The Force of Abstraction: Marx and Marxism

This chapter surveys the contradictory work of abstraction in Marxist critical thinking since Marx. First, it explores the paradox in Marx that abstraction is both the inhuman alienated intellectual form of commodity capitalism, and the human means or ‘force’ by which such alienation can be overcome, through an analysis of the term’s instability across the Early Manuscripts, Grundrisse and Capital. The paradox and the instability are bound up in the difficulties of reading Capital, which were overtly addressed by Marx and Althusser, and of communicating the revolutionary nature of abstract thought, as this is addressed in Tressell’s novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The chapter then explores what happens when aestheticians trained in Marxist abstraction – Brecht and Lukâcs, Adorno, and Negri – encounter the emergence of abstraction as a defining term in modernist art. In all of these cases, the Marxist writing of abstraction reveals the desire to rethink abstraction’s inhumanism as precisely the source of its revolutionary human potential.