Introduction to the Historical Materialism Edition
Alfred Sohn Rethel’s long, turbulent, and eventful life was shaped by the events that transformed north-western Europe over the course of the twentieth century. The first half of his life was marred by the failure of German communism, the rise of fascism, war, and exile. The second half was marked by contemplation afforded by the work of his first wife and then fortuitous employment in the academy. Over the course of his life Sohn-Rethel developed and continued to refine what he saw as his two main ideas: his ‘semi-intuitive’ identification of Kant’s transcendental subject with the value-form and ‘the domination of the logic of appropriation over the logic of production’. To this, Frank Engster argues we might add a third idea: that fascism was a Keynesian form of absolute surplus value production in the context of the final crisis of capitalism.1 As this indicates, these ideas and Sohn-Rethel’s heterodox interpretations of Marx were shaped by his experiences of fascism, but they were developed in relative isolation.
In what follows, I provide a brief overview of the development of these ideas in Sohn-Rethel’s life.2 I then focus on how the first two ideas are represented in the English edition of Intellectual and Manual Labour. I conclude by indicating the influence of these ideas in the reception of Sohn-Rethel’s work in the Anglophone world, Germany, and Italy.3
Life4
Born in 1899 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Sohn-Rethel died in Bremen in 1990, a retired professor of social philosophy.
The interests that Sohn-Rethel would focus on throughout his long life blossomed at a very young age. For although Sohn-Rethel was the son of a painter, he was also the godson of Ernst Poensgen, one of Germany’s leading steel magnates. He spent much of his childhood with Poensgen in Düsseldorf, whose factory he visited frequently, paying particular attention to the shop floor level. According to Reinfeld and Slater, Sohn-Rethel’s interest in the organisation of production goes back to these early years. Relocating to his parents’ house in Berlin in 1912, he was politically radicalised soon after. He requested and received a copy of Capital for Christmas in 1915, with which he would likewise be preoccupied for the rest of his life. As a result of his political radicalisation, he was kicked out of the house in 1916. Enrolling at Heidelberg University in 1917, he soon relocated to the University of Munich, where he would be less endangered by his anti-war agitating. Following Germany’s surrender, as Reinefelder and Slater note, ‘he then lived through the “momentous years” of 1918 to 1923’, ‘convinced of the necessity and imminence of revolution’.
The failure of the German revolution did not lead Sohn-Rethel to abandon Marxism, but to critically interrogate, rethink and supplement its basic tenets. This brought him into contact with a number of other middle European intellectuals – amongst others Bloch, Benjamin and especially Adorno – who were engaged in a similar problem. It was in this context that Sohn-Rethel first formulated the problematic that would preoccupy him for the next 50-odd years: a historical materialist theory of epistemology combining the first three chapters of Capital with a critique of German Idealism, especially Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the idea that the historical development of socialisation follows the logic of appropriation’s domination of the logic of production. These ideas were discussed in a letter to Adorno, later reprinted in Warenform und Denkform, and written down at greater length in 1936 in Soziologische Theorie der Erkenntnis.5
At the same time, Sohn-Rethel had not refrained from political practice; his job as a research assistant at the European Economic Congress gave him first-hand knowledge of the German economy and the rise of Nazism, serving as the basis for a number of articles that were further developed in The Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism. This book advanced the thesis that Nazism represented the last stage of capitalism in crisis, premised on the Nazi military-state’s Keynesian appropriation of absolute surplus value. Thus, as Alexander Kluge notes, ‘Sohn Rethel was the only theorist who was familiar with the thought patterns of Karl Marx and Karl Korsch and who also had the chance to accumulate actual inside knowledge of the industry’.6 In addition, his active opposition to fascism meant that he was forced to flee to England in 1937.
Sohn-Rethel would spend the next 30 years of his life there. He married, raised a family, and taught French. In his free time, he further developed these ideas. After Lawrence & Wishart rejected an English-language version of Intellectual and Manual Labour in the 1950s, on the grounds that it contradicted the prevailing Marxist orthodoxy, Sohn-Rethel turned his publication efforts back to Germany in the 1960s.
This would prove unexpectedly successful, in part as the unintended result of his long-running, if periodic, correspondence with Theodor W. Adorno. For not only did Adorno’s mention of Sohn Rethel’s idea of real abstraction in Negative Dialectics provide him with some degree of notoriety, but his funeral would provide Sohn-Rethel with the book contract he had long sought after. For here Sohn-Rethel would meet the head of Suhrkamp, Siegfried Unseld, who asked him to commit his theory of the commodity-form and thought-form to a book-length manuscript.
This led to Sohn-Rethel’s sudden, if long sought-after, success in radical academia. The edition of Geistige und körperliche Arbeit published by Surkhamp in 1970 (1st edition) was an unexpected hit with the student movement. In 1972 he was given a four-year visiting position as Guest Professor for Theory, Knowledge and Society at the University of Bremen, during which he would publish the second German edition of Geistige und Körperliche Arbeit. In 1976 he returned to England and completed the English version of Intellectual and Manual Labour. Italian and Serbo-Croat versions would follow.
In 1978 he was appointed a permanent professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Bremen, where he would spend the rest of his life, achieving a devoted following amongst the left milieu. A new German version of Geistige und körperliche Arbeit was published in 1992. Industrie und Nationalsozialismus. Aufzeichnungen aus dem Mitteleuropäischen Wirtschaftstag would follow, as would the final version with Ça Ira. The Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism and Das Geld die bare Münze des Apriori would also be published during this time.
Intellectual and Manual Labour
The English, German, Italian and Serbo-Croat versions of Intellectual and Manual Labor: a Critique of Epistemology represent Sohn-Rethel’s most influential formulations of his two great ideas.
In the English version, these themes are first introduced in Martin Sohn-Rethel’s two-page translator’s introduction, which signals that the books aim to ‘unravel the tangled web of relations between man and machine, between man and society, which now threatens to strangle him’.7
Sohn-Rethel’s preface provides a general discussion that orients his approach to these issues in the failure of revolution in the 1920s and the ensuing development of critical Marxism. As Sohn-Rethel notes, as recounted above, it was during this time that he ‘glued himself to Marx and began in earnest to read Capital’.
And what resulted from this exercise was the unshakeable certainty of the penetrating truth of Marxist thinking, combined with an equally unshakeable doubt about the theoretical consistency of the commodity analysis as it stood. There were more and other things in it than Marx had succeeded in reaching! And finally, with an effort of concentration bordering on madness, it came upon me that in the innermost core of the commodity structure there was to be found the ‘transcendental subject’.
Consequently, as he notes, the following enquiry is intended to take Marx’s commodity analysis into ‘new territory’.8
Just what this entails is laid out in more depth in the introduction, which as Reinfelder and Slater note ‘serves the useful purpose of presenting the basic arguments of the text in advance’.9 Here Sohn-Rethel argues that an ‘extension of Marxist theory is needed for a fuller understanding of our epoch’, which he characterises as one in which ‘science, and especially scientific technology, exerts an influence upon production and through production upon the economics and the class relations of society’.10 Since Marx’s analysis was concerned with an earlier phase of capitalism, a present day historical materialist understanding of these phenomena and their overcoming is necessary. According to Sohn-Rethel, this entails three interrelated issues – an explanation of the origins and development of scientific thought, of the separation of intellectual and manual labour and the effective line of differentiation between a class and classless society – all of which are internally related by their link to his idea of social synthesis.
This leads Sohn-Rethel to introduce his key idea of social synthesis as a ‘constituent part of the Marxian concept of social form’.11 For Sohn-Rethel, social synthesis is ‘the network of relations by which society forms a coherent whole.’12 This is because
Every society made up of a plurality of individuals is a network coming into effect through their actions. How they act is of primary importance for the social network; what they think is of secondary importance. Their activities must interrelate in order to fit into a society, and must contain at least a minimum of uniformity if the society is to function as a whole. This coherence can be conscious or unconscious but exist it must – otherwise society would cease to be viable and the individuals would come to grief as a result of their multiple dependencies upon one another. Expressed in very general terms this is a precondition for the survival of every kind of society; it formulates what I term ‘social synthesis’. This notion is thus nothing other than a constituent part of the Marxian concept of ‘social formation’, a part which, in the course of my long preoccupation with historical forms of thinking, has become indispensable to my understanding of man’s social condition. From this observation derives the general epistemological proposition that the socially necessary forms of thinking of an epoch are those in conformity with the socially synthetic functions of that epoch.13
Social synthesis thus sets up Sohn-Rethel’s historical and social explanation for the development of the relationship between scientific thought and intellectual and manual labor (Intellectual and Manual Labour’s formulation of the logic of appropriation and production) and the real abstraction of exchange and the ensuing abstraction of scientific (and philosophical) thought as well as the related issues of the labour process, technology, and class society. In turn, this opens up the possibility of refashioning the first and second in a classless society.
The main body of the book turns to substantiate these and related claims, in different parts.
Part One, ‘Critique of Philosophical Epistemology’, provides Sohn-Rethel’s account of real and ideal abstraction. He presents his theoretical argument for how real abstraction is constituted by the socially synthetic practical activity of exchange, and explains how such activity also engenders ideal abstraction. He further details how the properties of the former serve as the basis for the properties of the latter, ensuring the formation of second nature. Finally, he posits how second nature forms the independent intellect and serves as the a priori categories of philosophical – primarily Kantian – epistemology.
Part Two, ‘Social Synthesis & Production’, entails Sohn-Rethel’s account of the historical development of appropriation and production. He begins by opposing the categories of ‘societies of production’ and ‘societies of appropriation’. Whilst the former are indicative of primitive communism, the latter are constitutive of class societies, the evolution of which this section traces. Sohn-Rethel argues that the division of intellectual and manual labour arose in tandem with the appropriation of surplus via exploitation in the first class societies in the Bronze Age. His historical schemas argue that these phenomena increased during the age of the Pharaohs, but that it was classical Hellenic society where real and conceptual abstraction first developed. This part also accounts for the medieval mode of production, the transition to and the development of capitalism, capitalist technology and bourgeois scientific thought.
Part Three, ‘The Dual Economics of Advanced Capitalism’, is where Sohn-Rethel lays out his analysis of the contemporary, and contradictory, stage of capitalism. Such an account argues that the increase in technological automation and the reliance on the Taylorist organisation of social production indicate that capitalism is in a new stage, ruled by the ‘curse of second nature’. Rather than using these technologies in an instrumental manner for appropriation and exacerbating the division of hand and head, Sohn-Rethel argues that this curse can be overcome by using technological automation in a communist society based on social production that consciously overcomes the division between head and hand.
Part Four, ‘Historical Materialism as a Methodological Postulate’, offers Sohn-Rethel’s own interpretation of historical materialism. In opposition to those who interpret Marxism as a ‘worldview’, epistemological theories of reflection, or empiricist and philosophical methodologies, Sohn-Rethel argues that historical materialism is non-dogmatic and critical method that deciphers necessary false consciousness from social being.
Influence
Perhaps in part due to the peculiar structure of the book, its idiosyncrasies, or the particular focal points of already existent Marxian discourses, the reception of Intellectual and Manual Labour tended to focus on specific aspects rather than his overall critical social theory.
In Sohn-Rethel’s adopted home of the UK, his work received attention in a number of marxian journals and associations that had grown out of the 1960s. Although his work was published in Radical Philosophy and Marxism Today in the 1960s, it was the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) that incorporated it into the new reading of Marx developed in conferences, debates, the CSE Bulletin and later Capital & Class. Consequently, the area of Sohn-Rethel’s thought that was drawn on by figures in the CSE tended to be reflective of the evolution of these debates. As Chris Arthur points out in his preface, it is seldom noted that Sohn-Rethel’s work on production was thus a key component of the initial debate that concerned the CSE, on the organisation of labour.14 It was only later that the value, as described in Clarke, of Sohn-Rethel’s term real abstraction – if not Sohn-Rethel’s theory itself – became important for understanding Marx’s theory of value as one of social objectivity.
These aspects of Intellectual and Manual Labour were likewise the focus of debates in Germany and Italy. In Germany, the idea of real abstraction was critically utilised in ensuing debates on Marx’s theory of value in the 1970s and 80s (see Backhaus, Reichelt, Halfman and Rexworth.) Oskar Negt wrote a short book on Sohn-Rethel, and Negt and Kluge drew on Sohn-Rethel’s ideas in their work. Hans-Dieter Bahr and Norbert Kapferer also criticised Sohn-Rethel’s account of the labour process and technology.15 These debates can be said to follow three lines: one followed his idea (R.W. Müller, Bodo v. Greiff); another one rejected it from the standpoint of classical Marxism; and one pointed to and developed the crucial problematic missing in Sohn-Rethel, of how real abstraction connects action and thought, exchange and labour, form and substance of value, and circulation and production, as well as how the – according to Sohn-Rethel – very old form of commodity-exchange connects with the capitalist mode of commodity-production (Halfmann/Rexroth, Bahr, Engster)
Finally, as the accompanying material from Lotta Continua also points out, Sohn-Rethel’s work was influential in Italian Marxist circles, primarily in discourses on technology, fordism and the work process, but also, like in West-Germany, in connection with its epistemological dimension.16
Although the idea of real abstraction had been a persistent focus for those working on Marxian value theory, Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology pointed to the unexplored reception of Sohn-Rethel’s work in the now former Yugoslavia and also restored the idea of real abstraction to prominence in radical discourses.17 Yet the past decade or so has seen a revival of interest in Sohn-Rethel. This was initiated by Alberto Toscano’s work, which contextualised the idea of real abstraction within Marxist debates across cultural discourses.18 In addition, thinkers such as Endnotes,19 Bhandar/Toscano20 and Jason W. Moore21 have used the idea to develop notions of gender, race, and nature as real abstractions. Christian Lotz and Werner Bonefeld have likewise used the concept in their critical theoretical work. Finally, Frank Engster’s authoritative Das Geld als Maß, Mittle und Methode has further developed the third line of the German reception of Sohn-Rethel. The republication of Intellectual and Manual Labour, along with the accompanying texts, hopes to contribute to the further reception of Sohn-Rethel’s ideas today.
Author’s correspondence with Frank Engster, who was of invaluable help in preparing this introduction.
To do so, I draw on Reinfeld and Slater 1978, p. 126; Schlaudt and Engster 2018; Lange (forthcoming).
I will discuss the third idea in the forthcoming republication of Sohn-Rethel’s Fascism book.
In 2021, Ça Ira will publish Carl Freytag’s authoritative biography of Sohn-Rethel.
See Lange forthcoming for a discussion of this formulation of Sohn-Rethel’s ideas, which will be discussed in more depth in future publications of the Selected Works.
Kluge 2017.
See this edition, p. xviii.
This edition, p. xx.
Reinfelder and Slater 1978, p. 130.
This edition, p. 1.
This edition, p. 4.
Ibid.
Ibid.
See Conference for Socialist Economists 1976.
The German reception of Sohn-Rethel’s work will be discussed in more detail in the introduction to the forthcoming translation of Warenform und Denkform.
Bahr, Kapefer and other important contributions from these Italian and German debates were translated in Slater (ed.) 1980.
Toscano 2019.
Toscano 2008.
Endnotes 2013.
Bhandar and Toscano 2015.
Moore 2016.