请将“METHODOLOGICAL CRITIQUE

The Ableitungsdebatte is methodologically self-conscious in a way that is alien to the stamocap approach considered as a whole. Indeed form analysis is inspired in part through dissatisfaction with the basic method and/or reformist implications of stamocap theories and it tries to return to the methodological and substantive theoretical concerns of Marx (e.g., Altvater, 1971, p. 99; Ebbighausen and Winkelmann, 1974, pp. 27-35 and passim; Gerstenberger, 1972, pp. 134-135; idem, 1976, pp. 84-86; Müller and Neusüss, 1970, pp. 15-16;Tristram, 1974, pp. l08-123; Wirth, 1972, pp. 12-14, 18-19; idem, 1973, pp. 298-312). However, while form derivation might seem methodologically superior to the subsumptionism of the ‘monopoly-theoretical’ tradition in stamocap theory, it is itself subject to various unresolved methodological problems and theoretical difficulties. Let us consider them.

A basic presupposition of form analysis is that reality comprises a complex structured whole whose elements have a certain autonomy within an overall unity. Thus the economic and the political are considered as different but complementary moments in the reproduction of the social whole constituted by capitalism and they are also characterised by a distinctive ‘separation-in-unity’. This view bears some similarities to the Althusserian structuralist school in its rejection of crude economic reductionism and in its insistence on analyzing the connections between the economic and political moments of the capitalist mode of production. Thus the Althusserians argue that a mode of production (and, by extension, a social formation) is a complex structured whole, comprises several relatively autonomous regions which nonetheless condition each other, is characterised byte dominance of one region (economic, juridico-political, or ideological respectively) over the other regions, and is subject to economic determination in the last instance in so far as the mode of reproduction of the relations of production assigns the dominant role to one or other of these regions (see Althusser, 1965, pp. 151-218; Althusser et al., 1968; Poulantzas, PPSC, pp. 12-33; and, for subsequent self-criticism, Althusser, 1976; and Balibar, 1975, pp. 203-246). But there are two major differences between the form derivation and Althusserian structuralist approaches to capital as an ensemble of social relations. In considering these differences we can better understand the nature and limits of these related traditions.

First, whereas most form analyses tend to rely on theories of fetishism to account for the subjective moment of social relations and otherwise concentrate on the articulation between the economic and the political, the Althusserians have stressed the discursive interpellation of subjects as the crucial mechanism of ideological practice and traced its implications for economic and political struggles. In this context ‘interpellation’ embraces all the diverse mechanisms through which biological individuals and collective agents are discursively recruited to specific positions in social relations and endowed with a corresponding sense of self-identity. Theories of interpellation and fetishism agree in rejecting the argument that individuals are pre-given, unitary, free-willed subjects but they disagree fundamentally about the processes through which individuals acquire subjectivity. Thus, while theories of fetishism tend to treat consciousness as an epiphenomenon of relations of production and/or as a complex ideological effect determined in the last instance by the economic and serving simultaneously to support and mystify economic relations, theories of interpellation stress that there are distinct mechanisms of subjectivation which have their own conditions of existence and fields of operation and which can constitute a distinct terrain of ideological class struggle with major repercussions on the economic and political regions. This emphasis is salutary and marks an important advance on theories of fetishism. In particular the latter operate economistically through establishing commodity fetishism as the model for other regions and also adopt a subsumptionist approach in reducing all forms of ideological domination to fetishism. Furthermore, where attempts have been made to go beyond theories of fetishism, there is a depressing tendency to substitute an analysis of the opposition between general and particular interests without regard to their complex mediations and immediately discursive character. In contrast theories of interpellation are able to relate the definition of interests to specific discursive mechanisms and to consider how particular and general interests are articulated through the exercise of hegemony.

Second, and just as seriously, while the Althusserians are rather perfunctory in their treatment of economic determination in the last instance (although this is a principle to which they subscribe) and typically focus on the specific mechanisms of the juridico-political and ideological regions as if they were fully autonomous from the economic, the form derivation theorists give analytic and causal priority to economic categories in deriving the form and functions of the capitalist state and legal order. This contrast is worth noting because Holloway and Picciotto claim that form derivation theories actually start from the historical materialist categories of the capital relation as a whole rather than from economic categories taken in isolation (Holloway and Picciotto, 1977, pp. 78, 82, 85-86; idem, 1978, pp. 3-4, 10, 14-15, 17-18, 26). If this means simply that the capital relation encompasses more than economic relations and is irreducible to an epiphenomenal base-superstructure relationship, it is perfectly acceptable; it is unacceptable, however, if it implies that the capital relation is an essentially unitary ensemble of social relations with analytic and causal priority over its elements. Indeed, while Marx certainly criticised bourgeois economics for focusing on the surface forms of economic relations and treating them as relations between things (pace Holloway and Picciotto), his critique of political economy did not involve the substitution of historical materialist categories (whatever these might be) for economic categories tout court but rather the development of an epistemologically realist, multi-level account moving from the abstract to the concrete and aiming to explain the form of the capitalist economy, its conditions of existence, its laws of motion, and its social effects. In this context Marx indicated that the anatomy of civil society and the state could be deciphered from ‘the specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of the direct producers’ (Marx, C3, p. 791, emphasis added). This is certainly the approach adopted by other form derivationists and, indeed, Holloway and Picciotto themselves also derive the ‘doubling’ of the capital relation into economic and political forms from the nature of commodity exchange and its overdetermination by the commodification of labour-power (Holloway and Picciotto, 1977, pp. 78-79). In short, at the same time as respecting the necessity for political conditions of existence of the economic and recognising the intervention of the political into the economic region, it is also necessary to respect their differences and to take as starting point the form of appropriation of surplus-labour. This is the strength of the form derivation approach in comparison with the ‘politicist’ tendencies of Althusserianism and neo-Gramscian approaches (see chapter 4) and it should not be confused by talk about sui generis historical materialist categories.

In this context what meaning should we attribute to the concept of ‘separation-in-unity’? Its diacritical function is clear. It tries to distinguish the form derivation approach from crude economic reductionism in which the form and functions of the state are held to correspond inevitably and automatically with the needs of capital and from the twin deviation of ‘politicism’ with its assumption of the complete autonomy of the political region and the state. But it nonetheless runs the risk of conflating economic and political relations as production relations and thereby reducing the political to its (relatively autonomous) role in bourgeois reproduction. And it also runs the risk of essentialising the moment of unity rather than separation so that the latter becomes a subordinate, functionally necessary element in the reproduction of this unity. Such essentialism would ultimately render the particularisation or separation of the state illusory and present its apparent autonomy as a ruse of capital. This would avoid economism only at the expense of reducing the state to the needs of the self-reproduction of capital seen as a relation that is simultaneously economic and political. Why should one assume that the combination of economic and political practices together can assure the reproduction of capital when the economic alone are insufficient? Indeed, as Holloway and Picciotto themselves argue, this unity is far from automatic and essential: it must be reproduced through specific class practices. But, if one accepts that the so-called ‘separation-in-unity’ is a problematic and contingent result of specific practices of ‘societalisation’, it cannot be privileged theoretically and invoked without explanation or mediation to account for the form of state and its functions in capitalism. Indeed it is a further strength of the form derivation approach that it proceeds beyond mere ‘capital logic’ to establish that the particularisation of the state renders its functionality on behalf of capital deeply problematic. In this context the concept of ‘separation-in-unity’ cannot serve as an unconditional principle of explanation for bourgeois reproduction but only as a point of reference for assessing the effects of societalisation practices.

This critique leads to another problem with form derivation, that is, the nature of the relation between logical derivation and historical explanation. Once one denies that history is simply an effect of the logically necessary selfrealisation of capital and concedes that class struggle (however defined and mediated) makes a difference, what sense is there in attempting to derive the form and functions of the state from the categories of capital as an ensemble of social relations? An adequate answer must specify the relation between capitalism and class struggle and also examine the nature of historical explanation.”翻译为中文