MARX AND WITTGENSTEIN 71 finger to indicate that one is pointing to the shape and not the colour of the object which are suggestive of possibilities offered by the objective nature of one's gesture, are subsumed, as dependent, in the indefinite., all-inclusive term 'circumstances'. It follows that characteristic ways of pointing are characteristic' only because they recur often enough. The consequence of this account, as Rubenstein himself notes, is tliat it becomes "impossible to specify the relevant context (of an action)... with precision .. there are no relations of entailment between a given set of circumstances and the meaning of an act" (p 146). In the absence of a materialist account of activity, the obvious impossibility of conceptually linking all aspects of a given action, however specific, leads to the meaning of an action being equated with its context. Activity and context form an indistinguishable whole, a 'praxicaP notion which is itself indistinguishable from the frankly idealist one that every human action, and thus all events in social history, are absolutely unique. Wittgenstein remains uneasily at the brink of the idealist explanation of this uniqueness in subjective intentionality only because he gives up the search for explanation altogether and not because he rejects its premises. For what tempers uniqueness is the inter-subjective 'form of life' in which activity is observed to occur. However, the socialised character of human activity simply is, a fortuitous given, which spares one the ignominy of solipsist conclusions: "How could human behaviour be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of human beings, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgement, our concepts and reactions^ is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action" (Z:567). Wittgenstein's conception is fundamentally opposed to that of Marx as regards questions of method, range and content of analysis. All science, asserts Marx, "would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided".16 In order to explain human activity in capitalist society, to grasp its explanatory core in the production of surplus value, we must leave that 'noisy sphere' "where every thjng takes place on the surface and in the view of men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production.... Here we see not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced."17 Marx's scientific materialist analysis consequently provides that definite-ness of sense to the notion of 'a situation and a history' necessary for comprehending the meaning of socialised human activity. Wittgen-stein's philosophy, denying validity to the 'central facets of the debate' between materialism and idealism, is incapable of achieving this clarity and depth. The attempt to synthesise their approaches to derive a view of activity that illuminates the 'character of social scientific explanation' does not merely infringe the norms of 'modesty', as Rubenstein believes,