On the actuality of Spinoza by Jørgen Sandemose

Presented here is a lecture by Jørgen Sandemose on Spinoza that is also a critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. Sandemose died last year on the 24th of September and we hope he to expose more to his work through publishing this lecture. He was a social activist as a member of the Communist University Association and editor of the Communist Workers’ League journal Red Flag in the 70s. After graduation, he also worked for many years in industry, more specifically at Norgas. Sandemose wrote several books, one about his father Aksel Sandemose, many about economic theory and philosophy. More of his work can be found here. The lecture presented below was given at ’The New Space’, Manhattan, March 2008.

As announced, this intervention on the status of Spinoza’s philosophy will bring with it a criticism of viewpoints in works of Antonio Negri.

Still, I shall also try to show that there surely is a rational core in what Negri is doing, in the sense that while I take his main propositions to include mystifications, there is a logic in the production of these mystifications. They follow in an understandable way from the factual exploitation in the present world.

In his book from 1981, L’anomalia selvaggia,  ”The Savage Anomaly”, Negri presented the thesis that Spinoza’s philosophy was anomalic – that is, a weird phenomenon – in 17th century Western Europe and that this was grounded in the alleged fact that the Low Countries in which he lived were anomalic too – primarily because they did not know the baroque. 

This last thesis, promoted by Johan Huizinga in a work from 1940, is significant enough. The baroque was a movement inaugurated by the counter-reformation, as a potlatch of grandiose style, presented to the subjects by almighty regents. Such regents were not to be found in the Dutch or neighboring republics. Again, this fact was related to the truly modern form of Christianity, Calvinism and other reformed beliefs, which were predominant here, and which in their turn might make the population immune to potlaches.

However, to base a contention of anomaly on the absence of the baroque hardly seems to be to the point in an analysis of Western Europe. As we should all know, it was the religious reformation, not the counter-reformation, which everywhere set the standards for what is to be called ”capitalism”.

Of the sociological features which are important here, we have the theory of pre-determination, meant to set its mark on every God-chosen person; this served to give the populace a continuous reminder of the social elite and the obedience due to it; we have the belief in bourgeois business work and calculation as a service to God, indeed, as an imitation of God; we also have the stress on the material labor process as a religious service in itself, making luxury or any activity not combined with work obsolete and sinful.

All these factors, and many that go together with them, we today recognize as features of the early style of the accumulation of capital in Western Europe. Indirectly, we also will be able to recognize them as features of Spinoza’s own philosophy.

Thus it seems relevant to ask what it is that lies behind Negri’s standpoint of a Spinozian ”anomaly”. The crucial point for him seems to be Spinoza’s alleged opposition to the tradition of political philosophy introduced by Hobbes. This Negri calls a tradition of ”transcendence”. He sees its most disastrous effects in the political philosophy of Hegel. Furthermore, he takes Spinoza to represent a standpoint of ”immanence” introduced by Machiavelli, and – says Negri – upheld by Karl Marx. So he is out to defend a line of philosophically based immanentism in the social sciences, the line Machiavelli-Spinoza-Marx.

Now, that there is an ”immanentism” in Spinoza, no one can doubt. That follows from his concept of the one all-embracing substance, which per definition cannot be determined in the least from anything outside. Here, all development is immanent, and to Spinoza, even thought is progressing according to this immanence, which is described as a movement depicted by a geometrical form. As in Descartes, the understanding of the physical world would be perfect in an sempiternian mind that acts according to geometrical principles. The advanced geometrician can in principle predict all of nature’s physical movement. By Spinoza, the implied determinism goes also for what he calls the attribute of thought, not only for physics.

This way of thinking leaves its traces also in the special field of politics. Here, Negri contends that Spinoza leads a battle against Hobbes very similar to his war against Descartes: While Descartes operated with a transcendent maker and upholder of the world and consequently accepted an Augustinian and Christian God beyond this world, Spinoza’s God was identical with his Substance. And while Hobbes looked upon the state as a power beyond, transcending the multitude and transcending the system of citizen rights and duties, Spinoza came to look at the state (so Negri rightly tells us) as a power mechanism that had its origin in the practical interaction between humans.

Now, it might be a reasonable interpretation of Hobbes that the construction of the Sovereign was a result of a mental situation common to all members of society, namely ”fear”. ”Fear” can be taken to be a sufficient explanation of the state, given some modifications. What then happens, is that the masses, the members of the ”multitude”, make a contract between themselves, excluding the one Sovereign, who is no part of the contract, and giving him an omnipotent position through the very excluding act.

Such an explanatory model is not possible for Spinoza, since a mental situation, to explain anything, must be analytically coupled with a certain bodily state. Each and every ”thing” or situation in the mental world corresponds to a definite thing or situation in the physical world. Or rather, these two, which we are apt to call distinct, are in fact just one and the same entity. It is because of certain characteristics of the human mind that we operate with them as separated. The true mental concept of a flame is the same thing as the flame, seen under a special aspect. The idea of the flame is the material flame. The crowning example is that the individual human soul is the idea of that individual’s human body. That implies that when we have ideas, they must  be mediated through activity of, or impressions on, our own personal body. The idea of another person is mediated through physical contact with physical things related to other men’s bodies, and so forth. When the mind has the idea ”flame”, it is because the body is affected by fire. However, the soul is of course not affected by it. There cannot exist interaction between soul and body. Spinoza’s point here is that no thing can interact with itself.

Back to the entity which is called ”state”, or, by Spinoza, ”imperium”: Given Spinoza’s ontology, the state has to have its immediate origins in certain situations susceptible to be exposed both as mental and material. Let us suppose, for  instance, that the genesis of the state can be explained through a consensus among men such as the one Augustine had in mind when he defined the state as ”the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love”. Such an explanation, Spinoza would say, is a halfway house. Love between humans is a mental situation of theirs. This situation has to exist as a material entity. This entity is nothing but the physical interaction between human bodies. Since all bodies belong to one and the same attribute, namlely that of extension, they can interact. If in the Dutch Republic we have a state made possible by a common agreement among citizens, a mental interaction which is identical with, let’s say, their Calvinism, then this means that there must exist, within the same Dutch republic, a material situation which is this same imperium.

Spinoza did not make any detailed analysis of this entity, or of such an example.  Let us make a try, hopefully without deviating too much from his general intention. 

If we have before us a strong mental unity amongst the members of the multitude, that implies that this strength can be verified by showing that there exists a strong material unity between the bodies of the citizens – in truth, an advanced corporation of citizens! 

If we look at 17th-century ideology and literature, it is not difficult to spot the existence of a material relation that made a remarkable impression amongst the people in general, and, especially, in the upper strata of society, namely what the English called ”manufactory”. This mode of production is the first form in which capital – which formerly mainly existed as merchant capital – makes itself felt as an independent force in the construction of material products. In fact, the contemporary tendency to look at nations as machines, steered by a king mechanic, a roi-machine or a roi-machiniste, to quote two know denominations for Louis 14th, certainly was closely related to the feeling of successful human endeavour pervading the public audience in its adoration for manufactural production.

Now, both Spinoza, Hobbes and Descartes are what we call mechanistic philosophers. It is a remarkable fact that mechanistic thinking in philosophy and in the sciences flourished not in the period when what we call machines and machinery came in extensive use in social production, but in the period preceding it, when machinery in our meaning of the term was scarcely there.

What was it that bore the name ”machine” in that age? Most often, the word meant an ”automat”, that is, a clockwork or a machinery functioning for entertainment, not for production; Newton’s conception of the universe as a machine is symptomatic.  But the word was primarily used of manufacture production proper. Being the first capitalist form of productive enterprise, ”manufactory” consisted in assembling artisans and unskilled workers under one roof, let synergetic effects be generated from their cooperation and thus ruining masses of simple commodity producers. It was the assembly of manual workers, their living, so to speak biological unity in the functioning of their work, that was apprehended as a ”machine”, or as an”engine”, to use a word to be found in a work by Adam Ferguson in 1767. The parts of this engine, Ferguson said, are the workers.

Consequently a ”machine” here is something living, a sort of biological organism. Its concept is consciously or unconsciously being modeled after the mass of cooperating workers. It is a disgusting fact that historians of philosophy do not see this feature, and even in many cases take the mechanicism of the 17th and 18th centuries to be a ”modern” theory about parts of outer nature behaving like heavy man-made metal and wires of iron; these scholars when relating to their students about Descartes’ view of the animal kingdom, may contend that a sheep is like a Volkswagen and a gazelle like a Mercedes Benz, while in reality no ideas corresponding to this was to be found in ”mechanist” theory.

Now, returning to Spinoza’s theory more specifically, we may conjecture that a view of the whole society as an active manufacture is precisely the most adequate idea for fulfilling his construction of a ”state”. His state is, in contradistinction to Hobbes’, something which is growing up through the material of bourgeois society itself. Hobbes’ and Hegel’s idea of the bourgeois state as an entity which is born in an alienating movement contra civil society, is contested by an ”immanentist” theory focusing on the interaction of all the bodies of men.

Thus, some aspects of Negri’s view is in fact vindicated here. The problem is of course that Negri himself has no place for the argument. He is not interested in the aspect of manufacture which I have underlined, he does not see its relevance for Spinoza’s theory, and he is not preoccupied with the interesting fact that Marx accepted the verdict of Ferguson and others, finding it essential for the understanding of 17th-century capitalist production. This is so despite the fact that in L’anomalia selvaggia he actually has an appendix on the classical Marxist debate on the issue.

But it is one thing to explain the existence of a theory, and quite another to accept the theory as a relevant one. For my own part, I find no empirical evidence that there ever existed a bourgeois state that did not roughly correspond to the Hobbesian construction. The idea of the bourgeois state as an alienated entity with nonetheless legitimate power over the citizens is to be found both in Hegel and in Marx. The latter’s theory of money, of a gold money excluded from the circle of mean commodities, in fact is thought along the same lines. In both of these theorists, the empirical background is sound enough.

Returning to Negri’s explanations: It seems that what has prompted him to stress the uniqueness of Spinoza’s theory, is the fact that in the last of the writings that Spinoza worked on, the Political Treatise, he gave some strong arguments for the priority of a democratic mode of government, and at the same time seemed to drop the theory of contract. This last theory is common for Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Grotius and Kant, and in fact even for Spinoza, in the first of his political works, Theological-Political Treatise. In the Political Treatise, it is not mentioned at all.

Furthermore, even when it is mentioned, as in the first treatise, Spinoza’s ”contract” seems to be very different from Hobbes’. By the latter, it is a covenant made between a series of absolutely isolated individuals, between singleton ”mushrooms”, to employ an ideal picture of his citizen, which he uses in De Cive. By Spinoza, this abstract picture is set aside, and a seemingly more concrete and historical one takes its place: The state is thought of as a historical product of the rise of different social groupings, not simply of individuals. Since a ”contract” in its 17th-century meaning tends to be a relation between individuals, Spinoza has a much more relaxed attitude to this concept than many of his contemporaries. Its absence gives Negri an opportunity to consider Spinoza as a realist historian – an ”immanentist” thinker.

But every ”realism” is in danger of falling into the trap of empiricism, which means to loose the great lines and structures in a given whole, and stay content with the immediate impression. I’d like to say, against both Negri and Spinoza, that the realism here is just a show. Hobbes’ model implies a much more mature view, as far as the immanent tendency of society’s development is involved. His theory presents us with the human type of the isolated producer or (primarily) owner of commodities, and the socio-mental situation characteristic of this human type. When we read Hobbes, we have no problem in recognizing this social type as the one dominant in our own Western society – as well as present in each and every capitalist relation. 

At this point, the listener may raise doubt as to what this speaker (yours truly) is actually saying. Isn’t he giving a one-sided presentation of Negri’s mode of thinking? If the listener, in addition, is familiar with Marxist theory, she or he might even ask: Is it possible that Negri, as an immanentist, does not operate with the possibility that phenomena which are functioning as transcendent, are actually results of an immanent movement? That there is by no means any necessary rivalry between the viewpoints, since a ”transcendent” state, as an ”imperium” may well be a product of immanent contradictions?

But in fact, Negri does not take up this evident possibility, and that is a most serious weakness in his whole theory. For instance, it is true that Marx, like Spinoza, is an immanentist thinker. But still, the expropriation of means of production, and the continual, magnified, exponentiated form of this expropriation in the course of accumulation of capital, means that humans are producing a ”transcendent” world that is not less real than the immanent movement of the capitalist economy; indeed, it forms a primary content of this economy.

Quite obviously, the crown example of immanentism in Capital is the treatment of accumulation in the first volume, where Marx says that we come across an ”inner, unavoidable dialectic” which results in the abolition of one form of laws (namely, related to simple commodity production) and the emergence of another (of capitalist appropriation). This is the only place in Capital where Marx speaks expressis verbis of a real dialectic. This immanency is at the same time nothing but the development of alienation between the worker and the means of production, that is, of real ”transcendence”. 

There is no such thing in Spinoza. Alienation here is just an individual, not a social or economic phenomenon, and, also, not a product of immanent movement. It is not the movement of a substance, but only of an individual human being’s perception of substance. No alienation can be immanent when the true development of the world is geometrical in the sense that it takes place according to the same coercion as in an axiomatic proposition – e.g. according to which in a rectangular triangle it follows that the two remaining angles taken together must be equal to the first.

The question is now: Does Negri really reproduce Spinoza’s ”geometrical” viewpoints when it comes to analysis of capitalist economy?

The answer must be that he does, and he underlines this in principle, also. The listener is referred to pages 326sq in Empire, where the authors say that modern capital depends on a mechanism of control that is immanent, not transcendent, and that modern sovereignty turns into ”an axiomatic mechanism”. On top of it, Negri and Hardt describe these relations as if they accepted modern neoclassical economic theory and its poorly elaborated equations and variables.

Going on now with the accumulation example, we know that the real core of Marx’s analysis of capitalist accumulation as a dialectic process shows itself in the definition of the ”absolute, general law of capitalist accumulation”, which he takes to be very closely related to the phenomenon of pauperism. His description of modern pauperism, produced by the capitalist mechanism, is perhaps the theme that a person who today reads Capital for the first time, will hold on to as a token of how accurate the analysis in Marx’s work still is for the society in which we live.

What about Negri’s and Hardt’s stance vis-á-vis this Marxian piece of dialectic? I think that nothing could describe that better than a passage from their book Empire (cf. 164). Here, the authors tell us that the (alleged) Marxian theory of unequal exchange of commodities on the world market is no longer of any import. The reason? Well, they say, because unequal exchange of commodities now is the rule not only internationally, but also between segments of the populations the world over, such as between poor and rich neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Moscow, or in Mumbai. Thus national and transnational phenomena are coalescing, they say – without any argument being given.

This is a typical way of ”argument” in the works of these authors. Let aside the fantastic notion that one could even conceive of an international unequal exchange without it being mediated by different national currencies opposing each other. Let us instead concentrate on the comparison between populations that is made in Hardt-Negri’s thesis. What they actually say, is that pauperism and poverty is one and the same thing in places like Los Angeles and Mumbai. But of course, this is not the case. Pauperism in LA is a direct product of capitalist accumulation, of the specific bourgeois production of a reserve army of unemployed. Poverty in Mumbai has quite other causes, for even if we could talk about capitalism there, it would have quite another form, as we shall see in a moment.

What goes on here is that Negri ed altri are bowing to the meanest empiricism: Since specific groups of the world population all look ”poor”, the authors jump to the conclusion that their situation has identical causes. Let it only be added here that with such an abstract theory, one has no chance of developing a strategic line for the liberation neither of the wage working classes proper, nor of the subjugated peoples.

What makes itself felt here, is the much-debated notion of ”multitude” that pervades the works of Negri (cum Hardt). It is not necessary to say more about it than what follows from these last arguments. It is a no less distasting expression of empiricism to consider different kinds of population as all belonging to one big class simply because they are or may be doing work under the control of others.

Still, it is important to look for the reasons why the Negrian theory has the appeal on the Left that it actually has. Indeed, it has something of a rational core. The suggestion that the present exploitation on a world scale does in fact attain a certain homogeneity in later years is not that far-fetched. But this is only because a certain capitalist mode of exploitation has been accelerated in so many populous countries. And even this does not lead to the situation for Western workers being identical to the one that dominates the lives of Eastern or Southern wage workers. The reason is that the capitalist mode of production, according to Marx, can exist in two different forms. And the Western form is not identical with the Eastern or Southern. 

To see this, let us concentrate a moment on Marx’s concept of formal subsumption, or better, formal subsumption of the worker under capital.

This concept is to be used of each and every wage worker the world over. It is a subsumption that is simply embedded in the wage form. Through the contract implied, a worker subjugates himself formally to capital. In this sense, we find a basis for international proletarian international solidarity.

In Spinoza’s time, we had manufactory as a dominant capitalist mode of production, and this also implied what Marx called ”formal subsumption”. What he meant by that, was that the workers continued to operate on an artisan basis in production – the machine was not outside themselves, since on the contrary they actually composed it themselves, as we have seen. In other words, capital, the money fortunes which bought the labor-power, had not developed any own technical basis. The workers were not yet subjugated under a specific capitalist technique. They could e.g. resist capital simply by the lack of discipline.

As soon as that technique appeared, with the industrial revolution, the worker could be said to be not only formally subsumed (as through the wage-form), but also really subsumed under capital, since he now had to adjust to a technical base he did not originally master. Since then, Western workers have been both formally and really subsumed under the capital relation.

The important point now is that the differences between these two modes of capitalist production make international capital heterogeneous with itself – a fact that Negri refuses to see. Yet it should be obvious that workers, especially in Asiatic countries, have not yet subjugated to the form of work organization that is accepted socially in the West. They are as yet formally subsumed.

But on the other hand, if we look at the 17th. century situation, capitalism, although it was truly international already then, in fact was homogeneous – it did have the most important characteristics that Hardt-Negri mean to find in their ”Empire”-construction.

This also means that the 17th. century world, so nicely mirrored in the mechanist ideology, stood on the boundary between a new world of real subsumption under capital and an old world dominated by the traditional relation of lord and bondsman, Herr und Knecht, as Hegel said. These old forms are related to persons, and do not abstract from any form of personal dominance, as is the case with capitalism. 

Now, neither does the intermediary form, the manufacture of the 17th. century, depend on personal relations. It depends on the formal, and yet abstract, subjugation – in the sense that it is dictated through the abstract money-form of the wage, the abstract cash nexus.

I will contend that it is this kind of new formalism in the historical exploitation of labor that explains the enormous influence of the geometrical method as a scientific paradigm in the age in question. For if we analyze the structure of geometry, we find a structure of formal domination, nothing less.

When Hegel, early in the Phenomenology, says that it is easy to see that a new time is coming – and he put this in connection with mechanized labor – he relates this to two different methods. This is where he distinguishes the mathematical truth from the philosophical truth – these adjectives also being denominations of method.

Here Hegel treats the mathematical method, which he takes to express the core of the spirit of his recent past, the former period of the Spirit, precisely as geometry. The mathematico-geometrical method or ”proof”, he says, forms a movement of thought, namely a kind of intuition and deduction, which ”does not belong to what is object, but is an activity external to the matter”. In fact, in this basic relation, the method is not immanent at all. To pronounce a sentence that gives the proof of the Pythagorean theorem does not concern the object which is described by the right-angled triangle. This object is constructed in quite other ways. And more importantly, as soon as we accept (which Hegel does, in principle) that the geometrical structures are not given inside a Spinozian substance from eternity, but actually are uniformly constructed by human sensory activity (Kant), then it turns out that the geometrical proof is potentially alienating through and through.

When we were kids in the classroom, we were asked to accept a rule which we could not as yet understand, and then accept that certain relations inside a figure do follow. This is what the upholders of geometrical method told the 17th-century multitude, and that is nothing less than commanding a worker to construct a product, assuming beforehand that he has no control of it. This is, then, the command structure that makes possible the productive interaction of bodies in ”manufactory”!

In making his point about geometry, Hegel must have had precisely Spinoza in mind. In the Phenomenology, he says firstly that ”Spinozism” is the general philosophical standpoint, but that it lacks the element of a dynamic. It must be developed, and that Hegel sets out to do.

So while Spinoza is duly criticized, it is still precisely Spinozism that should be developed. Nonetheless, when Spinoza holds that men are subjected to a geometrical structure, he consequently – that is the new dialectical viewpoint of Hegel’s German Idealism – brings philosophy to the brink of understanding that they are dominated by what is in reality their own product.

Paradoxically, Spinoza’s geometrical abstractions are signs of his acute consciousness of the concrete economic environment. In stating that every human being, universally, is subjugated to the geometrical proof, he is in fact contending that the whole of humanity is subsumed under an undifferentiated power. And he was right, for this is a perception, or anticipation, of the coming of universal bourgeois rule. In this bourgeois world-picture, the quantitative aspects of thing are ruling, and that is satisfied in geometry: It is a subjugating, quantificational science.

However, geometry does not subsume the producer technically in any way. It reflects a formal subsumption, because it just tells of the form of subjugation, just as the wage form implies such a formal subsumption. Thus, it is not adequate as an ideological paradigm of a capitalist mode of production based on real subsumption, as it appeared after the industrial revolution. On the other hand, it universalizes all archaic form of dominance and prepares for the transition to a genuine bourgeois society.

Now we are in the position to look once more at Negri’s contention that Spinoza is a kind of revolutionary for the 21th century, since he is an anomalic figure in relation to the bourgeois world in the baroque.

We can clearly see that he was not anomalic at all. He has a theory of material production which is extraordinarily well fitted to mirror the capitalist production in his time, and his geometrical methodology is like an excellent description of the subsumed position of the wage-workers of the day. In both cases, Spinoza takes these reflections, in reality, thought-products of the mode of production of his time, to be eternal givens, resulting from the all-embracing substance.

I’d like to say another couple of words about this, to show what an important and classical bourgeois thinker Spinoza in fact is. 

True, there is no contract theory in the Political Treatise. But there is something else, combining the author closely with the whole militant bourgeois movement: In §§ 7 and 8 of the treatise, he makes a decisive move: He tells us that the state, imperium, should nationalize the soil. This is simply an anticipation of a progressive claim that became popular and accepted amongst the physiocrats in the 18th century and by progressive bourgeois theorists in the 19th. Their argument was that a nationalization would canalize all ground rent to the society at large. 

Spinoza’s argument seems to have had still another bent to it. By nationalizing ”all bona fixa”, Spinoza thought that all citizens would now understand that the only way they could act economically, was to trade with another, being bourgeois tradesmen exchanging their own products with one another. He says so explicitly, and it is a deplorable fact that the Marxophile literature on Spinoza’s political theory has not noted it at all.

Spinoza’s immediate aim with this maneuver is philosophical: He meant that if all men had the same basic relation to the things around them, then the basis for avarice and contradictions would disappear from society.

Yet, it is clear that all of this does not make Spinoza an adherent to any theory of contract. The contrast to Hobbes’ political philosophy remains clear. Spinoza will have no ”transcendent” state power in his system.

But this difference should not give us any reason to count Spinoza as a non-bourgeois thinker. Actually, the positions of Hobbes and Spinoza are complementary to each other. Spinoza looses sight of the true form of the bourgeois state, but excels in his description of the other side of the coin, the civil society and its production. Similarly, Hobbes gives us a rather poor description of material production, but on the other hand excels in clairvoyant analysis of the state form. None of them manages to give us the whole. Such a synthesizing work was left to Hegel and Marx – and to their closest allies up to this day.

Literature

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