Autonomies

Uri Gordon’s recently published essay on Fredy Perlman’s anarchist social theory “Leviathan’s Body” serves as an inspiration to return to Perlman’s writings.

Perlman’s starting point, which informs his entire body of work, is a critique of alienation as practice. Initially drawn from Marx via Isaak Illich Rubin, and later influenced by the Situationists and possibly Lefebvre, the key to this critique is the concept of fetishism, which stands for the inverted domination of social forms of alienated power over the individuals who reproduce them. Influenced by his activist experiences and by the anarchist histories he read and translated, and taking further selective cues from C. Wright Mills and possibly from Kropotkin, Perlman’s breakthrough is to generalise this account of fetishism to include but exceed productive relations. Thus, he explicitly sets the state in analytical parity with capital, theorising authority as a fetish distinct from exchange value. Implicitly, he points to various other containers for alienated human powers, including the family, religion and scholarship. In further identifying direct action with the reclamation of alienated powers, Perlman adds sociological coherence to the anarchist case against representation and for collective autonomy in social struggles.

Isaak Illich Rubin’s tragic life would be outlived by his essay of 1927, Abstract Labour and Value in Marx’s System; a fundamental work that would contribute to the emergence of value-form theory, and more recently value criticism theory, withing the Marxist theoretical tradition. For Perlman, the encounter with Rubin’s work would allow him to develop a global understanding of capitalism rooted in a reading of Marx that bound his early theory of alienation with his later concepts of reification, the fetishism of commodities, abstract labour and value. Without here plunging into the details of this reading – summarised in the text below that served as an introduction to the first English language translation of Rubin’s essay -, Perlman would come to share the conception of capitalism as a historical social system that moulded social relations and social “identities” according to the needs of commodity production (and these include goods, labour and money). The critique of capitalism cannot therefore limit itself to questions of economic distribution and political liberalism – however significant these may be -, but must extend to a criticism of labour, money, the commodity form and of the social relations that render these possible (which potentially extends beyond the factory floor and the sphere of labour as typically understood).

Rubin points out that the form which labor takes in capitalist society is the form of value: “The reification of labor in value is the most important conclusion of the theory of fetishism, which explains the inevitability of ‘reification’ of production relations among people in a commodity economy” (Rubin, p.72). Thus the theory of value is about the regulation of labor; it is this fact that most critics of the theory failed to grasp.

The question Marx raises is how the working activity of people is regulated in capitalist society. His theory of value is offered as an answer to this question. It will be shown that most critics do not offer a different answer to the question Marx raises, they object to the question. In other words, economists do not say that Marx gives erroneous answers to the question he raises, but that he gives erroneous answers to the questions they raise:

Marx asks: How is human working activity regulated in a capitalist economy?

Marx answers: Human working activity is alienated by one class, appropriated by another class, congealed in commodities, and sold on a market in the form of value.

The economists answer: Marx is wrong. Market price is not determined by labor; it is determined by the price of production and by demand. “The great Alfred Marshall” insisted that “market price — that is, economic value — was determined by both supply and demand, which interact with one another in much the same way as Adam Smith described the operation of competitive markets.”^[63]

Marx was perfectly aware of the role of supply and demand in determining market price, as will be shown below. The point is that Marx did not ask what determines market price; he asked how working activity is regulated.

This Marxist source would be of considerable importance for Perlman’s own thought, as would be quickly revealed in his reading of the May 68 events in France (Worker-Student Action Committees. France May ’68). But it would perhaps also show its limits, limits that can be summarised in the ideas of a historicism of labour (the framing of human experience-thought by capitalist commodity production) and of emancipation as reappropriation or disalienation of human creative power (the conscious and self-conscious autonomy of creation). This however will be for a future post.