965). George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1973),
vi Sohn-Rethel,

p. 83.

vii Sohn-Rethel,

p. 139.

viii Sohn-Rethel,

p. 169.

ix George

Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, (London: Merlin 1971), p. 111.

x I.I. Rubin, Abstract Labour and Value in Marx's System, Capital and Class, No. 5, Summer 1978
http://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/abstract-labour.htm
xi Raya Dunayeskaya, Notes on Chapter One of Marxs Capital and its Relation to Hegels Logic (1949),
The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism (Chicago: News and Letters Publications, 1992), pp. 8994.
xii

Alfred SohnRethel, The Historical Materialist Theory of Knowledge (in four parts). Marxism Today,

(March,April,MayandJune1965).

xiii Marx, Notes on Adolph Wagner in Karl Marx Texts and Method, ed. T. Carver (Oxford University
Press: 1975). http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01/wagner.htm
xiv

Marx, Capital Vol. III. (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 970.

xv

Rosa Luxemburg, Slavery, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, eds, K.B. Anderson and P. Hudis (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2004), p. 114.

xvi

Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind (Cambridge University Press: 2004), pp. 188-89.