suggestions for a fresh start on an exhausted debate

Suggestions for a Fresh Start on an Exhausted DebateAuthor(s): Gavin KitchingSource: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol.19, No. 1 (1985), pp. 116-126Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/485055 .

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Suggestions for a Fresh Start on an Exhausted Debate

Gavin KITCHING

I The "Impasse"

As several of the papers in this volume indicate, there is increasing anxiety about and disenchantment with "modes of production" analysis, both in African Studies in particular and in the "Sociology of Underdevelopment" in general. Yet as many of those same papers also indicate, the roots of this disenchantment are not well understood, even by those who feel it. Epithets such as "aridity," "formalism," "reductionism," "economism" abound, but in themselves such epithets are no more illuminating than the body of literature at which they are directed. They may well herald a change in intellectual fashion, the decline of one "jargon" and its replacement by another. But if that change occurs without a proper understanding of the fundamental intellectual problems which have produced the "need" for it, it is certain that those problems will reappear, though perhaps in a different form, in whatever replaces "modes of production" analysis.

What then is the problem? I shall begin by outlining what it appears to be to most of the contributors to this volume (and indeed to many other people) who think that there is a problem (Alavi et al. forthcoming). I shall then suggest that though this is the form in which the problem appears, it is in fact a more fundamental problem than it is commonly understood to be, and involves nothing less than a complete misapprehension of what language is and of the way it works, a misapprehension which I believe is very widespread among Marxists (though by no means only them), and which I readily admit to having shared. Indeed the whole of my "Kenya" text (Kitching, 1980) was based on that misapprehension, although with a continual unease that "something was wrong" which gave that book a rather peculiar final form. I now believe that I have discovered what was wrong. That discovery turns out, if I am right, to be a very ironical one, for had I understood my "early Marx" properly I could have avoided all the problems in which I found myself ensnared. However, though I had read the "Theses on Feuerbach" and The German Ideology many times, I realise now that I had never properly understood them, and that I had not done so is in no way surprising, considering that, like many other people both then and since, I was mesmerised and obsessed by the "reading" of Marx given to us by Louis Althusser.

However, back to the matter in hand. How does the problem of the modes of production literature appear? As most frequently and most naively stated, it appears to be one of "fit" between "concepts" and "reality." Whether we consider the use of "feudalism," of "the Asiatic mode," of the "lineage mode," of "the colonial mode" or of "the capitalist mode" in African studies, these concepts are no sooner developed and their empirical characteristics (or "criteria") enumerated, than another participant in "the debate" finds an empirically discrepant case or cases, or reinterprets the evidence used to justify the existence of the said mode. Thus debate rages over the "feudal" nature

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of Ethiopia, over the "Asiatic" nature of the medieval states of West Africa (did they really rely on the state exaction of an agricultural surplus through taxation, or on taxation of trade?). "Elders" are no sooner perceived as extracting surplus from lineage "juniors," than another scholar sees them "redistributing" that surplus again through polygyny and bridewealth, through feasts and funerals. And as for the capitalist mode, confusion could hardly be more confounded. Does capitalism always require "free" wage labour and total separation of the producer means of production and reproduction (the so-called "real" subsumption of labour to capital) or does it merely require that a surplus be extracted from direct producers (even those still controlling some of their means of production and reproduction) for capital accumulation through relations of "unequal exchange" between pre-capitalist or non-capitalist modes and capitalism? And in the latter case is it best to speak of capitalism in a relationship of "articulation in dominance" to pre-capitalist modes, or is it best to identify, perhaps, a "colonial" mode of production which both maintains and guarantees such dominance, but at the same time prevents the full flowering of the capitalist mode, western style?'

Now the "impasse" (Booth 1985) which we appear to have reached in these debates is two-fold. Firstly, we do not know how they could be "resolved" (if by resolved we mean "how one side or another could be unambiguously vindicated by the evidence") for "the evidence" seems irresolubly contradictory or fragmentary or both. But secondly, and more significantly, I think, WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT WOULD BE ATTAINED BY "RESOLVING" THEM EVEN IF WE COULD. Supposing, for example, that a determined and gifted scholar of India were to spend a lifetime sifting and resifting the evidence on Moghul economic and social structure, and in a brilliant tour de force were to demolish all the major empirical arguments against seeing fifteenth century India as an Asiatic mode. It would still be open to the clever and lazy student of the period to say "So what? I will now call Moghul India an Asiatic mode if you like, but what has been gained thereby?". One possible reply might be "well, Marx's category has been unambiguously validated in at least this one case," but whilst this might be a reply which would satisfy professional "Marxicologists," it is, I submit, hardly a reply which should satisfy Marxists. And similar "formalistic" replies could be given in the other cases above, in which P.P. Rey or Jarius Banaji would be vindicated, along with Marx. But again one would surely be no more satisfied with such "vindications" in those cases than in the "Asiatic" case.

But there does appear to be another way out, which is less formalistic and arid. We can remember a little of our intellectual history. As I recall it, in African Studies, and in "Third World" studies generally, modes of production were originally summoned into the fray to undertake a number of crucial theoretical and political tasks. In the Latin American literature, they mainly appeared in the wake of Laclau's famous critique of Frank. The primary aim here was to dispute Frank's "exchange' '-based contention that Latin America had been "capitalist" since the sixteenth century. In Africa, in addition to some early attempts to illuminate the history of pre-colonial African states, modes of production mainly served two different purposes:

- In the field of colonial history and of post-colonial sociology and politics, they served as the basis for an attack on the "dualism" of that old and much-battered adversary, "modernisation theory. " In sum, the aim here was to demolish the notion that Africa was mainly composed of "traditional" societies untouched or hardly touched by "modernity." In the mode of production approach this contention was turned on its head

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and the terminology was, importantly and purposively, altered. The aim was to show how "pre-capitalist" modes of production and "social formations" had been permeated by or "articulated with" the capitalist modes of production, by which they were dominated.

- In the field of social anthropology, modes of production (or to be more precise the "lineage" mode of production) was utilised as part of an attack on functionalist anthropology with its focus on the "socially integrative" role of kinship. The lineage mode of production literature was initally employed to show that beneath the apparently "mutualist" and cooperative facade of kinship lay relations of exploitation and dominance of which kinship categories and norms were, in part at least, an ideological justification/mystification.

Now this historical account of the genesis of the modes of production literature is a bit more promising. It does at least relate conceptualisation to theoretical and political purposes, and this is clearly a step forward. When we remember this history, when we recall "what it was all about," some part of the present sense of "formalism" and "aridity" is removed.

Yet in other respects intellectual history is no solution, for it simply replaces one set of problems with another. For the problem with this "justification" of the modes of production literature is not so much that it was not able to achieve these purposes, AS THAT MOST OF THEM COULD HAVE BEEN ACHIEVED EQUALLY WELL OR BETTER WITHOUT IT. That is, from the point of view of these purposes, the modes of production literature must be regarded as a piece of massive conceptual overkill. One simply does not need the great lumbering tanks of modes and articulations of modes to show, for example, that forces and relations of production in African peasant agriculture were altered by its incorporation into territorial and international markets in the colonial period, or that urban petty commodity producers depended/depend on industrial capital for supplies of raw material, or that the manner of control and circulation of bridewealth cattle favoured the power of elder over junior men in many African societies. In short, as I argued in my Kenya text, and has been argued by several others since (Booth 1985; Hindess and Hirst 1977) there are altogether humbler, more disaggregated concepts which can do these jobs, and which are, in addition, a lot more historically and empirically flexible than modes of production.

And yet I do think we are on the right track in looking at the historical genesis and role of the modes of production literature. The answer to the problem does lie around here, although such an answer will not turn out to be a "justification" of modes of production. We can approach the answer by asking "did this literature have anything in common, historically, despite its different social, geographical and disciplinary applications?" And the answer to that of course is "Yes, it did. This literature was all, in one way or another, a product of the Althusserian moment in Marxism. All of this literature was sired by Louis Althusser, though out of various dams (Laclau, Rey, Meillassoux, Hindess and Hirst, Wolpe, Banaji, etc.). So if the solution to our problem lies anywhere, it must lie here.

I suggest the following answer. The effect of the Althusserian moment in Marxism was to impose a fundamentally flawed understanding of what concepts are upon many Marxist scholars. Because this understanding (which Althusser termed a "Marxist

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philosophy" or "Marxist epistemology") was fundamentally flawed, it was bound to lead to the insoluble conceptual and empirical puzzles in which the modes of production literature is now ensnared, and which has led to the increasing sense of aridity and arbitrariness referred to above. To grasp how and why this Althusserian understanding of concepts is fundamentally flawed, we must confront some philosophical issues.

II Philosophy

In For Marx and at greater length in Reading Capital, Althusser offers us two alternative - and apparently exhaustive -- "pictures" of how concepts work and of their relationship to reality. The first "picture" (which he rejects as "empiricist") says that all concepts must be reduced or reducible to empirically verifiable "observations" (presumably through "the senses" or "sense data"). The second (which he accepts) states that many concepts (and particularly "abstract" or "theoretical" concepts) cannot be so reduced, and that therefore the "reality" which they designate cannot be grasped by simple "empirical" observation. Rather, empirical observations will be of "phenomena" or "appearances" produced by these underlying "theoretically real" objects. Thus the existence of the latter can only be inferred (though not "directly" or "empirically") from the empirical observation of phenomena (which are simply the visible "effects" of these underlying theoretical causes). "Theories" are composed by logically consistent sets of theoretical concepts (sets which Althusser calls "problem- atics"') and by the propositions which specify the formal relations among the concepts in a set (these rules will be logical rules of entailment, contradiction and non-contradiction, etc). It is clear, then, that "strict Althusserianism" can remain fairly composed in the face of assertions that its concepts do not "fit" the empirical data, since it explicitly disavows this simple kind of "correspondence theory" of truth. Indeed one way of understanding Althusser is as a "neo-Kantian" who insisted that concepts are both ontologically and epistemologically prior to"observations" and are indeed what make "empirical observations" possible (see Benton 1984).

The problem, however, is that in the case of the kind of highly complex concepts on which Althusser concentrates (which are in fact very different from the "synthetic a priori" concepts of Kant) this simply is not true. As I have already suggested, it is perfectly possible to find another "observation language" to accomplish all the purposes which modes of production were set (not by Althusser but by others) to accomplish. Indeed there are probably several observation languages which can do this, and these "lower level" observation statements do not pose nearly so many empirical problems as does the complete mode of production "problematic." It is not so much, then, that modes of production are invalidated (in the sense of "not fitting the facts," however that is construed), as that the existence of alternative observation languages, which can accomplish the same purposes, renders them redundant.

Now this is a vital observation which strikes to the heart of Althusser's conception of a "Marxist philosophy." For Althusser, like many philosophers, is obsessed by questions of truth, but also like many philosophers (Marxist and non-Marxist, realist, idealist or empiricist) he construes the question of truth in a particular way. When Althusser suggested that what Marxism needed (and did not have) was a "Marxist philosophy", what he meant, and what philosophers usually mean, was that Marx's work did not contain A FORMAL ACCOUNT OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN MARXIST CONCEPTS AND REALITY (OR "THE WORLD'"') WHICH COULD GUARANTEE

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THE "TRUTH" OR "SCIENTIFICITY" OF THOSE CONCEPTS. Philosophers argue endlessly over what such an "account" should be, over how the "truth" of concepts is to be established, and it is over this issue, above all, that different "schools" of philosophers and philosophy divide.

But there is something missing here, and it is missing not from the particular answer Althusser gives to this question (nor from the answer given by many other philosophers and schools of pholosophy) but from the very form of the question itself. For truth is not established, as both the Marx of the "Theses on Feuerbach" and "The German Ideology" and the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty saw, in the relationship between concepts and the world, but in the relationship between conceptualisers (people) and the world. And by "people" one means not an abstract "humanity," but as Marx said "real" people, i.e., particular people living at particular times, in particular places, in particular sets of social relations and with particular sets of goals and objectives. The central point of The German Ideology, that "the first premise" of "all human history" is "the existence of living human individuals" and that "the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men - the language of real life" (Marx 1976: 31 and 36) - is no mere banality.2 On the contrary, if such observations are understood aright, they lead to a completely different (and properly materialist) understanding of what both language and knowledge are from that proffered in Althusser, and indeed in much philosophy.

To sum up that alternative viewpoint in a sentence would be to say that both language as a whole, and the practice of knowing-through-language in particular, must be seen as a purposeful or purpose-related activity. "Knowing" is only one activity of an active purposeful creature (homo sapiens), and therefore two questions are of equal (and always related) epistemological significance. These two questions are:

- "What is to be known (or wished to be known)?" And this question is of course the classical philosopher's or epistemologist's question which focusses attention on the subject/object or concept/reality relation. But the other, equally important and frequently disregarded question is:

- "Why is it known (or wished to be known)?" which focusses attention on the subject/subject relation or the concept/conceptualiser relation, i.e. on human motiva- tions and purposes and on human social relations. Now, to stress that these two aspects or dimensions of knowing are of equal importance (and both indeed are always present in every act of knowing) is also to stress that to understand human knowing aright NEITHER MUST BE SUBORDINATED TO THE OTHER AND NEITHER MUST BE DISREGARDED. To conceive knowing as simply a formal relationship between "concepts" and "the world" (no matter how that relationship is postulated) is to have a seriously incomplete understanding of knowing as a human activity. However, to conceive knowing as simply a relationship between active conceptualisers (purposeful homo sapiens) and the world, is to risk subordinating knowledge totally to purposes and to speak as if there were no constraints "in the world" upon what human beings may claim to know or succeed in doing. In reality, the world of human beings is a world of "activity-within-natural-constraints" (those constraints being both those of human nature and of Nature more generally). But history (human history) also makes that world one in which those constraints are themselves altered by human activity. Moreover, the

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activity of knowing (increasing human knowledge) plays an important, indeed central, part in such "alteration." Therefore any epistemology which does not base itself in a recognition of both these dimensions (human purposes and activities on the one hand, natural constraints on the other) is seriously defective. And conversely, a proper materialist epistemology must therefore always be deeply contextualised. In other words, it must not operate with concepts like "knowers" and "known" ".concepts" and "reality" at all, but must always specify who (precisely) its knowers are, what (precisely) they are trying to know, why they are trying to know it, when (in human history) they are trying to know it, and where (in human geography and society) all this is happening. What this means is that epistemology should "sound" very different from the way it "sounds" in much conventional philosophy. And how it should "sound" brings us to Wittgenstein.

/// Wittgenstein, Althusser and "Capitalism"

Wittgenstein3 would have thoroughly disapproved of everything in the "philosophy" section because virtually everything I have written about Althusser and philosophy up to this point has been expressed in a language which Wittgenstein believed only gets philosophers and philosophy into trouble. He might have said that most of the last few paragraphs were an attempt to "say" what can only be "shown," or more precisely he might have said (as he said a propos of something else) that these paragraphs were "a misfiring attempt to express what can't be expressed like that" (Wittgenstein 1976, par. 37). And he would certainly have insisted that I give an example or examples to "show" what I am trying to say. Wittgenstein in fact believed that "giving examples" was itself an extremely epistemologically "deep" and important thing to do. For when we give examples, we find, if they are "good examples" that they show what we are trying to say much more exactly than the "idling" language of much philosophy and epistemology. Moreover "good" examples not only "show" their own exactitude, they also "show" the precise way in which a generalisation or generalisations about them are inaccurate. In fact it was a cornerstone of Wittgenstein's later philosophy that examples always are more varied than you can ever say they are. Hence "human knowing" for example would be precisely the kind of "idling language" Wittgenstein sought to combat.4

"Don't tell me about 'human knowing,"' he might have said, "tell me precisely how reading a barometer differs from reading a book, and how both of those differ from reading a musical score. And if you can't do that, don't speak to me about 'human knowing' ". And similarly he might have said. "Don't speak to me about 'sense data.' Tell me if you do the same thing when you see the sun rise as you do when you see the warmth in a smile, and if you can't do that, don't speak to me about 'sense data."'

Thus Wittgenstein's later philosophy does not state a critique of conventional philosophy and epistemology (since to do that would be to fail to break totally from it), rather it offers an alternative epistemology both in what it says and how it says it (i.e., in the way that it is written). This is, in my view, what an historical, sociological, materialist epistemology sounds like. It does not sound like Althusser. And similarly, the general absence from Marx's own corpus of work of what Althusser would have recognised as a "Marxist philosophy" or "epistemology" is not a weakness but a strength. Or to put that another way, there is an epistemology in Marx (both the "early" and the "later" Marx) but Althusser failed to recognise it because being deeply

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historically and sociologically contextualised, it does not "sound" as Althusser expected it to "sound." But let me now do what I say should be done. Let me offer an example.

In developing his case that Marxism needed and lacked a "Marxist philosophy," Althusser produced (1966) an elucidation of the concept "capitalism" as used by Marx. Althusser suggested that, in Marx, this concept is a "complex" encapsulating several different "levels of abstraction." For Althusser, the development of a Marxist "science" required that these various "levels" of abstraction be clearly separated and identified, for without such a separation there is an ever-present danger of "reducing" one level of the concept to another. Thus Althusser suggested that at the most "abstract" level the concept "capitalism" referred to a "mode of production" which was in turn a complex concept embracing a structured set of "relations" and "forces" of production. At a more "concrete" level the concept "capitalism" referred to a form of society (or what Althusser termed a "social formation") constituted of a set of class relationships, but also composed of a number of "instances" of which the "political" and "ideological" instances were the most important.

Now, what Althusser is doing here is to construct for us a "picture" or metaphor about the relationship between concepts in Marx. And in some ways I think this "picture" has been Althusser's most influential and enduring legacy, perhaps because he simply formalised and "clarified" this "picture" which had been around much longer in Marxism, and was and is very widely accepted. This picture or metaphor works by analogy with a hierarchy, or a set of altitudes (think of shifting your gaze slowly from ground to sky, or following the vaults of a Gothic cathedral from floor to ceiling with your eye). In this epistemological analogy, then, concepts are seen as occupying different "levels" or "heights" in conceptual "space" and the danger is of "reducing" or "conflating" concepts at a more "abstract" "level" with concepts at a more "concrete" "level." (The parallelism between this metaphor of knowledge and a very similar hierarchical metaphor or "picture" of society is not of course accidental, and it leads to yet further confusions.).

But this metaphor is not useless. It serves certain purposes quite well, notably the purpose of positing a "space" in which things can be "separated." But like nearly all analogies it carrys certain dangers (dangers which are immensely increased, one might add, if it is not recognised as a metaphor or analogy at all, because it has been "naturalised" with a certain intellectual tradition). The danger in this particular case is that this picture of conceptualising "represents" as different "levels" ("levels of abstraction") what are in fact different purposes for conceptualising. Marx uses the term "capitalism" to mean (roughly) "form of economy" when he has certain explanatory and descriptive purposes in mind. He uses it to mean (roughly) "form of society" when he has yet other purposes in mind, and he also uses it to mean (roughly) an "enemy" or "object of struggle" when yet other purposes are uppermost in his mind.

Now what difference does it make if we change the conceptual analogy or "picture" from "levels of abstraction" to "different purposes?" Well, one difference we make immediately is that we simultaneously "recast" the picture we have of "reductionism." The danger of "reductionism" is now seen as the danger of entirely subordinating some purposes (say descriptive or analytical purposes) to others (say political or revolutionary purposes). The most obvious form which this danger might take would be to select for description or analysis only those elements in capitalism which could be interpreted as

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showing both the possibility and necessity of its overthrow. Personally I think this is a much more direct and exact way of posing the question of "reductionism" (i.e., this is what the danger of "reductionism" really does consist in) than the way it is posed (as a

"conceptual space" question leading to formulations like "relative autonomy") in the Althusserian metaphor. But there is another advantage to this alternative "picture" or

analogy, for it also draws attention to an equal and opposite danger to the one above, i.e., the danger of totally separating descriptive and analytical purposes from revolutionary ones. Since I believe that when Althusser rendered "capitalism" as "the capitalist mode of production" this separation is what did in fact happen, I want now to explore this

danger.

If one does make this separation, it is clear what then happens. "capitalism" becomes the name of something: "capitalism" becomes the name which we give to a a certain form of economy and society. And in that case the central conceptual question becomes "how are we to apply the name correctly?" When the question is posed in this way, Marxists answer it in the way that "we all" answer questions about the application of names. "Is that my old friend Brian Roberts? Well, he certainly has that stooped walk, that mass of curly brown hair, that semi-permanent frown. Yes it is ... .!" etc. "Is this a

capitalist society? Well, it certainly has capitalist economic enterprises, there is some free wage labour, the law of value does operate." In short, to decide whether the name is correctly applied or not, one adduces criteria by which we "recognise" a society as capitalist (criteria mainly drawn from Capital). But of course just as we can be "wrong" or "uncertain" in applying a proper name to a human being, so we can be wrong or uncertain in applying criteria to a society. ("He did have the stoop and the hair, but when I got closer he was altogether fatter and had a much more florid complexion. Odd, I could have sworn..." "The form of subordination of labour to capital makes the matter difficult to determine. Many wage labourers maintain access to land, and their other means of production, while often rented or supplied by the landlord, remain under their managerial control.. .".)

But here, of course, my analogy breaks down. For whereas if I am curious enough or determined enough I can usually "be sure" or "become sure" whether "it was Brian Roberts or not", if some of my criteria "fit" my case study but others do not, I may remain uncertain whether I should apply the name "capitalism" or not. I may have to make supplementary theoretical decisions about which of these criteria are "essential" and which are "secondary" in order to resolve this uncertainty'. And if I cannot adequately ground or justify these decisions about " essentiality'", and "secondariness," I may come to feel that any decision I make, whether to withhold or apply the name, is arbitrary.

What I am suggesting here is that in these "mixed" or "marginal" or "difficult" cases such decisions will be arbitary (the feeling of "arbitrariness" and "formalism" will be a quite proper, justified feeling), SO LONG AS ONE CONTINUES TO USE "CAPITALISM" SIMPLY AS A NAME. But now, bring back the third use of "capitalism." Conceive "capitalism" as an enemy, i.e. as a form of economy and society to be overthrown and as a form of economy and society out of which a socialist transformation can be made. Now turn your attention back to your case study (say it is India). You may previously have approached empirical research on India looking for an answer to the question "Is there a capitalist mode of production in India?" or "what is the dominant mode of production in India? "Given the Althusserian rendering of mode of

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production this is bound, I am arguing, to end in a decision to withhold or apply a name. But in what I believe is its properly Marxist use, the question "Is there a capitalist mode of production in India?" is just another way of asking, is just another form of words for "Is a socialist transformation possible in India?" And if you address that question to your case study you are much more likely to get a definite answer, and certainly an answer which is in no way "arbitrary" or "formal." Of course if description and analysis are not to be subordinated to political purposes, then the answer must, at the beginning of research, be "an open question," as we say. The possible answer must be "Yes" or "No." The possible answer can be "probably, and in the near future" or "most unlikely, certainly in the forseeable future." And in discovering that answer one must certainly give attention to forms of exploitation and accumulation, class relations, class consciousness, the role and nature of the state, etc. (In other words the full Marxist descriptive and analytical apparatus would come into play.) But the aridity and the formalism will be gone. The answer you get to this question may of course disappoint you. But it will be a much more substantive and political disappointment (not a "conceptual" or "theoretical" one) and, indeed, so it should be.

Now there is an obvious objection to this. One can imagine the poor researcher of India saying, "But just a moment. If I conclude that a socialist transformation is not possible in India, then, on your account, I am concluding that India is not a capitalist society, and, conversely, if I conclude that a socialist transformation is possible in India I am concluding that India is a capitalist society. But surely these two issues must be separable in theory and in practice?" To this I would wish to reply "No, the position you have just outlined is the position to which Marx (or at least the Marx of Capital) was committed. Only fully capitalist societies can be transformed into socialism." "But then doesn't everything turn upon what you mean by 'socialism?"' "Yes, indeed it does. I am arguing that Marx's concept of socialism presupposes both the economic structure and the 'bourgeois' political forms of advanced capitalism." "But then does that not entirely prejudge the result I will obtain in my investigation of India? On this account there cannot be a socialist transformation of India since I already know that India is not a capitalist society like, for example, the USA or France." But the reply to this is "Do not understand 'only fully developed capitalist societies can be transformed into socialism' as a kind of tautological rule (i.e., as a rule for the use of Marxist language) understand it as A HYPOTHESIS TO BE VALIDATED OR INVALIDATED both by 'empirical observation' and (more importantly) by your actions and the actions of the peasants and workers of India (and the workers of France, and the USA). It was based on historical observation and it may not be a correct hypothesis, or at least not invariantly so. It does not preclude the future or human praxis. "'6

IV Marx and "Pre-Capitalist" Modes of Production

Finally, let me make a supplementary point about "pre-capitalist" modes of production, but a point which can also be taken as an example of a Wittgensteinian, rather than Althusserian approach to Marxist concepts. Once again I feel that a great deal of confusion has arisen among Marxists and others because inadequate attention has been given to Marx's purpose in deploying these concepts. To save time and space let me once again offer an analogy. Think of a painting (say "The Potato Eaters"). Two gaunt brightly lit figures are in the foreground. In the background are a number of dark shadowy figures. Imagine now an observer of this painting who is a technically skilled painter but

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who has no aesthetic sense. He stands, nose up, to this painting and complains "all but two of these figures are very badly drawn and lit. Their shapes are indistinct, many of their facial features unclear. I can improve this painting enormously by bringing the standard of drawing and painting of these other figures up to the standard of the best two. " He sets about his work with a will! Unclear facial features are clearly sketched in. Light replaces shade. Dark indistinct brush strokes are replaced by thicker, clearer, brighter colours and definite lines. Then he steps back from the painting to admire his work and - oh dear! - the painting has changed beyond recognition. The two foreground figures are no longer in the foreground. They no longer have that same demonic and frantic quality. The whole "mood" and "feeling" of the painting has been altered and a rather flat group portrait of some colourful rustics stares out at us from the canvas.

The point of this analogy is that I believe that much recent Marxist scholarship has approached Marx's "sketchy" (a not inappropriate word!) remarks on pre-capitalist modes of production (and especially perhaps the Formen in the Grundrisse) rather in the spirit that our technically skilled philistine approached "The Potato Eaters." Many recent scholars have been so obsessed with the "sketchiness" and "inadequacy" or "lack of development" of Marx's remarks on "feudalism" or "the Asiatic mode" or the "German" or "Slave" modes when examined in detail, in "close up" as it were, that they have never stopped to ask themselves "why are these 'remarks' like this? i.e. why are they here, what is their role or function in the discourse?" And of course once one asks this question the answer emerges clearly. THEY ARE THERE TO THROW PARTICULAR ASPECTS OR CHARACTERISTICS OF CAPITALISM AND OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM INTO RELIEF as it were (principally by means of contrast and comparison, either explicit or implicit). Given Marx's own particular purposes, their "sketchiness" far from being a weakness is a strength, for it simply "expresses" or "shows" that Marx is interested only in describing or analysing those features of pre-capitalist modes of production which do throw light on capitalism, and for him to do more would simply be "distracting." But of course there are many features of the economy, society and culture of the pre-capitalist world which do not throw much light on capitalism, and these are not merely "interesting in themselves," they may well need to be brought into the picture if a proper Marxist account of these societies is to be provided.

But the point is this (and I think that this analogy will stretch a little further), if your aim is to do that, it may not - I can put it no stronger than this for to a degree it is an empirical question - be a particularly good idea to "build on" what Marx has provided at all. For this would be the equivalent of obliterating the background (and the foreground) in "The Potato Eaters." One might be better advised to begin with an empty canvas. For after all, what one really wants here is just a different picture painted with different purposes in mind. Or certainly that is true if you are an historian of medieval Europe, or of early modern India, or of tenth century West Africa, rather than a historian of capitalism. Of course you may be able to take some elements from Marx's "sketches" and fill them out or rearrange them, but the degree of "filling out" and "rearranging" you may have to do here might be considerable. And after all (to squeeze the very last drop from this analogy) if what you want to do is to paint a group of cheery colourful peasants it is just unnecessarily hard work (as well as philistine) to "start from" "The Potato Eaters."

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1. I shall not include the usual references here, since they can be found in the bibliography. I also think that part of the current problem resides in too much reading of the same kind of literature, all of it trapped within the same basic organising assumptions. As the notes below will indicate, I think that the solutions to some of our problems will be found in widening the scope of our reading.

2. For a brilliant statement of the parallels between Wittgenstein's latter philosophy and

philosophical positions arrived at by Marx in the mid-1840s, see Rubinstein 1981 and Manser 1973.

3. Good introductions to this philosophy and its wider significance are to be found in Pitkin 1973 and Cavell 1976, chapter 2.

4. Wittgenstein (1963, par. 38, 132, 281) does not of course mean "idle" in the sense of

"lazy", but in the sense we employ when we speak of an engine 'idling'. Wittgenstein suggests that much philosophical and conceptual "puzzlement" arises from using language in a way which detaches words from their normal context of use. The result is rather similar to the wondrous maneouvres one can undertake with a gear shift if you detach the gear box from the drive shaft.

5. "Fit" and "fitting" are of course themselves metaphors in this use, and ones quite often found in epistemological discourse. Wittgenstein (1963, par. 136-8, 182, 216, 537) has much to

say about 'fitting' and the conceptual confusions to which it can lead. 6. This implies that "capitalism" in Marx's discourse functions as what, since Austin (1979)

have been termed "semi-performative" words. "Semi-performatives" are words whose meaning embraces both a cognitive and an active element. That is, semi-performative words may describe "states of affairs", but the truth or accuracy of this description depends on something happening or

being done after the description, and this "something" may be either an act of the user of the word and/or the actions of others. Just in case this seems rather exotic or puzzling, it should be noted that

many quite ordinary words are semi-performatives. Thus third person uses of the verb "to expect" are usually semi-performative, as are many uses of the verb 'to remember', and (most importantly in this context) may uses of the verb "to know" (and therefore many "knowledge statements") and "to be certain" (and therefore many "certainties"). In my view, as used by Marx, the noun

"capitalism" is a semi-performative, and so is 'socialism'. Performative (the verb "to promise" is a full performative) and semi-performative concepts are of course the concepts which we would

expect an active purposeful knower to possess. Re-read the "Theses on Feuerbach" (and especially the first and second Theses) in the light of this. I believe these Theses are far more profound than

many Marxists have understood.

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suggestions for a fresh start on an exhausted debate

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