Social ontology in open Marxism and political Marxism: From alienation,to exploitation and back again

The social character of capitalist production and its obfuscation by classical political economy

The configuration of social power and of class relations under capitalism entails an apparent differentiation between “economic” and “political” spheres. This fact, underscored by political as well as open Marxists, underlays the economic determinism of liberal thinkers as well as of many Marxists.

Wood presents this differentiation of economic and political spheres as a distinct historical feature of capitalism, determined by a specific form of social property relations. The differentiation of the economic and the political has different dimensions, including the fact that production and distribution are no longer embedded in social relations, nor in modes of political, religious, or other forms of customary regulations. It also implies that the market acquires a life of its own and that a purely economic form of absolute and exclusive property emerges. Fundamentally, it is only when “moments” of coercion and of appropriation, constitutive of all forms of exploitation, become discontinuous – as the former is taken care of by a “public” state, and the latter fuses with the power to command over production under market imperatives – that the separation of the “economic” and of the “political” takes hold. The mass of direct producers are dispossessed from means of production and compelled to enter contractual relations with appropriators to whom they sell their capacity to work.

Social powers and functions tied to production, investment, and distribution are thus privatized, attached to private property over means of production and organized through mechanisms of commodity exchange that are no longer openly political, meaning that they are not publicly debatable or communally deliberated over. Exploitation can now take place through “economic” means, and the correlative is the emergence of a distinct “specialized public political sphere.” Since the exploiting class no longer needs to appropriate surpluses by “extra-economic” political means (feudal rents, state office revenues, or state-granted commercial monopolies), the emerging public state can take a liberal democratic form. Capitalists lose direct control over state power but gain direct control over production – a control that is privatized and submitted to the logic of market competition, consequently escaping processes of public deliberation tied to the new state form. (Wood, 1981: 67, 77, 80–82).

Clarke (1988: 126–127) agrees with Wood’s work on this point, explaining that the emergence of an institutionally autonomous, and apparently neutral, state emerged historically with the draining of political powers out of civil society and the rise of an economic sphere of contractual and market relations. Clarke (1988: 55, 69–79) provides a compelling historical analysis of the institutional maturation of the capitalist state form in Britain over the first half of the 19th century. This was a process that entailed the submission of the state to the abstract power of law and money and the modelling of the public administration after the impersonal efficiency and predictability of market mechanisms.

For Wood, the apparent splitting of economics and politics under capitalism is fundamentally a differentiation of political functions stemming from a reconfiguration of social power. Wood (1981: 68) reminds us that, for Marx, the “fundamental secret of capitalist production” concerns “the disposition of power that obtains between the worker and the capitalist,” which “has as its condition the political configuration of society as a whole.” In other words, “the ultimate secret of capitalist production is a political one,” and is accessible only to those who are prepared, following Marx, “to treat the economy itself not as a network of disembodied forces but, like the political ‘sphere,’ as a set of social relations.” This implies that the economy itself exists through, and is structured by, “social, juridical, and political forms” (Wood, 1981: 69). Following Marx, Brenner (1976, 1986) has produced ground-breaking historical work on the transition to capitalism, out of which political Marxism was formed, by deciphering the “social basis” of capitalist economic development.

Echoing Wood and Brenner, Clarke (1991b) develops a similar ontological conception of capitalism, stressing that “for Marx, relations of production are inherently social[,] ‘naturally arisen . . . historically developed’” (p. 84). What defines Marx’s theoretical approach is not so much an assertion of the “primacy of production” than a “transformation of the bourgeois conception of production itself” (Clarke, 1991b: 74, 77). Marx approaches capitalist production as simultaneously social and material, a contradictory unity of production of use-values and exchange-value that entails alienated social relations of production taking the form of external material forces orchestrating seemingly purely technical processes.

Classical political economists, and mainstream liberal social theorists ever since, have taken the separation of the “economic” and the “political” at face value, obscuring the social and political content of economic processes. As a result, explains Wood (1981), “the economy itself is evacuated of social content and is, as it were, depoliticized” (p. 68). This implies that the economy is no longer subjected to coercive “extra-economic” powers that supported surplus exactions in non-capitalist societies. And the flipside is that the core logic of the economy is no longer contestable and subject to public debates or communal deliberations (Wood, 1981: 77). Agreeing with Wood, Clarke (1991b) explains that Marx’s assessment of political economy develops a “critique of the constitutive basis of all bourgeois ideology, whose defining feature is the conception of production as a technical process, a conception that underpins the eternisation of capitalist relations of production” (p. 78).

Taking his cue from Marx, Clarke goes on to offer a deciphering of the theory of society put forth by classical political economists. This social theory, he explains, reduces the functioning of society to an economic foundation whose ontological nature is asocial. This means that this economic foundation is reduced to a purely technical process that exists outside, or prior to, social relations and is consequently impervious to efforts of socio-political reconfiguration. This is because production is organized around the technically imposed – and thus universal – cooperation of functionally differentiated factors mobilized in all societies: labour, stock (capital: tools and machinery), and land. The pursuit of the individual’s self-interest through a universal tendency to “truck, barter, and exchange,” and the ensuing expansion of markets, leads to a gradual division of labour that sustains growing production, renewed market expansion, and so on. Adam Smith conceived history as a succession of “modes of subsistence” culminating with “commercial society” (capitalism) and propelled by the development of the division of labour. History thus becomes a process of institutional trial and error that leads to the progressive elimination of barriers to the advance of economic efficiency. Fundamentally, the rationality, or logic, of this process lies outside history itself, in the natural growth of the division of labour and the accumulation of stock (Clarke, 1991a: 22, 24, 37–39, 83).

Classical political economy, following Locke, sees property as deriving from objectified labour. Property is thus a natural, universal, and a direct (socially unmediated) result of production. Progress in the division of labour creates a socio-functional differentiation between labour, stock, and land. These factors of production, at first held by single individuals, become distributed between distinct owners, giving rise to distinct classes in the process. Individuals belong to classes on the basis of their ownership of factors of production that provide distinct forms of revenues, once more universal: wages for labour, profit for capital, and rent for land. Property is thus a natural and necessary outcome of the development of production forces and unfolding of the division of labour.

A natural-technical theory of production is thus supplemented with a natural-technical theory of class, property, and distribution – production is a technical and universally applicable combination of factors of production, upon which relations of property and distribution are superimposed. Types of property and attendant revenues define class interests, which in turn define rational socio-economic behaviour. Class interests, however, can be misapprehended, and production and distribution disturbed by different forms of political corruption and rent-seeking behaviour that retard historical progress and make socio-economic and political institutions suboptimal. The task of political economy is to discover and expose the natural laws of historical progress and social organization so as to serve the common interest by way of maximization of national wealth through mastery over natural forces of production (Clarke, 1991a: 17–18, 32, 38, 79–80, 1980: 17).

Classical political economy, according to Clarke (1991a: 12–18, 83–85), offers the first attempt at a systematic theory of society, not as the arbitrary result of human design, but as governed by economic regularities. For political economy, property does not stem from distinct forms of social relations. It is rather property, the personal ownership of given factors of production, that constitutes individuals as social actors and orients their behaviour. This allows isolation of the economic (i.e. technical, asocial) ontological foundation of society and leads to understanding its structure and evolution in abstraction from moral, political, or religious considerations and institutions. The upshot is a theory that ascribes social powers to things, reversing subjects and objects. This, however, is not mere ideological deception – political economy renders and systematizes in thought an inversion existing in capitalist social reality.

The critique of alienated labour and Marx’s first historical materialism

It is this inverted social reality that the young Marx first attempts to pierce with his theory of alienated labour as the basis of private property. In his Manuscripts of 1844, Marx explains that the capitalist alienation of labour manifests itself through an estrangement of the labourer from the product of her activity and from her activity itself, as well as from her fellow human beings and from nature. At first glance, it seems to be the capitalist’s property that allows him to take control over, and alienate, the labour of his employee. An individual’s relation with a thing seems to directly determine his relation with another individual, in accordance with the liberal constitution of abstract individuals on the basis of their property (Clarke, 1991a: 67, 70).

Marx breaks with the abstract liberal conception of the individual put forth by political economy by reversing the equation and showing that it is in fact the alienated form of labour that explains capitalist property, not the reverse. This, in turn, points to the fact that alienated labour, and the property that stems out of it, are rooted in, and mediated by, distinct forms of social relations of production. Alienated labour is not the consequence of an unmediated performance of labour under the command of the owner of means of production. It is in fact “mediated by the commodity-form of labour and its product” (Clarke, 1991a: 75) – the estrangement of labour from the means of labour and of subsistence – which is a prerequisite to capital’s ability to harness the social power of labour and accumulate the surplus it generates as private property.

In his Comments on James Mill, also written in 1844, Marx comes to the conclusion that only when performed within a form of social production characterized by alienated relations of exchange of commodities under the rule of money can labour take the form of a thing appropriated as private property (Clarke, 1991a: 73–74). A mature analysis of the commodity form was developed later, in Capital, where the early theory of alienated labour was supplemented with the theory of commodity fetishism.

Clarke (1991a: 90) indicates, however, that the early Marx was not yet able to explain the historical emergence of capitalist relations, and when attempting to do so, for instance, in The German Ideology (1845) and The Communist Manifesto (1848), he fell back onto the mechanical materialism of political economy, for which the foundation of historical laws “appears to lie outside history.” Here, Marx’s conception of history is abstract, eschewing an investigation of historically distinct social forms of labour as the basis of specific modes of division of labour and of property. He focuses instead on a continuous and “technical division of labour” giving rise to a succession of property forms that, in turn, underlay class relations – a process recurrently constrained by different forms of moral or religious beliefs, as well as by different political institutions (Clarke, 1991a: 87–88).

Brenner offers a strikingly similar critical reading of the early Marx’s historical materialism. According to Brenner (1989), the intellectual roots of Marx’s initial theory of historical materialism “are to be found in the mechanical materialism, the economic determinism, of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and above all in the work of Adam Smith” (p. 280). ¹

Brenner (1989: 272) shows how, in these early writings, Marx adopts the “central explanatory notion” at the core of Smith’s materialist theory of history, namely “the self-developing division of labour.” Marx sees the development of productive forces, tied to the division of labour, as an unproblematic spontaneous response to the extension of market exchange. This, in turn, specifies the nature of class and property relations (and ultimately of the state) structured by the “distribution of material, instrument and product of labour” (Brenner, 1989: 276). With the growth of productive forces and the division of labour, society evolves from one mode of producing its means of subsistence to the next. As part of this linear process, a transition from feudalism to capitalism is eventually caused by “the maturation of the developing bourgeois society, nourished by constantly-growing world trade, within the womb of the old feudal society” (Brenner, 1989: 272, 275).

At this early stage of his intellectual career, explains Brenner (1989), Marx ends up

following Smith in failing to attribute to distinct forms of society distinctive forms of economic activity and developmental patterns; correlatively, like Smith, he attribute[s] to the growth of trade and the development of technique a universal capacity to determine a pattern of growth along capitalistic lines, whatever the prevailing, historically developed societal form. (pp. 282–283).

Moreover, “Marx’s understanding of the place of class and property relationships is, in these earlier works of his, explicitly techno-functionalist” (Brenner, 1989: 284). Functions in production units are technically specified by the logic of the productive process, and these roles in production underlie the class structure of society. Accordingly, the evolution of class and property relations is “determined by the evolution of the productive forces via the latter’s determination of the evolution of the labour process.” And it follows that “class relations and class struggles occupy a passive and determined position, rather than an active and determining role, within Marx’s early conception of historical evolution.” Class struggle and revolution merely play a facilitating role in breaking “political-parasitic barriers” to the emergence of capitalism, for instance, which was fundamentally caused by the growth of trade, productive forces, and division of labour (Brenner, 1989: 279–280).

Marx’s mature critique of political economy, the development of a critical historical materialism, and their obfuscation by mainstream Marxists

Brenner and Wood explain how Marx decisively breaks with economic reductionism and technological determinism at the time of producing his mature critique of political economy, presented in the Grundrisse (1857–1858) and Capital (1867). In these works, his conception of the relationship between class, property, and the development of forces of production – key aspects of his social ontology – undergoes a major overhaul. Class exploitation and struggles take centre stage. Modes of production are now conceived as systems of social property relations characterized by historically distinct patterns of surplus appropriation and social reproduction that specify the tendential development (or absence thereof) of productive forces. Marx now sees that each historical form of society, or mode of production, has its own economic functioning, or “laws of motion.” Systematic technical and technological improvement is specific to capitalism, and so the development of productive forces cannot explain the rise of capitalism itself, no more than historical development in general. The transition to capitalism must be explained by a transformation of class relations of exploitation which Marx connects to the mass dispossession of the English peasantry in the closing section of the first volume of Capital (Brenner, 1989: 272–273, 285, 292–294; Wood, 1995: 120–121, 123–125).

Likewise, Clarke (1991a: 7) stresses that Marx’s mature theory of history is developed on the basis of his analysis of the historically distinct “economic forms of the social relations of capitalist production.” Marx realizes that production is never simply a material process but also one of “production of social relations,” which leads him to analyse the social form of value (Clarke, 1980: 48–49). Far from adopting it, Marx developed an incisive critique of Ricardo’s theory of value as immediate, concrete labour embodied in a commodity. Thus, the truly original character of the Marxian critique of political economy hinges on his value-form theory, which breaks with Ricardo’s naturalistic theory of value (value as a universal expression of labour). For Marx, it is only alienated, abstract labour that produces value. That is, commodified labour performed under the command of capital as part of a specific form of competitive social production mediated by the exchange of commodities. Value is thus an expression of abstract labour, which appears in the social validation of a private expenditure of labour through successful market exchange of its product.

Value appears as an unmediated relation between an individual and a thing (the product of her labour), but actually stems from a distinct form of social relation. Labour takes a value-form, producing value only in the context of a social division of labour organized through competitive market exchange. Likewise, land does not naturally yield rent, nor means of production profits – these things produce the expected effects only in specific social settings. It follows that sources of revenue are not the result of the ownership of factors of production per se, accruing to “distributive classes,” but of an appropriation and sharing of surplus value created under compulsion in a labour process that is simultaneously one of valorisation. Social relations really are, and can only be, mediated by the property and exchange of things, under capitalism. But to understand the nature of relations of production and distribution organized around things (factors of production and commodities), we must decipher the fetishized social forms through which they exist, and which give rise to distinct socio-historical processes (Clarke, 1991a: 96–103, 1991b: 77–78).

The classical or orthodox Marxism, first schematised by leading intellectuals of the Second International, accepts classical political economy’s labour theory of value and largely ignores Marx’s value-form analysis and his theory of commodity fetishism, or reduces the latter to an ideological and illusory reflection of relations of production. Consequently, mainstream Marxism tends to take for granted the technicist conception of production of classical political economy and to adopt the economic reductionism of Marx’s first historical materialism. The primacy of production, understood as a technical, asocial, or desocialized process, leads to a conception of history tied to “extra-historical laws,” a technological determinism that “necessarily rests on the metaphysical foundation of dogmatic claims about the nature of the world” (Clarke, 1980: 21). As Clarke (1991a) argues, Marx’s materialism and his conception of history are thus “identified with [those] of the Enlightenment, in seeing the historical development of society as the adaptation of social institutions to the unfolding of quasi-natural laws” (p. 308). Wood (1995) agrees, stating that “uncritical Marxism effectively repudiated everything Marx had to say against the metaphysical and ahistorical materialism of his predecessors” (p. 5).

The technicist conception of production and reductionist historical materialism were embraced by Stalin through the philosophy of Georgi Plekhanov and became the orthodoxy of the Marxism of communist parties. As Clarke (1991b: 79–80) and Wood (1995: 6) explain, Stalin conceives history as the development of a technical structure of production that serves as the material basis on which modes of production develop. Each mode of production represents a set of property relations that determines relations of surplus appropriation and distribution that specify society’s class structure. The self-enclosed economic base of technical production and distributive relations, in turn, determines external and superstructural political and cultural spheres. History is approached as a sequence of modes of production, or sets of relations of property and distribution, each contributing to the development of productive forces for a time, before becoming an impediment to this growth and being replaced by a new more adequate set of property and class relations. This, as stressed by both Wood (1995: 49) and Clarke (1991a: 95, 2002: 60, 67), is fundamentally a rehashing, of the historical materialism of Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment.

Plekhanov had already established the gradual and autonomous development of productive forces as the determinant of historical processes (Clarke, 2002: 56, 65–67). Doing this, Plekhanov maintains the possibility of an agency for social actors by making it conditional upon an adequate knowledge of, and proper adaptation of practice to, objective laws of historical development. He proposes that while the direction of history and content of “superstructural” elements, such as property relations (and other legal and political elements), are determined by necessity, the pace of this process is subject to human agency through the determination of the form of property relations by class struggles. This, as Clarke underlines, is reminiscent of the attempt by classical political economy to scientifically isolate the natural laws of historical progress in order to promote a sound programme of social reforms aimed at optimizing growth. Likewise, explains Wood (1995), the Stalinised Soviet regime, equipped with a scientific knowledge of a technologically determined history, made “the object of socialism [. . .] to perfect the development of productive forces” (p. 141).

Louis Althusser’s Marxism represents an attempt to avoid, and offer an influential alternative to, the economic reductionism of Marxism. Althusser sees the error of Stalinist or orthodox Marxism not in its desocialized conception of the economy, its technicist understanding of production, which he fundamentally retains, but in an attempt to reduce other “instances” of the social whole to a direct determination by the economy. In this, as Clarke (1980: 23, 25, 28, 52, 1991b: 81–84) shows, Althusser is closer to mainstream sociology, and of structural-functionalism in particular, than he is of Marx. Like structural-functionalism, Althusser rejects crude economic reductionism, and his point of departure is not production or the economy but the whole – society and its different instances or levels, which have distinct functions in the reproduction of the whole. Differentiated functions imply that each level – economic (production), political, or ideological (property and distribution) – is autonomous from the other and inserted in a hierarchy whose logic and organisation is determined by the economy “in the last instance.”

Just like Clarke, Wood (1995: 51–52) rejects Althusser’s “levels,” which eternalise the separation of the political and the economic that is in fact specific to capitalism. Althusser retained from the base/superstructure model its “mechanical character and conceptualization of social structure in terms of discrete, discontinuous, externally related ‘factors,’ ‘levels’ or instances.’” Meanwhile, his “indefinite postponement of economic determination to an unforeseeable ‘last instance’” scuttled the notion that social relations of production and class exploitation have direct and determinant effects on politics and other social institutions.

The splitting of social reality between an economic level (a realm of necessity and technically tuned production) and political and ideological levels (the terrain of distributive class struggles) has important practical implications (Clarke, 1980: 37–38, 1991b: 80–81; Wood, 1981: 77). With this split, Marx’s crucial insight regarding the social and political dimensions of relations of production is lost, and the point at which they can be contested slips out of sight. Socialism is reduced to matters of distribution (of wealth and/or of ownership of means of production), pursued through trade union activity or reformist politics, while fetishized social mediations can never be questioned, let alone overturned. Both open and political Marxists radically break with this reductive conception of socialist politics. As Clarke (1988) stresses, “the class struggle does not simply take place within [capitalist] forms. The forms of capitalist domination are themselves the object of class struggle” (p. 16) and can be surpassed.

The works of Brenner, Clarke, and Wood, then, question the naturalization of production by political economy and by mainstreams of Marxism. Divergences begin to emerge, however, when we further specify their understanding of the social ontology of capitalism and of class societies more broadly – that is, the structuring of social and historical processes and the role of class exploitation and struggle in this structuring. This pertains to the ways in which we should mobilize the concepts of social forms and of social property relations.

Alienation, exploitation, or both?

Clarke (1979: 140 fn. 3) explicitly identifies Brenner’s perspective to Maurice Dobb’s definition of relations of production “as forms of exploitation.” It follows that Brenner, like Dobb, limits his analysis of particular modes of production to a consideration of relations of exploitation as they take place in the immediate process of production. Exploitation is treated as if it were a direct and “interpersonal relation” between the “labourer and owner of means of production,” a conception explicitly rejected by Clarke (1980: 61–62), who sees exploitation as actually taking place between classes and as part of a “total social relation.” Brenner commits the mistake, characteristic of orthodox Marxism, of ignoring the specific social form of labour, that is, the form of “class relations within which social production takes place” (Clarke, 1979: 140).

According to Clarke (1979), “[t]he reduction of relations of production to forms of exploitation” narrowly conceived is tantamount to “the substitution of a naturalistic economism for historical materialism” and “is an aspect of the isolation and naturalization of the economic form of capitalist relations of production” (p. 144). Brenner is thus situated by Clarke in the same league as Marxists who retained the technicist and desocialized conception of production as a combination of universal factors, first developed by classical political economy. To this technical form of production is superimposed a mode of production understood as a set of property relations defined in legal terms. These politico-legal institutions represent the terrain on which political action can intervene, albeit in a reformist or trade-unionist way, aimed at distributive issues and leaving the capital relation untouched. Moreover, as Clarke (1980) puts it, the Marxist theory of history is thus

replaced by a metaphysical law of history [. . .] seen as a mechanical, extra-historical law which determines history as a succession of modes of production by governing the progressive, and exogenous, development of the forces of production which underlies it, each mode being defined ahistorically by the specific form of appropriation of the surplus (rather than form of production) appropriate to a particular level of development of the productive forces. (pp. 21–22; see also Clarke, 1991b: 74–76).

If property relations and surplus appropriation are framed as legal relations of ownership, class struggles do seem to be “external” to the core of the alienated social relations of capitalist production. It thus becomes clearer why Clarke is uneasy with Brenner’s focus on forms of surplus appropriation (as he understands it). Indeed, as Clarke (1980) explains, once the critical analysis of capitalism has “established the basis in production of the expenditure of surplus labour, the question of the appropriation of that surplus labour is relatively trivial” (p. 60, emphasis added). Alienated relations of production (the capital relation), not property or appropriation (peripheral institutional and distributional issues), must be our focus, since “[t]he basis of capitalist social relations is the commodity form of labour power, and not the capitalist’s ownership of the means of production” (Clarke, 1980: 62). The issue at hand pertains once more to social ontology, and the key to Marx’s critique of political economy and capitalism is the identification and deciphiration of alienated forms of social mediation that act as impersonal modes of power constraining social actors. Socialism, it follows, will not ensue from a mere transformation of property relations implying the collectivisation and state administration of means of production. It will require a more fundamental disalienation of social relations.

Clarke is certainly right on this last point, and political Marxists would agree (Wood, 1995). His critique of Brenner, then, seems wide off the mark. Indeed, Brenner (2007: 58; see also Dimmock, 2015) is quite clear that he chose the concept of “social property relations” (as opposed to “social relations of production”) precisely to avoid the orthodox Marxist reduction of dynamics of exploitation, and of the whole social structure, to the immediate “organization of the labour process.” Such a reduction, Brenner claims, would be “disastrously misleading.” For Brenner, surplus appropriation takes place through a “society-wide network of social relationships,” and social property relations entail rules of reproduction that act as constraints and opportunities as class actors compete and collaborate to secure a share of surplus labour or to resist surplus extraction. Far from acting “from without,” class relations of exploitation form the very core of Brenner’s explanatory model, setting rules around which social reproduction and class struggles are structured.

In a similar vein Wood (1995: 108) fully recognizes that “capitalist appropriation is not a distinctively visible act,” precisely because there is “no immediately obvious way of separating the act of capitalist appropriation from the process of production or from the process of commodity exchange through which capital realizes its gains.” As she explains, Marx’s concept of “surplus value,” as opposed to the more general concept of surplus labour, “is meant to convey this complex relation between production of commodity exchange through which capital realizes its gains.” Put another way, in order to appropriate a share of total social surplus labour as surplus value, capitalists must successfully compete on markets through the maximization of labour productivity and profits, which necessarily implies alienated labour. Indeed, according to Wood (2002a, 2002b), capitalism emerges when markets become coercive forces that compel capitalists to compete by systematically improving the productivity of the labour they employ. Their social reproduction, their capacity to appropriate a surplus and retain and expand their property, is made dependent upon their competitiveness on markets. Though their vocabulary might differ, political Marxists certainly are aware of the key importance of alienated social mediations through which the exploitation of labour by capital is made possible.

It seems unwarranted, then, to oppose, as Clarke does, the commodity form of labour power to the capitalist’s ownership of the means of production, as the basis of the capital relation. One hardly goes without the other, and both play key parts in the structuring of the capitalist mode of exploitative production. The same goes for the opposition of the expenditure of surplus labour power in production to the appropriation of this surplus. Indeed, capitalism is the first historical society in which exploitation takes place through “economic means” (private property and the market dependence of appropriators as well as direction producers) that provide command over labour processes, as opposed to “extra-economic,” political means.

Likewise, there is no need to oppose exploitation to alienation to qualify the deep structure of capitalism – its ontology: again, both go hand in hand. Clarke is right to claim that orthodox Marxists tend to reduce class struggles to distributive issues pertaining to the rate of exploitation, ignoring in the process the fetishized social forms that underpin class relations. What he misses, however, is that political Marxists, starting with Brenner and Wood, conceive modes of exploitative production – sets of social property relations – in a way that directly and necessarily leads to a consideration of alienated forms of social relations. This is because social property relations necessarily entail rules of reproduction that individual and class actors must abide by in order to reproduce themselves as they are, so long as the same social property relations prevail. As Brenner (2007: 58) puts it, while they are reproduced through “collective socio-political action” (crucially involving state initiatives), “these constraints present themselves to individual economic agents as unchangeable givens.” “Unchangeable givens,” we might add, that act as alienated social forms, are collectively created social phenomena that appear to detach themselves from social actors that have created and that reproduce them and to confront these actors as seemingly autonomous powers.

In all class societies, the reproductive relation between social actors and nature is mediated in one way or another by relations of class exploitation. Direct producers are coerced, by extra-economic means (in non-capitalist societies) or the “mute compulsion of economic relations” (under capitalism), into producing surplus labour that is appropriated by exploiters. The latter, too, only have a mediated access to their means of reproduction. Not merely because they do not produce these means on their own and depend upon direct producers to do so, but also, crucially, because whenever surplus labour is produced, appropriators need to compete to get part of it (as individuals or as competing groups of exploiters). All social actors, then, because their access to means of reproduction is mediated by forms of class exploitation need to engage in social relationships that they contribute to reproducing but do not control and seem to be controlled by – again, alienated social relations.

These alienated social relations of exploitation entail specific rules of reproduction. Exploiters must compete (economically under capitalism, extra-economically in other modes of production) and find ways to maximize surplus-extraction in order to secure resources that will enable them to optimally struggle with other exploiters. Correlatively, direct producers have to develop strategies (either individualistic or solidaristic in nature) so as to limit the surplus labour that they to produce and let go. As Brenner (1986) explains, in non-capitalist class societies, direct producers are in possession of means of production (mainly land). The appropriators consequently need to engage in processes of state-building in order to secure the politico-military might necessary to extract surplus labour from direct producers while keeping competing exploiters at bay. Under capitalism, direct producers are dispossessed and their survival depends on their selling their labour-power to exploiters that are compelled by market imperatives to maximize surplus value, engaging in the process of endless capital accumulation for its own sake described by Marx in Capital.

The conclusion must be that in all class societies, dynamics of exploitation, and the constraining rules of reproduction that they entail, rule out any form of conscious and non-alienated social reproduction. There is, then, a sense in which alienated social relationships necessarily result from class exploitation, albeit always in historically distinct forms, and impose structural constraints that orient social behaviour. This is because, as political Marxists demonstrate, sets of social-property relations always involve rules of reproduction.

As it is used by Clarke, the concept of “alienation” does not refer to an estrangement of individuals from a genuine human essence, nor is it limited to the estrangement from one’s product or even one’s productive activity. Fundamentally, for Clarke, who takes his cue from Marx’s mature critique of political economy, alienation refers to the emergence of an automatic social logic that confront social actors as an external and uncontrollable power. Though they sparsely use the term “alienation,” it seems clear that Brenner’s and Wood’s concept of rules for reproduction (tied to distinct sets of social property relations) refers to the kind of alienated social logic to which Clarke is pointing.

Now, it is certainly true that this form of alienation reaches its paroxysm under capitalism, to a point where a new social ontology emerges. Indeed, the core open Marxist concept of social form allows us to see how the form taken by capitalist social relations transforms these very relations “into real abstractions imposing themselves on social life through an impersonal form of power” (Mau, 2023: 66). Though rooted in, and reproduced through, the actions of social agents, capital emerges as Marx describes as an “automatic subject,” a “self-moving substance” that acts “behind the backs” of agents. Yet, the point I want to stress here – which is key to our understanding of the social ontology of capitalism – is that this paroxysmal alienation is still in fact fundamentally due to the mode of surplus appropriation that is specific to capitalism. While, in pre-capitalist class societies, exploitation rests on relations of personal dependence, under capitalism, it is supported by a unique type of impersonal domination. Capitalism implies that both surplus appropriation and social reproduction are mediated by market relations, and from this stems the fetishism of commodities, which makes alienated capitalist social relation appear “as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things” (Marx, 1976: 165). Put another way, while pre-capitalist exploitation takes an extra-economic, directly coercive form, capitalist exploitation, as Wood explains, takes an “economic” form, and fundamentally relies on the market-dependence of both direct producers and appropriators. And it is specifically out of this economic and market-mediated mode of exploitation that the fetishized and alienated forms that are specific to capitalism emerge.

There is no need, then, to oppose the concepts of social form and of social property relations. They are in fact complementary and, in fact, the latter represent an attempt to specify the logic and dynamics of the former. And it should be stressed that the foregoing argument does not in any way contradict Marx’s claim that it is alienated labour that explains property, rather than the reverse. This is because, as should be clear by now, for political Marxists, it is not juridically and institutionally defined property that explains surplus appropriation (though legal forms obviously are part of the equation), but social property relation – a much broader and multidimensional configuration of social and class power. Marx understands, as Clarke so aptly demonstrates, that alienated labour stems out of a social organization of production mediated by commodity exchange. This is what Marx expresses with his theory of commodity fetishism, from which he derives the value-form of labour and his explanation of abstract labour and surplus value – categories that correspond to the alienated social form which sustains the “economic” form of surplus appropriation that is specific to capitalism.

Implications for the Marxist theory of history

It appears that the younger Clarke, especially at the time of writing his early critique of Althusser (Clarke, 1980), does not properly grasp the dialectical connection – the internal relation – between exploitation (surplus appropriation) and alienation, and that leads him into theoretical troubles when he attempts to specify his understanding of the Marxist theory of history. ² Later in his career, however, as we will see, Clarke gets very close to the political Marxist notions of social property relations and rules of reproductions, and of the specific form that they take under capitalism.

In his critique of Levi-Strauss’s structuralism, written in the early 1980s, Clarke (1981: 232–233) asserts that Marx provides the explanation to the dichotomy between subject and object, and the existence of “society as an objective field of human activity” that puzzles social theory. This is a specific historical phenomenon that is explained by Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. This theory shows not only that social relations are veiled by relations between things but, more fundamentally, that in a capitalist society, social production necessarily takes the paradoxical form of social relations between things. This allows Marx “to understand the external, objective, and constraining character of social relations which are themselves human products.” Clarke is certainly right – the theory of commodity fetishism explains the structuring of capitalist social relations. But what about the structuring of social and historical processes of other class societies and the transition from one to the other? How do we get, historically, to distinctly capitalist forms of social objectivity and ontology?

In his early critique of Althusser, Clarke (1980: 21, 70) claims that the basis of the Marxist theory of history is the contradictory unity of forces and relations of production, with relations of production first acting as a vector of development of productive forces, then as fetter, at which point they need to be replaced. This conception of history, according to Clarke, is undermined by orthodox Marxism’s purely technical definition of forces and relations of production and their separation into self-enclosed spheres. As Clarke (1980) explains, forces and relations of production are fundamentally social and inseparable elements, and “the contradiction between value and use-value is the specification of the contradiction between forces and relations of production in the capitalist mode of production” (p. 78). What we end up with, however, despite this insistence on the social character of forces and relations of production, is a vision of history as the unfolding of the transhistorical development of productive forces that sporadically come into conflict with relations of production. Clarke (1980: 72), it should be mentioned, does concede that this is “speculative and hypothetical” since we would have to confirm through an in-depth analysis of non-capitalist modes of production whether they actually are conducive to the development of productive forces. Nevertheless, what emerges is a version of “productive forces Marxism.”

Clarke offers a historical illustration of these theoretical proposals in a paper produced in the late 1970s, which offers a reading of the historical emergence of capitalism that has a distinctly Smithian undertone, assuming the existence of the capitalist dynamics that must be explained. He criticizes, for instance, Dobb (and Paul Sweezy) for failing to recognize “the connection between the progressive growth of the productive forces in the middle ages, spurred by the struggle for rent, and providing the basis for the growing division of labour, and the expansion of commodity production” (Clarke, 1979: 148). The gradual expansion of commodity relations, Clarke (1979: 146, 148) goes on to explain, gradually eroded feudal class relations and this led “soon enough” to “the emergence out of the commodity form of capitalist forms of exploitation.”

Yet, when writing his Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology – and a fortiori when publishing the expanded second edition of this book – Clarke engages in a clear theoretical break with productive forces Marxism. In his Keynes, Moneratism and the Crisis of the State (Clarke, 1988), his Marx Theory of Crisis (Clarke, 1994), and in articles produced during the period between these books, Clarke offers a clearly stated theoretical alternative to productive forces of Marxism. Doing this, he moves in the direction of political Marxism, underscoring how unique competitive pressures explain the dynamic development of productive forces that is specific to the capitalist mode of production.

Especially important for our discussion, Clarke (1989: 5) stresses what he presents as the key “distinction between particular capitals and capital-in-general.” Individual capitalists are interdependent within a social division of labour, yet have conflicting interests as each seeks to sell at the highest price while buying at the lowest price. This contradictory relationship of conflicted interdependence is resolved through market competition, which confines the activities of particular capitals within the limits set by the logic and needs of the accumulation of capital as a whole. This implies that the general interest of capital – the logic of capital accumulation enforced through market competition – presents itself to the individual capitalist as a barrier to his or her own interests, in the form of competition with other capitalists. This competition is experienced as an “external force” and “each capitalist seeks, by one means or another, to overcome the barrier of the market.” Clarke explains that the “authority of the market cannot be maintained merely by the tacit agreement of individual capitals” since “unless the authority of the market is imposed on all particular capitals they will individually and severally seek to overcome the barrier of the market by suppressing competition, by fraud and, in extremis, by force.” It follows that “the authority of the market can only be maintained by an external power that can meet force by force,” that is, by the state (Clarke, 1989: 6, 1988: 123–125).

Here, Clarke’s theoretical argument (though not always his historical argument) fits perfectly within a political Marxist framework. He tells us that it is “the pressure of competition” that “forces every capitalist to develop the productive forces without limit” (Clarke, 1989: 7; 1988: 20). Or, in political Marxist parlance, capitalists face specific rules of reproduction, tied to market imperatives, which compel them to maximize profit through systematic reinvestment and accumulation of capital. As Wood (1995: 123–124) explains, building on Brenner’s work, capitalism is a system uniquely driven to systematically develop productive forces and “indeed, this insight into the specificity of capitalism is the essence of Marx’s critique of political economy.”

Moreover, the accumulation of capital through the constant revolution of forces of production is anything but natural, since, as Clarke explains, capitalists will instinctively try to escape market discipline, experienced as an external power and a barrier to their private interests. It becomes clear, then, that it is not the development of forces of production that leads to capitalism, but on the contrary the competitive logic of capitalism that leads to the systematic development of production forces. This concords with the political Marxist “principle that at the foundation of every social form there are [social] property relations whose conditions of reproduction structure social and historical processes” (Wood, 1995: 121, emphasis added).

Finally, as is claimed by political Marxists (Teschke, 2005; Wood, 1991), Clarke makes the theoretical point that the state plays a crucial role in the transition to capitalism by imposing a new form of market discipline on economic actors, by developing new social property relations that entail new rules of reproduction. Before this transition, the owners of “capital” (merchants and financers) reproduced themselves by cornering, and arbitrating between, disconnected markets using fraud and forces whenever necessary, in a context where the market worked as an opportunity rather than as an imperative (Wood, 2002a). ³

Importantly for our argument, these points pertain directly to modes of surplus appropriation. Whereas pre-capitalist owners of “capital” (merchants and financiers) appropriated surplus labour through what political Marxists, following Marx, have called “extra-economic” means – Clarke’s “fraud” and “force” – capitalism imposes on capitalists the law of value, an alienated, external force that compels them to compete on markets so as to appropriate surplus value. Developing this position, Clarke comes to present how capitalist exploitation and alienation are internally connected, in agreement with political Marxism.