ABSTRACT
In this final substantive chapter I return to Marx, and to his anti-europic theory of modernity. Marx’s work was a critique of the forms of modern society: of its conceptual forms, split between idealism and materialism; its forms of sociation, civil society; its political economy. Marx was engaged in a general critique of both the self images of modernity and of the realities of modern social formations dominated by capital. His project was necessarily philosophical, theoretical and political-economic because, as we have seen, the philosophical, theoretical and political-economic dimensions of capitalist modernity are deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Confronted by the harsh realities of the europic problematic, Marx supported the emergence of a radically novel social space from which to engage with it, both theoretically and politically. The argument here is that Marx struggled against the principal errors of
theoretical europism: the identification of the social relations of modernity with the transhistorical categories of its own philosophical anthropology. The results of such errors include a conception of history as a process through which philosophical categories are realised as social ones; as a form of universalisation in which immanent categories are socially objectified. That is, without using the term, Marx was engaged in a critique of the europic problematic, which can only be understood by means of a radical break with europic categories.1 This requires securing the necessary distinction between two kinds of abstract universal: the categories of philosophy and theory on the one side, and those of historical social relations on the other. Not only does Marx decisively reject the conflation of the philosophical with the socio-historical. He also inaugurates a novel social ontology. In the guise of the problem of immanentism, the issues of europism are in
fact familiar ones within debates on Capital, though not necessarily always understood as such. The problem of europism is posed, for instance, in what has become known as Rubin’s dilemma. The problem arises because Marx uses what appears to be a transhistorical category, abstract labour, as the basis of an avowedly historically specific social relation. If this was indeed the case, thenMarx would be reproducing europic forms by affirming capitalist modernity as the realisation of
transhistorical human categories. However, Rubin’s dilemma only appears as a consequence of interpretative presuppositions which obscure those actually informing Marx’s writing. This chapter explores those presuppositions and provides an account of Capital as having successfully provided a theory of the europic form of the ‘universality’ of modern social relations. The distinctiveness of this theory of universals is to be found in the social ontology of Capital, a social ontology which, once properly understood, is an essential ingredient of theoretical anti-europism.
