DOCUMENT 9 A Contribution to the Understanding of Marx's

Research Method (1910)

Heinrich Cunow[671]

Source: Heinrich Cunow, ‘Zum Verstandnis der Marxschen Forschungsmeth- ode’, Die Neue Zeit, 28.1909-10,2. Bd. (1910), H. 53, s. 1001-10.

Introduction by the Editors

Heinrich Cunow’s essay on Marx’s research method is a response to Revision­ism in the Social-Democratic parties and empiricism in the social sciences. Revisionists were rejecting Marx’s conclusions because capitalism appeared not to conform to the essential laws that Marx discussed in Capital. Empirical political economy proposed to study a world of facts without considering their necessary and essential logical connections. For ‘vulgar’ economists, the ‘facts’ are the ‘facts’; if they follow one another in some order, then it must be the facts that constitute the order. The problem, of course, is that the facts may just as well appear in some different order at different times and in different places. In that case, the world of phenomena would be ‘meaningless’ - unless the facts can be shown to conceal what is ‘real’, namely, a logical pattern that governs appearances. Cunow explains that in the determination of economic laws, Marx was influenced by Hegel’s logical distinction between the ‘real’ and the appearances that merely ‘exist’.

The distinction between reality and appearance is as old as Plato, who reasoned that all sensations presuppose concepts. A concept is a class, or a universal; and if existent things can only be known through universals, then the universals themselves must be objective. Objective universals are Ideas that are beyond all specifics of time and place. For Plato, ‘things’ are imperfect copies of universal Ideas. For Aristotle, ‘things’ are a combination of ‘matter’ and ‘form’. Since form implies the purpose of a thing, or the end towards which the thing moves, Aristotle says ends are logically prior to beginnings.

Hegel’s Logic addresses these same issues. The doctrine of Being traces the movement from indeterminacy through the categories of Quality and Quantity to Measure. Next comes the doctrine of Essence, demonstrating that essence has its ‘being’ in appearances. The union of essence and appearance is ‘Actual­ity’. Beyond the doctrine of Essence is that of the Notion, or self-determining thought that culminates in the thought of thought. The Absolute Idea, the end of Hegel’s Logic, is the identical ‘subject-object’ and the dialectical ‘unity of the concept and reality’.^[672] The Absolute Idea is also the form of logic, which is the dialectical method. The end, therefore, is the beginning, for the contra­diction of indeterminate Being, which is unformed and therefore nothing (i.e. no-thing), is what initially sets the entire Logic in motion.

Marx, says Cunow, speaks of ‘absolute’ laws in a similar sense, that is, as dialectical principles of movement. Economic laws are the real logic behind the facts of economic history. Like Hegel’s laws of logic, they are also dialect­ical and must entail contradictions. Cunow points out that the same holds in any physical science. The law of gravity is not an illusion because it is con­tradicted by centrifugal forces. Similarly, the law of the falling rate of profit is not an illusion because profits rise temporarily during a business cycle.

The laws of capitalist development, rather than being contradicted by trans­itory phenomena, are the real explanation of such contradictions. To account for contradictions, says Cunow, is the purpose of all science, which would ‘be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence’.

Heinrich Cunow on Marx’s Research Method

Two or three decades ago, especially among the academic youth, it was, so to speak, de rigueur in the socialist world to avow oneself a Marxist. The older utopian-socialist doctrines had hopelessly collapsed. Their beautiful dreams too clearly contrasted with the capitalist economic development taking place for the entire world to see, with its increasingly intensifying class struggle between workers and entrepreneurs.

Today the situation is reversed, at least for the socialist movement in Cent­ral and Western Europe. Many, who once called themselves Marxists, have returned to their earlier circle of ideas, to a bourgeois radicalism permeated by sentimental socialism, and they advocate some kind of ‘turning back' whether to the teachings of Proudhon, Kant, Hume, or even Rousseau.^[673] To be sure, Marx is granted a place of honour in the history of socialism, but - so proclaim these reactionaries - most of his theories have been rendered obsolete by the recent facts of economic development, and Marxism finds itself in a state of mental paralysis. Its once-living theses have become numb, dead formulas, and for that reason a thorough review of the theoretical legacy of Karl Marx is urgently needed.

What explains this change? In part, to be sure, disappointed hopes and a realisation that the bourgeois world has much greater vitality than was once thought: a realisation that makes the revolutionising of the present social sys­tem appear to be far away; but also, to a very considerable extent, as we already said, the fact that those who call for a revision of Marx’s doctrines never pen­etrated into the very essence of Marx’s method of investigation. As they once decided to call themselves Marxists only by observing that Marx’s teachings outwardly corresponded to the phenomena of economic development, now they think they have recognised that this agreement no longer exists, and they have decided to turn away from Marxism and return to the earlier stages of their development.

That is a very different goal from the one that contemporary political eco­nomy, as taught at the universities and applied in the bourgeois press to elu­cidate economic problems, for the most part sets itself today. Contemporary bourgeois economics does not want to (and usually does not claim to) discover the laws of capitalist economy, as the classics of English political economy once did. It merely seeks to provide explanations for the economic processes taking place before our eyes, and often only for the outward form of those pro­cesses. Its method, therefore, is not the analytical-abstract one, which seeks to understand the laws at play by eliminating the accompanying phenomena and grasping the processes under investigation in their purest possible form. Rather, it proceeds in a purely empirical-combinatorial way, often even in what Marx mocked in Capital as a crudely empirical way.^[674] It thinks that economic phenomena are just as they present themselves to the observer, i.e. they are regarded as given facts, without the more or less random concomitant circum­stances [Nebenumstande] having been separated out by a penetrating analysis, and then a causal nexus is assumed to exist between them because of their apparent outward connection, and often even only because of their temporal succession.

Such examples of a totally crude empirical approach, which concludes from the temporal succession of two or more economic phenomena that the lat­ter phenomenon must simply be the result of the former, can be multiplied indefinitely. Let us recall here only the nice theories about the organisation of production and the future prevention of economic crises by the trusts - the­ories that have been thoroughly refuted by the latest crises in Germany and America, but which vulgar economics could easily have discovered to be erro­neous before this refutation, if only it had studied analytically the question of how contemporary capitalist economy balances supply and demand by com­modity production constantly outstripping demand and falling behind it, and by the over- and undervaluation of products resulting from these fluctuations.

But not only do these kinds of economists simply conclude, without further ado and from the temporal succession of two phenomena, that a causal link must exist between the two; they often go a few giant steps beyond that and immediately construct, when they encounter apparent analogies in the pre­vious course of economic development, all sorts of beautiful laws, often the kind of ‘eternal’ or ‘general’ laws that apply, in their opinion, not only to cap­italist economy, but to the economy ‘in itself, even to Caesar’s Germans or the Iroquois of James Fenimore Cooper’s time.

Marx’s method stands in the sharpest contrast to this practice. To draw such causal inferences, or even to derive economic laws, from some arbitrarily chosen events from ancient and modern times, because of their apparent outward conformity, appeared to Marx totally unscientific. In his view, such laws can be discovered only by way of a logical deduction from proven general basic facts. Also, Marx was, in a sense, an empiricist; he also proceeded from the phenomena of economic life at different times; but he did not use those phenomena in the way in which they present themselves outwardly to the observer in order to build his system. Everyday experience, he says, grasps only the deceptive appearance of things; any such phenomenon must therefore first be investigated in its real essence, it must be scientifically analysed: an activity which he compares in the preface to the first edition of the first volume of Capital to ‘microscopic anatomy’.^[675] The final shape of economic relations, as they outwardly manifest themselves to our observation, is in fact quite different from their essence, their often veiled real character and the concept corresponding to it. Thus, it is also completely wrong to accept those external appearances as the given, actual facts and to draw conclusions from them. The task of science is rather to penetrate through the outward appearance to the inner nature of economic processes.

From this standpoint, in Capital Marx hurls at vulgar economy the accusa­tion that, in its crude empiricism, it only sees the outward manifestations, and usually only seeks to clarify conceptually and to systematise those ideas that force themselves onto the merchant and the manufacturer in their economic activity, without penetrating more deeply into their internal connections. Thus he says, for instance, in the first volume of Capital, that vulgar (‘crudely empir­ical') political economy ‘relies here as elsewhere on the mere semblance as opposed to the law which regulates and determines the phenomena’.^[676] ‘That in their appearance things are often presented in an inverted way is something fairly familiar in every science, apart from political economy'.^[677]

And even more characteristic of Marx's methodology is perhaps the follow­ing passage in Capital:

Vulgar economics actually does nothing more than interpret, systematize and turn into apologetics the notions of agents trapped within bourgeois relations of production. So it should not surprise us that precisely in the estranged form of appearance of economic relations that involves these prima facie absurd and complete contradictions - and all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence - that precisely here vulgar economics feels completely at home, these relationships appearing all the more self-evident to it, the more their inner connections remain hidden, even though they are comprehensible to the popular mind.^[678]

Marx insists that the economist should approach the study of economic laws just as the physicist approaches the determination of physical laws. As the physicist tries to discover ‘pure' laws and, to this end, abstracts from particular concomitant circumstances and disturbing influences, which in reality are always present, so Marx seeks to derive analytically, as far as possible, the economic laws in their ‘pure' form from their basic conditions, thrusting aside the disturbances that always appear. He says himself, comparing his method with that of the physicist:

The physicist either observes natural processes where they occur in their most significant form, and are least affected by disturbing influences, or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions which ensure that the process will occur in its pure state.^[679]

So the economic theorist should also proceed in his field, in the field of political economy. And since economic processes are often linked to all kinds of accidental circumstances, since they are therefore not only the effect of a law but also the result of many laws or tendencies, more or less criss-crossing, mutually abrogating, weakening or complementing each other, the researcher must distinguish between the main phenomena and the accidental circum­stances, abstracting from the randomly or regularly occurring disturbing influ­ences, and separating out, as far as possible, the individual causes and their special effects in the consideration of the original [causal] nexuses. He must know how to separate out and isolate.

Of course, this method too does not always provide a correct result, because accuracy depends not only on the method but also on how the researcher fol­lows it in practice, how deeply his analysis penetrates, how far he recognises the accidental circumstances as such, and how much he separates the essen­tial from the inessential. But in any case, according to the opinion of Karl Marx, only in this way is it possible to recognise the underlying laws of economic phenomena. For example, Marx does not derive his law of value from price phenomena emerging to the surface of the economy, but by way of logical deduction from the nature of commodity exchange. And he does not obtain his law of capitalist accumulation by starting from phenomena of concentra­tion, but rather through a penetrating analysis of the capitalist reproduction process, of the transformation of surplus value into capital and of the changes taking place during this process in the mutual proportions of the individual components of capital. And only after he has deductively derived the tenden­cies of accumulation from certain basic facts of the process of capital formation and expansion, or, as he himself says, ‘the absolute general law of capitalist accu­mulation’,^[680] does he proceed to offer ‘illustrations’ of this law, that is to say, to prove from English economic history how the conditions of individual strata of the English working classes developed under the effect of this law.

A cursory glance at the method used here by Marx is enough to see immedi­ately how much this process differs from the crude empirical-historical method of that practical economics that we find in the columns of the financial and commercial press. The methodologists among these people proceed the other way round and, on the basis of mere outward similarities, want to combine different kinds of phenomena of concentration of capital and then, by draw­ing a diagonal through this pile, to derive a so-called average law. It is quite natural that this empirical economics, which merely takes the superficial phe­nomena of economic life to be its basic elements, should find the method of Karl Marx totally incomprehensible. Thus, for example, Mr. Bohm-Bawerk, the much-admired Austrian professor and former Finance Minister, says of Marx's theory of value:

Now Marx, instead of proving his thesis from experience or from its operant motives - that is, empirically or psychologically - prefers another, and for such a subject somewhat singular line of evidence - the method of a purely logical proof, a dialectic[a[∖ deduction from the very nature of exchange.^{[681] [682]}

Such laws of motion (tendencies), inferred by way of deduction from certain basic facts, Marx calls ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ laws - ‘absolute' in the sense of the philosopher Hegel, whose student Marx was. That is, the term ‘absolute law' is not to be understood, according to contemporary parlance, as an ‘unrestricted’ or always applicable law, but as an ultimate principle of movement underlying the manifold changing phenomena of a certain type, as a basic trend of devel­opment, more or less hidden under the outward forms of appearance. For that reason, it is by no means a contradiction - as claimed by those theorists who never understood Marx - when Marx, after explaining in the first volume of Capital the law of capitalist accumulation and characterising it as ‘an absolute and general law', immediately afterwards says: ‘Like all other laws, it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here'.11

Thus, although the law of accumulation is an ‘absolute' and ‘general' law of the capitalist economy, it is not ‘unrestrictedly' valid, nor will it always show its effects in the same way. Its effects are rather - as with other economic laws - modified (that is, altered, diverted or restricted) by ‘many circumstances'.

Is that not a contradiction?

Only for those who do not understand Marx’s method. Because, just as the laws of physics do not always manifest themselves in a pure form but are thwarted by the counter-effects of other laws, so also in the economy the ‘absolute’ laws, which are the basic tendencies of movement, do not always manifest themselves in the same way. There is not one, but many economic laws, and none has its own particular self-contained scope or sphere of action in which it rules unchallenged. Economic life is rather a resultant of many laws that mutually limit, weaken and abrogate each other in their effects: a product of manyforces and counter-forces crisscrossing in many ways.

If that is so, why was it necessary to research the so-called ‘absolute’ or ‘pure’ economic laws? Marx replies: because only by not sticking to the outward appearance, by analytically penetrating into the basic laws of economic life, is the social movement understandable! Appearances, says Marx, are decept­ive. Just as the human body is not understandable as long as we only look at its overall appearance and its external functions, and just as we are first able to understand its vital mechanism when we dissect it, researching the func­tions of its individual parts, both in themselves and in their interconnection, penetrating down to its basic element, to the cell, so it is also necessary for us in the economic field to identify first, through careful analysis, the basic eco­nomic laws in their purity, unaffected by any side effect, and only then to get to know the deviations (modifications) that they suffer under the influence of other laws.

But if Marx conceives economic development, so to speak, as a ‘natural historical process’, he does not claim that economic laws are ‘natural laws’ in the same sense as the laws of physics. While theorists of the classical school of English political economy, on whose shoulders Marx stands, regarded the laws they discovered in the economic conditions surrounding them as the laws of economic activity in general, which, ever since man produced and exchanged, always determined his economic life - although their effects naturally did not emerge so clearly during the earlier, simpler stages of development - according to Marx, every economic period has its own special laws. Whenever such an economic phase has outlived itself and another begins, more or less new economic laws also appear in place of the old ones. Economic laws are in fact, according to Marx, nothing but the laws of social relations between people, and because society is not something unchanging and rigid, but is always reshaped anew in the course of development, every new social formation has its new special laws.

All economic laws must therefore be regarded as historically determined. As a consequence, the object of economic research cannot be to construct laws suitable for all economic stages, ‘eternally’ valid laws. Each economic era must be seen in its historical contingency, in its dependence on special laws. Besides, as Marx stated in the preface to the second edition of the first volume of Capital, in reference to a criticism of his work in the European Messenger (Vyestnik Evropy)^[683] of St. Petersburg, for him the most important thing is to find the law of change of economic phenomena, ‘the law of their variation, of their development, i.e. of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connections into a different one’.^[684]

Such an analytic-deductive method of research must necessarily come into conflict with the approach prevailing today in almost all historical and social sciences, which, despite all their occasional flirting with the theory of know­ledge, usually accept social phenomena as they outwardly manifest themselves to our senses, without deeper analysis; and is it quite natural not only that the method used by Marx in Capital should be found by ‘scientists’ of this kind to be a ‘hair-splitting play with concepts’, but also that some of the smartest of these ‘scholars’, among them particularly the Italian Professor Achille Loria, should have discovered that Marx, in his diabolical malice, merely wanted to lead his readers and followers by the nose. Is it not folly, so these gentlemen argue, to use a complicated, painstaking analysis to work out ‘absolute’ economic laws and then afterwards state that those laws are not at all ‘absolute’; that is, that they do not have absolute validity, but that their action is rather always affected or even abolished by other laws? - i.e. to construct laws that actually are, accord­ing to his own admission, not at all effective in practical economic life! Is that not a ridiculous analytical gimmick? Thus, for example, Marx investigates, in the first 100 pages of Capital, exchange-value and the metamorphoses of the commodity, and after he has found, in his opinion, this value, he says that it expresses itself in the commodity price and that the price is therefore the monetary expression for the amount of labour materialised in the commod­ities. But, then again, he afterwards denies that average prices correspond to the magnitudes of exchange-values; and finally, in the third volume of Capital (Part 1, Section 2), he states that the market prices of commodities are, indeed, determined on the whole by the socially necessary labour time required for their production, but that not just the law of value must be taken into con­sideration as a factor in [the determination of] the magnitudes of prices, and that alongside the law of value also operates the law of the equal average rate of profit, that is, the equalisation of the different profit rates through competi­tion.

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Is that not a contradiction, a self-refutation of Marx’s law of value? Abso­lutely not! Because the economy and its various manifestations, as mentioned earlier, are not the result of one, but of different laws criss-crossing in their effects, and the impairment of the effect of a law by the effect of another law can never be regarded as a refutation of the first law, especially not when, as in this case, the so-called ‘disturbance’ can be accurately traced and, in a sense, even foreseen. For example, does the law of adhesion not apply in the field of physics because it is often modified or cancelled in its effects by the opposite law of cohesion? Is gravity just an illusion because centrifugal force often more or less paralyses it? Is the law of gravity just a silly construction because it only applies in a vacuum, while the atmosphere is filled with air and, because of the resistance of that air, the effects of the law are in many ways affected and appear to have been altered? Whoever says that all those laws do not exist, because their effect is not always the same and is often modified or abolished by other laws, thereby negates the whole of modern science.

It is therefore quite funny when people, among them many of the so-called revisionists, learnedly argue that many of Marx’s laws, such as the law of accumulation and concentration, cannot be right, because their effects were not always felt, or not in all branches of production or in all capitalist countries. This is every bit as scientific as if someone announced, full of wisdom, that there is no law of gravity, because gravity sometimes cannot be recognised. Certainly, Marx’s method is not correct because of the fact that Marx applied it; and even assuming that it is correct, that would not mean that each individual research result that Marx reached is true, for even a correct method can, of course, be used incorrectly, even by those who created it. Thus, one can surely raise no objection when opponents take up Marx’s method and try to prove that it is faulty, inaccurate, or contradictory, or when they try to demonstrate that the basic facts from which Marx proceeds and the various elements of his argumentation are erroneous. But to claim that this or that economic law does not exist because of the fact that its effect cannot temporarily be seen, only shows that the ‘Marx-critics’ in question have never understood the difference between Marx’s method and the crudely empirical method of ordinary financial-press economics.

It usually turns out that those critics understand nothing concerning the methodological questions raised. So we can often hear, for example, that yes, Marx’s law of accumulation and concentration is not entirely wrong, because it is valid for industry, although not for agriculture - or rather, that it is actually not valid only for German, Belgian and English agriculture, because one finds in agriculture in North America, Russia or some other country a remarkable con­centration of capital and enterprises, just as so and so many decades earlier Germany had its agricultural concentration. This reasoning betrays immedi­ately that the speaker did not understand even the most basic elements of Marx's method, because in that case he would have known that the idea that the laws of capitalist production could be valid only occasionally and at some places is absurd. A capitalist law applies to the whole area of the capitalist mode of production, not only for individual countries and not from time to time. To be sure, its effect in particular countries can be thwarted or paralysed by various other opposing forces, for example, by economic, commercial and tariff policies, settlement and mortgage legislation, competition from neigh­bouring countries on domestic and international food markets, artificial main­tenance of certain agricultural operations and settlement forms through tax, land, export premiums, etc.

The fact that these and other counter-effects are present and may temporar­ily or permanently weaken or prevent in any given country the concentration of capital or enterprises does not at all mean that there is absolutely no law of concentration in the capitalist economy. That law merely operates, as does any other economic law, in different ways and to varying degrees under different circumstances.

Therefore, whoever wants to understand Marx's [economic] theory correctly and comprehensively must first familiarise himself with the method used by Karl Marx. That knowledge is the first precondition for understanding the great economic life-work of this mighty thinker. Whoever does not understand Marx's methodology cannot understand his argumentation and appreciate the importance of his research results. For them, Capital remains an accumulation of sharp-witted but mostly useless analyses and constructions.