By OLGÁRIA MATOS*
Foreword to the Brazilian edition of Alfred Sohn-Rethel's recently published book
Intellectual and manual work is a work published late. This exquisite translation, which is available to Portuguese-speaking readers for the first time, accompanied by structural notes prepared by Elvis Cesar Bonassa, is essential to the intelligibility of the work. The result of almost seven decades of research and subject to successive revisions, it began in the 1920s, a period in which Alfred Sohn-Rethel was close to the circle of Frankfurt scholars, such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Ernst Bloch, among those who examined questions of political domination and economic exploitation, with Marx and the “Western Marxism” of György Lukács and Karl Korsch as their axis.
Because it was only presented in book form in 1970, Alfred Sohn-Rethel gradually added reflections that ranged from Louis Althusser to Jürgen Habermas. The 1973 and 1989 reissues, in turn, brought changes that made it aware of the new studies that were being carried out on epistemology and Marx's thought. Thus, Sohn-Rethel's work historicizes itself amid the economic, technological and social transformations of contemporary times. It is the most recent version, consolidated in 1989, that was translated and now published.
Although not always cited by name, Alfred Sohn-Rethel's contributions had an important influence on the works of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. For example, in the concept of “natural history” of negative dialectic and in Benjamin's notion of “sex appeal of the inorganic”. In effect, the notion of “natural history” has the meaning of the inversion between nature and history, between what, being nature, is not made by us, while, in history, it is about beings intervening in the course of events.
In Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Theodor Adorno finds history in its abstract course, in which man has been replaced by the concept of man. Sohn-Rethel observes the origin of conceptual abstraction, created to conceal that which is a concept. As for Walter Benjamin, one should think in particular of the metaphorical concept of commodity fetishism, of this “supersensible sensible”, magic and animism in the use value and exchange value confused in commodity circulation, a mixture of reification and facticity, in the lack of differentiation between the organic and the inorganic, the living and the technical.
Alfred Sohn-Rethel's materialism carries out a phenomenology of the commodity form in which the eidolon Platonic, the Kantian transcendental Self and the fetishism identified by Marx.
This is why Sohn-Rethel's observation on Theodor Adorno encompasses Walter Benjamin: “Adorno formulated the grand proposition: historical materialism is the anamnesis of genesis; and it is a testament to Adorno's spirit to bring this formulation – which destroys Platonism – to the elegance of a Platonic definition.”
Searching for the genesis means recovering the Kairic moment in which manual work and intellectual work, active life and contemplative life were separated, since manual work not alienated in relation to the worker consisted, as in medieval monasteries, in weaving baskets, in manual work and elevation of the spirit – a non-dissociation that was also a form of prayer.
During his stay in Naples in the 1920s, Alfred Sohn-Rethel began to reflect on the advent of modern technology as a trauma that separates manual and intellectual work, dissociating know-how from know-how. If technical rationality demands automatic functioning, transforming the worker into an appendage of the machines, in Naples, on the contrary, the ideal is that of “gambiarra”. As spontaneous metaphysicians, the Neapolitans exalt what is broken or malfunctioning in order to understand how things work and why.
In Naples, technological devices are, as a rule, broken: only exceptionally and thanks to a strange coincidence do they happen to be intact. Over time, one acquires the impression that everything must have been produced broken from the beginning […]. But not that something does not work because it is broken, but because, for the Neapolitan, functioning begins precisely where something is broken […]; for him, the essence of technology lies much more in the functioning than in what is broken. […] Technology begins, in reality, much more where man places his veto against the sealed and hostile automatism of machines and places himself in their world.[I]
The intellectual project of Intellectual and manual work It therefore seeks to investigate the social, political and epistemological consequences of the universalization of modern technical rationality, under the auspices of the critique of Marxian political economy. Alfred Sohn-Rethel attests to the common origins of conceptual intelligence and mathematical thought in the first coin minted in Antiquity – in particular, the Greek one – and seeks to draw the consequences of this finding: “Mathematics is familiar to us as a non-contradictory and rigorously deductive discipline […]. It deals with the differentiation of quantities defined by numbers. Created by the Greeks, this type of mathematics dates back to the 630th and XNUMXth centuries BC. Thales and Pythagoras are the first names associated with it. Thales was born in Miletus, about two generations after the first minting of coins, which occurred around XNUMX BC in Lydia and Ionia (which kept Miletus under its influence).[ii]
In effect, although still qualitative, endowed with singular properties, the agalma Greek was already a form of exchange, the support through which relations between men and gods were established. As for the alétheia, it is, at the same time, the divinity of Truth and an abstract idea; truth as the unveiling of things. From Parmenides to Plato, forms constitute the principles of thought that govern modern natural science, the terminal moment of the metaphysics of separation: “We will not dwell here on Greek philosophy as a whole, but only on some key concepts that served as its basis. At this point, we have in mind the genetic explanation of the origin of the Eleatic concept of being. Among all the concepts of the first philosophers, this concept of Parmenides is the most concise, if not the most rigorous and persistent, which largely determined the paths and deviations of the development of Greek philosophy”. […] “Historically, pure philosophical concepts took shape through money, [our conception is a] historical-materialist alternative to the tradition of idealist spiritual history, which seeks to explain the origin of concepts through thought. The idealistic path leads only to the dead end of the “Greek miracle” and, moreover, a spiritual history does not account for the contradiction that it must seek the historical origin of historically timeless universal concepts.”[iii]
In this sense, Intellectual and manual work It is the history of abstraction from human action that produces use values, exchange values and currency. Unlike Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel does not trace the genesis of abstraction back to the production process. After all, it is the abstraction of money as a general equivalent that affects the production process. In money we find abstraction, the basis for the homogenization of what is heterogeneous, which makes comparable and identical what is not.
Understanding this phenomenon in an innovative way, Alfred Sohn-Rethel brings together Kant and Marx, of whom he was an early reader: “The assumptions of Kant’s theory of knowledge are correct insofar as the exact sciences are in fact the task of intellectual labor, which is carried out in complete separation and independence from the manual labor carried out in the places of production […]. The separation between mental labor and manual labor, particularly in relation to natural science and technology, is as indispensable to the domination of the bourgeois class as the private ownership of the means of production […]. There is a profound connection between the class antagonism between capital and labor, on the one hand, and the separation between intellectual labor and manual labor, on the other. But this connection is purely causal and historical. Conceptually, they are entirely heterogeneous, that is, there is no connection between them, either in the whole or in the particulars, that would allow one to be deduced from the other. For this reason, the critique of the theory of knowledge must also be carried out in complete systematic independence from the critique of political economy.”[iv]
The discovery of the “Kantian transcendental subject in the commodity”, with the critique of ideology understood as the “unconscious of the transcendental subject”, makes manifest the distinctive feature of capitalism: “real abstraction”. This refers to the abstraction of the use value of the commodity, its qualitative aspect, through the social process of the exchange of equivalents mediated by money.
This abstraction of the commodity is not engendered by reason, it does not originate in the mind; it derives from human actions themselves, from social practice: “If the process of formation of consciousness, namely abstraction, is the exclusive affair of consciousness itself, then there remains a gulf between the form of consciousness, on the one hand, and the supposed determination of its being, on the other […]. While the concepts of knowledge of nature are mental abstractions, the economic concept of value is a real abstraction. And although it exists nowhere else than in human thought, it does not arise from thought. It is immediately of a social nature, it has its origin in the spatiotemporal sphere of exchange between men. It is not people who create this abstraction, but their actions, their mutual actions. “They do not know it, but they do it.”[v]
Thus, the “Kantian transcendental synthesis” is not a “spontaneous act of consciousness,” but rather the result of processes of socialization and abstraction that take place in the “society of exchange.” The oxymoron “real abstraction” thus articulates Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s reflections on the fetishism of commodities, on the identity between the formal elements of thought, and on “social synthesis,” which “makes the diverse relations of dependence between men in the division of labor become a cohesive unity.”[vi]
As a perversion of reality, abstract systems transform all beings into objects, and quantity eclipses quality and the presence of creative human labor. In light of this observation, Alfred Sohn-Rethel also observes that “according to the conception adopted here, far from being the apogee of human spiritual autonomy, as idealism believes, the faculties of civilized man's understanding are based on a degree of depth and opacity of reification that not even Marx fully recognized.”[vii]
And here is the difference between the worker who produces with knowledge of the facts and in possession of his means of production and the proletarian who is stripped of his know-how and his instruments of work: “Freed from the servitude of feudalism, the worker became the owner of his house and his place of work, and therefore the owner of his immediate working conditions. And, united with other workers of the same category in the guilds, he guaranteed his status of producer. […] The unity of manual labor and intellectual labor runs through the entire Middle Ages and is exhausted in the transition from the Renaissance to Modernity. In this transition, the unity becomes a new abyss between science and industrial wage labor. In the Renaissance development of the unity of hand and head, one can follow in Florence, from one master to another, successive stages of the progress of mathematical thought, which extend throughout the Quattrocento e Five hundred".[viii]
By reconstructing the material and conceptual history of the dissociation between manual and intellectual labor, Alfred Sohn-Rethel follows the conversion of time into space, the spatialization of duration – which alienates the worker's time from that of society –, the loss of experience and the impoverishment of the dialectic of the lived. The commodity as a “total social fact” is usury of the worker's time, since mercantile exchange is a commutation of the amount of time invested in its production.
As an X-ray of the genesis of alienated labor, this book also seeks to identify the conditions that make it possible to reconcile intellectual and mental labor, knowledge and experience, and knowing and doing. This perspective remains an open question. That is why, in the edition of this work, Alfred Sohn-Rethel notes: “The version presented here also leaves many questions open. But my research, undertaken over 68 years, has made possible a general thesis: elucidating the (hidden) mechanism of the functional synthesis of our Western society makes it possible at the same time to reconceptualize Western philosophy.”[ix]
*Olgaria Matos She is a professor of philosophy at Unifesp and in the Department of Philosophy at USP. She is the author, among other books, of Philosophical palindromes: between myth and history (Unifesp) [https://amzn.to/3RhfKz9].
Reference

Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Intellectual and manual work. Translation: Elvis Cesar Bonassa. New York, New York, 2025, 280 pages. [https://amzn.to/40IilHp]
Notes
[I] Alfred Sohn-Rethel, “The Ideal of the Makeshift: On the Neapolitan Technique” [1926], trans. Thiago Ferreira Lion, Minus sign, n. 14, vol. 2, 2020, p. 374-6.
[ii] See, in this volume, p. 162.
[iii] See, in this volume, p. 137.
[iv] See, in this volume, p. 72-3.
[v] See, in this volume, pp. 50 and 53.
[vi] See, in this volume, p. 26.
[vii] See, in this volume, p. 109.
[viii] See, in this volume, pp. 155 and 152.
[ix] See, in this volume, p. 36.
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