This year marks the 75th anniversary of the completion of a major work by an unwavering yet often overlooked exponent of Western Marxism, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, "Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology". The German Marxist economist and philosopher died at the age of 91 in 1990, leaving behind a body of work that fused the deepest structures of capitalist exploitation with the rise of fascism.
Born in 1899 into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, Sohn-Rethel’s life was shaped by revolutionary tumult after the First World War. He studied philosophy, economics, and sociology at Heidelberg University, where he encountered both bourgeois luminaries such as Karl Jaspers and Marxist thought. Rejecting academic comfort, he worked as a research assistant for the Reich Association of German Industry, a lobby of heavy industrialists. This seemingly contradictory position proved decisive.
Sohn-Rethel attempted to bridge Marx’s critique of political economy with Kantian epistemology. His key contribution, “real abstraction,” argued that commodity exchange creates a form of thought independent of human consciousness, cementing scientific and philosophical understanding. He contended that categories of human understanding—space, time, abstraction—are not innate but originate in the economic abstraction of exchange, beginning with coinage in Ancient Greece. He became a precursor to modern value-form theory, insisting that exchange itself forms an abstract reality functional to both social synthesis and natural science.
While working for industrial capital in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Sohn-Rethel witnessed firsthand how German steel, coal, and chemical bosses eroded democracy and promoted rearmament. In "The Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism", written mostly in exile, he documented how major industrialists funded Hitler not out of ideology but to protect class interests. Fascism, he showed, was not aberration but a calculated project to crush organized labor and guarantee monopoly profits. His analysis refuted the notion that fascism was irrational, exposing it instead as a bourgeois counterattack.
His masterpiece "Intellectual and Manual Labour", completed in 1951 but published in 1978, argued that the “real abstraction” of exchange is the origin of abstract thought and scientific reasoning. Drawing on Marx’s commodity fetishism and Kant’s theory of knowledge, he demonstrated that categories of thought we treat as universal—space, time, causality, logic—are socially necessary illusions bred from the commodity form. Money mediates exchange by converting real, sensuous labor into quantifiable value. This abstraction designs the very form of our thinking. The separation of intellectual from manual labor is not natural but reflects a class-divided society where some think and others obey. Capitalist production exploits not only workers’ bodies but also colonizes their minds, producing a polarization in consciousness where the ruling class mistakes its alienated thinking for pure reason.
Sohn-Rethel’s legacy is indelible. He rooted fascism in class interests while showing ideology as a necessary appearance of social relations camouflaged by money and exchange. He refuted technocratic socialism that merely replaces capitalist bosses with state planners while preserving the division between intellectual and manual labor. A truly communist society, he argued, must abolish the monopoly of thought by the few. His insights remain vital for understanding today’s neofascism, where far-right movements funded by fossil fuel billionaires and tech monopolists echo the dynamics he described. Fascism is not a working-class uprising but a bourgeois counterattack exploiting mass resentment.
Honoring Alfred Sohn-Rethel is not merely academic. It is political. In an era of resurgent fascism, climate breakdown, and a left that sometimes retreats into moralism or electoralism, Sohn-Rethel revives the hardest task: evaluating how capitalism manufactures thought itself. For true liberation, it is imperative to eradicate the social division between those who command and those who obey, whether in the factory, the office, or academia.
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*Freelance journalist
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