Christopher J.

Ar thur
Once More on the Homology Thesis:
A Response to Smith’s Reply

I entirely agree that the main interest of this issue

is to locate criticism of capitalism in conceptually
defensible form. In a nut-shell, the difference between
us is that Tony Smith criticises capitalism for failing
to live up to the demands of Hegel’s philosophy;
whereas I think it is to be criticised precisely because
it does so. I argue this is so because it is a system of
self-moving abstraction. Obviously, we must be
reading Hegel very differently. I agree with the Marx
of 1843, 1857 and 1872 that Hegel inverts the relation
between thought and being. My innovation is to
argue that capital is also an inverted reality with a
parallel logic.

(i) With regard to Smith’s defence of Hegel: I

disagree that Hegel’s project was ‘thinking about
thinking’ (as will also be done under socialism).
Some of what Hegel says in the Logic is certainly
useful for anyone interested in this. But Hegel
himself treated this only as a moment of his
main project, to show the Idea constitutes reality,
that ‘the Idea creates Nature’, and realises itself

Historical Materialism, volume 11:1 (195–198)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003
Also available online – www.brill.nl
196 • Christopher J. Ar thur

as ‘Spirit’, as he puts it.1 Smith contests this reading of Hegel. If there

is textual evidence supporting two possible readings of Hegel, the
conclusion has to be that Hegel was muddled, not on this or that point,
but systematically muddled. Marx himself saw this; and he expressed it
by talking of a kernel and a shell. Smith concentrates on extracting the
rational kernel, but (with Moishe Postone),2 I say that the mystical shell
is also interesting because it is an absolutisation of capital’s attempt to
prove its self-creative power. Hence, the homology can be read back
into capital.3 Hegel’s ‘speculative construction’ prioritises logic and
downgrades the substantive realms to its embodiment.4 It is well-known,
since Feuerbach at least, that the transition from the Logic to the Real-
philosophie is the weakest point of his system. This transition also features
in my homology thesis because it is paralleled by the difŽculty capital
as a form has in subsuming under it the material forces of production,
centrally labour itself, and shaping them into an adequate content.
(ii) Smith makes an interesting point about whether I can match the idea
of capital (and its reconciliatory logic) with the class struggle I say is
constitutive of capital. The answer is that this hiatus is inherent to capital
itself, that in its own logic it cannot grasp its origin. Just as Marx in
1844 charged Hegel with alienated thinking thinking itself within its
estrangement, repressing true objectivity, so capital in its own self-
absorption is too locked up in the value-form to grasp that it is not
self-constituted but rests on expropriating the energies of labour and
nature. This is our critical moment which we bring from our materialism;
but, just as Hegel’s logic in its own sphere has some validity, so the
dialectic of the value-form modelling it has effectivity. The trouble with
both is the problematic interface with material reality (i.e. in capital’s
case, value versus use-value). The ‘separation’ between the logic and
the real content is right there in the Idea of capital. Contrary to Smith,
it is possible both to assert that capital, like Hegel’s ‘Idea’, claims to
encompass this reality in its own forms, while criticising it for repression
of the truth that it is not so reconcilable with its ‘others’. Capital as
self-valorising value Žnds in the use-value sphere its ‘others’, and, insofar

1
Hegel 1969, p. 592.
2
See Postone 1993.
3
See Arthur 2002.
4
See Marx 1975.
 Once More on the Homology Thesis • 197

as it conquers them, squashing them into its ‘forms’ and really subsuming
nature, need, and labour, it takes itself to be self-creative. In this context,
human beings are ‘resources’ to be managed; they cannot be recognised
as full subjects but only as ‘speaking instruments’ in the factory (albeit
as legal persons outside it). But our criticism of this is that ‘use-value
for itself’, if I may so term labour, may rebel.
(iii) Another interesting point Smith raises is that there are different ‘negations’
in Hegel. The Žrst is spirit’s negation of nature and its re-presentation
as simply the other of the idea. This negation is paralleled by capital’s
claim to have subsumed labour under the value-form. In both cases,
this requires a lot of effort on the part of spirit/capital to win its freedom,
but it is properly ‘constitutive’ of it from an idealist point of view, since
the ‘other’ is not truly so, but an initially unrecognised aspect of its own
self.5 But, from our materialist standpoint, we can criticise these claims
on the basis that nature/labour are genuine ‘others’ and are subordinated
to the idea/capital only through their alienation. In other words, the
reality, as opposed to Hegel/capital’s delusion, is that of despotism, as
in Smith’s second example of negation. If capital is self-moving abstraction,
then this complex totality – like Hegel’s ‘Idea’ – cannot do justice to its
own material basis; so, the real subsumption of labour and nature does
violence to them, and capital will pay either through revolution or
ecological collapse. But, insofar as capital has been relatively successful
in establishing its hegemony, what we experience is the freedom of
capital, but not human freedom.
(iv) What are the lessons for method of this diagnosis that we live in an
inverted world in which self-moving abstraction is hegemonic? Since
the inversion is real, it is no good counterposing to capital-fetishism ‘the
truth of the matter’. The method must present as it is the real movement
of self-valorising value, and the real subsumption of labour; but, at the
same time, achieve a critique of it through recovering the repressed
origin of the power of capital in its appropriation of material labour. In
modelling in its form Hegel’s idea, capital incorporates labour and nature
as mere bearers of its own actuality and truth. But, in reality, these are

5
‘[Spirit] negates the externality of Nature, assimilates Nature to itself and thereby
idealizes it’ (Hegel 1971, p. 13). ‘Labour is not only the use-value which confronts
capital, but, rather, it is the use-value of capital itself’ (Marx 1973, p. 297).
198 • Christopher J. Ar thur

genuine others, incorporated within capital only by force. Our method

must do justice to both moments.

References

Arthur, Christopher J. 2002, The New Dialectic and Marx’s ‘Capital’, Leiden: Brill Academic
Publishers.
Hegel, Georg W. F. 1969, The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, London: George Allen
& Unwin.
Hegel, Georg W. F. 1971, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marx, Karl 1975 [1845], ‘The Mystery of Speculative Construction’, Chapter V, Section
2, of K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family, in Marx and Engels Collected Works,
Volume 4, London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, Karl 1973, Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Postone, Moishe 1993, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.