Critique

Journal of Socialist Theory

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Activity, labour, and praxis: an outline for a

critique of epistemology

Siyaves Azeri

To cite this article: Siyaves Azeri (2019) Activity, labour, and praxis: an outline for a critique of
epistemology, Critique, 47:4, 585-602, DOI: 10.1080/03017605.2019.1678267

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2019.1678267

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Critique, 2019
Vol. 47, No. 4, 585–602, https://doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2019.1678267

Activity, labour, and praxis: an outline

for a critique of epistemology
Siyaves Azeri

This article aims at analysing the relation between academic-scientific knowledge-

production, scientific labour, and capital. Scientific knowledge-production is a specific
form of activity, that is, the metabolic material exchange between human and the
social environment, which is irreducible to forming a trans-historically universal
Weltanschauung. Knowledge- production is always tool-mediated and the tools are
historically determined. The limits of scientific knowledge are thus determined with
the specific tools of knowledge-production and the rules and forms of labour dictated
by the deployment of these tools, which, in turn, are constituted in response to
socially determined needs and questions in the face of the historically specific modes
of production – in particular capitalism.

Keywords: Labour; activity; knowledge; relations of production; capital

Introduction
Scientific labour is subject to the historical conditions of human activity – in this
context the conditions set by the capitalist relations of production. Subsumption of
academic labour and the process of knowledge-production under capital amounts
to fetishization of both education system and the produced knowledge.
Science is a means of production that is deployed to produce a variety of commod-
ities and exerts surplus-value from workers; it is, firstly, the means of producing skilled
workers needed in different branches of capitalist production; secondly, the means of
producing formalized knowledge-commodities that are put in circulation in scientific
and academic journals in order to be valorized; thirdly, it is the means of scientification
of production in form of technological advancement (‘applied’ natural sciences) and
managerial-administrative technologies (‘applied’ social sciences); it is the means of
production of knowledge as a natural force at the service of capital; lastly, it is the
means of production of science as the means production of science (constant
capital), a reflexive aspect, which is in close relation to all the three above-mentioned
areas of production.

© 2019 Critique
586 S. Azeri
One of the most important aims of scientific production is educating the skilled
labour required for different branches of the capitalist production. Mass education,
diversification of education through introducing new certificate programmes, continu-
ous education, vocational schools and colleges etc. are the means necessary for this
production. Education can be called production since it is the production of one of
the components of the organic composition of capital, that is, ‘variable capital’
(value of labour or the sum-total of wages), which corresponds to living labour
when looked at from the side of the technical composition of capital.1
Intellectual labour can be as productive as material labour, where productivity
means production of surplus-value regardless of the concrete form of the commodity
produced or the service it provides.2 As Marx states,
A school-master is a productive worker when, in addition to belabouring the heads
of his pupils, he works himself into the grounds to enrich the owner of the school.
That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage
factory, makes no difference to the relation. The concept of a productive worker
therefore implies not merely a relation between the activity of work and its useful
effect, between the worker and the product of his work, but also a specifically
social relation of production, a relation with historical origin which stamps the
worker as capital’s direct means of valorization.3
Scientific-academic labour and the process of knowledge-production under capital-
ism are subsumed under capital by turning into forces of nature at its service. Just as in
the case of scientification of production and the enhancement of the social division of
labour where the social characteristic of labour confronts it as ‘capitalized’ labour,
forces of nature, through sciences,
confront the workers as the powers of capital. They become effectively separated
from the skill and knowledge of the individual worker; and even though they are
themselves ultimately the product of labor, they appear as an integral part of
capital wherever they intervene in the labor process.4
There is no knowledge independent from the knowing agent, i.e. there is no knowl-
edge independent of the knowing activity just as there is no language independent of
speech and the speaking subject. ‘Knowledge’ is a potentiality similar to labour-power
that is realizable only once deployed in the production process – material and ideal.
Just as it is not history that does things, ‘possesses vast wealth’, or ‘fight battels’ but

1
K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, transl. B. Fowkes (Middlesex: Penguin Books,
1992), p. 762.
2
‘1) teachers are productive labourers; a) they are (co)-producers of the commodity labour power; b) the
surplus-value they produce is realized once the newly-produced labour-power is exploited; 2) they are directly
value producers as their labour takes the form of alienated, abstract labour (the substance of value)’. ‘Value Pro-
duction and the Struggle in the Classroom: Teachers Within, Against and Beyond Capital’, Capital & Class, 88
(2006), pp. 1–32, at p. 2.
3
Marx, Capital, op. cit., p. 644.
4
J. Stachel, ‘Marx’s Concept of Universal and Collective Labor and their Implications for a Contemporary
Labor Strategy’ (unpublished, 2010), p. 3.
 Critique 587

it is the real living human that possesses, fights, and pursue her ends,5 it is not the
knowledge but the human being that knows.
An analysis of subsumption of knowledge production and academic labour under
capital requires analysing the nature of knowledge as an ‘ideal’ phenomenon, its
mode of production (the historical form of knowledge-producing activity), and cir-
culation of knowledge-commodity in unity. Such analysis requires a clarification of
the practical materialist conceptualization of human activity, praxis, and labour in
light of Marx’s own discussions. To this end, Marx’s practical materialism will be
discussed and the relation between the concepts of ‘activity’, ‘praxis’, and ‘labour’
will be analysed. The relevant critical literature will then be considered in light of
such conceptual clarification. Finally, the forms of subsumption of scientific
labour under capital and the capitalist process of knowledge-production as a particu-
lar field of production and the nature of the subsequent product of this process, that
is, knowledge, will be scrutinized. It will further be discussed that scientific knowl-
edge is not only a product, the circulation of which amounts to realization of value,
but when the whole enterprise of knowledge-production is taken into account, it
functions as a particular means of capitalist production – a means of production
of a peculiar commodity; the knowledge-machine for the extraction of surplus-
value. Disregarding this aspect of the scientific enterprise amounts to the reproduc-
tion of the age-old theoreticist-idealist concept of knowledge as a combination of
propositions and science as Weltanschauung.

Marx’s practical materialism

In the ‘These on Feuerbach’ Marx identifies the major defect of metaphysical materi-
alism as considering reality in terms of objects of the senses only and not in terms of
objectivized human praxis.6 Furthermore, he criticizes idealism, which sets for ‘the
active, subjective side’ only abstractly (1976a, 3),7 that is, for reducing human praxis
to an abstract mental process. Idealism not only pacifies human agents, but in contrast
to its own intensions, pacifies thought and renders it unreal. Marx, in the second
thesis, states that the problem of the reality or truth of thought is not a theoretical
problem, but a practical one. Considering thinking in isolation from human practice
makes the problem of the truth of thought a scholastic one.
From Marx’s point of view, both materialism and idealism conceive the world dua-
listically, that is, in terms of subjects and objects of contemplation. The crude materi-
alist attitude reduces human being into a cognitive machine that passively receives
stimuli and reacts to it; human activities are thus reduced to a bundle of reflexes
and human thinking to an ordering of ‘ideas’ based on sensory data or to forming

5
K. Marx and F. Engels. The Holy Family (in Marx/Engels Collected Works 4, pp. 5–211) (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1975), p. 93.
6
‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (in Marx/Engels Collected Works 5, pp. 3–5) (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976),
p. 3.
7
Ibid., p. 3.
588 S. Azeri
mirror-like images of the world of objects in one’s head. Such a materialism inevitably
amounts to idealism, since the world of ideas, thoughts, or images, is considered a dis-
tinct world, independent of the world of human activity. Such materialism disregards
that the thinking is an outward activity, a process of solving problems and surmount-
ing obstacles in different forms: in case of animals, thinking is identical with the bodily
activity of, say, eating leaves, building a dam, or hunting a prey. In case of humans,
alongside the bodily activities, thinking is constituted and is actualized conceptually
with the use of sign systems. Thinking and activity are simultaneous; they are separ-
able only in abstraction. A thought or an image, which has already been structured in
one’s imagination, is constituted with signs, symbols, words, etc. Owing to languages
and sign-systems, humans constitute their consciousness as a social relation, forming
‘delayed responses’ to stimuli, and pose questions onto reality.8
Marx’s practical materialism does not have an ontological character; it is not a mere
admission that ‘matter’ (body) exists. Rather, it considers human praxis a constituent
of the entirety of human life, the social nature, and knowledge as the appropriation
and ‘manipulation’ of this nature. Human and nature, the subject and the object,
are moments of praxis (of human activity, of labour), where praxis is the middle
term that makes the dialectical unity and separation of the two actualisable. The
world, the social reality exists only as the object of human’s productive activity, that
is, labour. Labour process is the process of ‘physical’ abstraction, the process of chan-
ging the naturally available thing into something abstracted from its immediate
environment and natural state. Through labour, human ‘acts upon external nature
and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops
the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his
own sovereign power’.9 Therefore, according to Marx, cognizing reality means cogniz-
ing the world of human labour. Reality is the object of cognizance and exists to the
extent that it has been transformed into human’s inorganic extension. The human
animal is in a dialectical relation with the social environment: it is in unity with
nature to the extent that nature is humanized; but such humanization is realizable
only to the extent that nature is constituted as a world of human artefacts distinct
from, and in contrast to, human’s existence – to the extent that it is constituted as a
world resisting to human activity.
Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes
[verwirklicht] his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is con-
scious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he
must subordinate his will to it.10
Marx criticizes German philosophers for delving into pseudo-questions such as the
problem of the unity of human and nature ‘as though these were two separate

8
L. S. Vygotsky, ‘Tool and Symbol in Child Development’ in J. Valsiner and R. van der Veer (eds) The
Vygotsky Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 99–174, p. 166.
9
Marx, Capital, op. cit. p. 283.
10
Ibid., p. 284.
 Critique 589

“things” and man did not always have before him an historical nature and a natural
history’ (Marx, 40)11 via human labour. The crude materialist stance sees objects
only, as, say, ‘Feuerbach … in the Campagna di Roma … finds only pasture lands
and swamps, where in the time of Augustus he would have found nothing but the vine-
yards and villas of Roman capitalists’.12 For crude/contemplative materialist ‘pure’
natural sciences will disclose the secrets of the world to those that are properly edu-
cated, whereas, practical materialism realizes nature in terms of human labour that
provides the natural sciences with the particular material they work with.13
For practical materialist stance, humans see in nature what they experience in their
social existence and their mode of activity (production and practice). As Maidansky
aptly puts, ‘in practical materialism, activity is substance, manifesting itself in corpor-
eal form, whereas in somatic materialism, activity is a mere predicate of a body, and
body is its subject’.14
Marx conceptualizes praxis quite differently than most of the Marxist tradition –
including Engels. Marx emphasizes the inseparability of subject and object as constitu-
ent moments of reality: as much as human as a ‘natural’ being ‘reflects’ natural reality,
the very natural reality bears the marks of and ‘reflects’ human labour. Once the role
subject in creating the reality is admitted, a critique of idealism cannot be based on
naïve objectivism. As Schmidt notes, ‘In Marx, the object is not posited by the theor-
etical action of men, but the objective world loses its independent character as an inde-
pendent creation, and becomes ultimately merely the embodiment of human action’.15
For Engels, as Oittinen notes, ‘praxis’ is an epistemological category, which is devel-
oped in his criticism of Kantianism.16 Engels’ version of practice and materialism lacks
the centrality of the ‘subjective, active side’; motion is not considered the subject but a
mode, a predicate of matter. Engels’ ideas on practice, which he developed at the final
years of Marx’s life and after his death, is not a furthering of Marx’s philosophy of
praxis but a totally new philosophy – ‘a cosmocentric philosophy of science’.17 By
reducing praxis into an epistemological criterion and science into a world-view,
Engels’ materialism shrinks to that the ‘hitherto materialism’ of ‘thinking body’,
which attempts to explain the anatomy of thought through the anatomy of the
brain; whereas, as Ilyenkov puts, the functional determination of thought, can be

11
K. Marx, The German Ideology (in Marx/Engels Collected Works 5, pp. 19–539) (Moscow: Progress Publish-
ers, 1976), p. 40.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
A. Maidansky, ‘Reality as Activity: The Concept of Praxis in Soviet Philosophy’ in A. Maidansky and
V. Oittinen (eds) The Practical Essence of Man: The ‘Activity Approach’ in Late Soviet Philosophy (Leiden:
Brill, 2016), pp. 42–57, at p. 57.
15
A. Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, transl. B. Fowkes (London: NLB, 1971), p. 57.
16
V. Oittinen, ‘“Praxis” as the Criterion of Truth? The Aporias of Soviet Marxism and the Activity Approach’
in A. Maidansky and V. Oittinen (eds) The Practical Essence of Man: The ‘Activity Approach’ in Late Soviet Phil-
osophy (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 29–41, at p. 30.
17
W.F. Boeselager, The Soviet Critique of Neopositivism, transl. T. J. Blakely (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing,
1975), pp. 25–27.
590 S. Azeri
understood only through the examination of ‘the real composition of its objective
activities among the other bodies of the infinitely varied universum’.18 The thinking
body stance, albeit implicitly, preserves the mind–body dualism and the ‘contempla-
tive’ concept of matter; in so doing it fails to grasp thinking itself as a form of outward
activity; rather considers it a neurophysiological phenomenon.
For Marx praxis is a philosophical concept that he develops in the process of criti-
cizing Hegelian subjectivism and Feuerbach’s physicalism; Marx is the first materialist
that prioritizes action over body.19 Praxis is constituent both of social nature and
human being; it is human’s naturally determined action in, and her resistance to,
her natural environment and the necessary consequence of her initial unity with
nature. Furthermore, through practice human being emancipates herself from this
unity and negates her initial form of existence; alongside herself, natural nature is
negated and is posited in the form of social nature. Thence, praxis turns into the
middle term that unites and synthesizes these negated modes; social nature is the
reality populated by artefacts, which in turn assumes an existence independent of
human praxis as objectified human labour. Knowledge, in this view, is this continuous
process of negation and synthesis that is produced along the line of contact between
subject and object as two constituent moments of reality.

Praxis, activity and labour

The concepts of activity and praxis are closely related to the concept of labour. In the
German Ideology, Marx states that the differentia specifica of human species compared
to nonhuman animals ‘is not that they think, but that they begin to produce their
means of subsistence’ and by so doing ‘humans indirectly produce their material
life’.20 Marx emphasizes that this is not a simple act of reproduction, but a special
activity actualized in a certain mode so that it expresses what humans are: humans
coincide ‘both with what they produce and with how they produce’.21 Thus, productive
activity constitutes the core of human interaction with the environment and between
individuals; all human activity, therefore, is derivative of this essential activity, that is,
labour. Labour is the subject to which thought belongs as a predicate.22
As humans develop tools, means of production, division of labour, and the corre-
sponding forms of property develop too. ‘Division of labour only becomes truly
such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears’.23
The emerging division between manual and mental labour, which reaches its height
under the capitalist relations of production, contributes to the illusion that the

18
E. Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic: Essays on Its History and Theory, transl. H.C. Creighton (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1977), p. 73.
19
Maidansky, op. cit., p. 42.
20
Marx, The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 31. (All emphases original unless otherwise stated.)
21
Ibid., pp. 31–32.
22
Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic, op. cit., p. 74.
23
Marx, The German Ideology, op. cit., pp. 44–45.
 Critique 591

realm of the ‘ideal’ (ideological as Marx put) is an independent one with a life and
history of its own; however, alongside their lives, humans produce their ideas concern-
ing their life, their relation to nature, to each other and concerning themselves.24
Labour is the historical act that constitutes the basis of human history, which should
be sustained continuously if humanity is to subsist. The sensuous world, no matter
how impoverished or sophisticated, is the world of human labour – the world
mediated and materially produced by human labour. Labour constitutes the essence
of human being; it establishes ‘the original, primary source of the realisation of
social being, the model of human activity, the basic ontological foundation of
human “multi-facetedness”’.25
Marx, in his analysis of the dual character of capitalist labour, emphasizes that
labour, regardless of the historically specific form it acquires under different modes
of production, is the essential form of the metabolic relation between human and
nature.26 The other condition of this relation is the materials provided by nature.
Nature, as the source of material, is the force that necessitates humans’ productive
activity, which in turn, necessarily follows the course of nature itself by changing
the form of material.27 It is with labour that the unity and separation of subject and
object is constituted; labour is the condition of naturalized humanity as much as it
is the condition of humanized nature. Through labour the ‘pure’ forms of natural
things are exposed and nature is truly resurrected; labour ‘is a real dialectical conver-
sion of the human and the natural, subjective and objective, historical and eternal’.28
Labour’s dual character means that on the one hand, it is an expenditure of human
labour-power; in other words, it is the ‘abstract’ human labour that constitutes the
value of commodities. On the other hand, it is the expenditure of a particular
human labour-power that produces the use-value.29 The value of a commodity is
determined by the socially necessary time of its production. The essence of value,
thus, is not ‘labour’ but simple average labour that is … the labour-power possessed
by every human being in its organism.30
Hence, one can speak of three categories of labour under capitalism: concrete
labour, which is the producer of use-value of a commodity; abstract (or as Murray
puts, ‘practically abstract’ (2000)) labour,31 which constitutes the substance of value;
and ‘labour’, that is, labour as the condition of subsistence of humanity and the funda-
mental and perpetual form of human’s metabolic relation to nature, ‘the universal con-
dition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the

24
Ibid., p. 36.
25
R. Antunes, The Meanings of Work: Essay on the affirmation and Negation of Work, transl. E. Molinari
(Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 142.
26
Marx, Capital, op. cit., p. 133.
27
Ibid.
28
Maidansky, op. cit., pp. 48–50.
29
Marx, Capital, op. cit., p. 137.
30
Ibid., p. 135.
31
P. Murray, ‘Marx’s “Truly Social” Labour Theory of Value: Part I, Abstract Labour in Marxian Value
Theory’, Historical Materialism, 6:1 (2000), pp. 27–66.
592 S. Azeri
everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and … therefore indepen-
dent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society
in which human beings live’.32 It is only under capitalism that this general aspect of
labour, the ‘labour as such’ or labour as a ‘rational abstraction’,33 which signifies
those aspects of labour that are common to all social formations, becomes conceivable.
Under capitalism, in contrast to the historical development of labour, every ‘concrete’
‘particular’ labour appears as a moment of the general, ‘abstract’ labour. This, in turn,
is the expression of two characteristics of labour, once it is subsumed under capital:
worker’s work is under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs; the
product of labour is not property of the immediate producer, the worker, but of the
capitalist.34 It should be noticed that abstract labour is not identical to ‘immaterial’
or ‘intellectual’ labour. To the contrary, labour, material or intellectual, can become
abstract only to the extent that it produces (surplus) value and thus is under capital’s
formal and real subsumption.

Academic labour and the nature of ‘cognitive’ products

Knowledge is a product of human’s interaction with social nature; it is produced as an
instrument of manipulating nature; as a specific form of metabolic exchange with social
nature, production of knowledge involves ‘intellectual’ labour. Similar to manual
labour, intellectual labour too is subject to historically specific determinations. In capi-
talist society, subsumed under capital, labour becomes value-producing (abstract)
labour; knowledge-producing intellectual labour is not an exception. Analysis of aca-
demic labour process and scientific knowledge-production reveals forms of capitaliza-
tion of intellectual labour and contributes to dissipating the image of scientific labour
and knowledge-production as transhistorical and thus a neutral quest for knowledge,
which is rooted in human ‘curiosity’. Capitalization of academic labour and its sub-
sumption under capital is actualized through the functions this labour attains within
the capitalist mode of production. Academic labour functions as a means of producing
qualified labour as is the case with ‘single purpose’ universities that mainly commodify
teaching or as the means of production of innovations and applicable technologies as in
the case of ‘enhanced’ and technological research universities.35 Furthermore, through
national research and development programmes public funds are transferred to capital
that amounts to ‘appropriation [of the] creative achievements of social labour outside
the capital/wage labour relation as “free gifts”’;36 subsumption of creative and

32
Marx, Capital, op. cit., p. 290.
33
P. Damerow, Abstraction and Representation: Essays on the Cultural Evolution of Thinking,
transl. R. Hanauer (Dordrecht: Springer, 1996), p. 384.
34
Marx, Capital, op. cit., pp. 291–292.
35
C. Rikap, ‘The Differentiated Market-University: Is Commodification Equally Affecting All Universities?’
Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 15:3 (2017), pp. 266–304, at pp. 280–281.
36
T. Smith, ‘Technological Change in Capitalism: Some Marxian Themes’, Cambridge Journal of Economics,
34 (2009), pp. 203–212, at p. 208.
 Critique 593

innovative scientific activity is intensified with the introduction of ‘triple helix’ model
that is based on interaction between ‘three distinct institutional spheres – universities,
industry and government (UIG)’.37 A short survey of the Marxian analysis of academic
labour process will further clarify forms of subsumption of knowledge-producing
activity under capital.
Gregory and Winn draw attention to the fact that the basic form of work in acade-
mia is ‘wage labour’ and thus a deep and intense critique of academic labour based on
Marx’s ‘negative’ conceptualization of labour as a historically specific category is
required.38 Furthermore, they emphasize that the knowledge produced under the capi-
talist mode of production is itself a capitalist product – commodity – and thus a reflex-
ive critique of knowledge is also necessary.
Harvie and De Angelis39 note that knowledge-production is subject to Marx’s
labour theory of value; it is made ‘commensurable’ with other labours through impo-
sition of metrics, and thus is made measurable by the average socially necessary labour
time.40 Hall and Bowles (2016), on the other hand, relate the subsumption of academic
labour to the stress and agitation that academics experience. ‘Subsumption is the
process through which inherent constraints on the labour capacity of a particular
sector of the economy are overruled, and subordinated to the demands of capital.’41
Thus, the task is to identify the peculiarity of the subsumption of academic labour
under capital. Drawing on the distinction of ‘formal subsumption’, as the domination
of the ‘pre-capitalist’ work by capital through, say, prolongation of the work-day, from
‘real subsumption’, the authors discuss that anxiety functions as a means of real and
formal subsumption of academic labour to capital.42 The process of subsumption of
academic labour under capital guarantees its existence as a surplus-value producing
power, where the subjectivity and autonomy of labour are determined by capital43 –
in other words, subjectivity and autonomy of the labourer become the personification
of the Subjectivity and Autonomy of Capital. Hall and Bowles also underline the

37
F. Ramella, Sociology of Economic Innovation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), p. 165.
38
K. Gregory and J. Winn, ‘Marx, Engels and the Critique of Academic Labour’, Workplace, 28 (2016), pp. 1–
8, at pp. 1–2. Also see M. Neary and J. Winn, ‘Against Academic Identity’, Higher Education Research & Devel-
opment, 35:2 (2016), pp. 409–412.
39
D. Harvie and M. De Angelis, ‘“Cognitive Capitalism” and the Rat-race: How Capital Measures Immaterial
Labour in British Universities’, Historical Materialism, 17:3 (2009), pp. 3–30.
40
In his analysis of subsumption of academic labour to capital, Krystian Szadkowski introduces impact factor
and bibliometrics as the means for measuring the socially necessary academic labour. ‘Academic production is
bound to socially necessary impact/time – that is, the time required to produce an use value of a certain
impact (a published output that counts within a given national or institutional evaluation procedure) under
the conditions of production that are considered ‘normal’ for a given higher education system and with the
average degree of skill and intensity prevalent in the working process of that system.’ (‘Socially Necessary
Impact Time: Notes on the Acceleration of Academic Labor, Metrics and the Transnational Association of Capi-
tals’, Teori Vedy/Theory of Science, 38:1 (2016), pp. 53–88, at p. 62.)
41
R. Hall and K. Bowles, ‘Re-engineering Higher Education: The Subsumption of Academic Labour and the
Exploitation of Anxiety’, Workplace, 28 (2016), pp. 30–47, at p. 32.
42
Ibid., p. 33.
43
Ibid., p. 34.
594 S. Azeri
double movement of capital that stems from its demand for larger profit: on the one
hand capital intensifies the labour process in order to extract more surplus-value from
(academic) workers, on the other hand it expects them to be more creative and entre-
preneurial.44 In this way, education and knowledge-production becomes means of
increasing the productivity of capital and subject to its logic of competitiveness.
Simburger and Neary, drawing on Postone’s45 elaboration on Marx’s negative cri-
tique of capitalism, define the organization of academic labour as an expression of con-
temporary capitalism and aim at a critique of academic work based on Marx’s labour
theory of value.46 The authors note that capital is obliged to incorporate new technol-
ogies and scientific advancement in the production process and deploy sophisticated,
expensive machines, which in turn decrease the number of workers and thus cause
crisis (since only living labour can produce value).47
We might think of knowledge as one of the products of academic-scientific pro-
duction. Knowledge, the product that is incarnated in form of articles in journals,
books, electronic resources, etc. and which, at times, is also materialized in form of
technological advancement through the process of scientificiation of production,
can be considered the machinery, the means of production that is deployed in the
process of production of both the means of consumption (in this case the ‘qualified’
labour needed in different fields of capitalist production) and the means of production
themselves (‘pure’ or ‘theoretical’ or ‘scientific’ knowledge). Therefore, the worsening
of the conditions of academic work, both teaching and research, is a ‘necessity’ dictated
by the capitalist form of knowledge-production: On the one hand, there is the need for
the massive production of qualified labour-power as the potential to produce value, on
the other hand, there is the need for massive production of scientific knowledge as the
means of production of both labour-power and the means of manipulating the so-
called ‘forces of nature’ and incorporating them so that they exist as forces of capital.
The subsumption of academic/scientific labour under capital is also linked to the
problem of nature of knowledge as a commodity (a fetish). As Winn notes, ‘[W]e
know from Marx that the commodity form is a fetish; it is a historically specific
form of wealth made manifest in the capitalist mode of production’.48 Attempts at
addressing fetishization of knowledge are mostly based on an uncritical endorsement
of the mainstream commonsensical conceptualization of knowledge as a mental, hence
‘immaterial’ phenomenon. Furthermore, ‘immateriality’ of knowledge is considered a
sign of its ‘abstractness’ in contrast to the ‘concreteness’ of the ‘material’ (physical) –
the immediate object of the senses. This, in turn, amounts to identifying knowledge
with forms of its incarnation – a physicalist reductionism that ignores the ‘ideal’

44
Ibid., p. 39.
45
M. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
46
E. Simburger and M. Neary, ‘Taxi Professors: Academic Labour in Chile, A Critical-practical Response to
the Politics of Worker Identity’, Workplace, 28 (2016), pp. 48–73, at pp. 48, 50.
47
Ibid., pp. 64 cf.
48
J. Winn, ‘Writing About Academic Labour’, Workplace, 25 (2015), pp. 1–15, at p. 4.
 Critique 595

nature of knowledge and tries to deduce ‘objectivity’ of knowledge from such incarna-
tions. Such reduction is the form of appearance of conceptualization of knowledge as
Weltanschauung in the form of conceptual-mental lenses through which one views the
world. The uncritical endorsement of such conceptualization also resonates in debates
concerning the relation between material and immaterial labour and their subsequent
relation to production of (surplus)-value.
Worrell and Krier identify the distinctive feature of ‘capital fetishism’ as considering
capital a mere thing and not a system of social relations. ‘And the sheer “scale” and
“scope” of the capitalist system means that everything above the ontic plane of the
individual assumes the shape of something autonomous, inevitable, and unstop-
pable’.49 The same may be claimed to be the case with mainstream epistemologies’
conception of knowledge as self-expanding and independent from any social
mediation. Empiricism and naïve materialism conceive of knowledge as a personal
attitude stemming from an immediate confrontation between the (abstract) individual
and an (abstract) ‘nature’; this is considered empirical knowledge. At a more theoreti-
cal level, this abstract immediate confrontation with nature too is put aside; it is only
the immediate confrontation with ‘knowledge’ itself that produces further knowledge:
K – K + ΔK (the fetish picture of knowledge is further intensified in theoretical fields
such as theoretical physics where knowledge seems to be just a consequence of ‘pure’
mathematical modelling).
Knowledge is an ability reminiscent of ‘labour-power’; hence, its inseparability form
the individual. It should be noted that the inseparability of knowledge from individual
persons does not confer ‘autonomy’ and ‘mobility’ on the ‘subject of knowledge’, con-
trary to Gigi Rogerro’s50 and others’ claims. Such inseparability does not do away with
the historical determinations of the process of knowledge-production dictated by the
mode of production. As Murray notes, the distinctive feature of capitalist mode of pro-
duction is the specific social form and purpose of production, which in capitalist
society is surplus-value or profit.51 The organization of capitalist production on the
basis of the social goal of production of surplus-value amounts to what Tony Smith
formulates as the inversion in ontological priority of the means and ends under capit-
alism, where human flourishing becomes subordinate to that of capital.52 Capital onto-
logically precedes human agency and thus shapes subjectivity and intentions of
individuals. Such inversion fundamentally determines the nature of technology and
knowledge undater capitalism.53 To the extent that knowledge-production is

49
M. Worrell and D. Krier, ‘Totems, Fetishes, and Enchanted Modernity: Hegelian Marxism Confronts Ido-
latry’, 2018, http://logosjournal.com/2018/totems-fetishes-and-enchanted-modernity-hegelian-marxism-
confronts-idolatry/.
50
G. Rogerro, The Production of Living Knowledge, transl. E. Brophy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press, 2011), p. 94.
51
P. Murray, ‘Capital’s Reach: How Capital Shapes and Subsumes’ in D. Krier and M.P. Worrell (eds) Capit-
alism’s Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 113–135, at p. 117.
52
Smith, op. cit., p. 206.
53
Ibid.
596 S. Azeri
concerned, the question is how and under which social form knowledge is produced,
i.e. what the social form of actualization of knowledge is? As Marx notes,
It is not what is made but how, and by what instruments of labour, that dis-
tinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a stan-
dard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but they also
indicate the social relations within which men work.54
The determination of the social forms of human activity by capital has consequences
that transcends the boundaries of the immediate process of production and enables
capital to appropriate the products of ‘commons-based peer production’ and ‘the
achievements of social labour outside the capital/wage labour as “free gifts”’.55 Formu-
lations such as Rogerro’s, which are also shared by proponents of cognitive capitalism
theory56 and by figures such as Lyotard (1984, 18)57 are blind to the social form of pro-
duction and thus recapitulate ‘the illusion of economic’, the idea of production-in-
general that conceives of production as independent from any particular mode58 in
the realm of knowledge-production. According to such conceptualizations, knowledge
is not knowledge of object, where the object of knowledge is historically determinate,
provided by the historically specific form of human activity – the capitalistically motiv-
ated organic interaction between human and nature, but a general ‘understanding’ of
the world. Ignoring the ideal nature of knowledge and reducing it to its forms of incar-
nation, enhances the fetishistic image of knowledge as time-independent, neutral and
transhistorical. Such fetishistic view of knowledge is also apparent in treating ‘general
intellect’, after the image of Hegel’s ‘Spirit,’ as a thinking machine (as is with the pro-
ponents of cognitive capitalism thesis) or the ‘machine-Mother’ that once re-appro-
priated allegedly emancipates humans from thinking and labouring.59
If scientific knowledge-production is conceived of not in terms of formation of a
world-view, a language game that is hung in the air, but as a specific form of pro-
ductive activity (praxis) and the consequent knowledge in terms of (conceptual)
tools or organs of activity,60 then the question concerning the criterion of truth of
knowledge-claims is rendered redundant and absurd as if one asks the proof of a
spoon or an axe. The proof of the spoon is in its capability to serve as a means to reach-
ing out to the soup in a bowl; its proof is its social significance, just as the proof of the
pudding is in eating. Praxis is the middle term or the mediation between knowing and

54
Marx, Capital, op. cit., p. 286.
55
Smith, op. cit., p. 209.
56
P. Virno, ‘General Intellect’, Historical Materialism, 15 (2007), pp. 3–8, at. pp. 2–4. C. Vercellone, ‘From
Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism’,
Historical Materialism, 15 (2007), pp. 13–36, at p. 16.
57
J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, transl. G. Bennington and B. Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 18.
58
Murray, ‘Capital’s Reach’, op. cit., p. 132.
59
D. Krier and P. Worrell, ‘The Organic Composition of Big Mama’, Continental Thought and Theory, 1:4
(2018), pp. 636–652, at pp. 641–643.
60
S. Azeri, ‘Conceptual Cognitive Organs: Toward an Historical-materialist Theory of Scientific Knowledge’,
Philosophia: Philosophical Quarterly of Israel, 41:4 (2013), pp. 1095–1123.
 Critique 597

the object of knowledge. Conceived from a Marxian stance, knowledge-producing

activity is subject to the determinations of the mode of production and that of
human activity in general within a historically specific era. In other words, it is inevi-
table that knowledge-producing activity bears the mark of the specific socio-historical
conditions in the context of which it is actualized. The problem is one about how
knowledge is produced (what is the social form of its production?) and why it is pro-
duced so61? This can be understood in parallel to machines: a ‘properly’ constructed
machine realizes its proper functions in the process of production in relation to
other technical components that form the totality of a productive unit, say, an auto-
mobile factory. The specificity of machines, however, is irreducible to such a ‘technical’
functioning. The specificity of machine is its being a ‘revolutionary’ tool that intensifies
the extraction of surplus-value from the worker. Such specificity can be addressed only
in relation to the historically specific form of production. The same goes with knowl-
edge-production: the main problem is not determining the criteria of acceptability of a
truth-claim acceptable – that is a purely ‘technical’ question. Humans have always pro-
duced and will produce knowledge, which is necessarily and by definition, object-
oriented (knowledge is always knowledge of an object) – knowledge is the outcome
of human interaction with and her activity of manipulation of nature. The main
problem is determining the specificities of the form of knowledge-production. Such
reformulation stems from Marx’s demand for revealing the ‘this-worldliness’ of
knowledge.

Knowledge-production: a critique
Attributing self-sufficiency and independence from activity to knowledge is the
expression of human’s alienation. As Schmidt notes, the dialectical materialist con-
ception of the problem of knowledge-production has demonstrated that ‘drives,
desires, and aims, and indeed all forms of human interest in nature, are in each
case socially mediated’.62
Human’s confrontation with nature, from the outset, is mediated by human labour
and its means – including human body. Knowing nature, therefore, is mediated by
forms of appropriation of nature and the means deployed to this end that imposes
forms of existence on nature in correspondence to forms it is manipulated. Moreover,
meaning is related to tool-making; thus every human form of appropriation of nature
has a definite social significance owing to its tool-mediated nature. Tools determine
the limits of material and intellectual production. Furthermore, they determine the

61
Regarding the relation between social form of production and morality (as a particular realm of the ‘ideal’)
Murray states, ‘Production is always social, but there is no sociality in general, no general form of social
cooperation: production always involves specific social forms and purposes. Moreover, as a particular way of
life, a mode of production possesses a particular moral character. Morality for Marx is like the weather, the ques-
tion is not will we have any but what will it be’ (‘Capital’s Reach’, op. cit., p. 117).
62
Schmidt, op. cit., p. 97.
598 S. Azeri
limits of actualizability of intellectually anticipated goals. The application of tools
‘mediates between possibility and reality’.63 As Schmidt notes,
the most basic and abstract concepts have arisen in the context of labour-processes,
i.e. in the context of tool-making. The tool connects man’s purpose with the object
of his labour. It brings the conceptual element, logical unity, into the human mode
of life.64
However, under the capitalist relations of production tool-mediated knowing appears
to be an independent thing from social labour; knowledge appears as something, a
fetish, to be discovered in nature. Knowledge assumes a totally abstract form in two
senses: it is produced with the use of abstract means and becomes conceptual; it
appears as totally independent from human: just as under the capitalist relations of
production labour is deprived of its own nature and is converted into a purely subjec-
tive force that is confronted by its own product – an alienated value existing for itself,
the knowing subject confronts its own product as a thing by itself.
Scientific knowledge (and knowledge in general) is not the formation of a world-
view but is a form of human activity and metabolic relation with social nature. The
science-as-a-world-view stance is reminiscent of Feuerbach’s ‘contemplative material-
ism’ that takes the sensuous world not as the product and object of socio-historical
human activity, but merely as the object of the senses.65 As Ilyenkov notes, knowledge
is not something to be ‘acquired’ in the form of certain propositions, which should be
later ‘applied’ to the object. Knowledge is always object-oriented and therefore a
knowledge that still is need of ‘application’ is not genuine knowledge but is at best ver-
balism.66 Knowledge emerges only within interaction with the object that forms the
unity between human and nature, regardless of the texture of the object of knowl-
edge.67 That knowledge is not a set of propositions should be understood clearly.
This statement does not mean that sentences, propositions, formulae and specific
sign-systems are irrelevant to knowledge or that genuine knowledge is ‘experimental’
or ‘physical’. Rather, it emphasizes that knowledge in general and scientific concepts
and conceptual machines, in particular, are means for relaying the rules, methods,
and laws of human activity of manipulating the social world. As Damerow and

63
P. Damerow and W. Lefevre, ‘Tools of Science’ in Abstraction and Representation: Essays on the Cultural
Evolution of Thinking, transl. R. Hanauer (Dordrecht: Springer, 1996), pp. 395–404, at. p. 395.
64
Schmidt, op. cit., p. 102.
65
Marx, The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 30. Marx further notes, ‘Feuerbach speaks in particular of the per-
ception of natural science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and chemist;
but where would natural science be without industry and commerce? Even this “pure” natural science is provided
with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men’ (Ibid,
p. 40).
66
E. Ilyenkov, ‘A Contribution on the Question of the Concept of “Activity” and Its Significance for Peda-
gogy’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 45:4 (2007), pp. 69–74, at p. 71.
67
Formulating knowledge in terms of object-oriented activity also corresponds to Stachel’s demand for a
radical transformation of the main question of epistemology: not ‘what’ but ‘where is knowledge?’ That is the
question (‘Where is Knowledge?’ in AIP Conference Proceedings 1446, 404; doi:10.1063/1.4728008), pp. 404–
426, at pp. 406–407).
 Critique 599

Levefre state, ‘The primary form in which knowledge about natural and social relation-
ships arising from the labor process is represented is the form of rules for the appro-
priate use of tools’.68 Knowledge is expressed, becomes manifest, and relayed through
sign systems of different types, from ordinary languages to pure mathematical the-
ories; conceptual systems are the necessary form of incarnation (formalization) of
the laws of human activity that are ideally reconstructed in thinking – similar to
words that are forms of materialization of thinking, scientific propositions, formulae
and formalizations are forms of incarnation of knowledge that evidence its object-
oriented character. Just as a map is a certain tool deployed in order to locate
oneself, a place, or an object in the world and neither the world itself or a ‘picture’
of the world, propositional knowledge is a tool that posits the norms and tools of
the forms of a certain metabolic relation between human and nature.69 If the metaphor
of map is taken to mean a ‘reflection’, a ‘picture’, or a Weltanschauung then the sign is
mistaken for what it signifies: in this case, as Jorge Louis Borges notes, the best such
map will be one that is as large and as specific as what it maps; a map of a universe
that is as large as the universe will be of no use and thus will relay no knowledge as
another map – a meta-map – will be needed to map the original map ad infinitum.
Furthermore, the Weltanschauung stance approaches knowledge from the contempla-
tive point of view: knowledge accordingly is something totally mental, ontologically
different than the material, which provides one with certain conceptual frameworks
to ‘correct’ the picture of the world available to the imperfect common-sense intuition.
Thus follows the dichotomy between the world of ordinary ‘perception’ (or ‘cogni-
tion’) and those of the sciences, which is the form of appearance of the dichotomous
ontological foundations of contemplative stance – the absolute separation between the
subject and the object.
Knowledge as a set of skills and machinery is not granted for free. The student needs
these ‘skills’ in order to be able to sell her labour power, that is, she needs these skills in
order to function as a portion of variable capital. However, she has to pay for these
skills because knowledge under capitalism is itself a means of production; it not
only is a natural force at the service of capital, but also is a means for producing
more intensely and efficiently the variable capital that actualizes these forces.
Hence, just as workers are separated from the means of production, the yet-to-be-
workers should also be kept separated from this particular means.
Institutionalization of knowledge-production and its formalization (that is, publi-
cation of results of researches in academic journals and books, etc.) is another
aspect of this separation. The massive amount of scientific publication is the concre-
tization of the rule of production for the sake of production. Formalized commodity-

68
Damerow and Lefevre, op. cit., p. 396.
69
‘Science … is not free in forming its abstractions; in this activity it is restricted by material preconditions,
more precisely, by the specific tools at its disposal that provide cognition with abstractions which are capable of
realization … These tools open up the possibilities of a given scientific abstraction and simultaneously determine
its limits’ (Damerow and Lefevre, op. cit., pp. 399–400).
600 S. Azeri
knowledge is circulated in the market in order to finalize the cycle of valorization of
capital. That a formalized knowledge-commodity, say, a particular academic paper
or a software, can turn into a particular use-value more than once, that is, it is sellable
to more than one consumer, does not invalidate Marx’s labour theory of value, as pro-
ponents of cognitive capitalism claim; rather, it manifests the specific form of sub-
sumption of knowledge producing labour to abstract time. According to
Szadkowski, the ‘impact factor’ is the key element for measuring the socially necessary
time of production of knowledge.70 Calculated on the basis of average of number of
citations per year of a manuscript, impact factor reveals the potentially realizable
surplus-value.

In way of conclusion
What is the commodity that is denoted by ‘knowledge’? Apparently, we once again
come across the classical question of epistemology: ‘what is knowledge?’ In contrast
to mainstream epistemology that poses the question abstractly (devoid of its histori-
cal determinations) and answers it indeterminately (‘knowledge is justified true
belief’, ‘a system of propositions’, etc.), the aforementioned question implies that
(1) Knowledge is a product of labour; (2) This labour has historically determinate
forms; (3) Scientific labour’s specific form – that is the concrete (useful labour) –
should not be conflated with its historically specific form; there are two distinct
sets of questions: for example, that certain concrete skills are required in order to
run a machine, use a hammer, employ a telescope, or construe a model in theoreti-
cal physics is one question, the historical determinate form these labours acquire as
value-producing labours is another. The latter is indifferent toward the formers;
whereas the formers exist only as moments of the latter, that is, as specific forms
of value-producing labour. They will be promoted and appropriated to the extent
that they contribute to valorization of capital. Therefore, just as certain tools and
machinery get outmoded and alongside them the ‘skills’ or concrete labours
required for their deployment, certain forms of knowledge-production and the
skills for their deployment disappear. The emergence and disappearance of different
forms of knowledge is not due to a change in their forms of incarnation, as is
implied by Lyotard’s explanation of the emergence of ‘postmodern knowledge’ on
the basis of ‘digitalization’; rather, it manifests the changes in modes of human
activity. Mainstream epistemology treats knowledge in its ‘concrete’ form only
and thus indeterminately, i.e. devoid of its historical content, not as knowledge as
response to historically determinate social needs, but as Knowledge; it sees the
history of knowledge-production as a battle between ideas sprouting out of great
minds/brains where one thought replaces another etc. For such an abstract epistem-
ology that dismisses the interdependence of the material and the ideal,

70
Szadkowski, op. cit., p. 62.
 Critique 601

historical changes present themselves as changes of relations existing between

abstract concepts, changes that, just like the relations and their very existence,
cannot be explained in terms of these concepts. Historical changes appear as the
abstract negation of logical relations and not as the result of a specific logic of the
object.71
Such conceptualization of knowledge is as indeterminate as a person’s answer to the
question ‘What is a machine?’ in a purely ‘concrete’ form and with reference to its
mechanical components: ‘a collection of specific tools that are combined in a particular
form in order to run in a certain way with the “concrete” aim of producing this
peculiar object of utility’. This is, at best, a tautology similar to the proposition ‘a
machine is a machine’ or ‘this machine is this machine’. Whereas, from a critical mate-
rialist viewpoint, a machine is a historically determinate tool, which revolutionizes
production not because it facilitates large-scale industrial production, but because it
intensifies the extraction of surplus-value from labour. A critical analysis of knowl-
edge, the true concrete (determinate) analysis to which one should ascend, thus,
should unfold such determinations and historical specificity of scientific knowledge.
Labour is tool-mediated. In case of knowledge-producing labour, these tools are for-
malizing means such as sign systems, concepts, and theories as well as lab equipment
etc.72 If the social specificities of the tool is disregarded, this statement does not add
much to a critical analysis. As Murray and Schuler put,
Every society involves tools, but every tool tells the story of its society. The general
definition of a tool does not explain how instruments produce value (and surplus
value) in capitalist societies: Marx calls instruments of production constant
capital to disclose their specific social form and purpose. When social form is over-
looked, denied, or disguised, use-value Romanticism, with its penchant for general
traits, will pop up.73
Under existing social relations (i.e. capitalism) sciences are the furthering of
human’s dehumanization as they are natural forces made an element of capital.
Sciences constitute forms of existence of the ‘forces of nature’ as forces of capital;
thus, these forces are historically determinate and appear in a historically specific
form – as ‘objective’ ‘natural’ forces that are alien to humans and determine their
lives. However, nature is always humanized nature because human (re)cognizes
nature only within her interaction with nature. ‘The nature which develops in
human history – the genesis of human society – is man’s real nature; hence nature

71
Damerow, op. cit., p. 385.
72
In a similar vein Stachel states, tools of scientific production ‘may be conceptual, such as mathematical
techniques or scientific theories; or material, such as experimental apparatus and laboratory notebooks. Even
the use of conceptual tools will usually involve a material aspect: textbooks and journal articles, pen and
paper, calculator, computer, etc.’ (‘Problems not Disciplines’ in J. Renn and K. Gavroglu (eds) Positioning the
History of Science (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 163–167, at p. 164, n. 7.)
73
P. Murray and J. Schuler, ‘Social Form and the “Purely Social”: On the Kind of Sociality Involved in Value’
in D. Krier and M.P. Worrell (eds) The Social Ontology of Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017),
pp. 121–142, at p. 125.
602 S. Azeri
as it develops through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropo-
logical nature’.74
Knowledge is conveyed through formalizing means such as propositions; yet it is
not identical with these means just as a word spoken is not identical to voice (this
latter would yield the oddity that the same word written in ink is ink and thus a differ-
ent than itself). What might be of interest and relevant to a critical analysis of knowl-
edge-production is the peculiarity of the whole machinery that makes large scale
knowledge-production possible. Hence, mathematization of physics, for instance,
might facilitate mass production whereas not in historical sciences or in life sciences.
It is in this sense that the analyses of modes of formalization of sciences becomes rel-
evant and explanatory, in other words when the ‘concrete’ means of production of a
knowledge-commodity is conceived of as a moment of and a response to the needs set
by its historically determinate form.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
The writing of this paper was made possible by the Joseph Dobrovsky Fellowship granted by the
Czech Academy of Sciences [grant number FJD3-00091702].

Notes on contributor
Siyaves Azeri is an associated professor of philosophy. Azeri was dismissed from his
position at the Mardin Artuklu University in Turkey and banned from public employ-
ment by the decree law 679, alongside hundreds of other academicians, issued by the
Erdogan administration on 6 January 2017. At the moment, he is a visiting researcher
at the Université de Lorraine, Archives Henri-Poincaré-Philosophie et Recherches sur
les Sciences et les Technologies (AHP-PReST) in Nancy, France and an associate of the
Thesis Twelve: Mardin Value-form Circle. Azeri writes on a large gamut of subjects in
different international journals and books. His areas of interest include Hume’s
empiricism, Kant’s transcendentalism, Marxian materialism, the problem of con-
sciousness, and the critique of epistemology. Email: siyavesazeri@gmail.com.

74
K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844 (in Marx/Engels Collected Works 3, pp. 229–346)
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 303.