5 - With Respect to Contradiction

Summary

Marx positions himself, as we have seen, in the point of view from which human beings are seen as naturally active and productive. As natural beings and therefore as part of nature they are beings that deploy a precise and determined vital activity. Considering human beings as part of nature does not deny them all activity, but on the contrary makes it possible to understand that they can express the activity of the whole because they are part of it. In this sense, there cannot be, for either Marx or Spinoza, a natural being that would not be active. Sharing Spinoza's fully affirmative and positive concept of nature, there exists for Marx no real passivity: what is called passivity is nothing other than a privation of activity, a diminished activity, just as falsity and error can only be for Spinoza a privation of knowledge. Passivity does not actually exist in itself; it exists only relative to those that experience it as they are determined to act by something other than them-selves and confer, on that which determines them, the capacity to act on them and through them. This is the case, for example, with the relationship between ‘the activity of individuals’ and their ‘forms’ or ‘modes of exchange’. The problem is to comprehend how individuals can passively endure the relations they enter into with others, how these relations can be relations of passivity, and thus how they are nothing other than the forms of relation through which they are active.

An initial explication consists in saying that this distinction between the activity of individuals and their modes of exchange does not initially exist in a given historical epoch, but that it eventually appears, signifying each time the end of an epoch and its passage to a new period. In other words, initially the modes of exchange and relations of production always correspond to the productive forces and to the state of their development, the former appearing as natural conditions for the deployment of the latter.