Prelude:

The cardinal point to grasp is that in our analyses of all these theories it is not relevant whether they are “true” or “scientific” or indeed “false” or “fantastic”: What is most relevant is that these theories are “strategies” (rather than “ideologies”) that give practical order or provide guidance for the political effectiveness of capitalist social relations of production to be preserved, reproduced and, wherever possible, expanded. We say “strategies” rather than “ideologies” because our main objective is not to show that these theories are “false” or “inaccurate”; rather, we are interested in their “effectiveness” in explaining, revealing or concealing crucial aspects of capitalist reality and hegemonic practice. For us, these theories are “true and scientific” to the extent that they are effective: theirs is a partial truth – they are true only in the sense and to the extent and for the period that they are “effective” - although the theoreticians expounding them certainly believed their “scientificity”. Our exclusive aim here is to identify and comprehend by means of interpretation, analysis and critique of politico-economic theories of capitalism, the essential components of capitalist society so as to enable us to outline and develop our own strategies in the fight against it.

Here we are standing “outside” philosophy and scholarship: we are designing and shaping a “political tool” that will better enable us to combat the established order by helping us com-prehend it from a practical standpoint. Defensive or offensive is beside the point: this tool should help us fight and defeat an enemy that threatens more than our personal enjoyment of life on earth, but indeed the very survival of the ecosphere!

In a nutshell, we wish to do the converse of the histoire raisonne’e that Schumpeter attributed to Marx and then sought to emulate. We wish to conduct instead a raisonnement historicise’ – a historicized reasoning, winding our way through a series of critiques that parallel historical developments broadly in the history of capitalism but more intensely in the history of theories relating to capitalism, its history and its economy and, above all, its “meaning”. We say “meaning” because “meaning” is what characterizes, prompts and “shapes” human action: what we do has much to do with “why” we do it, and “why” we do something has a lot to do with how we “interpret” things, the world. (Arendt and Habermas come to mind. But contrast Pareto’s or Mannheim’s studies of “ideologies”.)

The fact that a historical process has “meaning” does not mean that it is “rational” in a purposive sense: the meaning may be different from the self-understanding of that process or entity and, in any case, the purpose may be irrational. We may distinguish between instrumental and substantive or purposive rationality. To insist, for instance, that capitalism is an “anarchic” social system fails to explain how it has survived and indeed “grown” for so long.

I open, by chance, Albert Mathiez’s La Revolution Francaise and parse breathlessly its formidable preamble:

“The true revolutions, those that do not limit themselves to changing the political form and the government personnel, but rather transform the institutions and occasion the great transfers of property, seethe a long time subterranean before bursting to the light of day under the impulse of some fortuitous circumstance. The French Revolution, which caught unawares with its irresistible impetus not less its artificers and beneficiaries than those who became its victims, had a languid preparation for over a century. It sprang out of the discordance, each day more and more profound, between the reality of things and the laws, between the institutions and the customs, between the letter and the spirit”.

It is impossible to tell with certainty when the capitalist mode of production that currently engulfs the world might come to an end. But if we study and understand its historical origins and structural development, it may be possible to elaborate a strategy for us to overcome it. A pre-condition for superseding the present state of affairs is that it should come to be regarded universally as a barrier to the further development of our human creative potential. For this is how we increasingly and overwhelmingly are coming to regard capitalism. It is not sufficient that the present system of human social organisation show itself as “irrational”: for this system to be superseded, it is necessary also that it become redundant and obsolete and above all “counter-productive”. If we survey the state of the ecosphere and our determinant role within it with any degree of practical objectivity, we will asseverate that all the essential practical measures needed to ensure its survival, let alone its enhancement in peaceful co-existence between its life forms, have their way barred by the essential pre-requisite of political and industrial action under the present system: - that it be “profitable”.

A time there may well have been when “profitability” went hand in hand with “progress”. Yet what is certain is that such time lies now well in the past. What we witness with growing certainty and clarity is the inconfutable truth that “profitability” stands more than ever in the way of human individual and social progress. It is possible to trace the birth of capitalism back to the seventeenth century. But to be able to do that, we first need to identify the historical components that make up this concept – which is the task we have undertaken in the present work. So let us not pre-suppose what we are yet to prove. The present work may be described as the obverse of that histoire raisonnee that Joseph Schumpeter so highly admired in the analytical method of Karl Marx and that he too am Ende sought to adopt. By comparison, ours can be described as a raisonnement historicise, a dialectical enquiry into the origins and character of capitalism, at once an exegesis and a critique that hopefully will light our path to a better and more humane future.

Four hundred years of capitalism, we anticipated; and it is undeniable that humanity has made much progress in this time – so much so that, I venture to say, the path to a better future, to a rational society, is already visible if not clearly outlined. Yet it would be folly to conclude as many, including Marx, have done, that this is the path traced by the bourgeoisie, by the captains of industry. For it is just as likely that this “progress”, and the unspeakable devastation and crimes and atrocities with which it is strewn, is the gift of the countless people and workers who suffered at the hands of the bourgeoisie, yet who, refusing to be counted as silent victims, fought courageously against its ruthless rule and dictatorship. To all our fellow fighters, this work is humbly dedicated.

SMITH AND HOBBES

By highlighting the ability of “self-interest” to be “enlightened”, to lead to “equilibrium” or to increase “national wealth”, Smith then believes that this occurs through a natural division of labour as “separation/appropriation” - when in fact it occurs through a particular “political” form of social co-ordination – a “division of labour” that emanates from a “civilised society” that already contains a ‘State-form’ as the ‘preservation’ of “natural rights” presumably “acquired” in or “transferred” from the “state of nature”!

Locke, instead, does not yet pre-figure such a pivotal inference but rather relies on the social contract merely “preserving” pre-existing “natural rights” that first arose in the status naturae. In Locke there is “the pre-supposition” of the State in the status naturae.

This is perhaps one of the most important and delicate passages in the whole of political theory. It is here that Hobbes’s political theory poses a fundamental challenge to the “ideology” of liberalism. That ideology, as we have seen, was founded on two premises: first, the existence of “natural rights” in the status naturae accruing to “self-interested individuals” which form the basis of “civil society” in which these “natural rights” are guaranteed by the State pursuant to “positive laws” under which the State is “constituted”, and second, the reconciliation of these “self-interests” in the “self-regulated market” through “the price mechanism” – the identity of supply and demand.

The question that Hobbes confronts is to examine how “self-interested individuals” in the state of nature can agree to reach a “social contract” that protects their “natural rights” under the law. In reviewing the theoretical foundations of the state of nature, Hobbes follows the pessimistic premises of the state of nature to their “scientific” natural conclusion. If in fact individuals are already self-contained, “self-interested” atoms in the state of nature, it is simply impossible for them to agree to the drafting of a social contract that erects a status civilis regulated by laws for the simple reason that their “irreconcilable” egoistic interests would prevent them from reaching such agreement! To argue otherwise is to postulate the ability of individuals in the status naturae to have the necessary requisite “faculties” (reason or some other inclination) that allows them first to discern and identify their “natural rights”, and second to agree to observe them.

But if such faculties already existed in individuals, then they would no longer be merely “self-interested”, in that they would implicitly be able to conceive of “the common good” in respecting their individual “natural rights”, and therefore the contractual establishment of a “civil society” would be quite superfluous. (Cf. Rousseau in Colletti, p.235.) In other words, for Hobbes the positing of a contractual “civil society” by “self-interested individuals” governed by laws that protect their “pre-contractual natural rights” is simply either a contradictio in adjecto (“status naturae” is antithetical to the notion of “right”) or else a petitio principii , in that erecting a State that protects “natural rights” under the law presupposes a “society” of individuals capable of accepting the legitimacy of those “natural rights”, which begs the question of why the State is needed in the first place, because in that case both “the contract” establishing the “civil society” as well as the State erected to enforce the laws would be simply redundant, superfluous.

In Hobbes’s reasoning, no “self-interest” of individuals could justify or urge or prompt them to agree to the contractual establishment of a “civil society” except the “fear” for their lives, the

fear of being overwhelmed by other self-interested individuals in the state of nature. Either individuals are able to protect themselves from others in the state of nature, in which case they do not require a “civil society”, or else they are not, in which case it is simply impossible to speak of “natural rights”. Although the “conception” of such “rights” may be possible “in foro interno” by reference to some religious or ethical norm, “in foro externo”, in the reality of the status naturae, no such “rights” exist simply because there is no “power” that can apply “force” to have such “rights” observed by all individuals. (Koselleck, p.29, H proceeds “from the outside to the inside”, mediaeval origins of separation between ‘fora’.)

In other words, “natural rights” are mere “velleities” - empty and pious wishes existing “in foro interno”, they are a mere flatus vocis - in the status naturae; only in a state of law or status civilis can “rights” exist in foro externo and acquire “positive” reality. The inescapable outcome is that “natural rights” cannot have any “social” reality except as “positive laws” enforced by a social political “power or sovereign” – the State. What can bring individuals together to agree to the contractual establishment of such a State is the only “right” that all “self-interested individuals” can possibly recognise: - the right to self-preservation. But it is essential to understand that this “right” for Hobbes exists only as a “scientific” description of the reality of the state of nature: in no guise is Hobbes attributing any ethical or moral validity to “self-preservation” as a “right” that is simply “inconceivable” in the state of nature. Hobbes’s reductio ad absurdum consists in this: that in the state of nature the only “right” conceivable and apparent is the brutal fact of self-preservation. And this is a fact that human reason, seen by Hobbes as a mere “instrument”, can recognise and act upon. For it would be impossible otherwise for individuals to let their reason prevail over their passions and therefore to agree to the “formation” of a contract or “league” in the status civilis founded upon the total “alienation” of the freedom of their passions in the state of nature. But above all it would be impossible for them to agree to any definition of “right” whatsoever, “natural” or otherwise! (Hobbes exposes ab initio what Koselleck called “die Pathogenese” of bourgeois society. But see also Arendt, c. p.45ff.)

Here the Euclidean geometric logic, invariant and inflexible, is breathtakingly candid. With a few, pitilessly calculated propositions – more geometrico, like Spinoza -, Hobbes ruthlessly slashes and fells the pathetic apologetic assumptions of what was to become the “liberal ideology” first outlined by Locke in terms of the “political regulation” of bourgeois society and then assimilated and extended to its “economic expanded reproduction” by Adam Smith.

Hobbes draws a distinction similar to Vico’s between the natural sciences that are based on empirical observation and experimentation by way of hypothesis and induction, on the one hand, and on the other the moral sciences that are based on human conventions and deduction – with the inference that, given that human beings are able to reflect by introspection into the workings of their own minds, they are far better able to determine

“scientifically” the outcome of their “institutions”, political, economic and social, than they are to divine the regularity of natural events by experiment and induction (Piazzi cites Negri at p.16, also comments on link to Vico).

And upon this it was, that when I applyed my Thoughts to the Investigation of Naturall Justice, I was presently advertised from the very word Justice, (which signifies a steady Will of giving every one his Owne) that my first enquiry was to be, from whence it proceeded, that any man should call any thing rather his Owne, than another man's. And when I found that this proceeded not from Nature, but Consent, (for what Nature at first laid forth in common, men did afterwards distribute into severall Impropriations), I was conducted from thence to another Inquiry, namely to what end, and upon what Impulsives, when all was equally every mans in common, men did rather think it fitting, that every man should have his Inclosure; And I found the reason was, that from a Community of Goods, there must needs arise Contention whose enjoyment should be greatest, and from that Contention all kind of Calamities must unavoydably ensue, which by the instinct of Nature, every man is taught to shun. Having therefore thus arrived at two maximes of humane Nature, the one arising from the concupiscible part, which desires to appropriate to it selfe the use of those things in which all others have a joynt interest, the other proceeding from the rationall, which teaches every man to fly a contre-naturall Dissolution, as the greatest mischiefe that can arrive to Nature; Which principles being laid down, I seem from them to have demonstrated by a most evident connexion, in this little work of mine, first the absolute necessity of Leagues and Contracts, and thence the rudiments both of morall and of civill prudence. (De Cive, Dedication.)

Two forces, then, one opposed to the other. The very notion of “justice”, reasons Hobbes, entails the notion of “distribution” between members of a human society. And a fortiori it implies that what “justly” belongs to one member does not belong to another. The notions of justice and right, therefore, whether they be of divine or of natural origin, must mean that members of a society or community have moral or legal claims over some social resources “to the exclusion” of other members. But the actual “right”, even if natural or divine, would amount to a mere pious wish or velleity in the absence of a “social power” that can enforce it, that can transform this “right” from a moral aspiration to a positive social reality. And this “social power” must be overwhelming and unopposed in the society: this social power must have a monopoly of “force” over the members of society. It is sheer fantasy, then, it is mere utopia, empty moralising to insist on the “natural or divine rights” of human beings outside of a community or society ruled by an entity, an institution with sufficient power, political or otherwise, to enforce such rights. It makes no sense at all, therefore, to speak of “rights” as applying to human beings outside of a “society” organised in such a manner that these “rights” can be enforced. Outside of such a society armed with such an “institution” able to uphold such “rights”, it is not possible to identify, to name even, any “rights” or “laws” on

which human beings may claim to be entitled to anything at all. In a “pre-social” state, in a state of human existence that precedes that of civil society living in peaceful co-existence under a legal system, all resources must be “in common” and there cannot be any question of “individual claims or rights” to any of them. However much human beings may form the belief, in foro interno, that they ought to be entitled to certain resources, no actual positive “right” can materialise in foro externo in the absence of laws and institutions capable of enforcing them and thus give them social validity (Lev., c. p135). Not only is the concept of “property” meaningless, not only are “rights” vacuous and velleitary except in the feeblest moralistic sense, but also the concept of “individual labour” may well be difficult to define given that even “individual labour” can only be applied to other natural “resources” that must be “in common” and that therefore cannot entitle those who utilise them to claim the pro-ducts of their work as their own.

The source and origin and cause of “rights”, then, must arise from two opposing forces in human nature, given that nothing outside human nature can influence the conduct and association of human beings. On one side, there is the reality of “concupiscence” whereby human beings are prone to have competing claims to the same resources and that, as a result, there is bound to be conflict between them as to how to utilise and distribute these resources. On the other side, the very fact that unrestrained conflict in human society will lead to a widespread feeling of insecurity and fear whereby each individual will act in self-defence and seek self-preservation will mean that the members of the human group will be desirous of forming a “league or contract” to ensure their own safety and survival. Two forces, again, both attributable to human nature but tending in opposite directions: one is the human tendency to appropriate social resources – a “community of goods” – unreasonably and insatiably to the detriment of others; the other is the need to ensure personal survival by avoiding the destructive “contention and calamity” that will befall each individual at random. The “resultant” of these forces will be a “league or contract” whereby the “concupiscence” of each member will be kept in check by an overriding social power that will preserve social peace and protect the lives of each and everyone.

But a repentine doubt undermines the mechanical symmetry of Hobbes’s theorem. If it is the case that human reason can supply a remedy to the insatiable urges of human passions, why should these “passions” be so inordinate and “calamitous” that they cannot be restrained by reason itself? And if, conversely, these passions should be so “impetuous”, how could human “reason” ever be able to restrain them or, indeed, even conjecture the establishment of an overwhelming social power to such an end? The solution to this puzzle that Hobbes offers is truly breathtaking and places him unquestionably and irrevocably far away from the camp of “jusnaturalism” where bourgeois apologists usually prefer to enlist him.

Already, by arguing unequivocally from the scientific observation that “natural rights” are quite simply a contradictio in adjecto, Hobbes has won our unstinting admiration. (Lev., c. p111.) It is outrageously ludicrous for anyone to argue, or even to conceive in fact, that there can be “natural rights” of any description in the absence of a positive social institution that “decrees” certain claims to social resources to be lawful, and then also to be able to impose these “legal rights” on human beings and to have them respected. Hobbes is scathing in this regard (De Corpore, c. pp76-7) both with regard to theology and the “silly” atavism to “the just” (Aristotle’s “summum bonum”, De Cive, c. p66). It is “silly” to consider what is “ideal” to determine what is “real”. Only by examining scientifically what human beings are and do can we lay the foundations of a “political science” worthy of the name. It is because we are aware of our own “nature” through introspection that we can theorise the real causes of our behaviour and institutions by applying the scientific method (in Six Lessons).

Vico and Descartes meet in Hobbes’s new resolve: with intrepid determination he proposes to combine the “conventional” nature of human institutions with the “hypothetical”, scientific demonstration of their historical shape and operation (Preface to Elements). Like geometry and mathematics, the task of political science will no longer be that of “interpreting” the formulations of the antiqui auctores or of the scriptures. The aim will be to emulate the natural sciences that derive “laws” from observations in experiments based on “hypotheses”, much in the way that geometry moves from axioms to theorems. But these axioms must be derived from introspection and experience and observation, not from abstract notions from first principles. The scope of this science will be to examine what human beings do rather than what they ought to do; and then, and only then, to prescribe scientific measures to build on those scientific findings. Only on this basis will it be possible to construct human institutions that minimise conflict and maximise the welfare of human beings (DeCive, c.60).

Hobbes’s solution to the conundrum of the actual “creation” of the social power that will decree, impose and enforce the “laws” that give rise to “legal rights” will establish once and for all how distant and how far he is from the bourgeois apologetic cohorts of jusnaturalism – chief among them Leo Strauss and Norberto Bobbio. We emphasise this point because Hobbes leads us here at the very beginning of the capitalist era to a truly earth-shattering series of realisations and conclusions that will be absolutely essential to our understanding of not just the nation-state in the capitalist era, but indeed of the capitalist mode of production and of its social relations of production themselves! When confronted with the puzzle of how human beings can overcome their uncontrollable self-interest (concupiscence) and agree to submit their will and let their passions become subordinate to a collective institution, Hobbes suggests that it is by using their reason so as to avoid the uncertainty and insecurity that comes from the attempt by every individual to assert its own volition or will or passion on everybody else.

More specifically, the ensuing threat or even reality of a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes) and the apprehension of imminent harm or even death on the part of each individual allows reason to bend to necessity and to subdue the will sufficiently for each individual willingly to alienate the “free rein” of their will and passions in the state of nature and to have its absolute freedom circumscribed by the creation of a social entity or institution armed with sufficient power to establish rules and laws and to force their observance by every individual. It is understood that such “alienation” of one’s liberum arbitrium (literally, free arbitrariness, or free will) can eventuate only in extremis, at a time of grave need when the threat of losing their lives in a relentless war looms inexorable and ineluctable in the minds of all individuals. Only such a state of emergency, which Hobbes likens to survivors in a life-boat throwing into the sea all their remaining belongings (that is to say, their freedom) in order to remain afloat – only such an ultima ratio (ultimate reason) can form the rational foundation of a social power in the shape of a “sovereign state” that can suppress the war of all against all and guarantee the peaceful co-existence of all members of the new “civil state” (status civilis) under one legal system.

It is illegitimate if not insensate, and unjustifiable in the extreme, to attribute Hobbes’s “ruse of reason” to any kind of “jusnaturalistic” scheme or theory (Strauss and Bobbio). It is sheer folly indeed to explain Hobbes’s reasoning (his demonstratio, not exegesis or interpretatio! – see Bovero and Bobbio) by narrowing its scope to his empirical-historical observations of the rampant “possessive individualism” that flourished rapidly in seventeenth century Britain on the wave of market capitalism (CB Macpherson). For what Hobbes is telling us here has far broader significance than any jusnaturalist or mercantilist explanation. True it is, of course, that Hobbes has in mind “self-interested individuals” whose acquisitiveness is endless in the manner of later liberalist theories and of classical political economy. Yet what is unique and revolutionary in Hobbes’s theory is that reason is likened to a life-boat in a storm that only in extremis, in its capacity as ultima ratio or extrema ratio can agree to submit the freedom of its will to the higher authority and power of the state. This “reason” therefore is a very special moment of reason, the moment in which reason is stretched to its most “elemental” origins, where it is a mere “reflex” and most like the “passions” that it is supposed to counteract, tame and channel into rational action: this reason is in this “exceptional” situation an “extrema ratio”, the closest thing to an “instinct” and therefore closest to “nature” or physis, as against “convention” or nomos.

In other words, and here is the all-important conclusion, Hobbes is telling us that a society, a status civilis, that is constituted or founded by “self-interested individuals” such as Hobbes understands human beings in the status naturae, can only come into being under “exceptional circumstances” in the form of a “dire emergency” (cf. Schmitt, ‘Concept’). In such extreme circumstances, the only “rule” that human beings can give themselves is “the rule of exception” whereby they renounce and alienate wholly and irrevocably their

“autonomy” or the spontaneous freedom of their wills, and that finally this state of exception is what answers to the demands of the most “natural human instinct”, the instinct to self-preservation! Put in other and clearer words, this means, without shadow of a doubt, that the state that rules a society of self-interested individuals can only be “a state of exception” – in other words, a dictatorial and totalitarian state! (Cf. Schmitt, Pol.Theology, but see Strauss’s ‘Notes’ on this) – and that this State answers to the most elemental needs of human beings, to the most primordial requirements of their “nature”. Such is the “extremity of the emergency” that the State that is formed therewith is analogous to a Deus mortalis in that it is born of a sort of “miracle” by means of which the “state of nature” is “suspended” (again, Schmitt on ‘Der Leviathan’ and “PolTheol” – cf. also Donoso Cortes [in Lowith, ‘VonHzuN’]). To put it with lapidary terseness: “The Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”. As Schmitt comments, “the classical example of Dezisionismus appears in the seventeenth century with Hobbes. All the rights, the norms and the laws, and the interpretations of laws… are for him the decisions of the sovereign, and the sovereign is not a legitimate monarch or a competent authority, but exclusively he who decides as a sovereign” (in ‘Concept’, c. p263).

What Hobbes has ably achieved has completely and remorselessly sidelined the entire foundations and rationale of “natural right”: for here it is impossible to reconcile through any dialectic the “conventional” status civilis with any notion of “natural justice” or “right” (cf. the discussion in Strauss, ‘The Origins of N.Right’ and Bobbio’s and Warrander’s wishful interpretation of “rights” in statu natura based on utility, see Piazzi, pp28-9). Particularly scathing will be Hobbes’s attack on Aristotle’s notion of zoon politikon and its scholastic version of animal sociale. In Hobbes’s perspective, it is no longer feasible to retrace the origins of the State to any teleological notion of “justice” or “right” or “summum bonum” because its “origins” are no longer “conventional” but “hypothetical” and the “hypothesis”, not free choice or innate ideals of “reason”, condemns human beings to the “convention”. [Logico-historical status of the state of nature and of civil society. State by institution and by acquisition at the same time.] What many “liberal” commentators on Hobbes have conveniently forgotten is that his concept of “reason” is entirely different from that of the “Aristotelian-scholastic” tradition: for Hobbes reason is purely an instrument for calculation (Leviathan, c. p33) – to maximise pleasure and minimise pain and, above all, to ensure self-preservation, because “death is the greatest evil” (El.Ph.,De Homine) (Schmitt would talk of “danger” rather than “evil”, but that is clearly what Hobbes means).

Impotent and pathetic, then, Strauss’s “liberal-philosophisch” attempt to rescue Hobbes from the claws of his demonic vision of the “ferity” of human nature, and even to invert his logic by having Hobbes found the absolute rights of the individual in the new conventional ‘Leviathan’ as against the mediaeval scholastic prescription of theologically-ordained “duties” from which “rights” were derived. Equally stultified is Strauss’s attempt to show that Hobbes sought “to escape” the status naturae to a liberal state by exasperating the pessimistic features of

humanity whereas Schmitt seeks to revert from the liberal state to the status naturae again by highlighting the inevitability of “the political”. What Strauss misses completely is the fact that Hobbes and Schmitt are talking about the “finality” of the so-called “liberal state”; that is the exquisite “convergence” of their theoretical analyses on the ultimately dictatorial and totalitarian “natural” premises of the liberal state!

Strauss’s ‘Notes on Schmitt’ thoroughly misconstrue the dramatic novelty/invention of Hobbes’s theory. It ignores those “Inclosures” Hobbes mentioned above – that is, the obscene brutality of “original accumulation” by the bourgeoisie. Strauss’s efforts are all aimed at “reconciling” Hobbes with the universe of liberalist tradition and of the free market, the autonomy and equivalence of Political Economy:

Hobbes, to a much higher degree than Bacon, for example,is the author of the ideal of civilization. By this very fact he is thefounder of liberalism. The right to the securing of life pure andsimple-and this right sums up Hobbes's natural right-has fullythe character of an inalienable human right, that is, of an individual'sclaim that takes precedence over the state and determines itspurpose and its limits; Hobbes's foundation for the natural-rightclaim to the securing of life pure and simple sets the path to thewhole system of human rights in the sense of liberalism, if his92 Leo Strawsfoundation does not actually make such a course necessary. Hobbesdiffers from developed liberalism only, but certainly, by his knowingand seeing against what the liberal ideal of civilization has tobe persistently fought for: not merely against rotten institutions,against the evil will of a ruling class, but against the natural evilof man; in an unliberal world Hobbes forges ahead to lay thefoundation of liberalism against the- sit venia verbo-unliberalnature of man, whereas later men, ignorant of their premises andgoals, trust in the original goodness (based on God's creation andprovidence) of human nature or, on the basis of natural-scientificneutrality, nurse hopes for an improvement of nature, hopes unjustifiedby man's experience of himself. Hobbes, in view of thestate of nature, attempts to overcome the state of nature withinthe limits in which it allows of being overcome, whereas later meneither dream up a state of nature or, on the basis of a supposeddeeper insight into history and therewith into the essence of man,forget the state of nature. But-in all fairness to later menultimatelythat dreaming and that oblivion are merely the consequenceof the negation of the state of nature, merely the consequence of the position of civilization introduced by Hobbes….

Whereas Hobbes, in an unliberal world, accomplishes the founding

In the first edition of this treatise Schmitt had described Hobbes as "byfar the greatest and perhaps the sole truly systematic political thinker" (Archivfur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik vol. 58, p. 25). Schmitt now speaks ofHobbes only as "a great and truly systematic political thinker" (64). In truth

Hobbes is the antipolitical thinker ("political" understood in Schmitt's sense).

Notes on The Concept of the Political 93of liberalism, Schmitt in a liberal world undertakes the critique of liberalism.

Strauss’s incomprehension of Hobbes is breathtaking. Hobbes is just as far from interpreting “death is the greatest evil” as “the foundation for the natural-right claim to the securing of life pure and simple” as the devil is from the Gospel. The fact that Hobbes calls death “the greatest evil” does not in the least mean that life is “a natural right” or worse still “the foundation for…the whole system of human rights in the sense of liberalism”! Along similar lines is Warrender’s favourable gloss on Strauss’s reading according to which Hobbes is not defining the state of nature as “the right of everyone to everything” but rather in a negative constitutive sense as “the right to some things such as life that are irrenounceable” (see Piazzi, p28), reference by Hobbes to “the measure of right is utility” (De Cive, c. 89). And Bobbio clasps this straw of “utility” to suggest that natural right “…has itself a measure of its own, and therefore is not just a mere fact…” But what Hobbes means by “utility” here is not even remotely either a negative “limit” for natural rights” or a “basic right”, nor is it “a measure” of right: what Hobbes means by “utility” is quite obviously “whatever satisfies the irrepressible concupiscence or passions of individuals” – in other words, “the right of everyone to everything”! Utility for Hobbes stands for the “insatiability” of human passions or “concupiscence”: this is one pole of the “two opposing forces” of which the other pole is constituted by the instinct of reason “in extremis” to self-preservation. (The echo of Hobbes’s empiricist pessimism in Schopenhauer’s later elaboration is blindingly obvious. We will return to it later.)

Even in these milder versions, therefore, the sheer foolhardiness of these estimations from thinkers of Strauss’s and Bobbio’s caliber is almost painful: their attempt to drag Hobbes back into the fold of jusnaturalism and (later) liberalism is fallimentary. Almost culpable, instead, is their stratagem to hide the “totalitarian” implications of Hobbes’s theory of the State as they arise “mathematically” and with strict rigour from the premises of a (capitalist) society of infinitely acquisitive “self-interested individuals” whose living labour has been “reduced” to “labour power”. As we have taken pains to demonstrate, the preservation of one’s life is merely the exercise of “instrumental reason” to restrain the irrepressible passions of individuals that in extremis, in “dire emergency” dictate the “convention” in favour of the status civilis. In no guise can this be understood as a terminus a quo or as a “foundation” for “natural rights”. Rather, and crushingly so, it is the most damning reductio ad absurdum and scornful relegation to mere flatus vocis of every and any “velleity” or “pious wish” to erect “the natural right to life” as the foundation of liberal values and culture, or indeed (pace Macpherson) “the free market”!

Confrontation with SchmittQuote from ‘Diktatur’ in Piazzi, p30. And quote Piazzi re importance of this divergent interpretation, that is, alleged limit to State’s power in “liberal” reading of Hobbes.Hobbes is truly “the antipolitical thinker” because his status civilis represents the end of politics as antagonism in Schmitt’s sense. This “end of politics”, however, is achieved by enshrining the State as a totalitarian dictatorship, which is exactly how Schmitt perceives the denouement of “the political”! Save that the State itself perpetuates “the political” against other individual nation-states. For Schmitt, liberalism does not in any way “abolish” the Political: it simply disguises it and hides it from view. Yet the deception cannot last. No surprise, then, that Schmitt should think so highly of Hobbes: his entire work is merely an

exegesis and “elaboration” of Hobbes’s philosophy. – Down to the negation of the “autonomy of culture” as a “nurture of nature” from which “rights and values” can grow!

Again Strauss:

The affirmation of the political is the affirmation ofthe state of nature. Schmitt opposes the affirmation of the state ofnature to the Hobbesian negation of the state of nature. The stateof nature is the status belli, pure and simple. Thus it appears thatthe affirmation of the state of nature can only be bellicose. Thatappearance fades away as soon as one has grasped what the returnto the state of nature means for Schmitt. The affirmation of thestate of nature does not mean the affirmation of war but "relin-104Leo Straussquishment of the security of the status quo" (93).

As we have clearly shown, far from “negating the state of nature”, Hobbes affirms it as the only real foundation of the status civilis! Strauss forgets that there is no dialectic in Hobbes; there is no “metaphysics”; there is no notion of “supersession” or “negation of the negation”. The state of nature is “scientific” reality itself; and “reason” as an instrument is part of this reality; and reason can offer a “remedy” to the state of nature in the nature of an “improvement”… “demonstrated by a most evident connexion” (above) – the sovereign state which is itself “an instrument”, a “tool”, a machine. Schmitt is a different case: he is obviously not arguing for a return to the state of nature, but rather against the liberal state as a false truce and veil over the ultimate reality of what he advocates, that is, a return to “the state of exception” which is what Hobbes’s status civilis is founded on! As Schmitt rightly perceives (‘Concept’, Tronti, p269), the status civilis is a “normalisation” of the state of nature; the Hobbesian State is a “suspension” of the state of nature, yet constructed entirely on its empiricist and pessimist foundations – certainly not as a “negation” of the state of nature!

Once more, Strauss completely misinterprets what Schmitt is aiming at. As Strauss himself cannot fail to perceive:

[33] The affirmation of the political as such can therefore be only Schmitt's first word against liberalism; that affirmation can only prepare for the radical critique of liberalism. In an earlier text Schmitt says of Donoso Cortes: he "despises the liberals, whereas he respects atheistic-anarchistic socialism as his mortal enemy . . ." (Politische Theologie 55). The battle occurs only between mortal enemies: with total disdain-hurling crude insults or maintaining the rules of politeness, depending on temperament-they shove aside the "neutral" who seeks to mediate, to maneuver, between them.

Yet this is precisely how Hobbes would have it – not because of a “romantic” attraction to Sturm und Drang as is perhaps the case with Schmitt, but rather as the result of “scientific” analysis and “mathematical hypotheses” based on the reality (not the negation!) of the state of nature! To paraphrase Donoso Cortes, like dictatorship, the Hobbesian State is “a miracle”

in that it “suspends” the natural passions and forces of conflict running riot in the state of nature: – like a “miracle”, it suspends the “laws” of nature.

In concreto Schmitt violatesthis principle, which itself is entirely bound to liberal presuppositions,by opposing his unpolemical concept of the state of natureto Hobbes’s polemical concept of the state of nature; and hefundamentally rejects this principle by expecting to gain the orderof human things from a "pure and whole knowledge" (95). For apure and whole knowledge is never, unless by accident, polemical;and a pure and whole knowledge cannot be gained "from concretepolitical existence," from the situation of the age, but only by means of a return to the origin, to "undamaged, noncorrupt nature" (93).

(We may pause here to draw attention to the limitations of Weber’s own innerweltische Askese and the Protestant Ethic in explaining the genesis of the capitalist State and the parallel or consequent Rationalisierung which can no longer be attributed to the “rationalist” impact of “commercialism” and “scientific experimentation” but rather to the very “Catholic” conception of an “absolutist state machine” that is “engendered” by the ursprungliche Akkumulation and Trennung. In this regard, in denying a certain “autonomy” to the Political, Weber’s “historicism” based on Verstehen mirrors faithfully the historical-materialist “historicism” it was criticising! [Cf. Segatori in Tronti, p105.].)

Again, therefore, reason and passion, hypothesis and convention, physis and nomos, mathematics and political science combine in the Hobbesian framework. This demonstratio more geometrico continues with a reductio ad absurdum of the fundamental “elements” of jusnaturalism down to its component part, the individual. The Hobbesian notion of the individual from an epistemological and cognitive perspective differs from the later empiricism from Locke to Mill in that the “pessimistic” features are dramatised or underscored and ruthlessly pursued to their logical conclusion. Whereas later empiricists – Locke chief among them – will expand the scope of human reason to allow for a “consensus” to be formed in the status naturae as to the desirability of forming a State to protect the agreed “natural rights” of the individual members of the novel “civil society” or indeed (in Smith) “civilised society” – hence the State is empowered only in this “negative” protective role, quite the opposite of Hobbes’s “positive”, indeed totalitarian view of the Deus mortalis -, this is simply not possible in Hobbes’s vision precisely because he takes the “acquisitiveness” of individuals, their nature as “self-interested in-dividuals”, that is, atomic entities with unlimited desires or passions, to their logical and terminal conclusion – hence the powerfulness of his reductio ad absurdum of jusnaturalist theory. With brutal coherence, Hobbes exposes the hypocritical contradictoriness of jusnaturalism and of the ensuing liberalism on the basis that the

“reason” of its “in-dividuals” is irreconcilable and utterly incompatible with the “concupiscence” or “passion” of their “self-interest” on which these theories are based and which they were conceived to justify and sanction legally!

The corollary to Hobbes’s ruthless and relentless logic raises an even greater contrast between Hobbes and later jusnaturalists and empiricists of Locke’s stamp in that there is no room whatsoever in Hobbes for the kind of “reason” that enables human beings to form “estates” or “leagues” or “classes” that can constitute themselves as a pre-statual “civil society” or “people” armed with a “public opinion” that serves as a bridle or a leash or a check against a negatively-defined State whose only role is “to protect” the “life, liberty and estate” of the members of the civil society. (Cf. Piazzi quotations on Charles I, pp82-3 on rex a lege an lex a rege pendebit.) As we have shown above, to allow for such a “reason” would be to land oneself in a welter of contradictions because the “possessive individualism” of the “self-interested individuals” must be founded logically on the “irrepressibility” and “insatiability” of their “interests” or “passions” no less than on their “in-dividualism”.

It is this profound chasm between self-interested “bourgeois” and socialised “citizen” on which “Christian-bourgeois society” is founded (Lowith) in the self-understanding of nascent capitalism that Hobbes subjects most pitilessly to the razor of his logic.

Despite his reference to a “Community of Goods” in the status naturae, Hobbes does not even remotely envisage a “primitive communism” of the kind suggested a century later by Rousseau. For Hobbes, “goods” are “communal” only in the special sense that “everybody has a claim to every thing” – which is why the status naturae is so treacherous. Nor is there in Hobbes any notion of “social labour”, of human beings sharing common tasks and the products of their labour. Again, Hobbes’s pessimistic and “geometric” vision does not allow for such blatant inconsistencies.

A legitimate doubt arises therefore about the “historical” status, likelihood or indeed even “feasibility” of Hobbes’s state of nature. And once more we are confronted by the interaction of Hobbes’s method as a remarkable mixture of “hypothesis” and “convention”. For it is quite evident that Hobbes is not indicating that the state of nature is “normal” or that it has even ever existed historically. What Hobbes is saying is that the State as was methodically and coherently conceivable to him from the standpoint of a nascent and all-conquering bourgeois society (literally, burgerliche Gesellschaft, an alternative description for “civil society”) can only come into existence and have any “sense” at all as a “normalisation” of the state of nature. In other words, Hobbes is arguing that any human State that does not carry the salient features or traits and characteristics of his ‘Leviathan’ or ‘Deus mortalis’ is unlikely to last for long under the assumptions of bourgeois society (!) and is indeed certain to

degenerate into a state of civil war, the status belli or the bellum omnium contra omnes. (Quote from Koselleck and from Arendt.)

Nor does Hobbes even distantly create the illusion that the status naturae was or could ever be a historical state. His state of nature has far greater force than an adventitious accident or epiphenomenon of history. It is clear that what Hobbes is drawing here are the most tightly calculated inferences to be derived from the most “elementary” (recall his ‘Elements’ and Euclid’s!) physical and psychological laws of human nature and behaviour. Hobbes’s reflections have the deductive force of Euclid’s geometric theorems and the universal physical application of Newton’s laws of mechanics: his reasoning constitutes a ‘reductio ad absurdum’ of Lockean liberal jusnaturalism. Both his status naturae as well as the status civilis are “logical” states necessarily encompassing human social reality with the latter being the only form of society possible from the given premises of “self-interested individuals”. Constitution of “property” (Piazzi, pp.65ff).

Political science in Hobbes [Piazzi, pp.10-5 “The aim of science is power”(15), Schmitt’s ‘Technique’, also (273).

Homo homini lupus and the bellum omnium contra omnes are the axiomatic outcome of Smithian assumptions – a mixture of Euclidean geometry, Thucydidean “hegemonic” history and, ultimately, Newtonian mechanics lead Hobbes inescapably to this conclusion. In Hobbes, there is at most only the “use” of the social division of labour, and only the contractual creation of the State can give rise to the Trennung! Hobbes sees the im-possibility of Trennung in the status naturae. Locke “certifies” it retroactively and absorbs it into his “civil society” as its contractual foundation: this was his “reasonable ideology” on which liberalism was founded. As Hobbes shows, this ex post “certification” is impossible and must remain sheer obfuscatory ideology. Any examination of the notion of “rights” will lead us to the conclusion that no such “rights” are admissible in a secular sense.

Given that both Locke and Hobbes shared the secular distinction of “legal” and “divine” rights, Hobbes draws the inescapable conclusion from his geometric mathematical logical-deductive method that it is evident that no “rights” can exist in the state of nature. Whatever jusnaturalist notion of “right” might exist in the state of nature can be valid only ‘in foro interno’: It cannot a fortiori exist or have any validity ‘in foro externo’, (Piazzi, 67). Any “rights” to which individuals may lay claim require the establishment, even if “contractual”, of a status civilis. It is only as “positive law” that “rights” can exist, because only the law can make them “enforceable”, give them a social “reality/effectuality”. [Tronti, pp.256-265.] (Quote from Locke re “the law grants authority” and Schmitt’s query, “Who enforces the law?”, in Piazzi, p.83.)

The only manner in which human beings can protect their lives and create a status civilis in which “rights” are at all possible is by agreeing “to alienate” each and every claim they may have to property or other “natural rights” to a “Sovereign” with the ultimate, indivisible and unchallengeable authority and power to legislate and enforce “positive laws” that will positively bring those “rights” into being and give them social effectiveness. In this theoretical-scientific, logico-deductive conventional framework (that is, one that is logical-contractual or even ‘game-theoretic’, cf. Cacciari in ‘Krisis’), it is impossible to believe, still less to assert as does Locke that the State merely is brought contractually into being so as “to preserve” and “to protect” any “natural rights” that existed in the status naturae. Such “natural rights” did not and could not exist (except as velleitary empty and pious wishes) in the state of nature! If “natural rights” there be, these are only possible at all only once the State has been created with the Sovereign as its commanding head that agrees to create positive laws whose observance and effectiveness it will guarantee. (Koselleck, pp.26ff, refers to H’s “sarcasm” and his experience as “emigrant” and “personal experience” of civil wars.)

From these “logico-deductive”, “conventional” foundations, it is clear that neither is the status naturae a “historical” state nor is the status civilis a “contractual” state, a state by institution: rather, the status civilis and the State that “constitutes” it by monopolising all authority and power is a “state by acquisition”, no longer a “state by institution”. The ‘Leviathan’ is a historical-conventional, necessary ex-crescence, out-growth of the Political from the theoretical-hypothetical, impossible status naturae. It is because the status naturae is impossible that the status civilis must exist in one form or another (Hobbes draws no distinction between tyranny and monarchy or other forms of government, because they are all forms of tyranny – cf. Tronti and Arendt’s quotes, p.45). The “conventional” (“state by institution”) creation of the Hobbesian State (Negri in Piazzi, p.16; Cacciari, ‘Dial.’ p.64) would entangle Hobbes in all types of apories (Koselleck, p.32, about how “contract/agreement” can give rise to complete “alienation” of pre-existing (even if only ‘internal’) “rights”, but above all would make the “partitioning/distribution” (the Greek nomos) of “rights” again impossible.

For the status civilis to have conventional necessity, it must emerge “historically” (by acquisition) from the theoretical-hypothetical premises of the state of nature, from the bellum omnium (which can therefore remain a “hypothetical” state). (This seems to be the conclusion of R.Koselleck’s ‘Kritik u.Krise’, En.ed., p.24:”The civil war that was experienced as a threat to life came to rest in the State”, p.32. Also at p.36, “the historic premise of civil war thus became a logically necessary premise for Hobbes’s ability to deduce his concept of absolute sovereignty”. Note H’s own example of the sailor throwing all belongings overboard to save his ship from wreck. This conclusion becomes irresistible if one advances Schmitt’s analysis of the ‘Entscheidung/Exception’ to the “conventional” interpretation of the status

civilis; cf. Cacciari ‘Dial.’, p.64 who does not seem to grasp the point, insisting that Schmitt can be criticised for turning Hobbes into an “acquisition”, not “contractual-institutional” thinker.)

And it is right at this juncture that Hobbes’s “ruse” becomes transparent in all its efficacy. In fact, by applying a ruthless “reductio ad absurdum” of Lockean-Smithian liberal jusnaturalism, Hobbes demonstrates in rigourous “geometrical-axiomatic” form (comparable to Spinoza’s ‘more geometrico’) the insuperable apories of the “contractual” origins of its “civil society” (especially when understood in its “economic” dimension as burgerliche Gesellschaft whose “self-regulating” Economy is perfectly homologated/reconciled in/by its Political State of Law). The Lockean status naturae with its “self-interested individuals” has “empiricist” (Locke’s tabula rasa) hypothetical premises. But given these premises, “natural rights” are im-possible in the status naturae, and even more so in the “freely-contracted” liberal status civilis given the im-possibility of “self-interested individuals” to agree freely to anything that detracts from their “self-interest”. The only possible institutional outcome from these hypothetical premises is the Hobbesian status civilis, the ‘Leviathan’, because once the destructive logic of “self-interest” threatens the very survival of their “self-interest”, individuals are forced “to agree” (to ensure “self-preservation”, the ultimate “self-interest”, cf. Loasby on Smith’s division of labour as a matter of survival) to alienate their “self-interests” completely to the State. Given the liberal jusnaturalist premises (hypothesis), the historical outcome (convention) must be ‘Leviathan’, not the liberal State. What started as logical hypothesis, the status naturae, becomes historical convention, the status civilis – no longer a “state by (contractual) institution” but one of (mutually coerced historical) “acquisition”.

As Arendt perceives, Hobbes’s empiricist logic shows that the liberal State, to have any logico-historical plausibility at all, must be founded upon the exasperation of the initial state-perpetrated violence of Marx’s “original accumulation”. This vindicates, but pre-dates, Tronti: “Bien que jamais reconnu officiellement, Hobbes fut le veritable philosophe de la bourgeoisie, parce qu’il avait compris que seul la prise de pouvoir politique peut garantir l’acquisition de la richesse concue comme processus perpetuel…” (p.48). And on p.52: “…’l’accumulation originelle du capital’…a savoir le peche original de pillage pur et simple…” (Cf. Husserl [‘Phen.&Crisis of West.Man’ first page; Strauss makes a similar point [check essay on Socrates re Heidegger]; and Cacciari [Krisis on ‘giochi’] on “infinite rules” as basis of “science” and ‘Technik’.)

With Hobbes, the theoretical self-understanding of both liberalism and Classical Political Economy, founded on a “pessimist” conception of “human nature” (self-interest) and an “enlightened” notion of “natural rights”, becomes impossible except as ideology (cf. Hegel in

‘Vorlesungen’, vol 3, t.2, and in Ph., vol 2, reference to ‘Verstand’ cited by Cacciari in ‘Dial.’ pp.14-5). Here Hobbes leaves the “internal” sphere of “Conscience” to treat the Newtonian “physical-mechanical” reality of “self-interested individuals” as “bodies” exerting “Power” over one another. Hobbes eschews the word “Conscience” together with “Just and Unjust” (again, Koselleck and Arendt).

In particular, “the Political” is eclipsed in Hobbes with the necessity of the State. It exists only in the state of nature. But once the civil state is constituted, there is no more space for Politics because all State actions are ipso facto legitimate and “moral”: there is no “society” to oppose the State; there is only “protection and obedience” (Kosel., p.33). The Political reappears only when it collides with the ‘jus externum’, when it emerges as raison d’etat; but then we have the insuperable problems posed by the Schmittian notion of “the Political” which Hobbes overcame with ‘Leviathan’.

(See Arendt, p.43, but especially fn.38 on p.299 about the eclipse of the Political in the Hobbesian State; refer to Lowith’s comparison of Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s ‘Destruktion’ nihilism of Dasein and Existenz. It is of paramount importance at this juncture to reflect on the effect of the Hobbesian status civilis on the integrity of the “individual”. Arendt at p.40 sketches the “dissolving/atomising” effect of a similar bourgeois order in that the eclipse of the Political reduces “citizens” to the private sphere through the mortifying pressure of “competition” until the socially-defined experience of the “in-dividual” becomes a mere ‘Existenz’, a ‘Da-sein’ whose ‘fate’ is decided by ‘fatality’ or ‘chance’. Arendt refers to the world of the novel from Balzac onwards as the exploration of “interiority” as a last refuge [recall Joyce and Woolf or Proust – “stream of consciousness”] where “human dignity becomes a desperate need for man to be, at least, a consenting victim [of the all-pervasive power of the bureaucratic State]” [fn.37, p.299; similar point made in ‘HumCond’, early part]. Cf. Nietzsche, ‘Zar. XLII’, ‘Of Redemption’ – “It was thus,…but I willed it thus” in Cacciari, Kr., p.185. Pursuing the “bureaucratic” theme whereby “the law” admits of no exceptions and fills up the interstices of all social action to reach an inexorable arbitrariness, Arendt masterfully turns to Kafka, at p.208 and fn.63 at p.327 [‘The Castle’ where K is indicted for a subversive letter he received! The most penetrating statement comes from Cacciari. The extension of the “totalitarian tendency” of “the Pure Logic of Choice” and game theory means that “la legge raggiunge sempre il colpevole” [Krisis, p.77: on Wittgenstein’s ‘giudice inesorabile’ and Kafka], again the “inexorability” of game/mathematical “convention” intended as ‘Technik’. This is how the conatus turns ‘cannibalistic’, becomes a ‘closed system’ and destroys through control/domination those it was intended to protect! The ‘intention’ becomes the ‘giudice inesorabile’. Bourgeois ‘Sekuritat’ turns into ‘Angst’ – Freud.)

Hobbes shows the despotic nature of the State needed to hold together a “society” of “self-interested individuals”. As Koselleck put it, [p.33 – state as machine]. The State cannot

consist only of “the Prince”. It must be above all a “machine” that covers the entirety of society and can bend it to its will. The State is a “technique” (Kosel., p.33 and Schmitt), but not a “mechanistic” appurtenance to “society” (as Meinecke would have it) precisely because it is a “state by acquisition”, not “institution”. There is no aporia here if we accept Hobbes’s “historical” con-ditions/circum-stances (Kosel., p.34; “…only when we ignore H’s starting point can the logical inconsistencies appear to arise”).

The nature of the Prince does not matter as much as does the “totality” of the authority/power of the State machinery. ‘Leviathan’ then refers almost exclusively to the machinery of state rather than to its “leadership” or “form of representation” such as democracy or oligarchy.

(It is Weber’s “iron cage” [stahlhartes Gehause] rather than the ‘leitender Geist’. But did Weber fully understand the connection between the machinery of state and the requirements of social capital? Neither the Rationalisierung nor the Protestant Ethic seem to com-prehend these essential links that, instead, are central to Hobbes’s theory of the state, arising ineluctably from its pessimistic-bourgeois premises. Tronti sees well when he highlights the “Catholic”, “Counter-Reformist” aspects of Hobbes’s theory against the Reformation/Protestant premises in Weber.) The Hobbesian Prince ends up being “Tyrannical” in any case (Arendt/Koselleck/Tronti).

Nature of the Hobbesian State, ‘Deus mortalis’ [Piazzi, property 62ff, re Montesquieu, p.78, Locke, pp.82-86, Schmitt ‘Dezisionismus’ 94]. Body Politic. State as “machine” [Tronti re Schmitt pp.266-274, re Bobbio 264, re Rousseau/Schmitt, pp.270-1 and Descartes] Sovereign as Prince. Schmitt’s political philosophy (Political theology, Exception/Entscheidung, Diktatur [as “miracle/exception/suspension of right” in Donoso Cortes]. Note Koselleck’s citation of Arendt’s ‘Origins’ pointing to Hobbesian ‘paternity’ of totalitarianism, p.24.)

Let us peer more closely into the nature of this “Leviathan”. Clearly for Hobbes the State machinery will need to be more far-reaching and powerful the more human beings are likely to transgress against its laws. That is why the power and authority of the Sovereign cannot have any political and military and coercive limitation. The only limit to its exercise is the one “natural right” that Hobbes allowed ab initio – the right of individuals to preserve their own lives.

The real apories start to occur only once we move away from the “necessity” of the Hobbesian State as an organic but pervasive “positive” ex-crescence of the status naturae and we begin, instead, to look at the actual “positive” content/substance of its laws. The form is com-prehensible, but what of the substance?

Property and Labour in Hobbes, leading to passage to Smith through “abstract labour”/Trennung.

Macpherson: Hobbes’s equiparation of “power” with “value”.

Right of everyone to everything in statu naturae. Two “maxims”: one from ‘Passion/concupiscence’ – to appropriate insatiably; one from Reason: to associate so as to protect the threat to life from the bellum omnium.

Contrast with Locke’s more traditional “mediaeval” notion of civil society as a “stage” or “universitas” or “class” able to oppose the State with “public opinion” or notion of “people” (meaning the owners of private property bourgeoisie), against Hobbes’s strict individualism in the war of all against all, which means of “each” individual against “each” individual. Homo homini lupus.

Thus, no notion of “social labour” either, despite reference to “community of goods”. Note reference to “Inclosures” which remain part of the state of nature. But this alerts us already to ursprungliche Akkumulation. Link with establishment of the State. Hobbes unable “to explain or justify” initial “Inclosures”, expropriation of peasantry.

The ‘overlap’ in Hobbes is that actual “possession” in statu naturae is then legitimated to “positive right” to possession in statu civile (Piazzi, pp.28-31).

But once the State “distributes” property, the subject has an undisputed “positive right” to it (Piazzi, p.38). Then, Locke’s version.

‘Value’ and ‘force’ and ‘power’ (Piazzi, p.42). Hobbes sees first the notion of “labour power” (Marx, ‘Theorien u den Mehrwert’ quotations of Hobbes in Piazzi, pp42-3). Transition to PolEcon.

The passage from Hobbes to Smith – Property, Trennung, Economic Ideology, Liberal State and Society.

Hayek and Loasby say that “the central problem of economics is the problem of co-ordination”. Economic science needs to explain how individuals can exchange products in a

manner that maximises their individual “utility” as much as possible (not necessarily ‘optimally’, in “Walrasian equilibrium” but “as much as possible”, Hayek’s “intertemporal equilibrium”). If economic activity and science is taken to be the “distribution” or “exchange” of goods and services between “individuals”, then it is obvious that this formulation leaves two outstanding lacunae: the first lacuna is “co-operation” (how do these “individuals” co-operate, work together?) and the other is “production” (how are the “goods and services” produced?). It is by leaving “production” completely out of their analysis (or science) that “neoclassical economists” claim that capitalism is purely “a marketplace society”, a society of pure exchange. (Langlois refers to “open-ended” theories – in ‘Econ&Ration’.)

The question then arises: how can we ensure that this “market exchange” is “fair and equal”? And the answer is that “individuals” exchange products in competition with one another and are prevented from all forms of “collusion” such as “association” or “hiding” products from the marketplace so as to inflate their prices.

What Adam Smith considered was a “civil society” with two obvious attributes: - a growing “national wealth” and a citizenry of “self-interested” individuals. So the obvious question arose: how can “national wealth” increase and, above all, how can a society of “self-interested individuals” produce such an increase?

Mandeville saw a “paradox” because he saw that the “self-interest” of individuals was a “private vice” (the selfish pursuit of personal wealth) whereas the growth of “national wealth” was a “publick benefit”. Smith avoids this “paradox” by insisting that “self-interest” does grow “national wealth” in any case. But, in the process, he must explain how this can happen. (Hence, there is no “continuity” between Mandeville and Smith in this sense [Hayek] and Mandeville does not show that “egoism leads to wealth creation” [Schumpeter] except as a “paradox” - the mass of workers ‘impoverished’ by this process.)

Smith starts with “specialisation” or “the division of labour”: by dividing their labour, individuals become more productive and can exchange their products for more products from other individuals. This was the basis of Locke’s and Ferguson’s “civil society” from which Smith borrowed his entire political theory and on which he based his economic theory. According to Locke, even before human beings seal a contract to establish a “civil society”, an association regulated by a “State” that preserves their legally-enforceable “rights” to “life, liberty and estate”, human beings had “natural rights” in the “state of nature” which extended to the products of their own, private individual labour.

Smith does not question the assumptions behind this “natural property right” of individuals to be enforced by the newly-created “State” in the contractually-agreed “civil society”. And he agrees that the role of “the State” is simply “to preserve and guarantee” the “natural rights” now enshrined in “positive law”. Nor can the State “interfere” with the “free exchange” of

individual “property”: first, because it infringes against their “natural right” to deal with and “exchange” their “private property” as they please, and second because this “exchange” is precisely beneficial in that it allows the “specialisation” or “division of labour” that increases “the national wealth”.

Here again Smith’s assumption is that “the improvement of the powers of labour” is due to “the division of labour”. But what Smith has surreptitiously done is to interpret “the division of labour” to mean “the specialisation of individual private labours”! In other words, Smith is proceeding now from the Lockean assumption of “the exchange of products of individual labour” to a very different social reality: the “exchange of products of collective labour”, that is of products arising from the social division of labour!

Smith assumes that human beings have an innate tendency “to truck, barter and exchange”, without which they would have to produce all that they needed through their “individual labour”. By “exchanging” the products of their “individual labours”, human beings can “specialise” and so improve the “productivity” of their individual labours to their mutual benefit – which results in a rise in the general level of “the wealth of a nation”. What Smith neglects, however, that in most lines of production, the goods produced are most certainly not the pro-ducts of “individual labours”, because they are produced in factories or workplaces where many workers contribute to their production. In other words, Smith completely overlooks the simple and incontrovertible reality that the vast majority of goods and services produced in industrial society are not the product of “individual labour” but rather the outcome of “social labour”, that is, the “co-operation of individual labour-powers”. The fact that this “co-operation” can be “divided” or “parcelized” into “individual” labours is itself a fact that needs to be explained.

Furthermore, in no way can it be said in an industrial society that individual workers “exchange” the products of their labour, for the very simple reason that they do not “own” the products of their labour. Those products belong to their “employer” and are sold by the employer. What the workers “exchange” is not the product of their “individual labours” (which, as we have seen, is already a mirage); in fact, they do not even exchange the products of their “collective individual labours” or of “social labour”, because these products together with the means of production belong to the employer. What the workers do “exchange” is their “labour power” (Arbeitskraft), and not between themselves, but instead with their employer in “exchange” for a “wage”, that is, for “dead objectified labour” that allows them to reproduce themselves as a “labour force”, so that they continue “to sell” their labour power to the employer. Obviously, were the workers to reach a point where they were sufficiently “wealthy” not to have to sell their labour powers, then they would cease to work for their employer and either stop working or “employ other workers” to perform work in their place!

Because workers do not own either the means of production or the product of their collective labours remunerated as individual labour by the employer, it is obvious that the greater specialisation and productivity of their labour (individual or collective) does not directly benefit them. But even for the employer greater productivity is a two-edged sword. If the employer can sell the products he owns at a price that increases his “profit”, then he will have an interest in raising the productivity of his workers. But if this is not the case, then the employer may well not have an interest in raising the productivity of his workers or, in any case, in raising the “quantity” of products produced in his workplace. In other words, the aim of the employer is not “to raise productivity” and so to increase “the wealth of the nation”. Rather, the aim of the employer is “to maximize the profit” derived from the sale of the products, that is, to increase revenue and reduce costs – or in other words to maximize the “value” of his product.

It is palpably evident from our dissection of Smith’s arguments (which is similar to what Ricardo and Marx did) that Smith has confused “wealth” with “value” and that for us to understand “industrial society” we need to understand the meaning of the concept of “value”. It is abundantly clear that it is not “exchange” between “individual labours” that increases wealth or value. What increases value is the “exchange” of dead objectified labour (the product of social labour) for a greater “amount” of labour power that, given a fixed level of technology for the means of production, will result in greater production not of “wealth” but of “value”. It is obvious that there is a “peculiarity” about this commodity called “labour power”: its peculiarity is that it has the ability to increase “value” for the employers who own the means of production and who “employ” the workers who supply the “labour power”.

Once this subtle, surreptitious but pivotal leap has been made, it is obvious that had he realised this, Smith would have proceeded to discover the true foundations and “origins” of this “marketplace society”. The most pivotal point, the hinge of the entire system is this: the ability of individual “property owners” to be able to use their “property”, which is dead objectified labour, in “exchange” for the “living labour” of other individuals who have only their “living labour”…”to exchange”!

How is this “exchange” of dead labour with living labour possible? Let us look at the process analytically, then historically. Smith accepts that “labour” is the real source of “new wealth”, of “products”. And, as we have seen, he mistakes “products” that are the result of the “division of social labour” with products that are the result of “individual labour”. Smith does not see this all-important “parcelisation” or “separation” of the individual worker from the social process of production (the production of social wealth, or the social production of wealth). Rather, he mistakes this pre-conceived “separation” of individual workers from the ineluctably social division of labour (intended therefore as “social labour”) for “specialisation”

leading to improvements in “productivity”. Smith sees all “production” as “individual production”, the sum of the parts, and not in its “inseparable” entirety.

But this “separation” of the worker from the social process of production entails necessarily the separation of the worker from the means of production (what Marx called the “alienation of living labour” before “alienation” became a subject for Hegelian philosophers). It is this “separation” that allows employers “to exchange” their “property” (dead labour) for the “living labour” of workers and thereby use this living labour for the further expanded production of “products” to be “exchanged” on the “market” – in part for other “products”, but in part for more “living labour”. But for this social reality to take place and effect, the “property” or dead objectified labour owned by the employer must be able to be “exchanged” with the living labour of workers and preferably “separately” or individually, not “as a group or collective”. And for this to occur, first of all, the workers must be “separated” from their means of production and from their products so that they have only their living labour “to exchange” for a wage, that is, for dead objectified labour that will serve only to allow them to reproduce as a labour force dependent on the employer’s “property” – which is in reality the labour objectified by their prior living labour – for its reproduction! And the “value” produced for the employer will be greater, the greater is the ability of the employer “to command more living labour as ‘labour power’ or ‘commanded labour’” for the sake of future production of goods that will command more labour power in future! And so on, ad infinitum.

Two things can be concluded from this sketch: the first is that the employer’s “property” (means of production and dead objectified labour to be offered to workers “in exchange” for their living labour “separated” from the means of production, that is, “destitute” living labour or “abstract labour” or labour power”) now becomes a power opposed and commanding workers politically as living labour by forcibly “separating” them from their means of production, from the products of their living labour, and by “paying” them “separately” so that their collective or social labour is “paid” or “exchanged” as “individual labour”! At this stage, the employer’s “property” has turned into “capital”. And the second aspect is that this process of production is aimed at “expanding the command of capital over living labour”. So it makes no sense to speak of “simple reproduction”. The reproduction of capitalist society will be “expanded reproduction” to which no “quantitative measure” can be applied or nothing at all.

Capital is that form of “property” or “wealth” that is dead objectified labour that is used “in exchange for” the living labour of workers so as to produce more dead objectified labour to be used as fresh “capital”. In other words, the use value of living labour to the capitalist is its ability to produce more “values” or “products” that can be used in exchange for more living labour. This “separation” of the worker from the means of production and the “parcelisation” of the division of social labour into individual labour powers is what we call Trennung.

What the Trennung entails is, first, the separation of workers both in terms of “their control and choice” over the means of production as well as the product of their social labour so that they are forced to work for their reproduction on behalf of the employers who own both the means of production and the product of social labour; second, as a result of this separation, the division of social labour can be “parcelized” into separate “individual labours” by remunerating the workers “individually” for what is “social labour”; third, the Trennung can now force the living labour of workers to be presented as “abstract labour” to be purchased (by capitalists) and sold (by workers) in exchange for “dead objectified labour” (part of the goods the workers have produced) so that workers’ living labour can be described/represented falsely as “labour power” (Arbeitskraft).

As a result of this process, workers can be reduced to a “labour force” that is a “good” or “input” or “cost” like any other entering the process of production. If we confuse, as Smith does, this “living labour” whose use value (political character) is to produce new objectified labour or “exchange value” that will be “exchanged” for more “living labour” mystified as “labour power” in an expanded production – if we confuse “living labour” with “labour power” so that “labour power” is the same as “labour”, then it will be impossible to see how a “profit” (or surplus value) can be derived by the capitalist from this process of production – we will misunderstand completely how “exchange value as money” (means of production plus wages) can turn into “capital”.

It is obvious that the whole process of “market exchange” is not needed here: “exchange” of living labour with dead objectified labour is merely a fiction that hides the real subjugation of living labour to the capitalist who commands/owns/controls dead labour exchanged under duress with living labour, what we call “capital”. And the “freedom” of the worker “to exchange” living labour for dead objectified labour so it can produce more dead objectified labour….and so on – that “freedom” is also a fiction that is not needed for analytical or political purposes. Indeed, the most telling point is that although the “formal equality” of citizens in capitalist society and the mystification of “the market economy” (Marxian “alienation” and the analysis of “commodities”) may have been valuable concepts in earlier times (capitalist “growth” was an indispensable factor), it is possible to argue that the very development/evolution of capitalism has brought about the “de-mystification” of the Trennung process by bringing out in all its naked violence the exercise of capitalist command in and outside the workplace! The society of capital has ensured that the process of exploitation and subjugation of living labour achieved by the Trennung has become apparent and e-vident, conspicuous and perspicuous in all its violence and brutality with the rise of “the collective capitalist”, itself a result of the antagonism of the wage relation.

Now we can turn to Colletti and Marxist analysis.

It is in order to explain this “co-ordination” of private labours and products that Smith needs “the market”. It is in order to show that resources are used most “productively/efficiently” that Smith needs “market competition”. But why “the invisible hand”? Because Smith knows that if the prices of goods are determined by the “labour value” embodied in them for their production, then “market competition” will still not explain “the co-ordination” of “private labours” – because there is no such thing or measure as “labour value” that can actually determine market prices! Consequently, only “the invisible hand” can “square the circle”, reconcile the irreconcilable, and turn the anarchy of “self-interest” into the “co-ordination” of resource allocation, into the equilibrium of the processes of production and consumption through “the law of value”.

“National wealth” grows out of “the division of labour”; but Smith has to break this down into “co-operation through self-interest”, which is contradictory and therefore the contradiction needs to be resolved by making the “self-interest”….”enlightened”! The need for “enlightenment” arises out of the very “political separation” and “private appropriation” (Trennung) of the division of social labour. But this makes it impossible to reconcile the “separation/appropriation” with the “individual rewards” (private distribution) arising from the social division of labour (social production) on which “private property” is founded. The “reconciliation” needed is the justification for the “Trennung” – “the invisible hand” of “the market” becomes the imaginary/fictitious replacement of the Trennung with the “natural self-regulation” of the market through competition.

SMITH AND LOCKE

The market is “self-regulating” because the social process of production (the division of social labour) is now based on the pre-contractual “natural-ness” of the “separation/appropriation”. Smith then tries to generalise Locke’s “private labour and property” through an assumed, naturally-arising “separation/appropriation” of the division of labour that gives rise to “national wealth” as a result of “enlightened self-interest”. As A. Piazzi rightly argues (in Tronti, ‘Stato e Riv. In Ingh’), and as we will show here, the capitalist economy starts with the Lockean liberal State, but ends up with the Hobbesian authoritarian State; the liberal State of Law ends up as the redoubtable ‘Leviathan’. Our task here is to show not only that this trans-formation of the State-form is possible but above all that it is necessary once we follow the “pessimistic” assumptions of the Lockean-Smithian “civil society” as “burgerliche Gesellschaft” to their bitter Hobbesian denouement. (For all this, cf. Koselleck and Tronti.)

We have seen that Locke is absolutely vital for Smith, because it is with Locke that the “productivity” of “private labour” gives rise to the “right” to “private property”, but this time intended as “the division of labour”-Trennung”! This “transition” from “property as the pro-

duct of private labour” to “property as pro-duct of Trennung”, that is the politically-enforced separation/appropriation of the division of labour, takes place subtly in Locke and is described as properly “pre-contractual”, as belonging to the status naturae. In Locke, Economics and Politics begin to draw closer – justified by the higher “productivity” arising from the Trennung now seen as the result of “self-interested” application of naturally-arising “private property” and, as such, as a Trennung no longer requiring “the State”, except “negatively” to protect it as a “natural right”. (See Piazzi in Tronti, pp.39-40.)

Only the “self-regulating market” can “reconcile” the Economic (civilised society with its “self-interests”) with the Political (the liberal, non-interventionist State) because “self-interest” can then be shown to be “enlightened” as a result of “economic laws” rather than exogenous/extrinsic relations of force, and can thus form the foundation of the liberal State. The State remains “the liberal guarantor” of and “non-interventionist” in the Economy both in the foundation of contractually-regulated “civil society” from the “state of nature” (it is the pro-duct of the social contract sealed by individuals and not a contracting party) and in the regulation of this “civil society” (no redistributive taxation affecting “self-interest in the market”, individuals have right to oppose excesses of authority). In Lockean-Smithian theory, the liberal State, the Political, arises contractually/conventionally from “civil society” (a state by institution), but not organically (a state by acquisition) because Locke has not yet shown that the “self-interests” of the contracting individuals in his “civil society” can be “reconciled” positively – as a “harmony”, a common goal. Only with Adam Smith’s Political Economy does the Political State of Law “reconcile” the individual self-interests through the Economic “invisible hand” of the “self-regulating market”, to become “the State of Law of Value”.

But in Locke, as Colletti (in ‘I&S’) notices, there is only the ‘presupposition’ of “the State” in Locke’s “civil society” (Colletti cites R. Polin’s study [La Politique Morale de J.Locke] and then quotes Smith in ‘Wealth’ making exactly the same point about “the State” preserving contractually rights [perhaps ‘functions’ or ‘roles’] acquired in the “state of nature”.) By contrast, there is no such “preservation” of rights in Hobbes (except thoughts), only total ‘alienation’ of rights to the State. In reality, Lockean/Smithian “civil society” and Kantian ungeselle Geselligkeit contain already “the social fabric” (certainly the “competition”) and the division of labour that found the market economy, in which “the State” only apparently plays a “negative” role “preserving” the natural rights of civil society, but in reality has achieved the Trennung that is now assumed away! (Polin is right to claim that the Lockean contract preserves individual “rights” in the status naturae; but he is wrong to suggest that the “contract” that constitutes “civil society” and “the State” really protects the “individual” from “society”[!], because it is limited only to the “negative feral” qualities of individuals, the “anarchical” aspects of pre-contractual society. Unlike Hobbes, Locke [and Ferguson and

Smith and Kant] sees no reason “to alienate” all rights to “the State”, which therefore plays only a “negative” role.)

Recall that, as Colletti himself notes, Smith [in ‘Essays on Ph.Sbjcts’] was aware of and praised Rousseau’s ‘Discours sur l’Inegalite’ where he highlights the important distinction between “self-interest” in a “co-operative” society and the same “self-interest” in a “competitive” one. This would have forced Smith to re-examine the nature of “co-operation” away from the Mandevillean version and to rely on the Lockean (natural rights acquired in the state of nature, as against “state of war”, and “protected/preserved” in “civil society” – above all “labour” and consequently “property”), rather than the Hobbesian (homo homini lupus/ belllum omnium contra omnes) notion of what he called “civilised society”.

What Smith intended by “civilised society” was “a society capable of improvement” in both an economic sense as well as a moral sense (hence the “Theory”). For what Smith embodied now was a rising bourgeoisie that wished not only to isolate the “divine” from the “secular” sphere, and not only the “economic” from the “political” (the enforcement of laws): he also wished, like Locke, to champion the validity of the new bourgeois “moral” sphere that distinguished between “vices and virtue” (cf. Koselleck ch. On Locke). As a result, the political sphere of the State to legislate and execute laws was to be confined further in that the State had to heed and be responsive to “the public sphere”, the sphere of “public opinion”. – Which is why Smith had to oppose (and follow his predecessor Hutcheson) Mandeville’s ‘Fable” because this seemed to erect a “paradox” between the Economic and the “public sphere” of morality that claimed now an ever growing role in the conduct of “public policy” or Politics.

Smith’s “Theory” highlights the necessity of Political Economy to homologate the Economic with the Political also in a hegemonic “moral” sense of “civilisation/progress” (though “scientific progress” is still “exogenous” to the Economy) or “Enlightenment”. But what Smith could not perceive was the devastating effect that this sphere of “moral sentiments” would have once the Economy with its “self-regulating market” and “wealth/commonwealth” expansion came up against the “national boundaries” in terms of capitalist accumulation, bringing its “self-interest” and ‘jus internum’ into destructive collision with the ‘jus externum’, just as the Hobbesian forum internum was bound to collide with the forum externum and re-ignite the bellum omnium. (Koselleck brilliantly traces this “pathogenesis”, as does Arendt. As Koselleck argues, this growing interference of “public opinion” and its “acquisitive morality” led eventually to the ‘Krisis’, the political use of “the mob” – the Demokratisierung that overran the bourgeois State itself in the 1930s because of the polarisation of “electorates” [cf. Nietzsche’s warnings and Arendt’s analysis]. We could say that “the machinery of State” now fell into very irresponsible hands aided by “insecure” [recall ‘Sekuritat] bourgeois elites [also Maier].)

BACK TO SMITH

The ability “to enforce” laws can exist only if a sufficiently powerful social entity exists. It is only once a political entity with sufficient power exists that the forceful “separation”/Trennung of labour from the means of production and consequent “parcelisation” of the labour process and the division of social labour, that their Trennung can be sanctioned and enforced – by the State. It is Hobbes that draws these premises to their logical conclusions. Locke develops and sanctions retroactively the “historical” notion of an autochthonous, spontaneous development of “the common law” together with divine sanction of “natural rights”, the fiction of the Magna Charta – all these are the “rationalisations” of a bourgeoisie that has become secure in the legitimacy of its Economy - so much so that it can seek to impose an arbitrary “limit” to the powers and legitimacy of “the State”. The establishment of this Economy was the pre-condition for the delimitation of the State’s powers to the Political – that is, predominantly the preservation of the Economy, of the market and property rights.

Had Smith accepted and explored the real social relations behind “the market”, he would have concluded that it is a “creature of politics”. By resisting this notion and espousing “competition” as “human nature”, Smith could only look to “the invisible hand” (a Leibnitzian “pre-established harmony” or “harmony of monads”) to explain how “self-interest”, however much “enlightened”, could keep “the market” together and “self-regulated”, let alone at “equilibrium” (which implies ‘optimal regulation’) or in a condition of “growth”! (Smith sees “growth” as an outcome of competitive division of labour – see Loasby, pp.10-17. Loasby refers to Demsetz calling Hayek’s “perfect co-ordination”, “perfect decentralisation”, the result of “perfect competition”. Loasby likens this to “perfect slavery”, confirming again that a “closed system” [Hayek] becomes ‘overdetermined’ and paradoxical – it enters as it exits and it exits as it enters, like Russell’s “set of all sets not members of themselves” [E&E p.17]. [Schumpeter’s “Kreislauf” and “stagnation” from Hayek to Keynes starts here.] Loasby then tackles Hahn’s replacement of “prices” with “information”. Note how bourgeois science moves away from “production” [division of labour] to “information”.)

Smith, for his part, could not perceive that “the capitalist division of labour” is a form of co-operation that does not require a “self-regulating market”; he could not prove the existence of such a mechanical market, the Law of Value – which is why he had to resort to “the invisible hand”: – because he needed at all costs to reconcile production and distribution and exclude the real antagonistic relations of production and with them any “political” interference with the operation of the “market”, so that “economics” could be reconciled with “civil society” without

“political” intervention in the “authoritarian” sense. Smith needed to turn the State into a deus otiosus (unlike the Hobbesian Deus mortalis).

Only the “self-regulating market” can “reconcile” the Economic (civilised society with its “self-interests”) with the Political (the liberal, non-interventionist State) because “self-interest” can then be shown to be “enlightened” as a result of “economic laws” rather than exogenous/extrinsic relations of force, and can thus form the foundation of the liberal State. The State remains “the liberal guarantor” of and “non-interventionist” in the Economy both in the foundation of contractually-regulated “civil society” from the “state of nature” (it is the pro-duct of the social contract sealed by individuals and not a contracting party) and in the regulation of this “civil society” (no redistributive taxation affecting “self-interest in the market”, individuals have right to oppose excesses of authority).

It is Smith’s neglect of the Hobbesian “political” separation of workers from the productive process, and therefore his acceptance of the “appropriation” of its products (‘exchange”) without “political” intervention that distinguishes him from Mandeville (on Trennung) and Locke (individual labour as basis of property). But then Smith adopts Locke’s “pre-civil” property rights as extending to the “Trennung” without the need for “violent political imposition” (the State) but assuming they already exist in the state of nature! And this is why Smith’s “self-interest” needs to be “enlightened”! The real “enlightenment” of Smith’s “self-interested individuals” arises from the fact that the labour process and the productive process are aspects of “social labour” of “co-operation”. But Smith’s inability to detect this forcible “separation” (Trennung) of workers from the means of production, the “parcelisation” of the labour process and its transformation from “division of social labour” into technical, “individual specialisation“ leading to higher “productivity” leaves him unable to explain rationally or scientifically how the “parcelised” or “specialised” labour of individual workers all intent on pursuing their “self-interest” can be “reconciled” or “co-ordinated” into a functioning complex capitalist economy that is able to grow and produce ever-greater “national wealth”!

(This is not to say that the liberal “nightwatchman state” [Lassalle] is weak. Just as in Hobbes, the Lockean State can be as authoritarian as need be to preserve individual rights and to fight wars [F.Neumann, ‘Dem&AuthState’].] Hobbes’s State Machine and Prince (Ghost in the machine).

Indeed, “the Invisible Hand” is as redundant as “the liberal State”, yet needed to explain eventual failures of “the self-regulating market”. It is a deus absconditus – it is a God superfluous only if “self-interest” is allowed to operate without interference. It is what “civil society” would be like if there were a God. “The Invisible Hand” is the “natural perfection” of “the self-regulating market”: it is the reason why the State/Political must not interfere with this market/Economy; it is an article of faith empirically displayed, “visible” in the unassisted, non-

political operation of “market forces”, the resultant or “balance”, “equi-librium” of these market forces; the natural order of human affairs, the “harmony” of human choices and plans; it is observable reality become aspired finality, hic et nunc become telos, “the rational become real and the real become rational”, the end of history. It was this “superfluity” that led to the abandonment of “the invisible hand” in later Classical Political Economy.

The “invisible hand” is impossible but necessary for Smith because “the Law of Value” is a “metaphysical”, unhistorical hypostatised concept, and capitalist production is antagonistic, not “equilibrated” (equilibrium is an absurd, aporetic notion): it would be superfluous if “the Law of Value” were real; and it is false because capitalist society is actually guided by a “political-historical construction or agency”! In other words, the invisible hand is “theological-transcendental” because “the Law of Value” is metaphysical; and if “the Law of Value” were “real” or truly “immanent”, the invisible hand would be superfluous. In reality, both notions are false as “analytical-scientific” concepts. (And this is where Weber and Schumpeter are utterly wrong about the need to sever Marx’s “scientific analysis” from his “ideological penchant”. To do so would “reify” economic studies because it would remove their “historical” underpinning. Refer to Hayek’s “scientism”. Cf. Colletti, pp.16 and 48 for Schumpeter’s later approach to Marx in CS&D where he eventually praises and adopts [in ‘BC’] Marx’s “histoire raisonnee”.)

In reality, logically and historically, what Adam Smith and Classical Political Economy after him disguised were the two fundamental truths that we have discovered and that are the most valuable products of our study. The first is that “the act of birth” of capitalism is the establishment of a “machinery of State”, a “Leviathan”, powerful and far-reaching enough both in its degree of “bureaucratisation” (administration and dispensation of political “policing” control over a given territory and population) and “rationalisation” (effective use of available resources for the paramount purpose of preserving domination over the population). In this regard, it is possible to say that the capitalist economy with its social relations of production owes its existence to the initial violent separation of workers from the means of production both in the “legal” sense of their “ownership” and in the “physical” sense of “parcelisation” of the social labour process through the payment of “wages” as “individual reward” for each worker’s contribution to production. This process we have called “Trennung”.

The second point is of equal importance, but one more immediately perspicuous: given that capitalist society is founded on the Hobbesian “bourgeois” premises of the self-interest of its individual members in competition with one another, the inevitable aim of this society will be and cannot but be the domination and subjugation of its members through the fear of poverty and degradation implied in the wage relation. In the final instance, once a nation-state is unable to control the explosive accumulative logic of the wage relation and of the capitalist

order, its irrepressible tendency will be internally the totalitarian destruction of its social fabric through the atomisation of its members and externally the military aggression, subjugation and domination of the entire “life-world” (Lebenswelt) – cf. Arendt, pp. 36ff. (This latter is a ‘tendency’ that can be buffered by “crises” that can reduce wage antagonism and allow the survival of the wage relation. But “crises” necessarily place the bourgeois order at risk and result in political polarisation with all its consequences. Indeed, we have seen with Hobbes that the “logical-fundamental” [‘fundus’, from the bottom/beginning/origin] tendency of the capitalist State is to degenerate into authoritarianism.)

Excursus on Negri’s ‘Empire’ and ‘Savage Anomaly’

It may be instructive to pause here and glance rapidly at Negri’s own treatment of our “raisonnement historicise’” (I refrain from using JC Passeron’s ‘raisonnement sociologique’ or ‘historique’, which is a revival of Weberian approaches in different garb) called “Passages of Production” in ‘Empire’ (co-authored with Hardt), and then the allusions to Hobbes in L’Anomalia Selvaggia dedicated to Spinoza, both of which suffer from the ‘malignant’ (and I suffer to use the strong word) influence of Deleuze and Guattari which (an invidious thing to say) owes more to the support Negri received from them in the difficult years but also (L’Anomalia was written while he was in prison, before the escape to France) to Negri’s own philosophical “roaming incertitudes” (just look at ‘Il Dominio e il Sabotaggio’ for a taste of the absurd charlatanry worthy of a Niall Ferguson that he can get himself bogged into.)

The cursory treatment of the historical analysis of capitalism in ‘Empire’ is very seriously, harmfully flawed in various regards. It emerges, mercifully, right from the outset:

“The wage of the worker (corresponding to necessary labor) must be less than the total value produced by the worker. This surplus value, however, must find an adequate market in order to be realized. Since each worker must produce more value than he or she consumes, the demand of the worker as consumer can never be an adequate demand for the surplus value. In a closed system, the capitalist production and exchange process is thus defined by a series of barriers: ‘‘Capital, then, posits necessary labour time as the barrier to the exchange value of living labour capacity; surplus labour time as the barrier to necessary labour time; and surplus value as the barrier to surplus labour time’’ (p. 422 [from ‘Grundrisse’]),” (p222).

Here from the outset is the use of “necessary” and “surplus labour” in a “quantitative” sense – which is everything we are trying to disprove in our work. As we have seen above, only the ‘Trennung’ is historically real and relevant: all the mumbo jumbo about “historically necessary labour time” is just that – scientism. And Negri gets right into the myth of “underconsumption”: he mistakes Marx’s “barrier or limit” to capital for the inability of capitalists “to consume” – which is rubbish because, ultimately, they can produce the “surplus” for their own consumption (Kalecki). And note Schumpeter’s objection (in CS&D)

that capitalist competition would whittle away any ‘surplus’ in any case. In short, what is missing is the real source of antagonism – what is central to Marx’s critique, what gives rise to the ‘Doppelcharakter’ of the commodity ‘labour-power: - the separation of living labour from the means of production. Negri has completely forgotten this essential point.

Negri immediately becomes aware of the difficulty – right from the top of the next page:

“Certainly, the capitalist class (along with the other classes that share in its profits) will consume some of this excess value, but it cannot consume all of it, because if it did there would be no surplus value left to reinvest. Instead of consuming all the surplus value, capitalists must practice abstinence, which is to say, they must accumulate.4 Capital itself demands that capitalists renounce pleasures and abstain as much as possible from ‘‘wasting’’ the surplus value on their own consumption. This cultural explanation of capitalist morality and abstinence, however, is just a symptom of the real economic barriers posed within capitalist production. On the one hand, if there is to be profit, then the workers must produce more value than they consume. On the other hand, if there is to be accumulation, the capitalist class and its dependents cannot consume all of that surplus value,” (p223).

But “where is it written” that there must be ‘accumulation’”? Why must “surplus value… [be] reinvest[ed]”? And what is that garbage about “capitalists must practise abstinence”? That is Schopenhauerian and Weberian mythology: in fact it is the most abject capitalist ideology from the time of Nassau Senior – the capitalist gets rich by “abstaining”! By admitting that this is a “cultural explanation”, Negri is evidently falling back on Weber’s “spirit of capitalism”! The argument simply does not hold water: to qualify it as “stupid” would do it too much honour; and from this point onwards, Negri’s entire “short history of capitalism” is banal, vitiated and mangled.

One of the distortions that arise from this treatment is to oppose as two contrary powers or forces capitalists and workers right from the beginning – hence the inordinate importance given to ‘primitive accumulation’ by Negri. Per contra, we ought to stress the gradual emergence of the wage relation and of capital as the material expression of it, as a “concentration of capitals” or private property or “wealth” – in gold, in land, in use values as well as exchange values – that then stands truly as a monistic entity, finally as social capital under a collective capitalist, in the course of its historical concentration. Yet initially, capitalism can arise as a gradual generalisation of the wage relation, and “capitalists” emerge from among the ranks of workers, as Dobb has shown!

Negri’s ‘manichaean’ presentation of the origins, the actus nascendi of capitalism owes much to his mistaken emphasis on “underconsumption” or “overproduction”, with consequent need to heighten the ‘conflictual’ aspects of its development that this approach cannot provide, by exasperating the violence of capitalism’s ‘act of birth’, “original or primitive accumulation”

(like original sin, cf Negri in ‘L’ anomalia’, p90, “Generally, seventeenth-century philosophy accepts this terrain. The passional appropriation of nature (this ideological metaphor for the capitalist market and for primitive accumulation) has to bow down to the necessities of the social and State organization of the fluxes of value”) as well as the ‘conquest’ in its “imperialistic expansion”. Yet “formal subsumption” shows the continuity and organicity of the “transition” to capitalism (to echo Negri, its “constitutive potenza”) stressed by Dobb, while “real subsumption” entails that “relative surplus value” can result from “the intensification of labour-power”, which contradicts the need for “expansion”. It follows that “expansion” need not take the form of “imperialism” (formal or informal empire – Negri’s definition of ‘Empire’ copies the latter notion), but can occur even without an increase in the population – so long as the antagonism of the wage relation urges it to greater “productivity” (production of use values that reproduce and perpetuate the wage relation). This defeats the entire central “thesis” of ‘Empire’.

Nor is there any consideration of the role played by “institutional trans-formation” of the machinery of State (cf Tronti, ‘Stato e Riv. In Ingh.’) which opens up an essential dimension of the Trennung – the regimentation and massification of the political elements of the new mode of production that are strictly-speaking ‘external’ to the wage relation itself but like “money” inherited from feudal absolutism (to comfort Tronti’s “autonomia del politico” and Cacciari’s “Politico” in its ‘Catholic’ hierarchy and Weber in its ‘Protestant rationalisation’).

Interestingly, Negri grows immediately cautious about “overproduction”, but has to insist on it to justify the “imperialistic” or ‘Empire’ thesis, which simply distracts us from the antagonism of the wage relation, from the Trennung: -

“We should note that this barrier has nothing to do with the absolute power of production of a population or its absolute power of consumption (undoubtedly the proletariat could and wants to consume more [so does the bourgeoisie, no?]), but rather it refers to the relative power of consumption of a population within the capitalist relations of production and reproduction. In order to realize the surplus value generated in the production process and avoid the devaluation resulting from overproduction, 224 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION Marx argues that capital must expand its realm:…”

… and then begins the whole nursery tale of “outside” and “inside”, of “barriers” and “limits” which leads to “imperialism” (“expansion” is the word Arendt uses in OT, and Negri quotes the same aphorism about “annexing the planets” from Rhodes) and ends, after “formal subsumption” yields to “real subsumption” (a proper categorisation), and after the New Deal

(“for the world”), with “Empire”. Clearly, Negri explains nothing with “the relative power of consumption of a population within the capitalist relations of production” – what on earth is that (!) if not the fact that, differently from what Negri is arguing, the actual “barrier to capital” is, once more, that “capital becomes a barrier to itself” (!) – in other words, that the preservation of the wage relation becomes antagonistically incompatible with the productive potential of capitalist industry!

This is an aspect of the origins of the bourgeoisie that is too often neglected and for that reason has engendered a thoroughgoing misconceptualisation of the actus nascendi, the birth and growth of capitalism (historical development of the Trennung from workshop to State and market institutions, that is) as well as of its “nature and causes” (antagonism of wage relation, as against sphere of circulation, something Negri’s emphasis on “underconsumption” and “imperialist expansion” serves to encourage).

The formative logico-historical passage from “many capitals” to “social capital” is traced in Tronti (“Il Piano del Capitale” in ‘OeC’ and in “SeRinIngh’). It is instructive to find that Tronti himself (quoting Marx) concludes that “the accumulation of capital is therefore the increase of the proletariat” (“Il Piano”, loc.cit., p75). Tronti’s analysis here follows Marx faithfully and is similar to Negri’s in ‘MoM’ (see below). Yet Tronti is more careful on the “transition” by stressing how the capitalist “separation” of the workers from the means of production as well as from control over their living labour already constitutes itself as “self-government of capital” (p71), as “concentration of single capitals” and ultimately as “social capital” in the society of capital by having to preserve the “sociality” of the labour process – and therefore en-gendering im-mediately a working class(pp76ff). As he puts it, “Il denaro separa, il capitale unifica. Cioe’: la produzione capitalistica riunisce wuello che il patrimonio monetario ha diviso. Qui ci sono due epoche di storia: nell’ unita’ di entrambe sta il passaggio, il processo, della transizione. C’ e’ una concentrazione di capitali e una concentrazione del capitale” (‘SeR’, p218) – a concentration of capitals in one place, even as ‘ursprungliche Akkumulation’; but also a concentration of formerly individual workers in one place by “capital” through the real subsumption of the social labour process – giving rise to the “socialization of capital” (“Il Piano”, p67).

In this section, Tronti quite rightly contrasts Marx’s emphasis on the violence of “primitive accumulation” in Capital with the more nuanced historical “transition” traced in the Grundrisse, from the “dissolving role of money on feudal relations”, to the role of “die Regierungen” in concentrating wealth and then forcing the Trennung (“La Transizione”). Again referring to the “Grundrisse”: “Prima aveva detto una di quelle nuove verita’ che rimangono in genere sepolte…: ‘Solo all’ epoca del tramonto del feudalesimo, in cui pero’ si svolgono lotte al suo interno – cosi’ in Inghilterra nel XIV e nella prima meta’ del XV secolo – si ha l’ eta’ d’ oro del lavoro che va emancipandosi’” (p217).

By contrast, Negri’s presentation conceals this ‘positive’ side of the rise of the bourgeoisie, surely in part with the support of the newly “emancipated” workers – forgetting thus the apocalyptic elogium paid by Marx in the “Manifesto”. One may legitimately admonish Negri for abandoning his own “metodo della tendenza antagonista”, for shifting from immanence to transcendence, in that he does not start from “the constitutive power” (the phrase from “The Savage Anomaly”) of antagonism of the wage relation and then pursue its historical “development” (Dobb) into full-fledged capitalism under the impetus or Negri’s “potentia” of the Trennung, culminating into the homologous liberal political institutions and their ‘degenerate’ forms. By “leaping” im-mediately (without mediation) to the op-position of capital and workers, Negri hypostatises capital as “Potestas” (one is reminded of the Hegelian ‘negation’ as (Lowith) “the annihilation of the world” (which he extends to the ‘post-Hegelians’, Marx included, and for which Tronti upbraids him, ‘OeC’, p140). Thus, he both mystifies the more “constitutive” or organic ‘trans-crescence or meta-morphosis’ of nascent capital (the Krisis of Cacciari that Negri adopts in “L’ Anomalia”) and hypostatises in Manichaean fashion the all-important ‘antagonism’ whose foundation he traces back to Spinoza’s ‘cupiditas’ (or its primary drive, ‘conatus’, that I used elsewhere).

This inability to enucleate the concept of antagonism historically helps explain why the notion of “Empire” itself is flawed in that it describes a form of capitalist command that is diffuse yet centralised (“disciplinary governability”) and thereby hypostatised (like kakotopian versions of omniscient and omnipotent dictators). Equally (continuing the litany of neologisms), it gives rise to a “primitive accumulation of informatisation” and to “immaterial labour” (a very weak notion, not supported with any detailed study of the labour process) and…. God help us!... Deleuze and Guattari’s famous/infamous “rhizomes”…. Enough! Assez! Basta!... Oh, and then there is that benighted word to which we will turn soon… “multitude”.

The misrepresentation of Marx’s ‘Grundrisse’ is more instructive. Marx is not saying that “the barrier to capital” is “underconsumption” or “overproduction” (that is Rosa Luxemburg!). The point Marx is making is that the productive potential developed through the antagonism of the wage relation leads to the compression of “necessary labour” and a rise in “the organic composition of capital” with consequent “tendential fall in the rate of profit” – something Negri interprets correctly and rejects as “economicismo” in ‘MoM’ (p110-1, see below).

Negri on the ‘Grundrisse’ – ‘Marx Oltre Marx’.

But first, a look at Negri’s MoM. Briefly, it would be tempting to give a favourable assessment, and there is no doubt that the analysis of the Grundrisse is much more insightful and accurate than the “dog’s breakfast” in ‘Empire’. ‘MoM’ alternates between moments of lucidity and disappointing areas (the majority) where Negri shows still that he has not overcome the “scientistic” aspects of historical materialism. The insistence on “the

law of value”, for instance – which, even when Negri insists with all his contorted rhetoric and absurd “philosophistry” that it has been “inverted” by Marx (and the meaning is far from clear), it is still the case that a concept can be “inverted” by historical developments (even antagonistic ones) only if it was “historically real and valid” at some earlier stage. Yet in reality, as we have amply demonstrated, “the law of value”, the whole notion of “necessary and surplus labour” and “theft of labour time” were always im-possible concepts that found no expression in reality. The chapter on “La Teoria del Salario” (especially at pp156-7) offers an inconfutable illustration of how Negri seeks to reconcile Marx’s old categories (law of value, necessary labour, law of falling rate of profit) with the insights of the Grundrisse with regard to the incompatibility of the productive potential of living labour occasioned by the antagonism of the wage relation and the permanence of this wage relation, particularly with the discussion of the “Fragment on Machinery”.

There are moments (p74), where Negri seems to think that Marx’s fault is to reduce the creation of surplus value to the sphere of industrial production (the P in M-C…P…-C’-M’) – which would be right, if Negri did not intend by this merely that one has to look at “social workers” or “immaterial labour” or “multitudes” or similar nonsense. And there are times when the ‘organic composition of capital’ and ‘the falling rate of profit’ are seriously countenanced (pp109-112) (cf Rowthorn in ‘CC&I’ on this). But it is this obstinacy to look at the wage relation through the prism of “necessary and surplus labour” that turns Negri’s – and Marx’s - exposition into an unseemly jumble, ornamented with expatiations about “il metodo della tendenza antagonistica” (ch3) – which does have a kernel of truth, represented by his discussion of the wage relation itself.

As we said, the erroneous formulation of “the barrier or limit to capital” can also be blamed on Marx. This fallacious analysis then leads Negri to wax lyrical on “the proletarian reappropriation of the use value of labour-power”, when in fact it is the very inability of living labour to do so because of the forceful imposition of the wage relation by capitalists that is the productive barrier and limit to capital. It is a subtle but essential difference of perspective. At p154 we find an excellent illustration of this mis-apprehension when Negri enters a lengthy quote from Marx to the effect that the compression of necessary labour expands surplus labour until the discrepancy becomes unsustainable (politically). Negri retorts that living labour has increasingly more control over its time and imposes on capital the expansion of ‘necessary labour’ (autovalorizzazione, p110; see also ch8, p171 and 175, and p188 about ‘il passaggio dalla legge del valore alla legge dell’ autovalorizzazione); and he insists that “the Fragment” demonstrated “l’estinzione della legge del valore” (p175 and 188) – as if, once more, the law of value had ever had any historical validity or logical content whatsoever (it is an apory, as we have shown) – and reveals the archaism of Marx’s “organic composition” framework (which Negri justly decries, pp110-1).

In fact, workers never cavil at parsimonious distinctions between ‘surplus’ and ‘necessary’ labour; and any “refusal of labour” and “auto-valourisation” provoke inflationary crises or else an expansion of capital to reserve armies of labour (cf Rowthorn again in ‘CC&I’), so that any ‘necessary/surplus’ distinction (Negri’s “legge del plusvalore”) becomes incomprehensible particularly when one considers the notion of “real subsumption of labour”, which is eminently political. The whole question of production and distribution therefore is one that involves not just the proportions of production distributed between workers and capital and the respective labour-power time employed for their production (see, eg, bottom p84 and p87). Such “distributive apportionment”, even if quantifiable, would tell us little because we would need to know what “use values” were specifically distributed (consumption goods for workers, production goods for capitalists). In this perspective, the suppression of “necessary labour” cannot constitute a limit to capital, because it is an entirely ‘aporetic’ or even fictitious notion that turns the whole analysis into a “distributive” one (cf Marx’s correction of JS Mill quoted at p173 [this nonsense is eminently neo-Ricardian – production is quantitatively ascertainable once distribution or profit is ‘politically settled’]).

By thinking within the narrow confines of ‘necessary and surplus labour’, by focusing on the fractioning of the working day between these two constituents parts, Marx tied himself to the ‘quantitative’ or ‘distributional’ analysis of the wage relation and, worse, to the emphasis on “actual production”, that is, the actual means of production (technologies, resources) used in the labour process at a given time. As a result, Marx left entirely out of the analysis – even in the “Fragment”, which remains the apex of the Grundrisse (“il piu’ alto esempio di uso della dialettica antagonistica e costitutiva… forse in tutta l’ opera marxiana”, p148) - the possibility that capital will seek to restrict and suppress the productive potential of these means of production precisely for the need to preserve the wage relation!

Once this becomes the case, the only available avenue of antagonism for living labour is its realisation that the existing means of production (technologies and use values produced) no longer properly reflect “the productive potential” that is feasible and that capital “prevents” so as to maintain intact “the need” for the wage relation to subsist. In effect, capital warps and distorts the productive potential of available technologies that wage-relation antagonism has occasioned, by “suppressing” their use and adoption! Thus capital becomes a barrier to production, a limit to itself. In effect, it is capitalists that now become ‘saboteurs’!

Marx frequently skirts by this insight, especially in “The Fragment”. But his focus on ‘value’ leads him to express it awkwardly, even wrongly, in terms of the apportionment of ‘objectified labour’ (or “output”, to use an economistic term), in terms of the relative shares of “necessary and surplus labour and respective time”, and finally in terms of capital’s opposition to “producing more value” - because of overproduction and rising organic composition of capital (see pp90ff and most of ch5). But then Negri intervenes and inverts the tendency (of the rate

of profit to fall) by asserting the tendency of living labour “ad autovalorizzarsi” and to expand the share of ‘necessary labour’ (p110), finally abandoning the “organic composition” as “economicismo” (p111). Apart from the arbitrariness of this “reversal” and the ‘apory involved in “the law of surplus value”, Negri and Marx miss the point because by then it is not “value production” that capital is preventing or suppressing, but rather the production of alternative emancipatory use values!

Appropriately, Negri quotes Marx saying that “use value plays a role as an economic category” (p185), which Marx knew all along given the ‘Doppelcharakter’, but here it is intended to extend to use values other than living labour (a point I made with regard to Roscher in ‘PhiloAnteofSoE’ and implicit in Pigou’s “externalities”), something that is lacking in Das Kapital. Recall also that Grossman falls short of making this point despite his correct stress on the fact that CPE’s exclusive focus on “valourisation” is its essential shortcoming – what we call here “the sphere of exchange”.

(Time to revise Sylos-Labini, “Oligopolio e Progresso Tecnico”. Cf. “spillover effects” in J Surowiecki, New Yorker http://www.newyork...ecki#ixzz1DM81hm8p : - "Those days are gone, and American companies now do less basic research. Economists have long argued that companies will underinvest in R. & D. and infrastructure because so-called spillover benefits prevent their capturing all the value they produce.")

Link to “Civil Society 3”.

In a growing or stationary economy, Smith’s “invisible-hand self-regulating market” is “divine revelation”; but in a “crisis” it becomes….”an article of faith”. And this, once “Labour Value” was replaced with “Marginal Utility” and “Political Economy” with “economic science”, is what it became when the bourgeoisie encountered “crisis”. If, indeed, the market is “self-regulating”, if it has a “centripetal tendency” to revert to “equilibrium”, it is obvious that any “crisis” of the Economic must be due to a “non-Economic” force interfering with the market – and that force or “disturbance” can only be the Political, the State. That is the real historical purpose of Smith’s “invisible hand”: - The hypostasis of capitalist social relations of production. Of course, this victimisation of “the State” grew more strident as the “socialisation/rationalisation/concentration” of capitalist industry advanced.

Attack on “labour as source of wealth” – “abstract labour” invites “negatives Denken” attack.