2 - The force of abstraction: Marx and Marxism

Summary

In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both… .

I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore think for himself.

Karl Marx, Preface to Capital, Volume I, 1st Edition (1909: xvi)

I love art from the moment when it became abstract – from the moment when, in abstraction, it revealed a new quality of being: the participation of the singularities of labour in a single whole, which is, precisely, abstract.

Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude (2011: 3–4)

What is the role of abstraction in the emancipation of human beings from capitalism that Karl Marx's work pursued? ‘Time and again’, writes Derek Sayer, ‘Marx uses the term “abstract” in connection with the modern world,’ while Alberto Toscano notes that ‘much of the force of the Marxian theoretical matrix is founded on its depiction of capitalism as the culture of abstraction par excellence’ (Sayer 1991: 87; Toscano 2008: 67). Yet, prefacing volume I of Capital (1867), his major published work and the culmination of a remarkable body of research and exploratory writing, Marx insisted that this culture of abstraction could be analysed and resisted only through the ‘force’ of abstraction. Marx indeed ‘repeatedly emphasised that the most powerful weapons for rebellion are provided by capitalist development itself’ (Hardt and Negri 2019: 79). Perhaps this paradox reaches its most intense expression in the early twenty-first-century Marxism of Antonio Negri, where abstract art is ‘loved’ from the moment at which the capitalist condition of abstract labour is transformed into a newly affirmative ‘quality of being’ embodied in that art. This chapter will be a way of tracing a path between these two endorsements, the ‘force’ and the ‘love’ of abstraction, in Marxist critical thought.

Theorists such as Sayer (1979, 1987, 1991) and Toscano (2008, 2014) have made important contributions to a wide, existing field of study of the development of Marx's thinking about abstraction, and the nature of my intervention needs to be clear from the outset. In the first part of the chapter, I explore and compare the writing of abstraction in three texts by Marx, the Economic and Philosophical or ‘Paris’ Manuscripts (hereafter Manuscripts) of 1844, the Grundrisse of 1857 and volume I of Capital (1867).