corrigan & sayer 1978—hindness and hirst- a critical review

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HINDESS AND HIRS T: A CRITIC AL REVIEW Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer* Readers of Socialist Register cann ot fail to have note d a stea dy flow of te xt s by a gr ou p of wri ters i n Engl and which has at t em p te d no th in g less than the cleansing of marxism of all its imp uri ties. From this vast st rea m, we have chosen to examine one particular current—the work associated with Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, especially their four book length state ments: Pre-capita list modes of production (hereafter PCMP), Mode of production and social formation (an aut ocr iti que of PCMP, hereafter MPSF), and th e tw o volume work Marx's "Capital" and capitalism today (MCCT, I, II). 1 The latter, in parti cular, "inte rv en es " politically and may be taken to condense the socialism of their project. Despite our authors' bans and proscriptions, we happen to believe that we are living in a material world wh ich has a history. It is th us , for us, of some moment briefly to stress the location of their work within one wider tradition which has entailed an extraordinary intellectualisation of both marxist theory and the socialist project. 2 The wo rk we are criticising repr esen ts per hap s th e most no to rio us exam pl e of this. There is th us a similarity in the styles and practices of this kind of work and its basic division be tw een mental and manu al labo ur—contributi ng to th e de- skilling of th e w ork ing class tha t has accom pa ni ed the rest ruct uri ng of capitalism since the 1950s. These two bases have im po rt an t impl ications for the notions of socialism within the texts we are examining. We begin our critical survey where they begin, with their apriorism, with their co mm it me nt to a world whi ch is only discursive—the sp ok en and tho ug ht world—a universe of concepts. We sho w how this, and indeed ma n y of their erro rs, springs from a mis und erstan din g of pr od uc ti on, of b o t h what it is a n d how Marx ana ly sed it. Th is leads us briefly to co ns ide r their claim of "necessary non-correspondence" and the fundamental circularity of their arguments. We conclude by stressing the political and theo re ti cal significance of h ist ory as par t of th e socialist proj ect— that of exposing and overcoming "the Obvious", the many and misleading forms in which Capitalism's relations present themselves "on the surface of society." 3 *We are most grateful to Edward Thompson for his detai led c om ment s on the final draf t of this paper. Given our general debt to his work and our specific differences it

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