Understanding Marx’s Critique of Political Economy
B) Marx’s text is a brief introduction, The Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).
The title allows us to introduce the meaning of the work at hand. This work is presented as a contribution. Marx knows that this is not an exhaustive analysis or conclusion of political economy.
The work is a criticism: it aims to critically analyze capitalist society and the discipline that has explained and justified this mode of production: political economy.
In this particular passage, Karl Marx analyzes social change (the dynamics of history) from the perspective of historical materialism. Marx outlines the foundations of historical materialism in a negative manner, as a critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law. Marx’s position is absolutely opposite to Hegel: the conditions that explain the emergence of civil society and the state are not the ideals of the human spirit, but the material conditions experienced by men.
Thus, historical materialism holds that the explanation of social change lies not in the will of men or their ideas or consciousness, but in the sphere of material production, particularly the contradiction between the degree of development of productive forces in a given society and the social relations of production established among its members.
The productive forces encompass all elements that contribute to production: the means of production and the workforce. For goods to be produced, humans must establish certain relationships among themselves, known as the social relations of production. Thus, we can distinguish a series of social positions in terms of ownership of the means of production. Marx distinguishes two types of companies: those that establish partnerships (where all individuals own the means of production) and those that establish relations of exploitation (where some are owners and others are not). In the latter case, each position is referred to as a class.
The social relations of production refer to the relations between social positions. This means that society has a structure, and this social structure is not changed by replacing one individual with another in function, but by changing social positions.
This economic and legal infrastructure corresponds to the various forms of consciousness.
It is formed by the institutions and forms of political power that order production. The forms of consciousness are those that legitimize the political and economic order. Marx attempts to explain the dynamics behind social processes. He establishes a connection between the development of productive forces and the structure of production relations. When developing the productive forces, contradictions arise between the two entities, necessitating a social revolution for progress to continue.
Thus, the first stage was the early Christian community (collective ownership), which faced a contradiction that resulted in private property. Marx referred to the next stage as the slave mode of production (master-slave relationship). The subsequent stage was feudalism (master-slave), from which the transition to capitalism occurred (capitalism-proletariat), where the proletariat is formally free but only to sell their labor. The final stage, according to Marx, is communism, where ownership is collective (as in primitive communism) but with significant development of productive forces. Marx questions the notion of political economy, stating that the employer buys the worker’s labor power, which is capable of creating value, thus acquiring a surplus. However, the capitalist pays only for the labor power, a non-refundable amount that Marx calls surplus value. The problem lies in the very structure of capitalism. If the employer does not pay the worker surplus, they will never earn any profit.
C) Marx develops his own political philosophy, supported by each of the three traditions he engaged with: German philosophy, French socialism, and political economy. Marx’s critique of Hegel began with dissatisfaction with his explanation of law and state. Marx concluded that the state is not a means to overcome and reconcile conflicting interests in civil society. From this, he derived two consequences:
– Marx broke with Hegel’s idealistic vision and considered that history was not the result of growing awareness, but rather the development of social relations with nature and with humanity itself.
– For reconciliation to occur, human social classes had to disappear, necessitating the abolition of private property. Only with the arrival of communism could humanity achieve happiness.
Marx also criticized political economy from the perspective of labor. He identified labor as alienated and thus exploited. Marx distinguishes three types of economic alignment: alignment of activities, where work becomes an alienated activity; alignment of the object, where the worker enriches another; and private property as alienated labor, the result of human exploitation. This implies a denial of human nature, which can only be overcome by communism, allowing work to be free and reconciling humanity with its nature.
After questioning Hegel, Marx concluded his critique of German philosophy by breaking with the Hegelian Left.
Marx recognized the shift in Feuerbach’s materialism but criticized it for losing the historical perspective. He argued that it mistakenly started from an idea of man as a static reality, while his essence changes due to labor.
Marx believes that religious alignment, and any ideological alignment, serves a social function: to create a false consciousness of reality that obscures economic alignment. According to Marx, theoretical criticism alone is insufficient; practical work (political-revolutionary) is necessary to transform social relations of production.
Marx also drew contributions from French socialism, determining that history can be divided into three main stages, understood as an evolution of humanity’s relationship with nature and itself. The first stage is primitive communism, which denies itself and gives rise to private property, social classes, etc. Finally, an exploited society emerges, which ultimately rejects communism.
Marx argues for the necessity of communism as the final state of human evolution. Communism is not only morally desirable, as utopian socialism suggests, but also scientifically necessary, a proposal he termed scientific socialism.
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