Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s
Intellectual and Manual Labour is one of the major texts of post-war Marxist theory. A tremendous influence on the major writers of the Frankfurt School, with ongoing relevance to current debates about value, abstraction, and domination, Sohn-Rethel’s ideas are here presented at their fullest scope and with their greatest theoretical clarity.
Out of print for many years, this new Historical Materialism edition contains a new introduction by Chris O’Kane, an afterword by Chris Arthur, and a compilation of the responses to
Intellectual and Manual Labour published in the Italian journal
Lotta Continua, including a substantial article by Antonio Negri.
Alfred Sohn-Rethel was born in 1899. Forced to flee Germany during World War II, he settled in the United Kingdom, where he continued to work on the ideas that he would present in his magnum opus,
Intellectual and Manual Labour.
“The republication of
Intellectual and Manual Labour is a gift to Marxist scholars and finally makes Sohn-Rethel’s work available to the wider public. With its additional material and contextual essay, the new edition of
Intellectual and Manual Labour is likely to reinvigorate an interest in Sohn-Rethel’s work.” – Fabian van Onzen,
Lone Star College, in:
Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (18 June 2021) [
Full review]
Introduction to the Historical Materialism Edition Chris O’Kane Translator’s Foreword Preface
Introduction
Part 1 Critique of Philosophical Epistemology
1
The Fetishism of Intellectual Labour 2
Can There Be Abstraction Other Than by Thought? 3
The Commodity Abstraction 4
The Phenomenon of the Exchange Abstraction 5
Economics and Knowledge 6
The Analysis of the Exchange Abstraction 7
The Evolution of Coined Money 8
Conversion of the Real Abstraction into the Conceptual Abstraction 9
The Independent Intellect
Part 2 Social Synthesis and Production
10
Societies of Production and Societies of Appropriation 11
Head and Hand in Labour 12
The Beginnings of Surplus Production and Exploitation 13
Head and Hand in the Bronze Age 14
The Classical Society of Appropriation 15
Mathematics, the Dividing-Line of Intellectual and Manual Labour 16
Head and Hand in Medieval Peasant and Artisan Production 17
The Forms of Transition from Artisanry to Science 18
The Capitalist Relations of Production 19
Galilean Science and the Dynamic Concept of Inertia 20
Bourgeois Science
Part 3 The Dual Economics of Advanced Capitalism
21
From De-socialised to Re-socialised Labour 22
A Third Stage of the Capitalist Mode of Production? 23
The Turn to Monopoly Capitalism 24
Imperialism and Scientific Management 25
The Economy of Time and ‘Scientific Management’ 26
The Essentials of Taylorism 27
Critique of Taylorism 28
The Foundation of Flow Production 29
The Unity of Measurement of Man and Machine 30
The Dual Economics of Monopoly Capitalism 31
The Necessity for a Commensuration of Labour 32
The Commensuration of Labour in Action 33
The Way to Automation 34
The Curse of the Second-Nature 35
The Epoch of Transition 36
Logic of Appropriation and Logic of Production
Part 4 Historical Materialism as Methodological Postulate
37
The Theory of Reflection and Its Incompatibilities as a Theory of Science 38
Materialism Versus Empiricism 39
Marx’s Own Object Lesson 40
Necessary False Consciousness 41
The Philosophical Issue 42
The Essentially Critical Power of Historical Materialism
Afterword Chris Arthur
Materials from Lotta Continua on Alfred Sohn-Rethel Translated by Richard Braude References Index
Marxists, authors interested in debates around real abstraction, the value-form, and social domination, students of Kant, economic anthropology, social epistemology and historical materialism.