请将“It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes, in turn, are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price, etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations … The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the unity of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought … But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being. [Marx 1973, pp. 100–1; emphasis added]

The ‘simplest determinations’ can only be understood as doing (or the two-fold existence of labour): this is surely the pivot, the turning-point which gives meaning to the retracing of the journey.

The same point is made repeatedly in Capital, as, for example, in a concise remark in a footnote in which Marx starts from the critique of technology and moves on to the critique of religion:

It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. [Marx 1965, pp. 372–3]

Why does Marx insist that this is the only scientific method? That it is theoretically more demanding is clear, but why does this matter? And how are we to understand the genetic connection? The remark on the critique of religion suggests an answer. The reference to discovering ‘by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion’ is a reference to Feuerbach and his argument that belief in the existence of a god is an expression of human self-alienation, that human self-alienation, in other words, is the ‘earthly core’ of religion. The second part of Marx’s sentence, on developing ‘from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations’, refers to Marx’s own criticism of Feuerbach, to the effect that self-alienation must be understood not in an abstract, but in a practical (and therefore historical) sense. Feuerbach is correct in pointing out that god is a human creation (and not vice versa), but the process of creation must be understood practically, sensually. The concept of ‘god’ must be understood as the product of human thought, and this thought, in turn, is not an individual ahistorical act, but an aspect of social practice in certain historical conditions.

The criticism of Feuerbach has important political implications. Religion presents humans as objects, as beings created by God, the sole creator, the genesis of all things, the source of all power, the only Subject. Feuerbach’s criticism of religion puts humans in the centre of the world, but Feuerbach’s human is trapped in a timeless self-alienation. Humans are at once deified and rendered powerless. Once the production of god is understood as a social, historical human practice, however, then humans are no longer trapped in a timeless vacuum of powerlessness: it becomes possible to think of a time of non-alienation, of different sociohistorical conditions in which humans would no longer produce god, would no longer produce their own objectification.

Marx’s critique of the political economists follows the same pattern as his critique of Feuerbach. In Capital, his attention has moved to a much more powerful god than the god of religion, namely Money (value). Money, in everyday thought, proclaims itself as ruler of the world, as the sole source of power. Ricardo (taking the place of Feuerbach) has shown that that is not so: he has discovered ‘by analysis’ that the ‘earthly core of the misty creations’ of economics (the religion of money) is human labour, as the substance of value. However, Ricardo treats value in the same way as Feuerbach treats god: as a timeless, ahistorical feature of the human condition:

Political economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour-time by the magnitude of that value. These formulae, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulae appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself. [1965, pp. 80–1]

The result is that Ricardo, like Feuerbach, puts humans at the centre of the world, but leaves humanity entrapped in a timeless, unchanging vacuum of powerlessness. It is only by tracing the production of value and money by social, historical human practice that the critique of the Power of Money (and powerlessness of humans) becomes a theory of human anti-power, of the anti-power of human practice.

Genetic criticism is crucial, therefore, to the understanding of existing phenomena as historically specific, and therefore changeable, forms of social relations. In a footnote to the passage on political economy just quoted, Marx says:

Even Adam Smith and Ricardo, the best representatives of the school, treat the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connexion with the inherent nature of commodities. The reason for this is not solely because their attention is entirely absorbed in the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value-form of the product is not only the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production, and stamps the production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by Nature for every state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the diferentia specifica of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form, and of its further developments, money-form, capital-form, &c. [1965, p. 81]

It is genetic criticism that opens up the question of form, that helps us to understand that our power-to exists in the form of being denied, that points us towards the all-important question of the force and reality of that which exists in the form of being denied.

These examples make it clear that the genetic method is not just a question of applying a superior logic.3 Marx’s method is sometimes described as based on the logical ‘derivation’ of categories (money from value, capital from money, and so on). This is correct, but in so far as the derivation, or the genetic link, is understood in purely logical terms, then the core of Marx’s approach is misunderstood. The claim that Marx’s method is scientific is not a claim that its logic is superior, or that it is more rigorous, but that it follows in thought (and therefore consciously takes part in) the movement of the process of doing. Genesis can only be understood as human genesis, as human power-to. Marx’s method is above all politically important.


III

Criticism, understood as an analytical and genetic movement, is the movement of defetishisation, the theoretical voice of the scream. Criticism is both destructive and regenerative. It is destructive because it is directed relentlessly against everything that is. It destroys is-ness itself. No identitarian statement, no claim (whether ‘left’, ‘right’ or ‘centre’) that something is something, can be immune from the destructive force of criticism. However, criticism is not solely destructive: the destruction of being is at the same time the recuperation of doing, the restoration of human power-to. In so far as criticism destroys that which denies, it is also the emancipation of that which is denied. Criticism is emancipatory to the extent to which it is destructive.

The recuperation of doing is, of course, just a theoretical recuperation. The being which we criticise, the objectivity which we criticise, is not a mere illusion, it is a real illusion. There is a real separation of doing and done, of subject and object. The objects which we create really do stand over against us as something alien, as things that are. Genetic criticism involves the recuperation of our lost subjectivity, the understanding that those alien objects are the product of our own self-alienated subjectivity, but the objects do not cease to be alienated objects just because of our criticism. Their objectivity is not the result of our lack of understanding but of the self-alienated process of work which produced them. To say this is not at all to minimise the importance of theory, but to make the obvious point that theory makes sense only if it is understood as part of the more general struggle for the real recuperation of doing.

In the context of this struggle, it is important to emphasise that the doing that is recovered is not an individual but a social doing. In order to understand the genesis of phenomena, in order to understand the origin of fetishised appearances, we are always brought back to social doing and the form in which it exists. Understanding the origin of money, for example, is not a question of saying ‘x made it’, but seeing that money is generated by the organisation of human doing as labour to produce commodities for a market. Money, like value, like the state, like capital, are, as Marx points out, forms of social relations, but it is crucial to understand that social relations are relations between doers, between active subjects. The doing that is recovered through genetic criticism is social doing, what we have called the ‘social flow of doing’.”翻译为中文