Material Abstractions
On the concretisation of matter; abstractions are material things.
Social Relations and Human Nature
The human nature argument is a worthless sentiment which fixes history upon a psychological determination without an analysis. The next time you encounter the human nature argument from a liberal, ask them what the features of human nature are. They will probably list things that require multiple people to be expressed: greed, self-interest, vanity, narcissism, hubris. What does Marx say on the matter?
the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.
In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.
Before we even consider the nature of the human, we need to stop ourselves and realise the abstractions being made are of social relations. As such, the preconceptions of greed, etc., do not deal with what can be reduced to an individual, as an instance of a lone human, but the concrete social reality that this individual participates in. Their “ensemble of social relations” is certainly of a material substance. The confidence our idealists have in their abstractions of human nature is founded on the mediation of their own experience by a social reality. The fact that this social reality is not reducible to psychological will, as psychological will changes with the natural world, has not entered their appreciation.
Across various social relations, a dominant trend can be expressed or identified. But social relations are also shown to have abstractive power in their own right. Particular instances of the wage relation, for example, are generalised as a common relation of “the wage relation” which exists throughout capitalist society. That is a traditional example of an abstraction. But the two primary classes of capitalist society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which require particular, concrete instances of the wage relation to emerge, also influence these particular instances of the wage relation. For example, the class balance of forces in society shapes individual wage relations. The abstraction of classes from particular relations is thus not a merely analytical device, or even a rhetorical device, as it is purported to be by some liberals, but a real feature of the social reality that these individual relations are mediated by. It is an abstraction, material as all things are. But the material of the abstraction for the social relation of class in particular lies once in the brain’s cognitive process, and again in social reality. Marx establishes that non-thinking processes have abstractive power.
Perhaps the grandest and most definite instance of the abstractive power of social relations lies in the law of value. Different labour processes are made abstract in the socially necessary component of their labour content. The greater the number of exchanges that take place, the more the law of value asserts itself. Sellers cannot sell above the market price, as buyers will refuse to buy when others are selling at the market price. Buyers cannot buy below the market price, as sellers will refuse to sell when others are buying at the market price. The market, which classical economists paint as flexible and personal, becomes mechanical and impersonal as it grows. In fact, it is the constant flux of price around a commodity’s value which causes it to concretise around an equilibrium. The concrete, material reality of this market price, however, is established by an abstraction made by society, pertaining to the amount of necessary social labour-time congealed in the commodity, in comparison to all other commodities and the necessary social labour-time congealed in them.
Contradiction and Motion
How does one depict motion in a still frame? Adherents to the surrealist movement will paint the form of an object such that it is obviously recognisable, but exaggerate its properties to absurdity. That which is solid has been molten by the constant acceleration of gravity. Fabrics fold into themselves in apparent perpetuity, where the air is vacuum-like and stiff. Cold and dead concrete is given a human figure, striking an unsustainable pose, and elsewhere, gases are given density and shape. A selection of an object’s properties are made too extreme, such that it would’ve already overcome the stable arrangement of its form, and have lost the original basis for this property being made extreme. For critical or revolutionary films, this feature of surrealism actualises the ability to optimistically point toward a conclusion, an overcoming, which is something that perhaps Ken Loach films lack in their commitment to British realism. For surrealism, the object or state of affairs is depicted in a state of internal contradiction. In paintings, it is visually clear that the contradictions which overcome this object are within itself rather than being external forces. Perhaps the “surrealness” of surrealist paintings should be said to lie in a painting’s inability to animate itself.
Surrealism is probably not the answer you would give to the question. More common expressions of motion in a still frame are motion blur and motion lines. For motion blur, an object frozen in place by the medium is shown in a manner that overcomes its own form and becomes unreal or undetermined. For example, an opaque object might be depicted with partial transparency on either side. For motion lines, an unreal, invisible and entirely transient form is introduced to overcome the imposition of an equally contradictory phenomenon: a moving object depicted in the medium of a still frame. An airplane for example, ought to be moving if it is depicted to be in the air, lest it fall into oblivion. To balance out the impossible airplane, which is matter without motion, an imaginary, fictional motion line is added to express motion without matter locally. Together, both matter and motion are communicated as interpenetrating opposites. The throughline between all three answers to the question is “by rendering an abstraction of the contradiction”. At root, this is the case because motion, or change, is itself the expression of the internal contradictions of matter. This can be said with confidence because there is no reduction of the sence of motion in a still away from such contradictions, acting as an engine for the internal life of the image from which all the motion flows. As an argument: motion in a still frame is necessarily contradictory, and so this contradiction necessarily powers the internal motion of a still frame.
Abstractions of Social Relations with Money
In 2020, the art collective MSCHF, a commercialist pop outfit focused on viral stunts and artificial scarcity, released one of their more reserved product lines, Blur. On their website, it appeared to be a stack of paper notes with a money strap, which had been digitally censored by being blurred. Today, MSCHF sells Blur products accompanied by this description:
A medium of exchange. The root of all evil. The anthem of success. More of it, more problems. All money since its inception has been an exercise in trust, a communal suspension of disbelief. What you see is exactly what you get. You get what you get and you don’t get upset.
What the buyer receives is a visually surreal rubber block with the blurred image printed on each face. The digital blur is revealed to be a feature of the artistic object, bringing it closer to motion blur than censoring. It makes for an excellent piece because money always negates itself and transforms into commodities in the hands of its proprietor as it circulates. Like rubbish, it is an object with the purpose of being disposed of properly. For Marx, money is the objective measure of value, an expression of equivalence which can only be made as an abstraction of productive social relations, but in its universality, the little use-values it has of its own are unbecoming of its value. And so, merely functioning as a measuring tape which gets passed around, the face of this block of money is blurred by the motion of its constant negation and transformation. The description hints at the “unreality” of money, but falls short, and establishes it by describing money as a figment of our collective imagination.
The ordinary worker does not buy this bluff that money can be explained as the psychological will to have a common medium of exchange, necessitating a collective suspension of disbelief. How is the abstraction of money as a store of value actually reached? Marx writes:
As measure of Value, and as standard of price, money has two entirely distinct functions to perform. It is the measure of value inasmuch as it is the socially recognised incarnation of human labour; it is the standard of price inasmuch as it is a fixed weight of metal.
Here we are dealing with gold currency — currency with a value equivalent to any mass of gold with the same weight and purity, regardless of whether it is shaped like a coin. But already, Marx distinguishes the measure of value (which, for example, allows a £1 gold coin weighing 1 lb., to be equivalent in value to a lump of gold weighing 1 lb.) from the standard of price currency enforces (which, for example, allows any £1 gold coin to be equivalent to any other £1 gold coin.) As metals enter circulation, they are worn down into different quantities, having different values as quantities of metal, but being exchanged as money of equivalent value. In having the special function of being a standard of price, gold money is marked with its original weight, and subsequent exchanges where the value of gold makes a historical abstraction, exchanging the gold for its value when it was minted. There thus remains a definite quantity of socially necessary labour-time to create any coin, but the essential feature of currency as a measure of price means that the value of money does need to be equivalent to its value if it were treated as a raw material. Value remains bound to necessary abstract labour because a certain quantity of gold is still needed to mint a coin. Marx continues:
The fact that the currency of coins itself effects a separation between their nominal and their real weight, creating a distinction between them as mere pieces of metal on the one hand, and as coins with a definite function on the other — this fact implies the latent possibility of replacing metallic coins by tokens of some other material, by symbols serving the same purposes as coins.
Silver and copper tokens take the place of gold in those regions of the circulation where coins pass from hand to hand most rapidly, and are subject to the maximum amount of wear and tear. This occurs where sales and purchases on a very small scale are continually happening.
This has expanded since Marx. Gold convertibility has fully ended, but states continue to store their long-term financial assets in the form of gold hidden in vaults. This is indeed where transactions can take months, and there could only be a handful of transactions in a decade. High-frequency trading firms, on the other hand, make millions of trades a day, and transactions are completed in microseconds. Instead of using bulky paper currency, they send blips of data, destroyed upon reception, as a form of currency — the “maximum amount of wear and tear” that the productive forces permit for a system of exchange. This has no fundamental effect on the role of money, merely how value is expressed in monetary units.
Bourgeois explanations of money often point out how a tenner will say “I promise to the bearer the sum of ten pounds”, and so paper money is in fact the title to a debt. But this is merely a legal obscurity, a historical accident, which allowed for the development of money whilst preserving maximum legal unity over time, minimising social rupture. In the same vein, one might argue that the blips of electromagnetic impulses used by high-frequency traders are merely used to send contracts and do not constitute a form of currency themselves. Yet by a materialist analysis, they certainly do. Returning to Marx:
The function of gold as coin becomes completely independent of the metallic value of that gold. Therefore things that are relatively without value, such as paper notes, can serve as coins in its place. This purely symbolic character is to a certain extent masked in metal tokens. In paper money it stands out plainly. In fact, ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte.
We allude here only to inconvertible paper money issued by the State and having compulsory circulation. It has its immediate origin in the metallic currency.
Proponents of chartalism explain that with fiat currency, it is the state giving money its value by only taking payment in the form of fiat currency, thus creating a demand for it. This would mean, at root, the value of money is set by an equivalence between the cost value of legal punishment for the non-repayment of legal fines or taxes, and the cost of paying legal fines or taxes. A litany of problems arises. Why do most people pay their taxes? Shouldn’t it be around half? If, by definition, the cost of money foregone must be equivalent to the cost of legal repercussions, why do people with higher incomes often face higher legal fines with the threat of the same punishments? Clearly, money is worth more than its ability to fund the state. There are somewhat plausible explanations. Perhaps due to tax evasion being an activity of the super-rich, a proportion closer to 50% of all legal monetary obligations do, in fact, go unpaid. One might even suggest that a legal punishment for a wealthier person does indeed carry a proportionally greater cost. But this is hardly what the chartalists have in mind.
Money stands in an exchange-value relation with all commodities. On its face, the suggestion that the common substance of these relations is not labour but rather the threat of legal punishment is already eyebrow-raising. No one would suggest that the state can give everyone in society enough money to buy a second home, simply by printing masses of money and throwing it out of a helicopter, then having the police go from doorstep to doorstep, issuing arbitrary fines which must be paid on the spot to drive up the value of this fresh money by creating demand for it. But this is exactly the kind of activity that is the conclusion if you take chartalism out of its theoretical bubble and try to apply it as enthusiastically as possible. Now, a chartalist will likely argue this is a strawman, saying that the state merely creates a base demand for money, and the actual value of money is set by market forces. But this just means that their claims about an incalculable “base demand”, their central premise, are useless.
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) does just that, formally subscribing to chartalism, agreeing that the demand for fiat currency is created by the state, but adding that with any increase in the supply of money, there must to be spare capacity in the economy to produce an increase in the supply of good and services to match consumer demand, or else there will be demand-pull inflation (i.e. a decrease in the value of money). Rather than leaving the determination of money’s value to speculative accounting, it is an attempt to continue the chartalist theory of money by grounding the value of money with the same mechanical materialist method. This is incomprehensible because the value of money is said to originally be determined by the intersection of money supply (set by the quantity of printed money) and money demand (set by legal obligations). Simultaneously, the value of money is also said to be the intersection of consumer demand for goods and services (set by the quantity of printed money) and the supply of goods and services. But the supply of goods and services is totally distinct from financial obligations put forward by the state. Neither of these interpretations, by the way, corresponds to the classical formulation, where the value of money is set by the intersection of the supply and demand for money. Instead, MMT flattens the supply of money and the demand for money (which classical economists say is set by the demand for goods and services) into the same category set by the quantity of printed money.
The state is indeed a powerful force. It forcibly reshuffles value in society and creates millions of sterling out of, practically, thin air. It also has levers to influence the value of money. It can set interest rates. It could even mandate that all notes with serial numbers ending in “4” are worthless. But it cannot set reality however it chooses. Its decisions must be made within the bounds of reality, and can only motivate as much change according to its influence on society. Money, in general, on the whole, is an abstraction which is given value by the whole of society, specifically by the labour contributed to the commodities that money is exchanged for. Not the backward result that taxes and debts are issues in it, but first and primarily in money carrying out societal abstraction, which compares and validates concrete labour processes. The difference in proportions between the average price of commodities over a length of time remains an abstraction of a real relationship between production processes. It is not an arbitrary device, even though the bourgeois state can print however much it chooses. The fact that this can be done with money which has no labour content shows that it is a distinct type of commodity which merely has the role of expressing such abstractions. The state can put forward the historically contingent, particular form that currency takes. In the transition from gold to paper notes, they can decide their size, denominations, colour, material and design. But money and its value, what any quantity of it can buy, is an abstraction determined by the social forces in society, which includes, but is certainly not limited to, the state.
There is already demand for goods and services and spare capacity in the economy. MMT theorists understand that capitalist production, however, is constrained by the need to make a profit, so they suggest flooding the money market. Accepting the bourgeois dogma of subjective value, MMT theorists see price as essentially arbitrary: “capitalists need revenue to be higher than costs, so let’s just print money to make that happen.” MMT theorists do not see the objective social content behind value and prices; they understand the need for revenue to be nominally higher than costs, but don’t understand that this rule in the market expresses a supply-side relation, a relation in production characterised by the appropriation of surplus value. The working class as a whole cannot consume as much value as they produce. If that spare capacity in society is spun into action, the working class must produce greater value in society for the rate of profit to preserve itself. It is the rate of surplus value which first sets the amount of value a worker may appropriate from society, and then the value of money is calculated by capitalist society as an abstraction of the value in society.
Marx patterns out, in Capital Vol. 1, chapter 3, section 2, part B, for the money supply, the same relationship described by Boyle’s law, where the quantity of money in circulation corresponds to volume, the sum of the prices of commodities corresponds to pressure, and the velocity of circulation corresponds to temperature. Money enters circulation to fulfil the needs of exchange. Marx illustrates this quite simply:
Let the circulating capital of £500 advanced in the form of money-capital, whatever its period of turnover, now stand for the total circulating capital of society, that is, of the capitalist class. Let the surplus-value be £100. How can the entire capitalist class manage to draw continually £600 out of circulation, when it continually throws only £500 into it?
The supply of money which enters circulation corresponds to the needs of capital. Fiat dilutes the value of money, and money enters circulation according to its value. There is an underlying material relationship to the numerical changes of money, where changes to the numerical quantity of money in circulation or its value may or may not represent changes to these underlying relations.
Truths are Abstractions
Lenin remarks, quoting Hegel:
One of the basic principles of dialectics is that there is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is always concrete...
That is, the truth is downstream from objective reality. Abstractions made to arrive at a law of nature are about the “concrete” world, so there is no truly “abstract” truth. Of course, this is correct — there is no such immaterial “mental world”. But taken at its least demanding, this formulation could mean, rather than the rejection of an immaterial world, a rejection of truths within an existing ideal world which are not true on the basis of the material world. This would just be a relatively harmless misunderstanding, unless the remark that “the truth is concrete” is constantly repeated without a full explanation, which could push people toward a lesser conception of the phrase, where the truth can be extracted, or rescued, from the material world. This is such that the truth can be formulated in a mental world with “pure reasoning”, disconnected from the material world, and the material world is used only as a lookup table to verify the truthfulness of statements. As such, the mere formulation of “the truth is concrete” on its own is not penetrating enough to properly establish the essential features of a materialist appreciation of truth. See how Marx establishes the concrete:
The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration 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.
Rather, the concrete is the concentration of abstractions, abstractions made at a higher level. Hence, the abstract and the concrete are not counterposed. Indeed, rather than refuting categories, the final analysis must absorb them into the material world. After all, we are materialists who posit only one substance to account for all experience.
Ta-da. Though the truth reaches for objective reality, it is through abstraction. This can only be the case, as truth is not mere being. It is not necessary for the material world to be true; it only needs to be. Truth is a property of statements, a property which is both objective and concrete, but nonetheless an abstraction. We understand that truth is not necessarily concretised by mental processes alone. A truth is a concrete determination of reality, an abstraction made by and made of the material world.
I write against Cartesian sceptics:
Firstly, “uncertainty” is not a characteristic of propositions themselves, so propositions are only “uncertain” to a subject.
Even a hypothetical being which experiences every possible experience, would not have “certainty” for what they understand about the universe, because they might be a brain in a vat. This differs from a categorically omniscient being, whose “certainty” cannot be caused by experience.
Their demanding concept of “certainty” reveals knowing to depend on abstraction. What a hypothetical being could know “for certain”, where their appreciation of this as knowledge could not be overturned, they would not know to be true. Indeed, it is in concretising contradictions when truth becomes worthy of its name. As such, Cartesian certainty and truth are opposite forms of abstractions made toward knowledge, each negating the other: truth is real whilst Cartesian certainty is unreal, but Cartesian certainty is being developed toward, whilst the truth is what is being developed away from.
For a considerable period of time, we accept the existing paradigm as an absolute truth. Only in the final analysis, as the absolute truth reveals its incomplete and contradictory nature, does its essentially relative and transient character become clear. But are we entitled to draw from this fact the conclusion that there is no such thing as truth, and therefore, as Pontius Pilate supposed, it is futile to even attempt to define it?
No. We are not entitled to conclude any such thing. Truth is not an absolute thing, given and fixed for all time. It is a process that moves through a never-ending cycle of constant contradictions, affirmations and negations. The history of science and technology and the entire course of human social development has served to define, deepen, and verify knowledge.
Notice that he says this for truth, not knowledge, not our appreciation of the truth. This is important because the purpose of this article is to establish, in various ways, the abstractive power of unthinking matter. (I have already established elsewhere the material nature of abstractions in the mind.) As this analysis moved from money to truth, I have shown this not only in value, in social relations, but at the most fundamental level: truth, the first valence that can be put on being, or the determination of things. Not only do social relations give rise to true laws by abstracting, but unthinking matter too. Except for size, locality, etc., there is no fundamental difference between a particular truth and a general law. You can understand such physical truths now not in a vulgar sense of an ideal or a cosmic prescription, but as the concretisation of matter.
Languages are Abstractions
There is little in the way of truth without language, something I’ve analysed in my article about mental labour. For a conclusion, we can make a full tour around what has been stated about abstraction with the example of language. Language exists as a social abstraction of the material world, determining perceptions. No one person can be credited as the inventor of language, and it has a social existence apart from being held by people. The abstractions of language have been used to inform changes to the material world in the form of vocalisations, inscriptions, books, signage with the intention that they are perceived in the same way by another person who shares similar abstractions. Of course it should be mentioned that the prejudices of any society will be concretised in the language of that society. In Knowledge in the Materialist Dialectic, I explain that acquistion of knowledge, such as language, is driven by the contradiction between what is explicit to a person and what exists that is not explicit to a person. For example, the shape of a specific bird may be explicit to someone in the moment, but they may have trouble recalling its features or differentiating them from other birds. What may not be explicit to this person, which may overturn this relationship for a higher one, is an association between the features of a bird and names of specific species of bird.
