Reappraising the Hessen-Grossmann-Thesis
Better than they're remembered but still not that great
In my last two posts, I arrived at the following conclusions:
1.) A Marxist critique of science and technology must first of all strive to articulate their respective social forms, forms which today lay hidden behind the increasingly mystified appearance of a ‘class neutral’ technoscientific rationality. It must in turn recognize the forms which science and technology today take as nothing eternal or absolute but as themselves products of natural history. Here, recall how Hans Dieter-Bahr warns against an idealist treatment of technology which would regard it as merely means (of labor) and not itself a product of labor, and thus expressive of historically determinate social relations. This bias pervades a great deal of socialist appraisal of capitalist machinery under the conceit that the ‘appropriation of the means of production’ by the producers of society is sufficient for the prevention of the reproduction of class relations latent to those means. This view appears to me rather strained: no Marxist would deny that the form which the labor process takes under capitalism must be transformed under socialism, but for some reason many neglect the implications this ostensibly total transformation of labor has for the transformation of the means of labor. We must correct for this latter oversight.
As I also showed, István Mészáros proceeds down an analogous path in his critique of the tendency toward formalism in modern science. Once again, what is at stake is a historical account of the social form of science specific to the capitalist mode of production. To this end, Mészáros explains how the history of science is, like technology, not ‘class neutral’ but marked early in the modern period by the abstraction of scientific thought from the social antagonisms which structure its condition of possibility. Subsequent investigations into natural law in early modernity have as their necessary precondition the obviation of the social form of scientific consciousness. As with technology, the recovery of this social form of science consists in explaining precisely under what specific social-historical conditions can scientific inquiry appear as ‘disinterested’ or ‘class neutral’. This is an extremely urgent task, given how closely ‘social progress’ and ‘scientific advancement’ today are identified with the production of value—if not explicitly in the application of science toward the increase of the exploitation of labor, then implicitly, as Dieter-Bahr reminds us, in the objectification of class relations into the “inner value-form” of machinery.
2.) Now, in reaching the above conclusion, what must obviously be avoided is a simple-minded, mechanistic determinism which would see the development of either technology or science as mere conscripts of capital accumulation. Such would amount to denying the necessary excess of subjectivity beyond the structural relations of production, and hence the elimination of the very possibility of politicizing science and technology at all (or anything else, for that matter). As Dieter-Bahr wrote, there is no linear causality governing the transformation of instruments of labor into fixed capital; such is only possible because this transformation remains mediated by a laboring subject irreducible to either its cause or effect. The stakes are thus quite high for a sufficient theory of labor in Marxism: if the first conclusion above holds, truly all hope of transforming this transformation of the means of labor into fixed capital rides on the intellectually cumbersome and heteronomous situation of actually existing concrete labor. Accordingly, a Marxist critique of science and technology must also engage in the delicate task of theorizing the grounds and formation of the subjectivity of labor, namely, as part of an overall process of articulating the technical class composition.
This being said, one must also avoid any tendency toward subjectivism which would abstract the capacities of subjects beyond their determinations toward some pure ‘realm of freedom’. By contrast, a Marxist account of emancipation proceeds dialectically, wherein labor is important precisely because, as the metabolic process through which nature-society produces itself, labor is also the site of revolutionary subjectivity. Hans-Jürgen Krahl identified this “revolutionary activity” as the “activity of auto-realization located in the virtualities of the internal contradiction of labor, and actualizes the possibility which this last conceals as only a moment of heteronomy.” Disconcealment of the political possibility of labor was for Krahl precisely the task of organization: a totalizing project of coordinating heteronomous labors of determinate negation of capitalist totality to the point of self-conscious durability and consistency.
In this post, I want to use these two conclusions to help guide a reappraisal of the “Hessen-Grossmann Thesis,” as has been initiated by Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin. Both Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann have been frequently and unfairly maligned by historians of science for their ‘vulgar Marxism.’ However, as Freudenthal and McLaughlin make clear, much of this scorn has little to do with what either actually said and much more to do with 1) the legacy of their scholarly reception in the United States and Western Europe during the interwar period, and 2) the clumsy if also unfortunately commonplace assumptions about what a ‘Marxist critique of science and technology’ in the first place means.
The central critique made against ‘classical’ Marxists like Hessen and Grossmann is that they take a “utilitarian” view of science. They are charged with regarding all scientific progress as driven by less noble economic pursuits. In brief, the ruling class recruits science to produce new concepts which can help the former solve technical problems pertaining to industry and commerce. Far from the disinterested discoverers of the ‘Truth of Nature’, then, scientists are understood to be denigrated by Marxists as witting or unwitting agents of bourgeois ideology.
Neither Hessen nor Grossmann actually subscribe to this account of scientific progress or its agents. In fact, they are both extremely careful to not reduce scientific inquiry to any sort of crass economic determinism. What they instead claim is that scientific practice is a form of labor, and like any form of labor, it is socially determined. As they stress, one of the most important determinations of all scientific labor is the pre-existence of specific, concrete technologies, which science studies in order to produce its concepts.
This is the Hessen-Grossmann-Thesis: not that technology is the ultimate goal of all scientific inquiry, but that it is its necessary precondition. The thesis thus answers a question concerning not what motivates scientists to engage in scientific research but rather the historical role of the means of scientific labor in the development of both its purpose and product:
The thesis may be generalized: the means available are decisive in conceptualizing a need. Now this notion seems to turn the widespread understanding of Marxist ‘externalism’ upside down. Means are not developed in order to satisfy existing needs (or interests), but the concrete conception of needs, purposes which may explain action, depends on the means available, that are then used to satisfy them. To a certain extent then, the means available can determine the possibility or at least the reasonableness of certain needs, interests and desires. (2009, p. 7)
Once again, then, we find ourselves returning to my first conclusion above: a Marxist critique of science and technology involves a historical inquiry into the social form of the means of (scientific and technical) labor. Here, Hessen and Grossmann share a deep interest in the work of Isaac Newton and the technical means by which he was able to develop a “mechanistic concept of the world.” What most centrally held this “world-picture” together, Grossmann writes, was the hypostatization of mechanical motion into a concept of universal motion. Thus, the question for Grossmann (and Hessen) is not whether or not Newton’s Principia was driven by economic considerations (although his consultancy work is both extensive and deeply underappreciated!) but rather: how was it possible to produce such a concept of motion, one entirely abstract from and formalized against concrete, moving things? Under what circumstances does a mechanistic concept of “pure motion” make sense to the subjects of scientific labor?
As the Hessen-Grossmann-Thesis contends, this concept does not make sense in situations where motive force remains inseparable from the instruments of labor. It thus did not make sense to speak abstractly of ‘mechanical motion’ in the context of craftsmen, where the tool and the force to apply it cohere immediately with skilled human labor. In Marx’s terminology, “machinery” implies precisely the separation of these two dynamics inherent to the labor process: on the one hand, the skill of the craftsman is objectified into a “working machine” or automatic tool, and, on the other, the whole of human labor is subsequently reduced to the application of motive force: “Only when the movement of the hand, which both drives and guides a tool, has been broken up into the function of an automatic instrument (which needs no guidance) and a power source producing a standard motion, can human power be replaced by an engine” (ibid., p. 13). The subsequent attachment of different kinds of labor to the same “standard motion” is what allows for the ‘practical’ possibility of producing a general concept of motion.
Recall that, as I had drawn out from Bahr in a previous post, for machinery to exist at all, tool and motive force (or “drive,” as he called it) had to have already been separated. Here, then, what Grossmann unveils is the obverse of the appearance of machinery under capitalism: the development of a uniform concept of motion. The separation and independence of the concept of motion from labor follows from the practical separation of motive power from the different kinds of labor which apply it. After this separation, not only does it become possible to devise a universal concept of motion, but it becomes necessary, namely, in order to explain the transformation of (now independent) motion which can take place in the labor process, e.g. from rotary to linear motion. In sum, the historical means of scientific labor clearly play a fundamental role in shaping its conceptual products.
At least with respect to the “mechanistic world-picture” developed by Newton, Grossmann and Hessen honor the first conclusion I laid out above concerning a Marxist critique of science and technology. They have identified the social form of modern science with the historically specific situation of the development of machinery. We can add to this that the tendency toward formalism is precisely grounded in this materialist history of technology. We have therefore both avoided Bahr’s warning of regarding technology as ‘pure instrumentality’, acknowledging their capacity to shape social reality, as well as Mészáros’s warning of treating science as mere ‘disinterested pursuit’, acknowledging this possibility of disinterestedness follows directly from the industrialization of labor—it coheres in, and is reflective of, the class structure of machinery.
Now, there is one important caveat: on the topic of the “present-day wreckers of productive forces,” Hessen reveals the productivist limits of his critique of technology. While he correctly rejects those who advocate for a return to pre-industrial forms of labor as “reactionary,” he proceeds to then accuse them of a “fetishism” of machinery through which they identify capitalist power with ‘things’ rather than social relations:
Improving the instruments of labour brings misfortune to the great mass of the population, we are told. The machine transforms the worker into its mere appendage. It kills individuality. Let us return to the good old days.
No, we reply. It is not the improvement in the means of production that causes the impoverishment and unprecedented sufferings of the masses. It is not the machines that transform the worker into a blind appendage of a mechanism, but those social relations that exploit machinery in such a way as to turn the worker into a mere appendage to it. (ibid., p. 87)
What the “machine-wreckers” do not recognize, according to Hessen, is thus the progressive character of the development of the productive forces under capitalism. Here, unfortunately, we revert back to the same bourgeois instrumentalism identified above, wherein technological problems are externalized from the technologies themselves, identified instead with abstractly defined “social relations.” The issue is that machines are not merely the “expression” of social relations; they are those social relations through which the labor process acquires its present form, that is, through which different concrete labors interact with and are mediated by capital. Once again, then, we find ourselves asking the same question: why would a transformation of the labor process not also imply a transformation in the means of labor—which, it would seem to me, is precisely the intention of the “machine-wreckers” to bring about?
This brings me to my second conclusion above, against which the above passage once again reveals the limitations of the Hessen-Grossmann-Thesis. An historical account (importantly, one derived directly from Capital) of the transformation of labor into “mere appendage” which kills its “individuality” matters a great deal for any theory of the subjectivity of labor under capitalism. Spiriting away the phenomenology of labor as “fetishizing machinery” means lapsing into a structuralist account of “social relations” meaninglessly abstracted from the concrete experiences of labor with machinery. This, in turn, means severely narrowing our political horizon to a blind faith in “scientific progress”—which, conveniently, takes the unquestioned path of the unending production of machines.
The problem is of course not exclusive to Hessen and Grossmann: to this day, many Marxists seem to be constitutively unable of thinking of any possibility of technological development beyond a very historically specific form of machinery, one which is rooted in (and serves to reproduce) the capitalist division of labor and the abstraction of control over the labor process from the producers themselves. This is testament to the lure of the appearance of capitalist machinery as ‘class neutral’, as mere ‘instruments,’ in spite of both the experience of technological alienation routinely uttered by workers themselves and, moreover, the deeply antagonistic character of the social history of the production of the means of labor. Once again (and in an analogous way to Krahl’s critique of the Frankfurt School), I associate the inadequacy of such accounts precisely in their severely lacking or entirely missing theories of subject formation which, in turn, continue to hamper the usefulness of the Marxist critique of science and technology for political organization.