What do you think?
Rate this book
Historical Materialism #224
Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology
Alfred Sohn-Rethels Intellectual and Manual Labour is a major text of post-war Marxist theory with ongoing relevance to current debates about value, abstraction, and domination.
224 pages, Hardcover
Published November 26, 2020
1 person is currently reading
31 people want to read
About the author
Alfred Sohn-Rethel
29 books15 followersAlfred Sohn-Rethel was a French-born German Marxian economist and philosopher especially interested in epistemology. He also wrote about the relationship between German industry and National Socialism.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 28, 2025
Intellectual and Manual Labour, by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, is a fantastic read for any Marxist in the philosophy of science, in the application of ‘scientific management,’ aka Taylorism, to the capitalist labor-process, and the history of the division between intellectual and manual labor. He develops the theory of the “real abstraction,” the reality of money as a social relation based upon a material object, that this thing in my pocket is real material, but has a complex socially-conditioned abstraction tied to it by our relations, that these concepts swim in my head without need of my knowing, that this is part of the development of abstract thinking.
He offers criticisms of the application of scientific findings within capitalism, the manner in which science isolates itself from laborers, as well as the technocratic systems found in Taylorism, Fordism, and even Soviet labor-processes and theories of science. SR goes to great lengths to dismantle the hypostasized idea of an eternal, unchanging materialism. We know only one science, the science of history. And the results, like the consciousness that history produces, are time-bound. “For historical materialism, then, to be the political weapon in the proletarian class struggle which Marx intended it to be, we must think of it, not in terms of a doctrine or of a world-view or any other dogmatic fixture, but purely as a methodological postulate.” (p. 165) This is precisely what makes historical materialism revolutionary: it is nor impartial, it does not derive from a pure intellect or a Kantian faculty. Instead, it is that it “attaches to the reciprocal reference of consciousness to social being and of social being to consciousness that [is] the essence of Marx’s basic methodological principles.” (p. 167)
There are two drawbacks I would like to point to: SR gives a bit too much praise for the Cultural Revolution, though I myself admire the ultra-left factions within China at that time that led the January Storm, as well as groups like Sheng Wu Lian that levied criticism towards Mao and others for declawing the second Shanghai Commune; as for the other, I find that SR is too quick to adopt an anthropocentrism with regard to cognition. Recent findings point towards a great variety of animals having the capability of self-recognition, of engaging in tool use, of play.
This book gets four big booms!
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
He offers criticisms of the application of scientific findings within capitalism, the manner in which science isolates itself from laborers, as well as the technocratic systems found in Taylorism, Fordism, and even Soviet labor-processes and theories of science. SR goes to great lengths to dismantle the hypostasized idea of an eternal, unchanging materialism. We know only one science, the science of history. And the results, like the consciousness that history produces, are time-bound. “For historical materialism, then, to be the political weapon in the proletarian class struggle which Marx intended it to be, we must think of it, not in terms of a doctrine or of a world-view or any other dogmatic fixture, but purely as a methodological postulate.” (p. 165) This is precisely what makes historical materialism revolutionary: it is nor impartial, it does not derive from a pure intellect or a Kantian faculty. Instead, it is that it “attaches to the reciprocal reference of consciousness to social being and of social being to consciousness that [is] the essence of Marx’s basic methodological principles.” (p. 167)
There are two drawbacks I would like to point to: SR gives a bit too much praise for the Cultural Revolution, though I myself admire the ultra-left factions within China at that time that led the January Storm, as well as groups like Sheng Wu Lian that levied criticism towards Mao and others for declawing the second Shanghai Commune; as for the other, I find that SR is too quick to adopt an anthropocentrism with regard to cognition. Recent findings point towards a great variety of animals having the capability of self-recognition, of engaging in tool use, of play.
This book gets four big booms!
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
November 21, 2025
A genuine marvel of the use of Marx’s historical materialism to analyze modern science and the human consciousness.
It contains a thorough analysis of the monetary form and how it’s abstraction develops our ability to think with concepts devoid of empirical knowledge. Using this we later understand how modern science has developed and why it is necessarily a tool of capitalist exploitation, and how science(purely intellectual labour) must be reconnected back with manual labor in order to separate itself from value extraction.
It also discusses Taylorism and its consequences with a very clear understanding of how it is a harmful development of modern monopoly capitalism
It contains a thorough analysis of the monetary form and how it’s abstraction develops our ability to think with concepts devoid of empirical knowledge. Using this we later understand how modern science has developed and why it is necessarily a tool of capitalist exploitation, and how science(purely intellectual labour) must be reconnected back with manual labor in order to separate itself from value extraction.
It also discusses Taylorism and its consequences with a very clear understanding of how it is a harmful development of modern monopoly capitalism
December 30, 2025
Attempt of deriving intellectual cognition from Marx's categories of capital, I think Althusser described this type of stuff correctly as intellectual Lysenkoism.
Nonetheless, his emphasis on division of mental and physical labour is valuable and his commentary on science‘s changing characters, alongside his analysis of Taylorism, are immensely fruitful - and his attempt at understanding thinking as social form a valuable failure nonetheless. The commentary by operaismo on him as appendix is quite interesting too.
Nonetheless, his emphasis on division of mental and physical labour is valuable and his commentary on science‘s changing characters, alongside his analysis of Taylorism, are immensely fruitful - and his attempt at understanding thinking as social form a valuable failure nonetheless. The commentary by operaismo on him as appendix is quite interesting too.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews