This enquiry is concerned with the relationship between base and superstructure in the Marxian sense. This, to a large extent, leads into new territory. Marx and Engels have clarified the general architecture of history consisting of productive forces and production relations which together form the material basis for consciousness as superstructure. But they have not left us a blueprint for the staircase that should lead from the base to the superstructure. And it is this with which we are concerned, or at least with its barest scaffolding of formal precision. To continue with our metaphor, the staircase must be given a firm anchorage in the basement, and this, for commodity-producing societies, can only be found in the formal analysis of the commodity itself. This analysis, however, requires considerable enlargement and deepening before it can carry the full weight I intend to place on it. For Marx it served to carry the critique of political economy. For us it must carry in addition the critique of the traditional theories of science and cognition.
What is new and bewildering in the present undertaking is that it must lay hand upon the commodity analysis as we have it from Marx, and thus upon that part of his theory commonly regarded as the untouchable foundation stone. It may therefore not be amiss to preface the theoretical presentation with a short sketch of ‘thought-biography’ to show how the deviating offshoot originated and has taken shape. Moreover it may also be necessary to explain why the investigation has taken fifty years to mature before reaching the light of day.
It began towards the end of the First World War and in its aftermath, at a time when the German proletarian revolution should have occurred and tragically failed. This period led me into personal contact with Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor W. Adorno and the writings of Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse. Strange though it may sound I do not hesitate to say that the new development of Marxist thought which these people represent evolved as the theoretical and ideological superstructure of the revolution that never happened. In it re-echo the thunder of the gun battle for the Marstall in Berlin at Christmas 1918, and the shooting of the Spartacus rising in the following winter. The paradoxical condition of this ideological movement may help to explain its almost exclusive preoccupation with superstructural questions, and the conspicuous lack of concern for the material and economic base that should have been underlying it. As far as I was concerned, though not a member of the Spartacus movement, I was stirred by the political events, partaking in the discussions at street-corners and public meeting-halls, lying under window-sills while bullets pierced the windows – experiences which are traced in the pages to follow.
My political awakening started in 1916, at the age of 17 and still at school, when I began reading August Bebel and Marx. I was thrown out of home and was part of the beginning of the antiwar rebellion of students in my first university year at Heidelberg in 1917, with Ernst Toller as a leading figure. For us the world could have fallen to pieces if only Marx remained intact. But then everything went wrong. The Revolution moved forward and backward and finally ebbed away. Lenin’s Russia receded further and further into the distance. At university we learned that even in Marx there were theoretical flaws, that marginal utility economics had rather more in its favour and that Max Weber had successfully contrived sociological antidotes against the giant adversary Marx. But this teaching only made itself felt within the academic walls. Outside there were livelier spirits about, among them my unforgettable friend Alfred Seidel, who in 1924 committed suicide.22 Here, outside the university, the end of the truth had not yet come.
I glued myself to Marx and began in earnest to read Capital, with a relentless determination not to let go. ‘Lire le Capital’ as Louis Althusser says so rightly! It must have taken some two years when in the background of my university studies I scribbled mountains of paper, seizing upon every one of the vital terms occurring in the first sixty pages of Capital, turning them round and round for definitions, and above all for metaphorical significance, taking them to pieces and putting them together again. 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’. Without need to say so, it was obvious to everybody that this was sheer lunacy, and no one was squeamish about telling me so! But I knew that I had grasped the beginning of a thread whose end was not yet in sight. But the secret identity of commodity form and thought form which I had glimpsed was so hidden within the bourgeois world that my first naïve attempts to make others see it only had the result that I was given up as a hopeless case. ‘Sohn-Rethel is crazy!’ was the regretful and final verdict of my tutor Alfred Weber (brother of Max), who had had a high opinion of me.
In these circumstances there was of course no hope of an academic career either, with the consequence that I remained an outsider all my life with my idée fixe. Only a few isolated spirits, outsiders like myself, had kindred ideas in their minds, and none more sympathetically so than Adorno, who in his own manner was on the same track. We checked up on this together in 1936. He in his whole mental make-up was occupied with completely different matters rather than the analysis of commodity and economics. Therefore even my contact with him was only partial and I was thrown back on my own resources for unravelling my thread of truth.
That this process was full of deadlocks and long periods of interruptions, both for reasons of money-earning and because of other difficulties, goes without saying. The interruptions, periods of complete recession, add up to even longer durations than the periods of theoretical work.
The time between 1924 and 1927 was spent in Italy, mainly in Capri where Benjamin and Bloch were staying; then to Davos for an international university course, where I met Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, Alexander Koyré and others, but had to remain for two and a half years for a cure of tuberculosis. When I returned to Germany to face the slump, with absolutely no financial resources, I was lucky to find work in an office of big business in Berlin.23
There I was also engaged in illegal anti-Nazi activities, escaping from arrest by the Gestapo to reach England in 1937. In Birmingham I met Professor George Thomson, the only other man I have known who had also recognised the interconnection of philosophy and money, although in a completely different field from my own – in ancient Greece. I finally finished a long manuscript, ‘Intellectual and Manual Labour’, in 1951, which, despite strenuous efforts by Thomson and Bernal, was turned down by the publishers Lawrence & Wishart as being too unorthodox for them, and by bourgeois publishers as being too militantly Marxist!
Until 1970 only three small texts of mine were published.24 Since 1970 several of my books have appeared in Germany, as a result of which I was appointed Guest Professor at the University of Bremen from 1972 to 1976.
For the present English version of this book I am particularly indebted to Dr Wilfried van der Will for reading my script and for his unstinting advice and critical comment; also to my son Martin for his work as translator, and to the late Sigurd Zienau for stimulating discussions during many years of friendship.
My inextinguishable gratitude is due to Joan, my wife, for her untiring effort and unflagging devotion to my work, which has become ours in common.
Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Seidel 1927.
Sohn-Rethel 1974.
They are: an article in Modern Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 1 (Winter 1947/8); two lectures given in the Humbolt University, Berlin, published in Academy Journal Wiss. Zeitschr. Humb. Univ., Ged.-Sprachwiss. R.X. (1961); an article in Marxism Today (April 1965); and an approving mention in the preface to the magnificent work of George Thomson, The First Philosophers (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955).