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NOTES TO PP. 449-453 □ 569

 

out of the ager publicus" (Marx, Grundrisse, p. 477): the plebeians became private owners of 

landed property, and also of commercial and industrial wealth, precisely insofar as they were 

"excluded from all public rights" (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the 

State [New York: International Publishers, 1972], p. 190).

 

42.  See the two great books by V. Gordon Childe, The Most Ancient East (London: K. 

Paul, Trench, Triibner, 1928)and especially The Prehistory of European Civilization (London: 

Cassell, 1962). In particular, archaeological analysis permits Childe to conclude that nowhere 

in the Aegean world were there accumulations of wealth or food comparable to those of the 

Orient (The Prehistory of European Civilization, pp. 106-110). 

43.  On the differences between "generalized slavery" in the archaic empire, and private 

slavery, feudal corvee, etc., see Charles Parain, "Protohistoire mediterraneenne et mode de 

production asiatique," in CERM, Sur le mode de production asiatique, pp. 170-173. 

44.  Gerard Boulvert, Domestique et fonctionnaire sous le haut-empire romain (Paris: Les 

Belles Lettres, 1974). More generally, Paul Veyne has analyzed the formation of "subjective 

law" in the Roman Empire, the corresponding institutions, and the new meaning of the public 

and private. He demonstrates that Roman law is a "law without concepts" that proceeds by 

"topics," and in this sense differs from the modern, "axiomatic" conception of the law. See 

Veyne, Le pain et le cirque (Paris: Seuil, 1976), chapters 3 and 4, and p. 744. 

45.  See Francois Hincker, "La monarchic absolue francaise," in CERM, Sur lefeodalisme 

(Paris: Ed. Sociaies, 1971). 

46.  Edgar Quinet, La genie des religions, vol. 1 of Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Hachette, 

ca. 1899). 

47.  Marx, "Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy," in A Contribution to the 

Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), p. 298 

[translation modified]. 

48.  On the historical independence of the two series, and their "encounter," see Etienne 

Balibar in Althusser and Balibar, Lirele Capital, vol. 2 (Paris: Maspero, 1968), pp. 286-289. 

49.  Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, pp. 13-14, and the following passage he cites 

from Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 

1942), p. 338: "'Capital' is not simply another name for means of production; it is means of 

production reduced to a qualitatively homogeneous and quantitatively measurable fund of 

value" (whence the equalization of profit). In his analysis of the primitive accumulation of 

capital, Maurice Dobb (Studies in the Development of Capitalism, rev. ed. [New York: Inter-

national Publishers, 1964], pp. 177-186) effectively demonstrates that primitive accumula-

tion bears not on the means of production but on "rights or titles to wealth" (p. 177; modified 

to agree with the French translation cited by the authors), which, depending on the circum-

stances, are convertible into means of production. 

50.  See the distinction certain jurists make between Roman, "topical," law, and modern, 

"axiomatic," law of the civil-code type. We may define certain fundamental ways in which the 

French Civil Code is closer to an axiomatic than to a code: (1) the predominance of the 

enunciative form over the imperative and over affective formulas (damnation, exhortation, 

admonishment, etc.); (2) the code's pretension that it forms a complete and saturated rational 

system; (3) but at the same time the relative independence of the propositions, which permit 

axioms to be added. On these aspects, see Jean Ray, Essai sur la structure logique du code civil 

francais (Paris: Alcan, 1926). It has been established that the systematization of Roman law 

took place very late, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

51.  [

TRANS

:

 

Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. and intro. Dirk J. 

Struik, trans. Martin Mulligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 129.] 

52.  See Jean Saint-Geours, Pouvoir et finance (Paris: Fayard, 1979). Saint-Geours is one 

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570 □ NOTES TO PP. 453-463

 

of the best analysts of the monetary system, as well as of "private-public" mixes in the modern 

economy.

 

53.  On the tendency toward the elimination of ground rent in capitalism, see Samir Amin 

and Kostas Vergopoulos, La questionpaysanne et le capitalisme (Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1974). 

Amin analyzes the reasons why ground rent and rent of mines keep or assume a present-day 

meaning in the peripheral regions, although in different ways; The Law of Value and Historical 

Materialism, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), chapters 4 and 6. 

54.  Introductory books on the axiomatic method emphasize a certain number of prob-

lems. For example, Robert Blanche's fine book, L'axiomatique (Paris: PUF, 1959) [abridged 

and translated by G. B. Keene as Axiomatics (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962)]. There 

is first of all the question of the respective independence of the axioms, and whether or not the 

system is saturated, or "strongly complete" (sec. 14 and 15). Second, there is the question of 

"models of realization," their heterogeneity, but also their isomorphy in relation to the axio-

matic system (sec. 12). Then there is the possibility of a polymorphy of models, not only in a 

nonsaturated system, but even in a saturated axiomatic (sec. 12, 15, and 26). Then, once 

again, there is the question of the "undecidable propositions" an axiomatic confronts (sec. 

20). Finally, there is the question of "power," by which nondemonstrable infinite sets exceed 

the axiomatic (sec. 26 and "the power of the continuum"). The comparison of politics to an 

axiomatic is based on all of these aspects. 

55.  Lewis Mumford, "The First Megamachine," Diogenes, no. 55 (July-September 1966), 

p. 3. [translation modified to agree with the French translation cited by the authors]. 

56.  Ergonomics distinguishes between "human-machine" systems (or work posts) and 

"humans-machines" systems (communicational aggregates composed of human and 

nonhuman elements). But this is not only a difference of degree; the second point of view is 

not a generalization of the first: "The notion of information loses its anthropocentric aspect," 

and the problems are not of adaptation but of the choice of a human or nonhuman element 

depending on the case. See Maurice de Montmollin, Les systemes hommes-machines (Paris: 

PUF, 1967). The issue is no longer to adapt, even under violence, but to localize: Where is your 

place? Even handicaps can be made useful, instead of being corrected or compensated for. A 

deaf-mute can be an essential part of a "humans-machines" communicational system. 

57.  One of the basic themes of science fiction is to show how machinic enslavement com-

bines with processes of subjection, but exceeds and differs from them, performing a qualita-

tive leap. Take Ray Bradbury: television not as an instrument located at the center of the 

house, but as forming the walls of the house. 

58.  See Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon ojPower, vol. 2 ofThe Myth ojthe Machine(New 

York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), pp. 236-360 (a comparison of the "old 

megama-chine" and the modern one; despite writing, the old megamachine notably suffered 

from difficulties in "communication"). 

59.  Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, p. 129. 

60.  Historically, these have been the major problems in axiomatics: "undecidable" prop-

ositions (contradictory statements are also nondemonstrable); the powers of infinite sets, 

which by nature elude axiomatic treatment ("the continuum, for example, cannot be con-

ceived axiomatically in its structural specificity since every axiomatization one can give it 

will rely on a denumerable model"). See Blanche, L'axiomatique, p. 80. 

61.  The "intuitionist" school (Brouwer, Heytig, Griss, Bouligand, etc.) is of great impor-

tance in mathematics, not because it asserted the irreducible rights of intuition, or even 

because it elaborated a very novel constructivism, but because it developed a conception of 

problems, and of a calculus of problems that intrinsically rivals axiomatics and proceeds by 

other rules (notably with regard to the excluded middle). 

62.  In our opinion, one of the best analyses of the Nazi economy is Jean-Pierre Faye's 

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