Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 5360

www.brill.nl/hima

Editorial Introduction
Peter Thomas
Department of Political Science, Universiteit van Amsterdam
thomas_p_au@yahoo.com.au

Abstract
Historical Materialism has previously published a signicant number of studies from the
contemporary Marx Renaissance. Roberto Finellis intervention into the debate over Chris
Arthurs The New Dialectic and Marxs Capital provides an opportunity to consider the
international reverberations of this movement and its political presuppositions and consequences.
Working in a very dierent tradition of Marxism, Finellis interpretation of Marx has decisive
similarities with Arthurs reading of the importance of Hegels Logic for the conceptual structure
of Capital. Yet whereas Arthur argues for a direct homology, Finelli proposes a heuristic
analogy. The dierent conclusions reached by the two theorists reect dierent orientations,
both theoretical and political. Comparison to theses of the Italian workerist tradition and other
contemporary readings of Marx suggest that these dierences are best comprehended in a
political rather than solely intellectual register. Despite their dierences, these various research
projects are in agreement regarding the necessity of deriving concrete strategies for the
contemporary socialist movement from theoretical debate.
Keywords
Marx Renaissance, interpretations of Capital, Della Volpeanism, the new Hegel, living
labour

One hundred and fty years after the compilation of the notebooks that were
only much later published as the Grundrisse, and one hundred and forty years
after the appearance of the rst edition of Capital, Volume I, the study of
Marxs incomplete theoretical project still arouses vigorous and productive
debates. The continuing publication of the German critical edition of the
works of Marx and Engels (MEGA) including many previously unpublished
texts, the vast majority of which still remain unavailable in English has
provided new material for re-opening old debates and initiating new ones.
Above all, however, it has been the development of the post-1989 political
conjuncture intersected by the experiences of the Zapatistas, Seattle, 9/11,
the largest international antiwar mobilisation in world history and continuing
resistance to neoliberalism that has prompted a return to Marxs texts, as
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007

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DOI: 10.1163/156920607X192066

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resources of renewal for a revolutionary Marxist theory freed from compromises

with the experience of Stalinism. The last decade has seen the appearance of a
number of signicant contributions to the elaboration and/or reconstruction
of the critique of political economy, in various national-linguistic Marxist
cultures: the studies of Enrique Dussel in Latin America, Jacques Bidet in
France, Wolfgang-Fritz Haug and Michael Heinrich in Germany, Geert
Reuten in the Netherlands and Riccardo Belloore in Italy (to cite only a few
prominent examples) can be regarded as among the rst oerings of a
contemporary renaissance of studies of Marx and, in particular, of the critique
of political economy.
Over the last decade, Historical Materialism has published studies of
dierent aspects of the work of Marxs maturity from a wide range of
theoretical and political perspectives. These studies have ranged from the
strictly philological and interpretative to the more exploratory and
reconstructive. All have been united in the conviction that it is only by
attempting to inherit the research programme bequeathed to us by Marx, even
with its uncertainties and problems, that we will be able to elaborate a
systematic and totalising critique adequate for an anticapitalist and, above all,
socialist politics today. Alongside these ongoing debates in the pages of the
journal, a parallel publication programme in the Historical Materialism book
series (published by Brill) has presented translations of important works
previously unavailable in English (e.g. Maksakovskys The Capitalist Cycle, or
more recently, Bidets Exploring Marxs Capital ). Both the journal and book
series will continue to promote actively the diusion of work originating
outside the Anglophone world, in accordance with Historical Materialisms
declared intention to promote a return to Marxisms traditions of cosmopolitan
debate. We believe that a more regular exchange between theorists working in
dierent national traditions and linguistic zones will prevent some of the
needless duplication or repetition that has arguably characterised theoretical
debates in dierent Marxist cultures in the past, while the cross-fertilisation of
perspectives from distinct intellectual and political traditions constitutes one
of the most powerful resources for the revitalisation of Marxism as a consciously
internationalist and integral conception of the world.
HM 13.2 carried a symposium debating Chris Arthurs The New Dialectic
and Marxs Capital (HM Book Series, 2002). Building upon work in value
theory previously published in the journal, this symposium included responses
from such renowned value theorists and Marx scholars as Albritton, Bidet,
Callinicos, Hunt, Kincaid, and Murray. As one might have expected, many of
these contributions took issue with the foundational thesis of the research
project presented in Arthurs book: namely, that there exists an homology

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between the structure of the categories in Hegels Logic and the structure of
categories deployed by Marx in Capital. According to Arthur, it was precisely
by attending to such a purportedly idealist thinker and not by peremptorily
settling accounts with his erstwhile philosophical conscience or by means of
an epistemological break that Marx was able to unravel the mystery of the
mode of being of capitalism as a spiritualisation of material interchange and
practical activity.1 While post-Althusserian debates have grown accustomed
to the notion that Marx continued to draw upon Hegel more than the prior
vulgate had allowed, it was the extent of Arthurs proposal namely, that Marx
not only irted with the categories developed by the theorist of Absolute
Spirit, but that there existed a direct homology between these categories and
those used by Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy, in its dual
sense as ideology and mode of production that prompted disagreements
from a variety of perspectives.
In this issue, we continue the debate with a contribution by Roberto Finelli.
Currently full professor at the University of Bari and regular contributor to
some of the leading Italian Marxist journals (such as Critica Marxista), Finelli
is one of the most well known Marxist scholars and philosophers in
contemporary Italy. Staunch critic of the Della Volpean initiative in Italian
Marxism, with signicant references also to Labriola, Gramsci and, further
aeld, Althusser, Finellis thought has developed through engagement with a
number of intellectual traditions, He has previously published major studies
on German idealism and in particular the development of the dialectic in the
Hegels thought, culminating in 1996 in the book-length study Mito e critica
delle forme. La giovinezza di Hegel (17701801). Alongside the work of his
fellow Italian Domenico Losurdo, Finelli has made an important contribution
to the new Hegel that has been emerging over the last decades. This research
has emphasised the necessity of situating Hegels thought in its historical
context and a close attention to the letter of his text, rather than received
preconceptions derived from overdetermined interpretative traditions. The
result, in Losurdos case, has been an image of a Hegel radically at odds with
the lamentably still inuential caricature of a reactionary pantheist or even
totalitarian thinker, according to the Popperian-Arendtian slander. In Finellis
work, it has led to an emphasis upon the Hegelian notion of Geist as a
dynamism of alterity that is not easily reconciled with either idealism or
materialism as traditionally conceived. Another eld of research is represented
by the numerous studies Finelli has dedicated to psychoanalysis, in particular

1. Arthur 2005, p. 218.

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to Freud. Here, Finelli has aimed to elaborate of a theory of the unconscious in

terms irreducible to those of identity and contradiction characteristic of
discursive-logical thought and, building upon the emphasis on relationality of
his Hegel studies, incompatible with the essentialism of traditional philosophical
anthropology.
All of these concerns are integrated into Finellis own distinctive conception
of the philosophical presuppositions and political consequences of Marxs
thought, signalled by Cristina Corradi in her recent Storia dei marxismi italiani
as among the most original readings of Marx to have emerged in Italy in the
post-WWII period. Astrazione e dialettica dal romanticismo al capitalismo.
Saggio su Marx [Abstraction and Dialectics from Romanticism to Capitalism.
Essay on Marx] (1987) developed a novel conceptual and interpretative matrix
that in many respects can be read as a detailed critique of the aporiai of Della
Volpeanism, particularly as it developed into the impasse of Collettis return
to Kant and subsequent exit from Marxism. Conceptually, this matrix was
dened by the concepts of real abstraction and the circle of presupposed/
posited [il circolo del presupposto-posto] as the essential terms of Marxs critique
of political economy. In terms of interpretation, Finelli opposed a long
tradition, both Marxist and otherwise, by positing the process of abstractionemptying out [svuotamento] of the concrete as the central tension of the
Marxist dialectic, rather than that of opposition-contradiction. The result was
a presentation of Marxs magnum opus as an analysis of capital as the total
subject of modernity, capable of absorbing and redening all social relations
on the basis of its own expansive logic.
More recently, Finelli has published Un parricidio mancato. Hegel e il giovane
Marx [A Failed Parricide: Hegel and the Young Marx] (2004). This is rst in a
planned two-volume research project that aims to oer a more concrete and
conceptually precise presentation of theses sketched out in the earlier volume.
The fundamental thesis of this study is that the young Marxs attempt to kill
his philosophical father Hegel failed, Marxs own claims and those of the
materialist conception of history notwithstanding. Finelli argues that Marxs
thought remained determined by an idealist problematic, structurally subaltern
to that of Hegel, until at least the period of the Grundrisse and Capital. The
young Marx, according to this reading, remained a theorist of the unfolding
via labour of the human species, a theorist of substance becoming subject
whose turn to Feuerbach, in order to escape the anxiety of inuence of his
relationship to Hegel, produced an anthropology more and not less organicist
and spiritualist than the Hegelian notion of the subject as that which becomes
itself by means of its relations to the other. In eect, Finelli argues that the
young Marxs eorts resulted in an unwitting armation of the most

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metaphysical elements of Hegels thought, while failing to comprehend the

critical dimensions hidden behind Hegels adoption of the only seemingly
theologically inspired category of Geist.
Even when the Marx of Capital nally succeeded in carrying out the
parricide desired in his youth, Finelli argues, it was not due to his arrival on
the continent of materialism (as traditionally understood within Marxism),
whether dialectical or otherwise. On the contrary and herein lies the novelty
of Finellis thesis, distinguishing it from other readings of a break in Marxs
intellectual development Marx was able to overcome his youthful anxiety of
inuence only by returning to it and transforming it into the foundation of
his mature writings. Finellis analysis of Marxs doctoral dissertation is decisive
for sketching out the presupposition of this hypothesis. While many
interpretations of this work have been content to focus upon selected passages
from the preparatory notebooks and their apparent humanist valorisation of
a Promethean freedom, Finelli takes seriously Marxs substantive theses
regarding the qualitative distinction between the thought of Democritus and
the later Epicurus and, in particular, Marxs use of the eminently Hegelian
category of Formbestimmung [determination of form] in order to understand
the fundamental coherence of Epicuruss only apparently self-contradictory
positions. The theoretical matrix of this category, according to Finelli, was
subsequently repressed in the rush to construct a materialist conception of
history and communist politics that was all too anthropological; but, with the
return of the concept of Formbestimmung from the Grundrisse onwards, Marx
was able to produce a theory adequate for the comprehension of modern
society, according to a dualism of two worlds: World I, that sphere of
appearance and visibility, animated by concrete things and individuals, and
World II, that sphere of essence and invisibility, animated only by the
abstraction of a wealth merely quantitative which, precisely because it is mere
quantity, is not able to have any other goal for its becoming than that of its
own quantitative accumulation.
As the reader will have discerned, and as Finelli succinctly summarises in his
intervention, there are thus important similarities between Arthurs and
Finellis reading of the structure of Capital. Both stress Marxs continuing
indebtedness to Hegel; both emphasise the conceptual rather than historicistteleological method of Marxs presentation of simple commodity production;
both stress the importance for Marx of the notion and procedure of formal
determination; and both insist that capital and the capitalist society that
derives from it must be analysed in systematic terms, as a tendentially selfarming totality. Nevertheless, there are also profound dierences between
their readings. Whereas Arthur posits an homology between Hegels Logic and

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Capital (arguably running the risk of turning the latter into an applied version
of the former), Finelli argues that there exists only an analogy. According to
this proposition, Marx did make decisive conceptual advances over Hegel after
all (and not merely those conceded by a change in the object of research); but
these advances were made, in a certain sense, by turning Hegel against Hegel,
or by taking Hegels method seriously at precisely those moments when Hegel
relapsed into categories derived from the metaphysical tradition. From this
perspective, the real problem (for Marx and Marxism) in Hegels thought is
not its supposed quasi-neo-Platonism (Spirit or Idea begetting the world).
Rather, it is the problematic of speculation, from which Hegel was never able
to escape, presupposing and producing a subject transparent to itself and thus
tending towards a humanist anthropology unable to grasp the constitution of
the subject of capital as a social relation. Whereas Hegels speculative method
proceeds with the annulment of the other as an absolute non-Being that in
turn annuls its antagonist (a dialectic of opposition-contradiction), Marxs
two-world analysis, according to Finelli, acknowledges the full reality of both
the concrete and abstract, but conceives of their constitution and antagonism
in terms of the subsumption of the former by the latter, followed by a
dissimulation in which the abstract presents itself within the concrete, as that
which it is not (a dialectic of abstraction-emptying out).
Similarly, whereas many of Arthurs other interlocutors have expressed
concern about the extent to which he oers a spiritualist reading of Capital,
Finelli argues that Arthur does not go far enough in thinking through the
conceptual consequences of a systematic account of the capitalist mode of
production. As Callinicos noted in the rst series of critiques, Arthur accepts
a notion (also to be found in Dussels work, among many others) of living
labour that regards it as irreducible, fundamentally radically other and,
ultimately, unable to be subsumed completely by capital: the Kantian moment
that Arthur admitted in his Reply to Critics continues to inform his otherwise
Hegelian orientation.2 Finelli objects that this position contradicts the
commitment to think capital in formal terms, betraying a lingering suspicion
that the formal can never be accorded completely the reality other traditions
of thought have assigned to the material. For Finelli, instead,
The logic of totalisation . . . does not tolerate any presupposed [Vorgesetztes]
element if it is not posited [Gesetztes], that is, produced and re-signied by the
2. Callinicos 2005, p. 53. For Arthurs response, see Arthur 2005, the following in particular:
we cannot allow that capitals dynamic creates the very substance of material production. There
remains in it a Kantian moment, in that the things themselves are, in the last analysis,
inaccessible to capital, hence its blind destruction of the environment, p. 200.

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totalising subject. . . . [T]he abstract occupies and itself invades the concrete,
lling it according to the exigencies of its expansive-reproductive logic.

The notion of a Kantian moment that resists capitals subsumption, in this

perspective, would be merely one of the ruses or dissimulations of capital
itself, one of the forms in which it presents its own subjectivity as the only
possible objectivity.
Finally, Finellis suggestion that Arthur may here be in some way still
inuenced by the tradition of English empiricism, read in a certain fashion,
allows us to highlight some of the political consequences of this debate, of the
extent to which theoretical assumptions are shaped by and in turn shape
concrete political strategies. For the fact that such a substantialist reading of
Capital has in reality emerged from a wide variety of intellectual traditions at
a much greater distance from Hume suggests that something more is at stake
here than merely the inuence of the history of philosophy on contemporary
Marxist theory. Apart from Dussels work (strongly inuenced by a reading of
Schelling, on the one hand, and, above all, the experience of Latin-American
liberation theology, on the other) and Della Volpeanisms anti-historicism, one
could also refer to another Italian tradition whose presuppositions have found
a wide echo in the alterglobalisation movement namely, operaismo. Negris
valorisation of the creativity of living labour against the morbid parasitism of
capital, in particular, posits an irreducible ontological priority of labour over
capital (in this, he continues the focus of early operaisti such as Panzieri or
Tronti, whatever their other disagreements). The political consequences of this
reading run from an earlier refusal of labour through to contemporary calls
for Exodus a strategy of delinking within the metropolis.
Arthurs and Finellis attempts to analyse the expansive dimensions of
capitalist subsumption provide some reasons why such a strategy may
underestimate capitals capacity to repropose itself, as a principle of modern
socialisation and subjectication whose idealist logic is yet to be negated in
practical terms. At the same time, both insist upon the necessity of working to
dene what Finelli describes . . . as a social subject . . . with a dierent economic
and life project, or what Arthurs terms a counter-subject, currently virtually
present, if empirically negated.3 The dierence between their proposals
Arthur focusing upon capitals ideality as supplementary to labour, whose
primacy provides a permanent basis for working-class political organisation,
Finelli insisting that it is only within what he terms the postmodern that
social relations of force adequate for a new mode of social organisation will
3. Arthur 2005, p. 215.

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emerge is overdetermined by a more fundamental agreement: namely, that

the attempt to register the contemporary dominance of capital in theoretical
terms, far from leading to a Frankfurtian pathos or sterile academicism, can
and should contribute to determining the realistic bases for a socialist politics
today.

References
Arthur, Christopher J. 2005, Reply to Critics, Historical Materialism, 13, 2: 190221.
Callinicos, Alex 2005, Against the New Dialectic, Historical Materialism, 13, 2: 4159.

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