Beyond Habermas: Rethinking Critical Theories of Communication
6.2. Economic Reductionism: Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Alfred Sohn-Rethel3 (1899–1990) was a Marxist economist and philosopher.
He stood in close academic contact with Adorno. After having fled from Ger-many, he lived in Great Britain and moved back to Germany in the early 1970s.
Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology is his main book.
Sohn-Rethel (1978) is interested in how economic forms and thought forms are related. He conceptually connects the base and the ‘mental superstructure’
(2) by constructing mental production in analogy to commodity abstraction.
Beyond Habermas: Rethinking Critical Theories of Communication 179
Marx would not have worked out a theory of mental and manual labour, which would however be important because abolishing the division of labour is a ‘pre-condition of a classless society’ (21).
6.2.1. Real Abstraction
Commodity abstraction means that for Marx, value-generating labour (abstract labour) abstracts from single use-values and exchange ‘excludes use’ (28).
Human minds in such exchange are however concretely reflecting on what they are doing. ‘The abstractness of their action will […] escape the minds of the people performing it. In exchange, the action is social, the minds are private’
(29). Sohn-Rethel terms the abstraction that can be found in the capitalist pro-cess itself a real abstraction (20). Speaking of a real abstraction also implies that this kind of abstraction is distinct from what Sohn-Rethel terms the ‘thought abstraction in the theory of knowledge’ (21).
Sohn-Rethel distinguishes communication ‘by signs’ from commodity exchange (40). Commodity exchange would be practical solipsism:
commodity exchange does not depend on language, on what we com-municate to each other. Nothing regarding the essence of things need be communicated. Some semantics for ‘yes’ and ‘no’, for pointing to this or that, and to indicate quantity, is sufficient to the essentials of a transac-tion of exchange whether it is carried on between two village gossips or between two strangers who do not speak each other’s language’ (41).
Commodity exchange ‘impels solipsism’ (41–42).
6.2.2. Conceptual Abstraction
For Sohn-Rethel, the equivalent to exchange abstraction in the world of knowl-edge is abstract thinking (58) and conceptual thought (67). The separation between head and hand would in the thought world have found its first mani-festation in Greek philosophy (66). Abstract conceptual thinking would find its typical expression in mechanistic, quantifying, mathematical reasoning that for Sohn-Rethel consists of ‘concepts deriving from exchange abstraction’ and is based on the ‘logic of intellectual labour divided from manual labour’ (73).
The separation of intellectual and manual activities would be a consequence of class-based societies (4).
According to Sohn-Rethel, twentieth-century capitalism’s abstract thought in the form of the separation of manual and mental labour found its expression in Taylorism and automation. The ‘unity of mental and manual work’ (181), the abolition of the division of labour, would be a precondition for the establish-ment of socialism.
Sohn-Rethel’s approach is politically important because it stresses that mech-anistic thinking and the division of labour are problematic dimensions of class-based societies that need to be thought of in socialist strategies. But he situ-ates communication and knowledge outside of the economy, which becomes evident in his distinction between the economy’s real abstraction and knowl-edge and communication’s conceptual abstraction. Sohn-Rethel makes a strict separation between the economy and culture. The phenomenon of cultural and communication labour makes it difficult to separate these two spheres. A software engineer creates a highly abstract and mechanistic form of concep-tual knowledge: software code. This code is an intellecconcep-tual product. It is part of the Sohn-Rethelian real economy in a double sense: a) Abstract and concrete labour produce software that b) is sold as a commodity. The abstract logic of the commodity and of exchange and the abstract logic of thought cannot be separated in this case. The one can also not be reduced to the other. Abstract thought and labour rather collapse into one: the software commodity is objecti-fied abstract thought and the result of abstract labour.
6.2.3. Knowledge and the Economy
Sohn-Rethel does, however, not separate the economy and knowledge in a dualist manner. He rather reduces knowledge to the economy by arguing that the economic world determines the thought world. He speaks in this context of a conversion, replication and correlation: ‘the real abstraction [is] being converted to its ideal reflection into intellectual form’ (61, see also 31). The
‘basic categories of intellectual labour […] are replicas of the elements of real abstraction’ (76). ‘Capital and mathematics correlate: the one wields its influ-ence in the fields of economy, the other rules the intellectual powers of social production’ (112). Formulations such as the ones in which the real abstraction is converted into the ideal reflection, or where the intellectual is a replica of the real, or in which there is a correlation, imply that the economy’s real abstraction determines culture’s intellectual abstraction. Sohn-Rethel’s approach in the last instance is a form of economic reductionism and determinism.
6.2.4. Money as the Language of Commodities
Sohn-Rethel’s dual separation of the real and knowledge also results in the fact that he considers economic exchange as being separate from communication.
He argues that commodity exchange is a practical solipsism that does not need communication. This separation is not just questioned by informational exchange-values such as commercial software, but also by the communicative logic of exchange-value itself. Money is a particular form of communication that is instrumental, non-verbal, mediated, anonymous, impersonal, abstract, fetishised (abstracted from direct social relations), reified, and void of
mean-Beyond Habermas: Rethinking Critical Theories of Communication 181
ing. Money communicates commodity prices on the market. Money is the form of communication that facilitates the abstract equalisation of commodi-ties on the market in the exchange process. Marx therefore speaks of value as the ‘language of commodities’:
We see, then, that everything our analysis of the value of commodities previously told us is repeated by the linen itself, as soon as it enters into association with another commodity, the coat; Only it reveals its thoughts in a language with which it alone is familiar, the language of commodities. In order to tell us that labour creates its own value in its abstract quality of being human labour, it says that the coat, in so far as it counts as its equal, i.e. is value, consists of the same labour as it does itself. In order to inform us that its sublime objectivity as a value differs from its stiff and starchy existence as a body, it says that value has the appearance of a coat, and therefore that in so far as the linen itself is an object of value [Wertding], it and the coat are as like as two peas. Let us note, incidentally, that the language of commodities also has, apart from Hebrew, plenty of other more or less correct dia-lects. The German word ‘Wertsein’ (to be worth), for instance, brings out less strikingly than the Romance verb ‘valere’, ‘valer’, ‘valoir’ that the equating of commodity B with commodity A is the expression of value proper to commodity A. Paris vaut bien une messe! (Marx 1867, 143–144).
In Marx’s equation (20 yards of linen = 1 coat = 2 ounces of gold), money has the role that it makes commodities commensurable and comparable in the exchange process by communicating prices. Marx, other than Sohn-Rethel, saw money as a peculiar form of economic communication.
6.3. Cultural Reductionism: Jean Baudrillard