Amy Allen, “Dripping with Blood and Dirt from Head to Toe: Marx’s Genealogy of Capitalism in Capital, Volume 1”

We began, as is our custom, with questions:

1.        Is there a role for nature (metabolic shift, environmental consequences) as an object of inquiry in the genealogy that Amy Allen is developing?  If so, would this impinge the vindicatory aspects of genealogy?

2.        Why is there not an aspect of subjectivation in Allen’s account of Marx’s genealogy?  What would adding it bring in or offer?

3.        How does a genealogical account of Marxism square with a historically materialist methodology?  Is Allen’s account able to understand social relations in terms of historically-specific material relations (yet not posited as transhistorical laws)?

4.        What work is done by the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘historical’ in this analysis (cf. 484)?  Can we read this in terms of the distinction between ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’?

5.        Marx’s genealogy is presented as explaining capitalism as a bundle of practices—this appears to be subversive.  How do we get from an explanation of an object (capitalism) to a justification of a process (historical process)?

6.        Is the empirical style of genealogy compatible with a more teleological (though not ‘crude teleology’) account focused on ‘historical necessity’?

7.        What is the object of analysis for Marx in his genealogy?  A series of distinctions operative here includes unilinear-v-multilinear and necessary-v-contingent.  Is a mode of analysis that begins with an economic/materialist starting point consistent with multilinearity and contingency?

8.        How can we best make sense of the idea of genealogical necessity?

9.        What does genealogy get from a presentation of Marx as a genealogist that genealogy does not already have?  What does Marxism get from a presentation of Marx as a genealogy that Marxism does not already have?

 

We then turned to discussion:

Let’s begin by focusing on the object of inquiry.  Allen writes, “genealogical argument that takes capitalism as its object” (471).  We tend to see Marx’s analysis as taking capitalism not so much as the object of inquiry but as the concept that Marx’s analysis produces.

What kind of analysis does Allen present Marx as offering?  “This line of argument tends to conflate multilinearity with necessity” (483).  On Allen’s line multilinearity does not entail contingency, but is consistent with an “internal logic of necessity.”

This involves “a conception of necessity more restricted in scope” (483), one involving “multiple historical trajectories, [and that] nonetheless claims historical inevitability for the specific historical trajectory” (483).

§1: Allen reads Marx as saying that primitive accumulation is linked to the theory of surplus labor.  (Is this link one of necessity or of sufficiency?)

               Is this a Foucauldian emergence analysis?  Or an origins story?

 

We see two key moments/concepts:

Necessity:

“His ambivalent genealogy is embedded in a vindicatory historical arc.  In the arc, however, what is vindicated is not capitalism per se, but rather the historical process in which capitalism is embedded” (481).

               It’s not a universal historical trajectory, but

               the historical inevitability of a specific historical trajectory (483).

“Quoting Marx: Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation” (483).

How does necessity or historical inevitability get established?

               Empirically?

               Functionally, as in practical necessity?

               Logically, or Metaphysically?

The answer to this question remains opaque to us.

 

Vindication:

The necessity itself is what vindicates, as a kind of redemption.