The M ediation o f Nature through Society

67

ness rather than destroys it. The materials o f nature, having

undergone the labour-process, remain components o f the
sensuous world:
T h e form o f wood, for instance, is altered when one makes a table out
o f it. Y et, for all that, the table continues to be that |*nmmnn1 scnsupof
thing, wood.17

The immediacy o f nature asserts itself at ever higher

stages o f the process o f production, though now humanly
mediated through men. M arx had this relationship in mind
when he wrote:
W hile the labourer is at w ork, his labour constantly undergoes a trans
form ation: from the form o f flux to that o f being, from the form o f
m otion to that o f objectivity.1*

In the finished thing which is the result o f labour, the

motion which mediates it is extinguished. But inversely i f
the product o f labour undergoes further processes, it is
reduced again to a mere moment o f the mediating motion.
W hat is immediate at one stage o f production is mediated
at another:
Though a use-value issues from the labour-process as a product, other
use-values, products o f previous labour, enter into it as means ofpro~
duetion. T h e same use-value is both the product o f a previous process,
and a means o f production in a later process. Products are therefore
not only results, but also essential conditions o f the labour-process. W

T his 'objectification as loss o f the object*0which defines

the labour-process has in addition a more general theoreti
cal content. As against Engelss assertion that 'the world is
not to be comprehended as a complex o f ready-made
things, but as a complex o f processes, 11 M arx did not make
the idea o f the dialectical process an abstract alternative to
reified consciousness. One cannot, without falling into
error, conceive things in a metaphysically rigid w ay as
finished and unchangeable. Equally however, one cannot
dissolve things com pletely into the moments o f the social
process which mediates them, for this would amount to the
same metaphysical error with reversed premisses. It is a
matter rather o f unfolding the concrete dialectic o f the
immediacy and mediacy o f objective being in its appropri
ate forms.