Among my least favorite passages and ideas in Marx is when he comments on Aristotle in ch1 of v1 of Capital. (I’ve commented on this before a bit, here.)
“an important fact (…) prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour-powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities. (…) The peculiar conditions of the society in which [Aristotle] lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth,” was at the bottom of this equality.” (Capital v1, Penguin edition, 151-152.)
One thing I want to note that I do like here is this line: “Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour-powers.” The foundation of Greek society is a certain type of labor relation or process. This labor relation involves inequality. The inequality counts here as the natural basis of Greek society. ‘Natural basis’ here means something historical and contingent (slavery), bound up with or present in the labor process or labor relations. I don’t know that Marx is always consistent on this, but I like it as a reading of ‘natural’ in Marx, where nature is not distinct from the historical and artifactual.
On to what I don’t like. Marx is commenting on a passage in the Nicomachean Ethics in which Aristotle declares that the equation of 5 beds with 1 house, which is the same as the equation of 5 beds and some sum of money, is impossible, in the sense that there is not an actual qualitative equality present in these items which the equation expresses. Marx comments that Aristotle here misunderstands value, labor, commodities, and offers an explanation for the source of this misunderstanding.
Minor quibble: not all of Aristotle’s works survive. So that Aristotle did not understand something in his extant texts does not mean Aristotle didn’t understand that something. Fine, but speculation that Aristotle did understand is no more grounded than speculation that he did and it’s not particularly illegitimate to say “Aristotle misunderstands” as a shorthand for “extant texts by Aristotle show a misunderstanding.” Minor quibble dismissed.
Bigger quibbles: for Marx, the issue is not simply that Aristotle did not understand. Rather, the point is that Aristotle could not understand. “[T]he society in which [Aristotle] lived, alone prevented him from discovering” or understanding this matter. That is, not only did Aristotle not understand, Aristotle could have but not understood. Furthermore, no one in Aristotle’s society could have understood. This means that those who labored, slaves in Greece, could not understand the nature of labor and value. Why should this be so? Why is Aristotle the most capable mind of his society? Perhaps the most capable mind which survives in written record, but Marx’s claim involves a claim about everyone in the society: a common epistemological limit which no one - not even the greatest mind of that society, Aristotle - could overcome. That attribution of a common limit is problematic as is the notion of Aristotle as necessarily the greatest mind. It seems just as plausible to presume different understandings and knowledges based on position with the labor processes such that slaves might have had a different understanding than Aristotle.
And what is “the fixity of a popular prejudice”? How widespread does an idea have to be for it to have acquired this fixity? Marx writes that no one could have understood these matters “until the [the moment in history when the] notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice.” Presumably popular prejudices begin somewhere. Some people think something before everyone thinks something. These some people, then, who had the (unpopular? minority?) prejudice of equality prior to everyone having the prejudice, might they not have had some inkling - or rather, the possibility of an inkling - of an understanding of labor and value?
In any case, why bother with any of this? Why not simply state that Aristotle didn’t understand, why look for reasons why he couldn’t have understood? Why aim for that passage from didn’t to couldn’t?
Marx later writes:
“Personal dependence [in the European middle ages] characterises the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organised on the basis of that production. But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground-work of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and payments in kind. Here the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on production of commodities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour. Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity-producing labour; but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own personal labour-power. The tithe to be rendered to the priest is more matter of fact than his blessing. No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour. ” (170.)
“[A]ncient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent.” (172.)
This helps undermine the earlier passage. European medieval society was less complicated and more transparent than Marx’s. Presumably so was Aristotle’s (and presumably, knowing Marx, even more so). If serfs can understand their labor without it taking - without it being necessary that their labor take - “a fantastic form”, then it seems safe to say the same of slaves in Aristotle’s day. Slaves then should have also had access to “the immediate social form of labor.” “Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity-producing labour; but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own personal labour-power.” “[I]n this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour.” Why can’t this lack of disguise include understanding value? (That _Aristotle_ didn’t understand is a different matter, as Aristotle was the equivalent or analog to the political economists who Marx treats in so much of his work, a sort of ancient Smith or Say or Mill.)
I must say I’ve always found arguments that Aristotle was blind to the possibility that slavery was wrong to be incorrect, because in the Politics he feels the need to justify slavery against those who say it is wrong, therefore showing that there were voices in Greek society that were against it. Obviously he was in a very situation to us today in that slavery was an accepted part of reality, but it’s not true that it was unquestioned.
Comment by Mark — July 4, 2007 @ 11:38 pm
hey Mark,
It’s also not clear what the “accepted” part of “an accepted part of reality” means - presumably many slaves didn’t “accept” their slavery in the sense of “agree with”, likewise in the present.
take it easy,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 6, 2007 @ 3:15 am
Really, I have always liked that passage. To me it suggests that intellectual discoveries, in this case the labor theory of value, are not the products of individual intellegence, but reflect larger social transformations. I see it as another stab at philosophy’s own idealist self-understanding.
Comment by Unemployed negativity — July 6, 2007 @ 11:36 am
hey there UN,
I like that reading and I like that there’s something good to be found in the passage, I’ll have to remember that. I think his remark on technology - I forget where it is and the exact wording, but something like ‘one could write a history of technological discoveries as a history of weapons against strikes’ - and the passages on machinery and law in this same light about nonphilosophical knowledge. But I think it’s different with the Aristotle passage because Marx isn’t relativizing/historicizing a positive intellectual discovery. He’s explaining a failure to discover in a way which makes the failure necessary.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 6, 2007 @ 3:57 pm
The two contrary positions—Aristotle’s justification of the master/slave relationship, and Marx’s insistence on the equality of all labor–both seem somewhat dogmatic and simplistic, though Marx may have had more of a historical–and economic– sensibility. Marx certainly perceives relationships and situations–the political economy of feudalism, in a sense– that traditional thinkers overlook or dismiss. But there are other issues at stake: one dares call them psychogical. Serfs and slaves obviously were controlled by the lords and estate holders, generally under threat of punishment, violence, torture, etc. Marx seems to think these relations were ALL economic, when they appear a bit more sadistic and tragic (and dependent on rather basic elements, like superior weaponry, and powerful military/courts/church etc.): reading some of Engels’ writings on the Middle Ages (or any objective, non-monarchical historian for that matter), and one soons realizes that those old spooky paintings done by like Bosch and Breughel were the social realism of the time. Marx’s economic abstract analyses while powerful and insightful, often seem to overlook the power structures (of course Aristotle’s apologies for the aristocracy often were used as justification for those monarchical or feudal powers) that were in place to keep the peasants in line.
Comment by Perezoso — July 6, 2007 @ 5:12 pm
Eh: ’scuzi poor editing. A spell check function on some blogs would be sympatico. (btw the above rant was not intended to give credence to Mssr. Foucault’s theories. Bertrand Russell, however glib or pompous, offered some interesting insights on the psychological assumptions of political economy, whether right or left—i.e. his essay “Power”)
Comment by Perezoso — July 6, 2007 @ 5:19 pm
Much could be said of your modal preoccupations, Nate. I share them. The inference from “didn’t” to “couldn’t” and/or “can’t” is the same as saying “if something happens to be the case, then it’s necessary, because its actuality rules out alternate possibilities.” I don’t know why people find this kind of reasoning convincing. And I’m always glad when someone exposes it for what it is. Unwarranted. Thanks, Nate.
Comment by colin — July 10, 2007 @ 9:27 pm
Per, if I knew how to set up a spell check I would. I can’t even get the preview function or the list of recent comments to work. I’m not smart with this tech stuff.
Colin, thanks, and great to see you a while back in Chicago and such. You should come visit us, and I’ll visit you when the weather gets cold. Anything you’d recommend reading on this modal stuff? I find myself stumbling over that stuff a lot. This is what I used to be fumbling for when I was going on about theodicy. I never did get round to finishing those readings on theodicy, need to eventually.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 10, 2007 @ 10:04 pm
sidenote: we have none of aristotle’s works. we only have fragments of his actual texts. what we have instead are lecture notes derived from the scholastics which are in essence schemas of aristotles arguments used for students of plato (who like plato because of jesus, and like aristotle only an addendum to understand the plato bit). apparently aristotle was one of the greatest writers, literary or otherwise, of all of greek history.
nietzsche brings up the good point that the hierarchy of philosophy might have been stacked differently were it not for what just happened to be passed down across the chaos of time.
Comment by todd — July 11, 2007 @ 11:01 pm
“”nietzsche brings up the good point that the hierarchy of philosophy might have been stacked differently were it not for what just happened to be passed down across the chaos of time.”"
And Nietzsche well realized that “slave morality” –whether that of xtians, revolutionaries, or victorian shrews—had much to do with what happened with the “history of philosophy”. Ah doubt Herr FN would have lent his support to the fascists (or one hopes that is the case): yet his writing shows few pro-socialist tendencies. He’s one of the great UnAffiliated (one could understand a certain anti-Nietzschean leftism; at the same time one understands a certain anti-progressive–and anti-feminist–anarchism). Nietzsche did on occasion allude to powerful criminals as prototypes for his Uebermensch.
Comment by Perezoso — July 12, 2007 @ 9:42 am
I think what we want is a modal category in between “is” and logical necessity. It’s not very interesting that Aristotle himself happened not to understand labor; but it does seem unnecessarily strong to say that he couldn’t have understood labor, in the sense that it would have been logically impossible for him to have done so.
I take it that what Marx wants to say (and this strikes me as true and useful) is that, from Aristotle’s lack of understanding of labor, we don’t just learn a biographical fact about Aristotle, but something about ideology in ancient Greece.
Comment by voyou — July 13, 2007 @ 2:12 pm
yep nietzsche said some dumb things. he said some smart things too *shrug*. Thinkers aren’t there to be perfect, but we can learn from them too. On that point nietzsche was right. we don’t have so much plato because he was a better philosopher than the other greeks, but just because of the random course of history.
Comment by todd — July 13, 2007 @ 10:28 pm
I enjoy reading Nietzsche. He was a bit of a naif, was he not. But I do not think he’s with the “left,” whatsoever. He was pals with Wagner, and routinely denounces the socialists and English liberals, as well as jews and xtians of course. He is sort of Aristotelian if not machiavellian; I doubt he ever would have sided with the partisans–or even “republicans” in european sense (I wager he was rather horrified at the sans cullottes, Marat, etc). When I hear the frat-boy sort of gonzo intellectual (or faux-intellectual) begin into his Nietzsche and Will to Power rant (and FritzSpeak often resembles a coach at the pep rally), I am tempted to ask frat-boy, then, if he is sort of giving his blessing to say an Al Capone, or Il Duce—if not the Waffen SS.
Comment by Perezoso — July 14, 2007 @ 10:58 am
hey Voyou,
It’s clearly not a logical impossibility for Aristotle to have understood labor, as in, there’s no logical contradiction involved along the lines of a round square etc. It may be impossible according to some proposed logic of history, which is I think what Marx meant. One of the stakes of the argument here, I think, is precisely what you said -
“from Aristotle’s lack of understanding of labor, we don’t just learn a biographical fact about Aristotle, but something about ideology in ancient Greece”
The question is if we learn more than “among the ideology in ancient Greece there was Aristotle’s work which did not express an understanding of labor”. I’m not sure we do, but I’d be keen to carry that discussion further.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 15, 2007 @ 2:41 pm