‘The Commodity-Form and the Dialectical Method: On the Structure of Marx’s Exposition in Chapter 1 of Capital’, Science and Society, Vol. 72, No. 3, pp. 295-318 (July 2008). (original) (raw)
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Method and Critique in Marx’s Capital
15th annual conference of the Marx and Philosophy Society, 9 June 2018, Institute of Education, University College London. This paper will attempt to address the means by which the possibility of immanent social critique is grounded and expressed in the thought of the mature Marx, namely in the Grundrisse and Capital, in his critique of the objective form that the categories of political economy assume in asserting themselves as ‘eternal’ economic laws, that manifest themselves externally of social practice. Furthermore, an examination of the ways in which Marx’s thought locates itself and accounts for its own possibility will be pursued by delineating the ways in which it does not posit itself extrinsically in relation to its object, as if inhabiting an Archimedean point that is a transcendent outside of it, but embedded reflexively within its object, that is capital, whilst maintaining a normative position, an “ought” of negativity from the critical standpoint of its potential abolition. Moreover, in as much as this paper will grapple with Marx’s deployment of an immanent social critique, it will also by extension concern itself with the Marxian method and form of exposition. In doing so Marx’s dependence upon Hegel’s conception of dialectic will be highlighted. To this aim excerpts from the Grundrisse, and part one of Capital will be read with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and The Science of Logic illustrating how on the one hand both thinkers unfold and ground their categories retroactively into complex wholes, not in a historical fashion but in a systematic way as a precondition of grasping the dynamic articulation of the moments in an always presupposed totality; and on the other how the dialectical method of exposition must be grasped as the very method of its objects content. To this effect, this paper will attempt to address the question as to whether a reading of the Hegelian dialectical method can inform our understanding of Marx’s immanent social critique of the ‘perverted forms’ of economic objectivity.
An Analysis of Karl Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
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Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2022
In the preface to the first edition of Capital Volume I, Karl Marx wrote ‘Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences. The understanding of the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will therefore present the greatest difficulty’ (Marx 1990: 89). It is no wonder then that in the face of this difficult beginning, Louis Althusser famously encouraged the first-time reader to put Part I on ‘Commodities and Money’ aside and only return to it after the end of reading the rest of the book. And even then, to do so ‘with infinite caution, knowing that it will always be extremely difficult to understand, even after several readings of the other Parts, without the help of a certain number of deeper explanations’ (Althusser 1977: 85). In the anglophone world, many readers reached for David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital for such help. But this companion, its importance notwithstanding, exhibits what Nicola Taylor and Riccardo Bellofiore (2004: 4n4) call the ‘immaturity’ of English-language scholarship on Marx which to this day continues to remain in the dark about primary and secondary literature emerging from the historical-critical edition, the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2).
Capital as Dialectical Economic Theory
JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY, 2012
This article maintains that the intelligibility of Marx's project in Capital resides in its apprehension as an economic theory. The ontological predicate for Marx's project as such is the historically unique tendency for capital to reify human economic life. Marx famously captured this tendency with his notion of capital converting concrete interpersonal material relations into abstract impersonal relations among things. It is capitalist reification which provides the epistemological warrant for the dialectical architecture of Capital as economic theory par excellence 1
The Culmination of Capital Essays on Volume Three of Marx's Capital
2002
Marx's Capital III , The Culmination of Capital: General Introduction G.Reuten Class, Capital, and Crisis P.Mattick Capital in General and Marx's Capital C.J.Arthur Hostile Brothers: Marx's Theory of the Distribution of Surplus-Value in Volume III of Capital F.Moseley Transformation and the Monetary Circuit: Marx as a Monetary Theorist of Production R.Bellofiore Capital, Competition and Many Capitals C.J.Arthur Surplus Profits from Innovation: A Missing Level in Capital III ? T.Smith The Rate of Profit Cycle and the Opposition between Managerial and Finance Capital G.Reuten The Credit System M.Campbell Rent and Landed Property M.Campbell The Illusion of the Economic: The Trinity Formula and the 'Religion of Everyday Life': P.Murray Abstracts of the Chapters Notes on the Contributors Author Index Subject Index
Retroactive Dialectics and Value in Marx's Capital
Opinião Filosófica, 2016
In this paper I expose Caligaris and Starosta's argument on the logical character of the initial moments in Hegel's and Marx's dialectics; I argue that the categories of Marx's theory of labor-value must be read in such a way that value, or substance of value, is taken non-substantially, arising only with the emergence of exchange value, or the value-form; Finally, I attempt to justify this reading from the standpoint of the idea of self-posited presuppositions, as developed by Slavoj Zizek.
Historical Materialism, 2010
Andrew Kliman's Reclaiming Marx's 'Capital' sets out to refute the 'myth' that Marx's original presentation of the theory of the value is internally inconsistent. A century ago, Bortkiewicz purported to demonstrate that Marx's mistake was his failure to adopt simultaneous valuation. Thereafter, twentieth-century Marxian economics worked out a 'corrected' version of Marx's original theory, culminating in Steedman's 1977 Marx after Sraffa. Conclusions Marx himself deemed central were dropped, prominently including the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. But simultaneous valuation is absolutely incompatible with Marx's first and fundamental premise, the determination of value by labour-time. On the other hand, if Marx's major theoretical conclusions do consistently follow from his premises, including the transformation of values into prices of production, then the quantitative dimension of his value-theory is internally consistent after all and stands in no need of correction on this score. Advocating a temporal, single-system interpretation, Kliman shows how 'two simple modifications' eliminate 'all of the alleged inconsistencies in the quantitative dimension of Marx's value theory': valuation is temporal, and values and prices are determined interdependently. Kliman's refutation is sound, but his claim to know Marx's intentions, in E.D. Hirsch's sense, is questionable.
Applying Marx’s Critique of Political Economy to his Critique of Capitalism
Conference Paper, 2024
In this paper, I argue that Marx's critique of capitalism is vulnerable to his critique of 'bourgeois' political economy: not least, because it presumes a naturalistic conception of productiveness-centred on labour-taken from political economy. In contrast, Marx's critique of the latter presumes a historically variable social conception of productiveness, which condemns political economy for naturalizing the productiveness of capital Marx could have avoided this inconsistency by acknowledging the historically specific social reality of capital's productiveness and grounding his critique of it in a historically specific social(ist) alternative. Instead, he resorts to a naturalistic conception of labour's productive powers, which falsifies capital's self-valorizing ones. As such, Marx's mature economic writings contain two incompatible theories of value. On the one hand, a labour theory of value (LTV) grounded in labour's material and transhistorical productiveness, which forms the basis for his critique of capitalism and, on the other, a capital theory of value (CTV) grounded in capital's historically specific social productiveness, which forms the basis for his critique of political economy. I shall begin with the latter, less well-known of the two. Marx's (social and historical) critique of political economy In the Grundrisse, Marx critiques political economy for presenting production '… as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded' (Marx 1973: 87). Above all, he critiques his economic predecessors for equating capital with produced means of production-to the point of treating early-human hunting-tools as capital (Marx 1976: 291). In opposition to which, he
Marx's Theory on the Dialectical Function of Capitalism
International Critical Thought, 2021
This article analyses Marx ’ s conviction that the expansion of the capitalist mode of production was a basic prerequisite for the birth of communist society. It overviews this idea through the whole of Marx ’ s oeuvre, from his early political writings to the studies of the last decade. Particular relevance is given to the analysis of Capital and its preparatory manuscripts, where Marx highlighted in depth the fundamental relationship between the productive growth generated by the capitalist mode of production and the preconditions for the communist society for which the workers ’ movement must struggle. Finally, the article shows that in the end of his life — for example when he studied the possible developments of the rural commune ( obshchina ) in Russia — Marx did not change his basic ideas about the pro fi le of future communist society, as he sketched it from the Grundrisse on. Guided by hostility to schematism he thought it might be possible that the revolution would break out in forms and conditions that had never been considered before.
The Circulation of Capital Essays on Volume Two of Marx's Capital
St. Martin's Press , Macmillan Press eBooks, 1998
General Introduction because Marx felt embarrassed that he had not y.et produ~ed the promised book on the circulation of c,aP.ita.l. ObvlOusl,Y th!s p~ra graph is also a remnant of the famous. m~s~mg chapter on the 1I~ mediate results of commodity production (mcluded as an appendix to the 1976 English translation of Book I-compare 1;" 97?): Thus Marx indicates the duality of capitalist production: It IS a contradictory process of producing useful objects (labour process) .an~ at the same time of producing value and surplus value (valonzatlOn process). The latter, however, dominates the former. (See .Re.uten & Williams, 1989: ch. 1; and the chapter he~e by Murray pomtmg out that the 'real subsumption' of labour mdeed affects the labour process and the kind of commodities being prod~ced). Moseley in this volume points out that Marx, with his Reproduction Scheme; of part Three, 'and against Smith's 'dogma' in t~is respect, shows how the annual production indeed reproduces capital.