Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture

REMARK: 1 Dialectic and metaphysics

REMARK 1: DIALECTIC AND METAPHYSICS To speak about time is, in general, to speak about metaphysics or ontology. Now, this can seem strange, for Marx is certainly an antimetaphysical thinker. Indeed, insofar as Marx’s philosophy is based on dialectic, it is an antimetaphysical philosophy. In fact, dialectical thinking represents one of the ways in which Western philosophy has tried to overcome metaphysics. Hence, dialectic and metaphysics have often been contrasted as opposite. The opposition between dialectic and metaphysics can be reduced to the opposition, within Presocratic philosophy, between Heraclitus and Parmenides . Supposedly, the former says that everything constantly changes, everything is in flux; the latter that nothing ever changes, that everything remains the same. The former presents a philosophy of becoming; the latter a philosophy of permanence. However, this view is not necessarily correct. Both Hegel and Heidegger have shown the fundamental agreement of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Moreover, reality itself shows—as soon as one thinks a little about it—that becoming and permanence cannot be in a position of mutual exclusion, but, rather, that the one cannot be without the other. The correct view would then be that things change and yet do not change; or rather, according to Aristotle’s solution to the Presocratic challenge , they change in some respects but do not change in others.14 The Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola, who corresponded with Engels in the course of a few years, explains how the opposition between dialectic and metaphysics only holds insofar as one uses “metaphysics ” in a pejorative sense; but this is then only vulgar metaphysics. Yet, this is the sense given to it by Engels himself who extended Hegel’s characterization of the ontologies of Wolff and other German philosophers (Labriola 1965: 190–191). Thus, in his Antidüring, Engels used “metaphysics ” to characterize a modality of thinking that opposes the genetic and dialectic understanding of the order of things (Labriola 1965: 222). It is this sense of metaphysics that one understands even with respect to fundamental Marxian categories such as commodity fetishism, money, and money as capital, as well as others. Yet, Labriola says, this is not the only meaning of metaphysics. This opposition, made fundamental in the dogmatic and false Marxism of Stalin,15 is really without any philosophical foundation and only generates a dangerous distortion—a distortion not only of Marxism but also of philosophy and thinking. The belief that by rejecting metaphysics and only embracing dialectic one finds the ultimate and most enduring truth, only turns dialectic itself into a metaphysics of the worst kind. Remark 75 ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE GRUNDRISSE AND CAPITAL The question of dialectic raises the question of the relation of Marx to Hegel, as well as the question of the relation of the Grundrisse to Capital. According to Negri (1991a), these questions are resolved by denying anything which is more than a terminological and conceptual resemblance between Hegel and Marx and by establishing the Grundrisse as autonomous from Capital. For Negri, the Grundrisse is not a rough draft to be used for philological purposes, but a political text in its own right. Indeed, the Grundrisse is for him superior to Capital, for the openness of the former makes possible what the objectified categories of the latter impede: the action by revolutionary subjectivity (Negri 1991a: 8–9).16 At the end of his book, Negri denies the dialectic, “that eternal formula of Judeo-Christian thought, that circumlocution for saying—in the Western world—rationality” (p. 189). Rosdolsky—by contrast, and before Negri—sees what he constantly calls the Rough Draft as “a massive reference to Hegel, in particular to his Logic” (Rosdolsky 1977: xiii) and considers superficial the view that Marx’s relation to Hegel is only terminological and external. Furthermore, as the title of his book explicitly says, the Grundrisse is for Rosdolsky a preparation to Capital. However, he warns that one “should not... exaggerate the similarity of the two works” (p. 51). And pointing to the transformation of money into capital as an important moment of this similarity, he concludes: “Both are the product of Marx’s dialectical method... The difference lies only in the method of presentation ” (pp. 189–190; emphasis added). It is evident that the views of Rosdolsky and Negri are diametrically opposed, yet their opposition does not require that readers of the Grundrisse or of Marx in general take sides with either one or the other. As Rosdolsky’s reference to Schumpeter shows,17 his interpretation tends...