Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour is one of the major texts of post-war Marxist theory. A tremendous influence on the major writers of the Frankfurt School, with ongoing relevance to current debates about value, abstraction, and domination, Sohn-Rethel’s ideas are here presented at their fullest scope and with their greatest theoretical clarity.
Out of print for many years, this new Historical Materialism edition contains a new introduction by Chris O’Kane, an afterword by Chris Arthur, and a compilation of the responses to Intellectual and Manual Labour published in the Italian journal Lotta Continua, including a substantial article by Antonio Negri.
Biographical Note
Readership
Marxists, authors interested in debates around real abstraction, the value-form, and social domination, students of Kant, economic anthropology, social epistemology and historical materialism.
Table of Contents
Introduction to the Historical Materialism Edition
Chris O’Kane
Translator’s Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Part 1 Critique of Philosophical Epistemology
1 The Fetishism of Intellectual Labour
2 Can There Be Abstraction Other Than by Thought?
3 The Commodity Abstraction
4 The Phenomenon of the Exchange Abstraction
5 Economics and Knowledge
6 The Analysis of the Exchange Abstraction
7 The Evolution of Coined Money
8 Conversion of the Real Abstraction into the Conceptual Abstraction
9 The Independent Intellect
Part 2 Social Synthesis and Production
10 Societies of Production and Societies of Appropriation
11 Head and Hand in Labour
12 The Beginnings of Surplus Production and Exploitation
13 Head and Hand in the Bronze Age
14 The Classical Society of Appropriation
15 Mathematics, the Dividing-Line of Intellectual and Manual Labour
16 Head and Hand in Medieval Peasant and Artisan Production
17 The Forms of Transition from Artisanry to Science
18 The Capitalist Relations of Production
19 Galilean Science and the Dynamic Concept of Inertia
20 Bourgeois Science
Part 3 The Dual Economics of Advanced Capitalism
21 From De-socialised to Re-socialised Labour
22 A Third Stage of the Capitalist Mode of Production?
23 The Turn to Monopoly Capitalism
24 Imperialism and Scientific Management
25 The Economy of Time and ‘Scientific Management’
26 The Essentials of Taylorism
27 Critique of Taylorism
28 The Foundation of Flow Production
29 The Unity of Measurement of Man and Machine
30 The Dual Economics of Monopoly Capitalism
31 The Necessity for a Commensuration of Labour
32 The Commensuration of Labour in Action
33 The Way to Automation
34 The Curse of the Second-Nature
35 The Epoch of Transition
36 Logic of Appropriation and Logic of Production
Part 4 Historical Materialism as Methodological Postulate
37 The Theory of Reflection and Its Incompatibilities as a Theory of Science
38 Materialism Versus Empiricism
39 Marx’s Own Object Lesson
40 Necessary False Consciousness
41 The Philosophical Issue
42 The Essentially Critical Power of Historical Materialism
Afterword
Chris Arthur
Materials from Lotta Continua on Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Translated by Richard Braude
References
Index
