Tang Zhengdong: Historical Specificity and the Path to the Concrete Manifestation of Historical Materialism
To discuss the Sinicization of Marxist philosophy or the path toward the concretization of historical materialism, one must first clarify how to understand the "concrete." If, at the level of theoretical analysis, the "concrete" is only identified as the empirically concrete, then such concretization can only be a process of applying universal theory to specific objects. However, if this "concrete"—in addition to containing the content of specific objects—can also include the elevation to the level of the "historically concrete" by excavating the significance of those specific objects within the general historical process, then the aforementioned process of concretization simultaneously acquires the connotation of the "concrete" enriching and developing the "universal." The dialectical character possessed by the concretization of historical materialism in this dimension is a key issue we must contemplate within the current theoretical context.
The Canadian scholar Moishe Postone’s interpretation of Marx's social critical theory, developed from the perspective of historical specificity, has significant influence in academic circles. His dual identity as a philosopher and historian prevented him from following certain post-structuralists in directly entering the horizon of "concrete particularity" to interpret the internal logic of capitalism. Instead, he committed himself to understanding the "concrete" of capitalism by placing it within a theory of the historical process. This allowed him, while abandoning abstract universalism, to avoid plunging headlong into a horizon of interpreting local experience or concrete particularity; rather, he advanced the interpretation of Marx’s critical theory and the analysis of contemporary capitalism as a whole from the unique perspective of historical specificity. Although his views on historical specificity still possess certain theoretical limitations when viewed from the dimension of historical materialism, deepening our understanding of the theory of concreteness or specificity through a thorough interpretation of his views is undoubtedly a significant undertaking.
I. Historical Specificity as a Qualitative Specificity
In his representative work, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory, Postone repeatedly emphasizes that what Marx studied in his mature works, represented by Capital, was not commodity relations in general, but capitalism's commodity relations, which possess historical specificity. "Marx moved from a transhistorical starting point to a historically specific one. In Marx's analysis, the category of 'commodity' does not merely point to an object, but rather to a historically specific, 'objective' form of social relations—a structural and simultaneously structured form of social practice that constitutes a completely new form of social relations." Postone’s views on issues such as the abstract domination and the essential contradictions of capitalism are all established upon the foundation of identifying this historical specificity.
In understanding Postone’s concept of historical specificity, we must be careful not to equate it with direct empirical particularity. Postone does not wish to direct his research object toward capitalist commodity relations at the empirical level, for that would only manifest the content of general commodity relations—namely, the relation of equivalent exchange in the economic dimension—and would fail to manifest the abstract domination of capital constituted by capitalist labor that Postone hopes to point out. For him, the social relationality of labor in pre-capitalist societies was provided by overt networks of social relations; thus, one could say that labor existed within overt social relations. In capitalist society, however, the social relationality of labor is precisely constituted and provided by capitalist labor itself. "In capitalism, labor itself constitutes a social mediation that replaces the aforementioned networks of relations. This means that the social character of labor is not endowed by an overt social network; on the contrary, by virtue of the labor mediation itself, it both constitutes a social structure to replace the overt system of social relations and endows itself with sociality." What Postone truly concerns himself with is the structure of abstract domination constituted by capitalist labor and its deterministic role over the elements of concrete particularity at the empirical level, even though the latter often obscures this structure of domination.
Therefore, the concept of historical specificity is somewhat ambiguous for Postone; it easily leads people to understand it from the perspective of concrete particularity in the historiographical dimension. In reality, Postone's line of thought transcends concrete particularity. What he attempts to demonstrate is the historical specificity of that essential structure of domination which, viewed from the perspective of the human historical process, constitutes the concrete particularity of capitalism. That is to say, his historical specificity is not a direct category of empirical elements that sets aside the horizon of the human historical process, but rather a grasp of the essential structure of concrete particularity within the horizon of the historical process. Under the premise of opposing the so-called "traditional Marxist" approach of abstract universalism, being able to interpret an interpretive approach based on specificity with such richness fully reflects Postone's profound methodological reflections.
The Chinese translation of his name, "Pu-shu-tong" (普殊同), was clearly approved by the author himself, as this name indeed captures the profound understanding of the dialectical relationship between universality (tong 同) and specificity (shu 殊) in his thinking.
In fact, Postone uses "qualitative specificity" as an auxiliary interpretation of the concept of historical specificity. In addition to being a philosopher skilled in the study of Marx’s critical theory, he was also a historian, particularly noted for his research on the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. In Postone's view, the Nazi genocide against the Jews cannot be simply equated with the Nazi massacre of others; for if the latter was for some military or security purpose, the former was an end in itself. Therefore, "any effective study of the Holocaust must grasp the qualitative specificity of the genocide against European Jews. At the same time, the study of this specificity must be based on viewing Nazism as a movement which, according to its own self-understanding, represented a revolt." That is to say, specificity must be qualitatively defined, and this qualitative definition is achieved by placing the essential characteristics behind concrete particularity within the process of historical development to find its uniqueness. Postone does not regard current concrete particularities as the inevitable result of the historical development process, but rather sees them as accidental, "rebellious" specific phenomena. Because of this, he also criticized the practice of overemphasizing historical specificity in Holocaust studies: "From this point of view, many studies seem to overemphasize historical specificity—including those that focus only on German history, culture, and thought, as well as those who focus only on Jewish history and unfold the study of anti-Semitism from a transhistorical perspective." In Postone's eyes, anyone who is confined to the empirical elements of concrete particularity and fails to excavate the deep structural essence behind these empirical elements from the perspective of the uniqueness of the historical process is someone who "overemphasizes historical specificity." In this sense, the category of historical specificity he speaks of must indeed be grasped accurately.
The reason Postone emphasizes this historical specificity is directly related to his understanding of contemporary capitalism. He not only regards the transformation of capitalism from a free-market model to an organized, bureaucratized model as the emergence of a completely new mode of domination, but also explicitly points out that this new mode of domination has no [necessary] connection with European history; it is a form of social life that appeared accidentally in Western Europe. He states: "On the contrary, particularly from a contemporary perspective, I believe capitalism should first be understood as a historically specific form of social life, at the core of which is a historically unique form of abstract domination that has been embodied in global historical dynamics. This form of life appeared accidentally in Western Europe, but it fundamentally transformed Western Europe, just as it began to transform and constitute the globe. That is, contrary to some already widespread assumptions, this form of life does not essentially or ontologically belong to Western society; rather, it itself reshaped the West." For Postone, on one hand, contemporary capitalism is not an accumulation of those direct empirical elements, but a new form of domination. On the other hand, it is not the result of the historical development of Western European society, but merely an accidentally appearing form of life whose historical role was to constitute a new form of life.
When Postone transfers this understanding of contemporary capitalism to his interpretation of Marx’s critical theory, what he sees is the theoretical significance of Marx’s exposition regarding capitalist large-scale machine industry. Postone points out that Marx clearly distinguished the difference between large-scale machine industry and [simple] cooperation or manufacture. If in the latter, capital carries out the appropriation of the productive capacity of wage labor by virtue of the ownership of the means of production, then in the former—the mode of production of large-scale machine industry—the productive capacity appropriated by capital has already been transformed into a general social productive force based on general intellect. "Marx's analysis shows that once large-scale industry has developed, although private property seemed to occupy a core position in the alienation process of capitalism's historical origins, it no longer occupies a structural core now. Under the latter conditions, the social productive capacity of concrete labor appropriated by capital is no longer the productive capacity of the direct producers, no longer that capacity which initially belonged to the workers and was later taken from them. Instead, they become general social productive forces; their alienated nature is inherent in their constitution process—in fact, the reason they are able to appear in history is precisely because they were constituted in a form distinct from and opposed to the direct producers." Because of this, the domination structure of capitalist large-scale machine industry should no longer be excavated and explored from the perspective of the ownership of the means of production, but should be analyzed within a deeper structural level. This structural level is the structure of abstract domination constituted by capitalist labor that Postone seeks to interpret from Marx's theory.
For Postone, this qualitative historical specificity is not a specificity based on the dimension of historical phylogenesis of internal contradictory movements, but a current form of social life that is significantly different from previous historical development processes in the dimension of its essential structure. This specificity exists within the socio-historical process, but its characteristics are not determined or influenced by this historical process; rather, conversely, it declares the accidental interruption or rebellion of the aforementioned historical process with its own unique essential structure. At the same time, although his historical specificity takes "specificity" as its basic characteristic, it does not thereby directly embrace concrete empirical particularity. Instead, it starts from the dimension of comparison with past structures of social domination to explore its own historical significance at the level of uniqueness. This qualitative definition of historical specificity allowed him to escape the methodological limitations presented by post-structuralists when they counter abstract essentialism from the perspective of empirical, local knowledge; it consequently allowed his "concrete" research to manifest a greater degree of dialectical character. Simultaneously, his views on the reinterpretation of Marx's critical theory actually highlight his theoretical effort to advance historical materialism in the study of concrete objects, even though his efforts in this regard indeed still contain some methodological loopholes.
II. The Historical Specificity of Capitalist Labor
In Postone's view, Marx, in his mature works represented by Capital and its manuscripts, was a model of the successful application of this methodology of historical specificity. When Marx says that capitalist labor constitutes its structure of social domination, the labor he speaks of is by no means that kind of universal, general human labor, but rather labor possessing historical specificity within capitalist society. Theories based on general human labor, although they also involve the connotation of social relations when discussing the production of things—and thus, like the labor theory of value in bourgeois political economy, arrive at conclusions such as social injustice from the perspective of distribution relations while deriving views on the development of productive forces—cannot penetrate the internal structural level of capitalist labor to explore the nature of this labor process and the structure of abstract domination it constitutes. This is because their dimension of social relations only refers to an overt network of social relations, or merely emphasizes that this labor is not a Robinson-Crusoe-style purely individual activity, but labor existing within certain social relations. In Postone's view, however, Marx's critical theory is able to achieve this.
"Marx's theory likewise criticizes the nature of capitalist economic growth, the nature and trajectory of the capitalist production process, and its inherent opposition between objectified general social knowledge and living labor. This critique is similarly directed at the quasi-objective, directionally dynamic nature emphasized by capitalist society, as well as the structural social universality arising from the opposition between the abstract and concrete dimensions. Fundamentally, this critique is based on Marx's critical analysis of the dual character of labor [6] in capitalism. It is categorically distinct from a critique of capitalism understood trans-historically from the perspective of 'labor' as such." That is to say, Marx not only criticized the material dimension and the general social-relational dimension of capitalist labor, but also criticized the historically specific social-relational dimension of this labor from the perspective of the structure of social universality. More importantly, according to Postone’s understanding, it is precisely this latter social-relational dimension that occupies the most fundamental and core position in Marx's theory of the critique of capitalism. This is because it is the abstract social relations constructed by capitalist labor—and the structure of abstract domination based upon them—that confer a brand-new connotation upon capitalist labor in both its material and social-relational dimensions. This makes the development of capitalist productive forces no longer dependent on the ownership of the means of production, but rather built upon large-scale machine industry based on general intellect; simultaneously, it ensures that capitalist social relations no longer center on class exploitation based on property ownership, but rather on a holistic structure of alienated domination based on abstract labor.
It should be noted that, if we momentarily set aside Postone's bias in grasping the dialectical relationship between the material dimension and the relations-of-production dimension of the capitalist production process, it can be said in a certain sense that he indeed grasped the importance of the reproduction of the relations of production within the entire process of capitalist production and reproduction. In the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 [7], Marx clearly pointed out: "The result of the production process and the process of valorization is, first and foremost, the reproduction and new production of the relation of capital and labor itself, of the relation between capitalist and worker. This social relation, the relation of production, is in fact a more important result of the process than its material results." It is precisely because the capitalist production process continuously realizes the reproduction of the labor-capital relation that capital exhibits the mystery of self-valorization. Postone's emphasis on the historically specific dimension of capitalist social relations is expressed in his interpretation of Marx's critique of political economy through an emphasis on the commodity as its foundational and core concept; in his view, the value-form of the commodity is the objectified manifestation of capitalist labor. "Within the framework of Marx's critique of political economy, the commodity is the essential category at the core of capital; he unfolds this category to elucidate the nature of capital and its internal dynamics."
In his interpretation of Marx's commodity category, Postone also fully implements the methodological horizon of historical specificity. He completely disagrees with interpretations of Marx's concept of the commodity from the perspective of general exchange relations. In his view, the commodity as the foundational category of Capital refers to the commodity relation under capitalist conditions, reflecting the essential connotation of capital relations. This commodity exchange relation is distinct from the general exchangeability of products; it is a universalized exchangeability. In its eyes, all things cease to be things and instead become "objects" used for exchange. On one level, "Marx's theory seeks to analyze the structural foundation at the base of a society characterized by the universal exchangeability of products—a society in which all goods and the relations between people and things are already 'secular'; that is, unlike many 'traditional' societies, all goods are viewed as 'objects,' and people can theoretically choose among all goods." Postone points out that bourgeois political-economic theoretical analyses of commodity value—whether the labor theory of value or utility equilibrium theory—fail to distinguish between these two types of exchange relations. Consequently, they treat the capitalist historical specificity of the commodity relation as a self-evident background condition without analyzing the characteristics of this background condition, thereby failing to truly grasp the essential connotation of capitalist commodity relations. In his view, if one truly grasps this historical specificity of commodity relations, then one can clearly see that the commodity category in Marx's eyes points not only to a relation between things, but also to historically specific forms of social relations and social practice. Marx's analysis of the commodity is intended to reveal the foundation and historical dynamics of this specific form of social practice. "We see that Marx's analysis of the commodity is intended to provide the basis for elucidating the nature of capital—that is, his theory attempts to explain the historical dynamics of capitalist society. I will show that this dynamic is rooted in the dialectic of abstract labor and concrete labor, which cannot be grasped by theories that focus solely on market exchange."
Postone's approach of penetrating the internal structural level of the capitalist labor process to discuss its abstract domination is clearly quite different from approaches that enter solely from the perspective of exchange abstraction. We know that when Sohn-Rethel uses "real abstraction" to develop a phenomenological description of exchange abstraction, he emphasizes the abstraction of labor by exchange relations, rather than the process of the abstraction of labor itself. "The exchange relation abstracts labor, or as we say, it renders labor abstract. The result of this relation is commodity value. Commodity value gives form to the exchange relation that performs the abstraction and turns the abstracted labor into substance. In this abstract relational determination of the 'commodity form,' labor as the 'substance of value' becomes the pure quantitative determining ground of the 'magnitude of value'." It is precisely the practice criticized by Postone—conflating general exchange relations with historically specific capitalist exchange relations—that led Sohn-Rethel to neglect the labor-process foundation of exchange relations, thus causing him to remain at the level of the magnitude of value in grasping the connotation and real abstraction of exchange relations.
In fact, it is not easy to truly reach Postone's interpretive horizon in the analysis of the real abstraction of commodity relations. Even a famous scholar like Christopher John Arthur, when interpreting the ontological foundation of the capitalist system, finds it difficult to escape the theoretical level of exchange abstraction and enter the deeper level of labor or the production process. Arthur, on the grounds that the use-value of a commodity is absent during the exchange process, posits that the "material abstraction" of capitalism is the value abstraction within the exchange process, and has absolutely nothing to do with the use-value of the commodity. "This foundation is that abstract reality in exchange, that abstraction expressed in the equality of heterogeneous commodities as values. This 'material abstraction' possesses a substantive reality entirely independent of the methodology concerning abstraction in theoretical construction. It produces an 'inverted reality' where the commodity merely exemplifies its essential nature as a value abstraction, and concrete labor is also viewed merely as the material manifestation of abstract labor." Here, Arthur clearly severs the determination of value from the realization of value, and the value-form from the value-content—which is precisely the problem Postone seeks to solve by starting from labor abstraction rather than exchange abstraction.
III. The Historical Specificity of Internal Contradictions in Capitalism
Postone's interpretation of Marx's commodity category from the perspective of capitalist commodity relations grants him a horizon of historical specificity in his understanding of capitalist social contradictions as well. He explicitly opposes interpreting capitalist social contradictions from a trans-historical perspective and opposes understanding the connotation of such contradictions from the perspective of generalized productive forces and relations of production. In Postone's view, the internal contradictions Marx discusses in Capital and its manuscripts refer specifically to social contradictions under capitalist conditions. They cannot, as traditional Marxism understands, contain the vague connotations of productive forces and relations of production applicable to all social formations [8]; rather, they are presented through the concrete forms of expression of productive forces and relations of production under capitalist conditions. Consequently, Postone believes that the internal contradictions of capitalism, as understood by Marx, actually refer to the duality or opposition existing in both the material and social-relational dimensions of those social forms (such as labor, commodities, etc.) constructed by capitalist labor and manifested at the level of the capitalist social formation. He notes: "After turning toward historical specificity, Marx began to historicize his earlier trans-historical concepts regarding social contradictions and internal historical logic. He now treats them as concepts specific to capitalism, arising from the duality of 'unstable' material and social elements—which is precisely the characteristic of basic capitalist social forms (such as commodities and capital). In my analysis of Capital, I will point out how this duality is externalized in Marx's work and creates a unique historical dialectic."
As might be expected, under the premise of breaking away from the dimension of historical phylogenesis [9], Postone's understanding of historically specific capitalist social contradictions inevitably suffers a significant reduction in its level of grasping the essential connotation of social relations and the contradictoriness between productive forces and social relations. We know that, regarding social relations, only by placing them within the level of the history of the development of social formations can we grasp the essential element that leads to the continuous transformation of various social relations—namely, the development of the relations of production. This is why historical materialism can penetrate to the level of relations of production to grasp the essence of social relations, while other leftist critical theories can only remain at the level of exchange or distribution relations to explain the connotation of social relations. Similarly, regarding the contradiction between productive forces and social relations, only by entering from the perspective of historical phylogenesis is it possible to truly find the core content of the internal contradiction wherein capitalist social relations hinder the development of its productive forces; otherwise, one can only seek so-called duality or opposition from the surface of the capitalist social formation. The duality between material and social elements peculiar to capitalism that Postone speaks of is, in fact, this type of dual opposition located on the social surface. Take capitalist labor, for instance: Postone sees that it possesses the dual dimensions of concrete labor and abstract labor simultaneously, but he insists that only capitalist society has true abstract labor. He even identifies the view that treats all concrete labor as a universal form of labor as a vague interpretation, noting: "This vague interpretation cannot and does not help us understand capitalism, because for Marx, abstract labor and value are specific to this social formation. What confers universality upon capitalist labor is not merely the commonplace that it is a common name for various specific forms of work; rather, it is the social function of labor that confers universality upon it."
In this way, the focus of the relationship between concrete labor and abstract labor in Postone's eyes will only concentrate on the opposition between the particularity and specificity of the former and the universality and abstraction of the latter. It is impossible for him, like Marx, to explore whether all concrete labor can be exchanged in the form of abstract labor from the perspective of the capitalist social division of labor—that is, the problem of the internal contradiction between these two forms of labor in the capitalist context. Applying this to the commodity as the objectified form of abstract labor, the problem here is: Postone focuses on the opposition between the abstraction of the commodity's exchange-value and the specificity of its use-value, but he is indifferent to the question Marx was concerned with—whether the use-value of the commodity can be converted into exchange-value. Therefore, when Postone concludes that "from the perspective of the social whole, an individual's concrete labor is specific, a part of a heterogeneous whole; however, as abstract labor, it is an individualized link in a homogeneous, universal social mediation, and this mediation constructs a social totality. This duality of the concrete and the abstract is specific to the capitalist social formation," he clearly fails to grasp the socio-historical foundation behind Marx's view on the internal contradiction between concrete and abstract labor. It must be said that if one does not approach the issue of capitalist exchange-value from the perspectives of relations of production and the social division of labor, it is very easy to think solely from the perspective of the magnitude of value and the abstract domination arising therefrom. This holds true even for a scholar like Postone, who has already noted the need to penetrate through economic phenomena to the essential structural level behind them, because in the eyes of historical materialism, the essential structure of a social formation can only be truly grasped within the dimension of the socio-historical process.
Postone's view in his [analysis] of the first volume of Capital...
The same is reflected in the interpretation of the logic of the exposition in Volume 1. In his view, the thread of exposition Postone unfolds in this volume—from commodity and money to capital—should not be interpreted as a methodological progression of ascending from the abstract to the concrete, as traditional Marxist perspectives would have it, but rather as a retrospective process of conceptual development. "Marx's argument has a very unique, reflexive form: its starting point is the commodity, which is established as the fundamental structural center of the social formation, and the validity of the commodity is continuously proven retrospectively in the unfolding of the argument: it can be used to explain the developmental trends of capitalism and phenomena that seemingly contradict the validity of the initial categories." For Postone, the commodity that serves as the starting concept of Volume 1 of Capital is already the capitalist commodity—that is, a commodity already situated within universalized exchange relations. Therefore, Marx’s concept of money is merely an external manifestation of the exchange-value dimension of this commodity, namely its measurability. It is not money that makes the commodity measurable; rather, the inherent measurability of the commodity attains an external expression. Postone regards this external expression of money as a fuller demonstration of the commodity’s value dimension; or rather, in the concept of money, the validity of the commodity concept receives a better retrospective proof.
As for Marx’s concept of money, Postone points out that it too is already situated within the universalized commodity exchange relations of capitalism. Thus, this money necessarily undergoes a "dialectical inversion" based on the accumulation of money. Marx "bases this dialectical inversion on a social necessity for accumulating money. This necessity arises from the relations of the circulation process itself, from the fact that once commodity circulation becomes universal, not every purchase originates from a corresponding sale. On the contrary, one must store a sum of money as a means of consumption and for the payment of debts. Although, according to the latent logic of the system, people sell in order to buy, selling and buying become separated, and the external value dimension of the commodity—money—becomes a self-sufficient goal of sale." That is to say, capitalist money is not money in general, but a type of money characterized by self-sufficiency—that is, the capacity for self-growth. Consequently, the concept of money itself cannot support the rich connotations of capitalist money. Thus, the concept of capital appears in Marx’s line of exposition. When Marx emphasizes that capital possesses the capacity for self-valorization and self-movement, he has in fact found the external form that can fully express the rich content of capitalist monetary relations, rather than intending to emphasize a chronological progression between pre-capitalist money and the capitalist category of capital.
IV. Rethinking the Path of Concretizing Historical Materialism
By emphasizing the historical specificity of capitalist commodity relations and interpreting the logic of Volume 1 of Capital as a process of retrospective proof, Postone is clearly much more profound than those contemporary scholars in foreign academia who focus on post-structuralist perspectives and dedicate themselves to a struggle against universalism from the standpoint of concrete particularity. This is because he has, after all, penetrated the level of the essential structure of capital or monetary relations—namely, the contradictory structure of capitalist commodity relations. From the perspective of scholarly depth, his interpretation also relatively accurately grasps the following content in Marx’s thought: monetary relations are the completed form of commodity relations, and capital relations are the completed form of monetary and commodity relations. In fact, it is precisely based on this thought that Marx unearths the specificity of capitalist commodity relations and further demonstrates that capitalist commodity relations are the highest form of the development of private-property commodity relations as a whole.
But the problem here is that when Marx says capital is the completed form of commodity and monetary relations, he does so not, as Postone suggests, to prove that the concept of capital is better suited to express the rich connotations of the commodity concept, but precisely to examine capitalist commodity relations within the process of the historical development of commodity relations, thereby discovering the true historical specificity of these relations. The historical specificity of capitalist commodities seen from this perspective must be a historically specific internal contradictoriness, and cannot remain merely at the level of a specific essential structure, because "specificity" within the horizon of historical materialism is actually a specificity based on commonality. It is in this sense that Marx, in the "Introduction" to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, states: "The prescriptions which apply to production in general must be set apart in order that the essential difference should not be forgotten through the unity (the subject is man, the object is nature, and these are always the same, so here there is already unity)." To understand specificity by placing it within the historical thread of generality and universality—such historical specificity is historical specificity in the sense of historical organicity [10] (the materialist philosophy of history), rather than historical specificity in the sense of historiography. The capitalist commodity relations understood by Postone constitute historical specificity in the historiographical sense; they are not themselves the result of a process of historical development of certain general contradictions; rather, they are defined as an object that appears contingently in the historical process. Although his interpretation of this contingently appearing object does not remain at the empirical level but goes deep into its internal structure, the lack of a historical-organic thread effectively prevents him from obtaining an accurate understanding of this internal structure.
Once the historical-organic dimension of contemporary specificity is severed, it becomes impossible to make an accurate judgment regarding the essential connotations of this specificity. While Postone repeatedly emphasizes the universalized state of capitalist exchange value, he fails to see that this universalized exchange value is actually not an ultimate theoretical level, because behind it lies precisely the emergence of the labor process of "production for the sake of production." Marx saw this very clearly, noting: "Once the exchange value of the product generally becomes the decisive goal, 'production for the sake of production'—production as an end in itself—indeed occurs with the formal subsumption of labor under capital. However, only when the specifically capitalist mode of production develops—and with it the real subsumption of labor under capital—does this tendency inherent in the capital relation find realization in an adequate way—and this tendency itself becomes a necessary condition, technologically as well." Just as Marx explains the socio-historical basis of the universalization of exchange value from the perspective of the transformation of the labor process, his analysis of commodity relations does not only see the dominance of abstract value, but discovers the socio-historical basis of commodity relations from the perspective of the social division of labor behind it. Therefore, the contradiction between concrete labor and abstract labor contained in the commodity is, for Marx, not a mechanical opposition between the concreteness and abstractness of labor, but a reflection of the cold social reality that under the conditions of a socialized division of labor, every type of labor must obtain its own existence through exchange relations; the internal contradiction is embodied within this exchange process of labor.
Starting from the 1950s, the left-wing academia in Europe and America has been committed to promoting the concretization of Marxist philosophy, especially historical materialism. However, this concretization has not been manifested in implementing the rich ideas of the dialectic of the abstract and the concrete in historical materialism into the analysis of contemporary concrete objects; instead, it has simply taken a theoretical path of shifting entirely from the "abstract" to the "concrete." In the analysis of the "concrete," some theorists have indeed made certain contributions. For example, the economist Ernest Mandel, in his analysis of late capitalism, provided the perspective of six autonomous variables such as the rate of surplus value and the turnover time of capital; the philosopher Althusser, on the issue of the reproduction of capitalist relations of production, proposed the view of the priority of relations of production over productive forces based on existing productive forces. However, because they abandoned the theoretical role of the "abstract" dimension, they failed to reach the theoretical height of internal essential contradictions in their understanding of the "concrete," remaining only at the level of the richness of concrete empirical elements or the dominance of social relations, and were unable to elevate their research horizon to the study of the developmental laws of the "concrete." Concomitantly, this made their understanding of the "abstract" increasingly abstract, preventing them from accurately grasping the theoretical level of scientific abstraction spoken of by Marx, and further distancing them from a scholarly interest in the general laws of human history. On the whole, Postone also belongs as a member of this theoretical lineage. Although he has shown strong theoretical speculative power and contemporary relevance through his research on qualitative historical specificity, in essence, he failed to transcend the general logic of the aforementioned theoretical lineage. It must be said that this is a limitation in his theoretical thinking.
The concretization of historical materialism in its true sense should be the application of the methodology of historical materialism to the analysis of concrete objects—that is, placing the concrete object of study into a socio-historical process based on the movement of internal contradictions to be understood. All scholars who claim that contemporary reality has no relationship with the process of historical development do so because they have not stood at the level of the movement of internal essential contradictions, but have only thought from the perspective of the development of social phenomena. For example, when Postone says that capitalist large-scale machine industry is a social structure completely different from previous forms of the development of productive forces, his perspective of scrutiny is actually only the mode of production at the technological level, without addressing the mode of production at the level of social relations. If we stand from the perspective of historical materialism, we can clearly find that the developmental trajectory from handicraft capitalism to large-scale capitalist machine industry is precisely the result of the movement of internal contradictions between productive forces and relations of production under the conditions of capitalist private ownership. Even in the era of large-scale machine industry, what determines the essence of its social relations is still the internal contradictoriness of the relations of production, rather than the abstractness of labor seen only from the perspective of the technological mode of production. At the same time, those scholars who claim that traditional Marxist theory only focuses on general and universal abstract theoretical levels have only failed to conduct an in-depth reading of the thoughts of the classic Marxist writers. A slight examination of the dialectical thought of the abstract and the concrete and its application in Capital and its manuscripts makes it not difficult for us to reach the correct conclusion on this point.
When we place concrete objects within the interpretive horizon of historical materialism, we find that the true meaning of the "concrete" lies not only in revealing the complexity of its content itself, but also in grasping its developmental trends and its influence and role on the entire historical movement from the perspective of the historical organicity of the movement of essential contradictions. Therefore, the study of the "concrete" within the horizon of historical materialism cannot remain at the level of empirical-elemental research of concrete objects, but should continue to deepen on this basis into the study of the developmental laws of the "concrete," thereby elevating the study of the "concrete" to a higher level. Only at this level can we better understand the counter-action of the "concrete" on scientific abstraction, as well as its active and dynamic role in enriching the understanding of "abstract" content. When we talk today about how the great practice of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in the New Era is both a deepening of our understanding of the laws of socialist construction and a deepening of our understanding of the general laws of human history, it should be very important to keep the aforementioned point in mind.
(Notes omitted) (Author's affiliation: Center for the Study of Marxist Social Theory and Department of Philosophy, Nanjing University) Web Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Academic Research (Xueshu Yanjiu), Issue 1, 2022