“The first shield in the world was the ground of the field where the dead were buried.” — Giambattista Vico
The Mediterranean, praised in the annals of historiography as an epicenter of world history, a crown jewel of empires and nations, is increasingly becoming a zone of sacrifice. Migrants land-bound for the coasts find themselves blocked from entry, hundreds at a time drowning, nameless, as their vessels capsize. Authorities fall back to defer responsibility for the tragedy captured by the camera, but the passive gaze of the camera does not fully condemn. Refugees fleeing those nations of the earth swallowed up by growing conflict are indefinitely held in offshore detention centers, subject to the invisible cruelties of what transpires behind walls of iron and concrete, made into open targets of xenophobic violence as they are abandoned in a state of statelessness.
The increasing deadliness of such passages observed over the past two decades has been met not with a response to preserve life, but a militarization of national borders. Rightist reaction to liberal multiculturalism misses entirely the fact that such a qualified open market society is identical to the Fortress, building a national equality of opportunity on an international inequality of labor-power. National policies of labor protectionism are weaponized against migrant labor, as domestic workers are turned into shock troopers who defend policies of indentured work and legalized segregation in migrant worker programs and reproduce the carceral regime that maintains and continues to incubate this distinct mode of racialization.1
These dynamics and techniques comprise aspects of what Harsha Walia identifies as the “social organization of difference”2 of the Border regime. This is a mode of governance that produces the political subject of the immigrant or refugee, an object of the state’s management of surplus life. Supporting the social organization of difference is a proliferation of technological surveillance capabilities lining itself with national borders of those countries aligned with the Global North. Of course, the tools of surveillance do not end at the literal national border. The walls of a national fortress become concrete only as it emerges out of the unity of social determinations. The Border is a principle concept in State power’s essential form of appearance as the nation-state; it marks and articulates the State’s limits. Contrary to the traditional narrative of the neoliberal era’s erosion of state capacity, what has instead occurred is a hollowing out of state functions in sectors that support the internalization of labor-power’s reproduction in exchange for the muscular development of the means to secure the reproduction of labor-power by means of the management of the surplus of labor-power being produced by the global upheavals of capital’s real subsumption of labor and its conditions of existence.
The obvious unevenness of this process, however, makes clear that we cannot simply level all distinctions of this reality. We must critically confront the relations of this social organization of difference as it emerges out of the Border as a site of class struggle. We must critically confront not only the armed checkpoint, but also the territorial diffusion of migrant labor and the State’s means of disciplining it. We find our ongoing engagement with the analysis and critique of the State form to continue leading our interest to the genesis of the “Nation.”
In our previous post, Fanon’s analysis of the revolutionary movement of Decolonization, which we understand to be the passage from Colony to Nation, revealed the limits of national consciousness, a porousness to the allegedly fixed identity of these institutions in the revelation of their historical transience. This involved a route through the social form of commodity value and the corresponding form of human labor, and brings about a more clear-sighted concern of this research: what can Marx’s critique of political economy contribute to the critique of the nation-state?
To this end, I want to introduce a critical examination of a possibly esoteric influence in Marx that directly takes as its object the world of nations, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, or, according to its proper title, Principles of New Science of Giambattista Vico Concerning the Common Nature of the Nations. My own attention to this work, the desire to read and examine it during my incarceration, comes from an ongoing fascination with the contents of footnote 4 in Chapter 15 of Capital, Vol I, where Marx makes an explicit claim regarding the character of a truly scientific materialism:
A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. As yet such a book does not exist. Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e. the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organization of society, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations. Even a history of religion that is written in abstraction from this material basis is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly bowel of the misty creation of religion than to do the opposite, i.e. to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized. The latter method is the only materialist, and therefore the only scientific one. The weakness of the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism which excludes the historical process, are immediately evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions expressed by its spokesmen whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own specialty.3
In emphasizing the importance of the historical process to the study of the production of the social relations of human life, Marx is able to define scientific thought as that which has the capacity to critically interrogate the tools of its own conceptual production. Rather than a mere technological determinism, as has often been misinterpreted here, we have a conception of the objects of human social life as moments crystallizing the social relations of the species in a definite form. Vico is introduced as a progenitor of this mode of thought, in his own genetic examination of the world of nations as the product of human beings, in the course of realizing an idea of universal history through his “rational civil theology of divine providence,"4 a common origin of human institutions in thought and practice. Contra the telos of Aristotle, that the nature of a thing is in its end, that it is what it is when fully developed, Vico sees the nature of a thing in its beginning.
Yet, no matter the direction, what we have here are both genetic accounts of development, whether the anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape or the anatomy of the ape containing something of the anatomy of the man. Our maneuvers of reflection, always beginning post festum, reconstruct from the position of the unity of both beginning and end. Thus, our own examination of Vico’s Science comes in our situated knowledge of the world by nations of today, and a study of the actual, given relations that apotheosize into its social organizations of difference.
The translators of the unabridged version of the third edition of Vico’s work (1744), Bergin & Fisch,make an explicit connection to Marx’s thought in that “Vico shares with the Marxists and existentialists the negative view that there is no human essence to be found in individuals as such, and with the Marxists the positive view that the essence of humanity is the ensemble of social relations, or the developing system of institutions.”5 Vico’s account presupposes a pre-humanity of bestial chaos, taking the notion of the “nation” as it is etymologically, a birth, a coming into being of a people in kind with a sense of common origins embedded by common languages and common institutions. Thus, for Vico, there is no actual existence of humanity or the human being that is prior to or separate from that very process of institution-building by which a “humanity” comes into being. It is neither race nor lineage that defines a people, but a system of institutions.
Vico’s historical presuppositions aim to disentangle and refine this idea out of the commonalities of such institutions that emerged independently from one another, producing a genetic system of continuous change and development through internal stresses rather than external shocks. It is this very dynamic emerging out of humanity in a state of nature, its continuity beyond this state that produces the distinction of man and nature, and comes to define this critical aim of this science, as Vico says:
Accordingly men offer worship, sacrifices and other divine honors to God as to the Mind which is the free and absolute sovereign of nature, because by His eternal counsel He has given us existence through nature, and through nature preserves it to us. But the philosophers have not yet contemplated His providence in respect of that part of which it is most proper to men, whose nature has their principal property: that of being social.6 [emphasis mine]
This passage resonates strongly with Marx. It bears the echo of a supra-natural property of value, the purely social existence of the commodity form.7 Yet the idea Vico develops here reverberates even deeper with Marx - namely, where Vico identifies the social existence of humanity as a distinct realm that emerges from, and must in turn be guided by, the divine providence of nature. Vico thus endeavors to show how:
...in providing for this property God has so ordained and disposed human institutions that men, being fallen from complete justice by original sin, and while intending almost always to do something quite different and often quite the contrary — so that for private utility they would live alone like wild beasts — have been led by this same utility and along the aforesaid different and contrary paths to live like men in justice and to keep themselves in society and thus to observe their social nature.8
In this principle – of man’s distinction from nature within nature – divine providence acts as the mediator by which the preservation of human life, the continuity of its conditions of being, are articulated by the institutions to which this existence owes its duration. Through this “true civil nature of man,” we come to find that “law exists in nature.”9 While the law may exist in nature, Vico’s concept of nature is not of a pure nature understood independently of the human species. Likewise, Vico’s rational theology of divine providence does not assume the work of a God intelligible prior to the history of humanity. Where, on the one hand, Epicureans see human affairs as the product of the blind movement of atoms, and, on the other, Stoics interpret the same in a natural theology through which the attributes of God are reduced to the chain of cause and effect, Vico argues instead that it is only in “the economy of civil institutions” that the meaning of providence can be found, as “divinity [ie the power of divining], from divinar: to divine, which is to understand what is hidden from men — the future — or what is hidden in them — their consciousness.”10
The eternal is proven in what is preserved by the actions of human beings and in their institutions, “by which, without human discernment or counsel, and often against the designs of men, providence has ordered this great city of the human race.”11 Thus the supra-natural in turn has a social character taking on an existence that operates, so to speak, behind the backs of men. In this, we are to identify an aspect of what Vico understands to be the content of universality, as “for though this world has been created in time and particular, the institutions established therein by providence are universal and eternal.”12
Universality is here determined by historical reflection, through a criticism of those means by which human social life has preserved itself, and, in so doing, comes to recognize itself as human. When beginning our journey through Vico’s own reconstruction of human history, it is notable that Vico cannot help but make use of both “physical and philological”13 sources of evidence passed down through the course of history. This is a crucial intervention of Vico’s, the means by which:
...the new principles of poetry found herein [show] that the fables were true and trustworthy histories of the customs of the most ancient peoples of Greece [...] the fables of the Gods were stories of the times in which men of the crudest gentile humanity thought that all institutions necessary or useful to the human race were deities.14
The institution, then, is a distinct form of activity which takes on a life of its own. This activity must be of a certain form and definite aim. In the times where men understood these actions as transmissions of divine offerings, “divination sacrifices arose among the gentiles from that common custom of theirs which the Latins called procurare auspicia, ie, to sacrifice in order to understand the auguries well so that the divine warnings or commands of Jove might be duly obeyed.”15
These earliest of divine institutions from which all later human institutions are descended were “marriage [...] the seed-plot of the family, as the family is the seed-plot of the commonwealth [...] burial [...] that human souls do not die with their bodies but are immortal” and, following these, “the origin among the gentiles of the divisions of the fields, to which is to be traced the distinction of cities and peoples and finally of nations,” for it is from these common practices, attaining the status of custom, that the “descendants of those who have been buried [...] considered themselves noble, justly ascribing their nobility in that first state of human institutions to their having been humanely injured in the fear of the divinity.”16 It is thus “from this manner of human engendering and not from anything else, what is called human generation took its name.”17
The institutions through which the specific form of human reproduction is expressed is always this interplay between the social ordering of the species and its inherited conditions of existence. It is from this dialectic that Vico orders the universal history culminating in the world of nations by tracing these forms of the continuities of peoples across distinct ages in the consciousness of humanity, passed on in fragments of languages, associations from utterances that themselves could only become systematized as customs, passed on between bodies that could not have believed that life ended within the finite body. To the continuity of these institutions, however, we must turn to the distinct ages of history through which their continuity is necessarily perceived, those of gods, of heroes, and of men.
This trinity form of periodization is the foundation from which the excavation of institutional life will take place, and the mode through which the coterminous evolution of languages and letters come into being as the originary and originating costumes of the nations. Vico’s concern is oriented toward “scientifically ascertaining this important starting-point — where and when that learning had its first beginnings in the world — and by adducing human reasons thereby in support of Christian faith.”18 Already our universality is defined by a particular mode of existence. However, Vico’s periodization is not a linear development, but a genesis shared by all peoples, in the stadial conception of the life and death of nations. The sequence of gods, heroes, and men, is said to have been handed down to us by the Egyptians, where the divine governments, commanded by auspices and oracles, evolved into the heroic governments led by the men who, in their command of these divine institutions, developed a sense of natural superiority over the plebians in aristocratic commonwealths. However, it is from this very ascension of the nobles that arises the age of men, in the recognition amongst all men of their equality in human nature, and thus the establishment of human governments in popular commonwealths and monarchies.
Corresponding to these three kinds of nature and of government are three kinds of language, beginning with the mute language of signs and physical objects having natural relations to ideas being expressed, forming the hieroglyphic or sacred language. The heroic tongue is that of emblems, comparison, image, metaphor, the ascension of the natural relation to description and language to the symbolic register. Then, human language forms from the agreement upon words by people amongst themselves, the epistolary or vulgar tongue for the “common uses of life,” of which human beings are the “absolute lords.”19
From this, it is to follow the revelation, the unique discovery of Vico’s, the “master key of this Science:” That “the principle of these origins” of languages and letters, the manner in which they bind humans to their institutions in government as the expression of providence in natural law, “lies in the fact that the first gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters.”20 It is from this basis that Vico will endeavor to prove that history is not the product of lone men, or the autonomous work of God, but the creation of human beings in their forms of social life, for Vico the originating form of being that of the nation. In this sense, the nation is the assumed basis of universality as a natural expression in which humanity has come to be intelligible to itself out of states of isolation and barbarism. This comes to Vico through his examination of the sources of humanity’s preserved history, as he explains:
It follows that the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables; for, as we shall see, all the histories of the gentiles have their beginnings in fables, which were the first histories of the gentile nations. By such a method the beginnings of the sciences as well as of the nations are to be discovered, for they sprang from the nations and from no other source. It will be shown throughout this work that they had their beginnings in the public needs or utilities of the peoples and that they were later perfected as acute individuals applied their reflection to them. This is the proper starting-point for universal history, which all scholars say is defective in its beginnings.21
This discovery of what Vico calls Poetic Wisdom, or Poetic Logic, is the scientific invention that aims to make sense of the disparate origins of peoples and produce a common social world constituted by common institutions. This proper starting-point of universal history makes clear the unity of beginning and end necessary to genetic reconstruction, and that, most critically, for a nation’s origin to be universal amongst others, its particularity must embody the universal written itself, expressed here in the notion of the public utility of its people.
But before we make a jump to the easy identification here, that the “natural origins of the nation,” or of people as a nation in their own origin as “human,” appear to be Vico’s own retroactive justification of Italian political life in the 18th century, let us continue remarking on what is novel about this approach to the dual-sided constitution of universal history, and how Vico sees the historical construction of a human nature in the species’ means of preserving its natural existence in forms of social institutions and civic life. We must see where his dialectic takes us in this pursuit of humanity’s development of self-consciousness, and how Poetic Logic unlocks their history.
Vico’s establishment of principles in the form of axioms philosophical and philological lays out a theory of human consciousness’s generation and its tendency towards social formation in the modifications of the human mind. For, the world of civil society being the work of humanity, therein must its origins lie.22 Yet the dialectic redounds back upon us, us “the order of ideas must follow the order of institutions,”23 and we find ourselves seeking this unity in mind and body as world, though they encounter each other as separate in that very world.
The construction of Poetic Logic is Vico’s meditation of this relation of the nations of peoples as historical beings, as a natural trait of the human being itself. It is “because of the indefinite nature of the human mind” that, when encountering itself in ignorance or non-knowing of a thing, “man makes himself the measure of all things,” always judging “by what is familiar and at hand.”24 It is from this state that philosophy aims to consider man as he ought to be and mold him into becoming a model citizen oriented towards the good of society. Thus, as man in these practices, in absence of truth, aim to “take care to hold fast to what is certain, so that, if they cannot satisfy their intellects by knowledge, their wills at least may rest on consciousness.”25 Yet it is here, as philosophy contemplates reason, and philology is authored by human choice, that a consciousness of the certain is formed.
But, to Vico, is this division in knowledge’s practice a failure of the philosophers and philologists? For “human choice, by its nature most uncertain, is made certain and determined by the common sense of men with respect to human needs or utilities, which are the two sources of the natural law of the gentes.”26
This is not common sense as innate knowledge, but “judgment without reflection, should by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race,” as “uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth.”27 Thus it is a sense of common conditions of existence, of common practices related to sustaining that existence, but as yet not subject to the critical faculties of those who espouse its maxims. From this comes the “mental dictionary” of which Vico’s Poetic Logic is the reconstruction of, through which an “ideal eternal history” is conceived, giving us “the histories in time of all nations.”28 In establishing the origins of this commonality, this history’s priority again asserts itself, as “the natural law of the gentes had separate origins among the several peoples, each in ignorance of the others, and it was only subsequently, as a result of wars, embassies, alliances, and commerce, that it came to be recognized as common to the entire human race.”29 What is common to the histories of nations is realized at the limits of particular forms in their encounters with each other, but this realization is effected in those conditions which precede that moment, and condition its possibility.
What is beginning to emerge here is a logic of a social process, profoundly unsettled in its own presuppositions, wherein the nations are themselves subject to a natural law of the human mind, but this mind is the providence of a sphere distinct from nature. Of this dialectic, “the human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to understand itself by means of reflection.” It manifests itself in a universal principle of language, that “words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit.”30 In this succession of institutions in the conditions of man’s existence, from the forests to huts, villages, cities, and the academies, Vico’s claims that monarchy is rooted in the cults of divinity, the heroic rule of patricians making of crowned rule a “vulgar tradition,” a state of human government brought about by the natural liberty of the popular commonwealths, a form which, he says, precedes monarchy. And it is in the premises within this assertion, of the monarch, the absolute sovereign as a product of man’s social activity as a species, that we begin to trace a thread of the nation’s possible unraveling:
The first socii, who are properly companions associated for mutual advantage, cannot be imagined or understood to have existed in the world previous to these fugitives who sought to save their lives by taking refuge with the aforesaid first fathers and who, having been received for their lives, were obliged to sustain them by cultivating the fields of the fathers. These were the true socii of the heroes. Later they were the plebians of the heroic cities and finally the provincials of sovereign peoples.31
The beginning of social life in a distinct institutional body lies not in the sole authority of the fathers in their noble claims of auspicious divinity, but in those to whom they granted asylum on their lands, who would come to labor under the protection of the laws of these fathers, and how their auguries and institutions helped order the continuity of these famuli seeking refuge.
However, the “necessity such that the commonwealths naturally took the aristocratic form” arises as the famuli, aware of their condition of deprivation of the rights to the divine institutions of the fathers, namely the recognition of marriage and thus transmission of ownership and property in Vico’s account, rose in rebellion against the fathers, and “the heroes must by nature have been moved to write themselves in orders so as to resist the multitudes of rebellious famuli. And they must have chosen as their head a father fiercer than the rest and with greater presence of spirit. Such men were called reges, kings, from regere, which properly means to sustain or direct.”32
In this passage we are able to see how a logic of class struggle in the underlying basis of Vico’s account —and what begins to make sense of the ongoing dialectic of mind and body, intellectual leadership and manual labor— is at the core of his account of the divine providence of human institutions. The great truth of this account, however, is exactly that means by which the argument for monarchy’s natural basis will be torn asunder, for to accept this would be in turn to accept what Vico is arguing, though not in reciprocal antagonism, is the natural state of humanity.
Vico’s evidence of this lies in the recovery of this universal history’s basis in the long series of etymological reconstructions of which his Poetic Logic is compromised. The sum findings of these are to reveal that these institutions lead toward a natural state of popular liberty from these origins in divine authority, for the only way to have preserved such institutions would have been in the actions and consciousness of the masses of those nations. It is the vulgar languages, letters, and customs of the plebeians from which history is reproduced, and these peoples themselves originated as refugees. This dynamic of the nature of civil institutions thus becomes:
The first cities were founded on orders of nobles and troops of plebians, with two contrary eternal properties emerging from this nature of human civil institutions which we are here investigating: namely, (1) that the plebeians always want to change the form of government, as in fact it is always they who do change it, and (2) that the nobles always want to keep it as it is. Hence, in the agitations of civil governments, all are called optimists, who lend their efforts to maintaining the state and the latter is called a state from this property of standing firm and upright.33
In this principle we come to learn that Vico’s common course of the universal history of nations is an account of human civil institutions as products and conditions of class struggle, though this is, to Vico, the natural consequence of human equality’s realization, and culminates in the divine providence of aristocratic and monarchical rule over popular commonwealths. To resolve this, Vico must collapse his history of the stages of gods, heroes, and men into a coterminous development, all containing their births within each other, and the popular development of vulgar traditions among the plebes an eternal content to be captured and subject to the transformations of rulers concessions.
Yet, if it is always the plebeians who invariably change the form of government against the nobles who fight to preserve it, and this course of divine providence always ends in the human institution of social agreement, social command of law in the body of this socii, the eternity of the monarchy is impossible, as history has indeed shown. What, then, to make of this conception of universal history, emancipatory as it seems, but trapped in the preservation of an antagonism that overthrew its own premise by the end of the century in which it was published?
While I plan to, continue studying Vico in all the diverse aspects afforded to the reader of his text, I want to begin an ending to this excursion by bringing out a concept in Marx that takes up and resolves the challenge of historical development and its logic that is opened up by this invocation of divine providence.
What Marx and Vicoshare is a conception of human history and institutional life that has its origins in the social activity of people themselves. One hypothesis to make here regarding the nature of Vico’s chief error in his study of history is his assumption of the nation as the form in which human life begins and ends. As such, Vico can only ever presuppose what he sets out to explain, revealing his rational reconstruction to be a justification, and all human activity is assumed an institution in so far as it posits the continuity of the nation, even if such people of that nation find themselves in rebellion against its institutions.
Vico’s critique of prior historiography and philosophy finds itself insufficiently critical of history itself. Vico’s notion of Poetic Logic, however, touches on the character of the dialectic of the social and the natural that bears consideration as it relates to the construction of institutional life and its reproduction in the histories of antiquity that he examines. The term “poet” is invoked in its sense as a “maker,” or “creator.” Its relation to the linguistic distillation of experience into communicative forms begins as a series of imaginative genera — from which human thought begins and learns the capacity of abstraction through the initial attachment of utterance to natural relations— and its development of means of reference to itself as their genera becomes a condition of social being.
The logic of Poetic language here is then nothing but the history of human institutions preserved and transformed through human activity told through the etymology of language as an act of production. Human thought is transmitted as a process of social production, and its account here is reflective of a history of production among class societies that have culminated into the world of nations that is Vico’s object.
We then have a bridge to what is related to, but unique in Marx’s conception, which is not to be found as a historical analysis of any one institution as a universal form in itself, but the production of human life itself as the basis of differentiating historical forms of such, and as it is to this end, as a complex meditation of the social and the natural presuppositions of this process, that Marx deploys the concept of social metabolism.
This concept operates on two distinct registers of time, the mutual relief of which renders the specificity of the process intelligible. On the one hand, there is a trans-historical relation between human labor and its material in nature that it transforms, and this is an essential basis of the notion of what a metabolic process even is:
Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head, and hands, in order to appropriate the material of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he 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 [...] At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it.34
“Labor” in its simple conception then appears to us as a concept through which this activity is mediated, a presentation that frees our understanding of what human labor is and does from political economy’s reification of all labor as the commodity from in which it appears in the capitalist mode of production, labor-power. In this sense, we are reconstructing what the human species-being is in its specificity from the standpoint of its realization in modern relations of production. And this introduces the accompanying aspect of this temporal dialectic in the historical specificity of a social form of this metabolic process, and it is this which Marx introduces first in Capital, before metabolism itself:
In so far as the process of exchange transfers commodities from hands in which they are non-use-values to hands in which they are use-values, it is a process of social metabolism. The product of one kind of useful labor replaces that of another. Once a commodity has arrived at a situation in which it can serve as a use-values it falls out of the sphere of exchange into that of consumption [...] We therefore have to consider the whole process in its formal aspect, that is to say, the change in form or the metamorphosis of commodities through which the social metabolism is mediated.35
We see here how it is the formal distinction of the metamorphosis of commodities in which this metabolism operates that distinguishes it from all of human life’s history of relating to nature and itself. For the labor process, “in its simple and abstract elements, is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values,” and this “appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man [...] is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the ever-lasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live.”36 In this foundation, there is a basis for a universal conception of human history that is not bound to any particular mode of human institutional life; contra Vico, Marx’s ontology of social labor de-naturalizes the national existence of peoples.
However, we are also dealing with this problematic at the level of opposing notions of humanism, ideas of what the human is, an implicit problem in the national classification of peoples that form social identity in and through the social organization of difference and processes of exclusion from institutional life. Vico’s presentation of humanity’s self-becoming ultimately sought an explanation for the persistence of a class struggle in the institutions of a nation’s civic life in the natural laws of human consciousness. Marx, however, locates this in the differentiating concept of social relations of production, a further specification of the distinct forms in which humanity’s metabolism is organized as a social process, and the form of the product of this process as the commodity posited towards the realization of values in their most abstract form, money, are rendered distinct from nature itself. It is in the concept of social relations of production that capital’s constitutive class struggle is itself de-naturalized, as we then find universal history’s content not to be an abstract struggle of man itself, but of human species-being with the social and historical limits of its own activity, and thus a conception of universal history that can incorporate particularity in its successive moments. Of Vico’s fetishization that takes the form of divine providence, we may do well to recall a warning of Marx’s in Capital on the foibles of abstract humanism:
For a society of commodity producers, whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, end in this material form bring their individual, private labours into relation with each other as homogeneous human labour, Christianity, with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, ie. in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion.37
In this sense, the error of Vico’s divine providence is a failure to account for the differentiation of peoples within their unity as a nation as an expression of a true universality to their conditions of existence. The generalized particularity of the nation as form of State leaves men at odds with each other despite its assurances of the formal recognition of human equality. It is an institutional form, however, that only recognizes an equality of human labors that relies upon suppressing the recognition, and intensifying the disparity, of its conditions of production.
In this manner, Vico’s natural liberty always assumes an alienation of men from their labor in the existence of a plebian class clamoring for the rights of divinity. Contrary to this, it is Marx’s account of the form of human activity in social relations of production that bases its universalism on the recognition of the mutual identity of form in the differentiation occurring within and between these relations, from the reciprocated antagonism of seller and buyer that nevertheless are not exclusive roles, to the mediation of the sale and purchase of labor-power that begins to concretize the characteristic differentiations of social relations into a dynamic of class antagonism. Only through the logical integration of this difference in conditions of humanity is Marx able to found a basis for a new humanist ontology in the concept of social metabolism.
On the other end of Vico’s adherence to a culture of man in the abstract is the equally erroneous move of naturalizing men in their concrete roles as taken by Aristotle. As is also laid out in the early pages of Capital, Marx notes how in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle is capable of apprehending a value relation in the form of money such that “5 beds = 1 house” is indistinguishable from “5 beds = a certain amount of money.” However, while being aware that there can be no exchange without equality, and no equality without commensurability, Aristotle concludes that, in reality, there is no basis by which such objects can be understood to be qualitatively equal, thus this form of equation is external to the nature of these things and but a practical invention. Marx identifies this impasse in analysis as the “lack of a concept of value,” preventing Aristotle from seeing the “homogenous element,” the “common substance,” between bed and house as representing “what is really equal, both in the bed and the house. And that is — human labour.” The reason for this failure? That “Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and their labour-powers,” thus the concept of human equality had no “acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion” owing to the commodity-forms as “the universal form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities.” Thus it is “only the historical limitation inherent in the society in which he lived “that prevented Aristotle from recognizing the basis of their relation of equality.”38
Between the abstract humanism of Vico, a universalism based on the fetishism of man’s equality in the nation-state in the age of capital’s ascension, and Aristotle’s inability for itself to see the abstraction already occurring within his close attention to particularly, is Marx’s account of the social ontology of human labor in the social metabolism of a definite, historical mode of production. In this discourse on the problems of humanism, there are resonances with Fanon’s accounts in The Wretched of the Earth, where in the critique of the assumed universality of European, white, humanity is the need to confront, and incorporate, the truth of the difference that this false universal relies upon. In the conception of the relation of production, we have a concept that articulates the social basis of material disparities in conditions of existence, and what logic binds these disparities into a coherent logic, in which its transformation, its supersession, becomes a historical necessity in its implicit transience. And it is as a moment of this social metabolism that we may say that Vico’s Poetic Logic returns its importance to us.
Walia, Harsha. Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Haymarket Books.
Harsha. Border and Rule. 171.
Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Penguin Books. pp. 493-494.
Vico, Giambattista. The New Science. Penguin Classics. 4.
Vico, The New Science. p. xxxix
Vico, 3.
Marx, 149.
Vico, 4.
Vico, 4.
Vico, 102.
Vico, 102.
Vico, 102.
Vico, 8.
Vico, 6.
Vico, 8.
Vico, 8-9.
Vico, 9.
Vico, p. 33
Vico, 20-21.
Vico, 21-22.
Vico, 33.
Vico, 96.
Vico, 78.
Vico, 60.
Vico, 62-63.
Vico, 63.
Ibid.
Vico, 64.
Ibid.
Vico, 78.
Vico, 81.
Vico, 210.
Vico, 225.
Marx. Capital. 283-284.
Marx, 198-199.
Marx, 290.
Marx, 172.
Marx, 151-152.