DOCUMENT 1 Karl Marx's Point of View in his Political-Economic Critique: A Review of Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1872)

Kaufman wrote approvingly of Marx’s emphasis upon the primacy of mater­ial production in determining the movement of history and its reflection in forms of consciousness. But what he took to be Marx’s method was not com­pletely accurate. He thought Marx’s distinction lay in rejecting the notion of universally valid economic laws in favour of a study of political economy by analogy with sciences such as physiology or biology. What Kaufman did not understand, with his allusion to an evolutionary process, was Marx’s appro­priation of the Hegelian dialectic. It seemed to him that Marx’s ‘external form of presentation’ was dialectical ‘in the bad sense of the word’, yet behind the idealist veneer lay a truly scientific analysis of factual material. Marx’s real achievement was to allow the facts to speak for themselves, in terms of object­ive economic laws, as if holding a perfect mirror to economic history. He did not superimpose - upon his historical research at least - any a priori ‘criterion’ of factual selection. Instead, Kaufman wrote: ‘he does not even consider the ques­tion of what will be his criterion in the project he is undertaking. He believes this question will provide its own answer if the investigation is scientific’.

Kaufman’s comments puzzled Marx. How, he wondered, could Kaufman find ‘my method of inquiry severely realistic, but my method of presentation, unfortunately, German-dialectical’?^[336] What the reviewer missed was Marx’s conviction that the facts themselves develop through dialectical contradic­tions, so that what may seem to be an a priori conceptual packaging was really the objective movement of history. Thus, when Kaufman summarised Marx’s work so sympathetically, Marx commented with obvious frustration: ‘what else is he depicting but the dialectical method?’^[337] The difficulty was that Kaufman knew Marx’s published work, but only Marx knew what he had writ­ten in his unpublished manuscripts concerning ‘The Method of Political Eco­nomy’.^[338]

In his notes on method, Marx began by pointing out that when economists undertook, for example, to study ‘a given country’, they typically began with aspects of the ‘whole social process of production’. To begin with the whole, however, treating it as some sort of self-evident fact, would be misleading. The whole was an ‘abstraction’ if one disregarded the parts ‘of which it is composed’. Population was an abstraction if taken apart from social classes; social classes were abstractions if separated from ‘the factors on which they depend, e.g. wage-labour, capital and so on’, which in turn could not be separated from ‘exchange, division of labour, prices, etc.’. ‘A very vague notion of a complex whole’ could only be made concrete by analysing the parts that constituted it, and then by making ‘the journey again in the opposite direction’. In other words, the method of political economy involved analytical pursuit of the facts, followed by their conceptual reconstruction in logical form. ‘The concrete concept’ of the whole, Marx noted, ‘is concrete because it is a synthesis of many definitions, thus representing the unity of diverse aspects’.^[339]

The problem was that conceptually re-assembling the facts may suggest - as Marx thought it did to Hegel - that the concepts themselves actually constitute the world rather than reflecting it.

Immediately following his long quotation from Kaufman in the preface to the second edition of Capital, Marx hoped to clarify these methodological issues with a brief but famous passage:

Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection. Only after this work has been done can the real movement be appropri­ately presented. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is now reflected back in the ideas, then it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction.

My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of ‘the Idea', is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea.

Marx appropriated from Hegel's Logic and other writings the dialectical move­ment of concepts (or categories). He regarded concepts - not imposed a priori but discovered through historical analysis - as forms of thought reflecting the real world. What he denied was Hegel's conviction that the real world begins with and is created by the movement of thought. His two short paragraphs cited above provide both the context and the theme of many of the documents that we include in this volume. Later Marxists frequently struggled with the same interpretive issues as Kaufman did in 1872, culminating in the study of Marxist political economy, in the works of Isaak Il’ich Rubin, as a ‘dialectical develop­ment of categories’.

Karl Marx’s Point of View in his Political-Economic Critique: A Review of Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy

In 1859 Karl Marx published a short book with the title A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The book was to serve as the beginning of a lar­ger study of the same subject. Marx’s illness interfered, however, and it was only after an eight-year interruption that he was able, in the autumn of 1871, to release the completed first volume of his broadly conceived work. Marx’s goal is a critical analysis of the economic foundations of bourgeois - or, as he puts it, capitalist - society. But he is not content with the economic literat­ure concerning these foundations. He undertakes his own investigation of the capitalist order of economic life, seeks out its foundations and, having found them, subjects them to his own critique. With a mass of notes showing enorm­ous erudition, Marx critically follows his predecessors in examining the laws of the modern economic system, subjecting them to ruthless scrutiny and, in passing, bestowing upon them [his predecessors] witty and scathing epi­thets that are occasionally crude and undeserved.

In a book whose main content is critique, a paramount question concerns the viewpoint from which the undertaking begins. In most cases the initial views, which provide the basis for the critique, include their own significant share of arbitrariness and preconceptions. If the critique has ideas and beliefs as its subject matter, then the guarantee of its scientific character must be precise methods of re-examination. But what is to be done when it is a matter of criticising not the ideas of one or another scholar but rather the facts themselves, which are the source of the ideas? In such a case, where can one find criteria for determining what is normal and what is pathological? This question is sometimes answered by saying that the needs of man can be the criterion: what must be recognised as normal, according to this view, is what accords with human needs, while that which contradicts them is abnormal. But in that case, one has to ask: What is to be done if the critique aims to deal with the needs themselves?

It would appear, judging by the external form of his presentation, that Marx is the most idealist of philosophers, and indeed in the German, i.e. the bad sense of the word. But in point of fact he is infinitely more realistic than all of his predecessors in the business of economic criticism, and that is why he does not even consider the question of what will be his criterion in the project he is undertaking. He believes this question will provide its own answer if the investigation is scientific. Only one thing is important to him: to find the law behind the kinds of phenomena that he is concerned to investigate.

Accordingly, Marx is concerned only with one thing: to show, with precise scientific research, the necessity of certain definite types of social relations and, so far as possible, to give a precise statement of the facts that are his starting points and his basis. It is quite enough for him if, having demonstrated the necessity of the modern order, he has also shown the necessity of another order towards which a transition will inevitably occur, whether or not one thinks about it or is conscious of it. Marx regards the social movement as a natural- historical process, governed by laws that are not only independent of human will, consciousness and intentions, but rather themselves determine human will, consciousness and intentions.

Let us listen to what Marx himself has to say on how his point of view developed. Here are his words from the preface of the short book from 1859 that we previously mentioned:

The first work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was a critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law... My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so- called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eight­eenth century, embraces within the term ‘civil society’; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy... The general conclusion at which I arrived... can be summarised as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of pro­duction appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production con­stitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond defin­ite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into con­flict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of develop­ment of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic found­ation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic con­ditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this con­flict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transforma­tion by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of pro­duction. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production - antagonistic not in the sense of individual antag­onism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence - but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism.^[342]

For Marx, therefore, the fundamental cause that is mainly responsible for con­ditioning the phenomena of economic life is found in the forces of production that operate in the economic world. Development of these forces is for him a natural-historical phenomenon that he traces with the aim mainly of captur­ing the forms that it first assumes and then leaves behind in different periods. He regards the increase of productivity as an almost mechanical fact, at least as mechanical as any physical growth. Consciousness only reflects this growth and its consequences, which occur for the reason mentioned and are inde­pendent of consciousness. The change in the relation of man to nature, which is the main content of productivity, conditions changes in the economic rela­tions between people; these changes, in turn, bring with them change in the juridical, political and daily relations of people with each other. When these changes have actually occurred in life itself - or insofar as they are occurring in life and in fact - human consciousness gradually absorbs them and reflects them, so that the conscious man becomes accustomed to them and then seeks to express them in words, images, customs and law.

If the conscious element in cultural history plays such a subordinate role, then it is understandable that criticism, whose subject matter is culture itself, will be even less able to base itself upon some form or result of consciousness. That is to say, only external phenomena, not ideas, can serve as the starting point. A critique will consist of comparing, compiling and collating a fact not with an idea but with another fact. All that matters is that the two facts be investigated as thoroughly as possible and that they actually represent different stages of development; and, most importantly, that an equally thorough invest­igation be made of the shapes, sequence and connections within which these stages of development appear.

We think it appropriate to characterise Marx’s general point of view in order to help eliminate any misunderstanding that might arise for the reader who is becoming familiar with Marx for the first time by way of his book, which has now appeared in the Russian language. In the first place, he does not discuss his fundamental points of view in this book. Secondly, he is frequently quite abusive in his treatment of just about everyone. Thus he sees Comte as ‘up to his knees in Catholicism’, and Comte’s positive system as merely a disciple’s exercise, a pallid imitation of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, of no interest except for a history of the development of French philosophical views. Yet one cannot conclude from this that Marx is opposed to what we call a realist worldview. Our earlier presentation of his views is enough to convince one of that. He can in no sense be called an idealist. Finally, a Russian reader might be misled on this account by Marx’s method of exposition (as distinct from his research). His exposition is dialectical, which ostensibly follows strictly from thought alone but in fact must always return to phenomena. It is precisely when Marx presents and discusses the facts that he is most difficult to read. To a Russian reader, who may be unfamiliar with the German art of developing ideas, he must be translated from the outset into a more comprehensible language in order to be understood.

The very character of his fundamental viewpoints obliges Marx to assign a very important place in his work to the facts. In this respect, his work surpasses any systematic studies that have appeared in the past 25 years, including both socialist literature and the literature coming from economists in the narrow sense of the word. In terms of dogma, Marx’s book can be compared to Proud­hon’s System of Economic Contradictions. In terms of his wealth of historical material and enormous erudition, Marx might be compared to Roscher,^[343] yet he surpasses him in force and depth of analysis and in comprehension of the factual material that he collects. The order in which Marx initially planned to outline the bourgeois system of economic life was the following: capital, landed property, hired labour; the state, foreign trade, and the world market. Under the first three rubrics, he wanted to investigate the economic conditions of life for the three large classes into which bourgeois society is divided.^[344] Today he has somewhat modified that system. The entire project is to involve three volumes. His present work appears with the general heading Capital. In the first volume he presents the foundations of the capitalist system of production (Book i); the second volume will deal with the capitalist system of circula­tion (Book ii) and the general foundations of the entire capitalist economy (Book iii); and a third volume will be devoted to the historical development of ideas concerning capital and the forms based upon it.^[345] Accordingly, the whole of contemporary economic theory is to be included in the theory of cap­ital. This idea is closely connected with Marx's general worldview, which we outlined previously. Since capital is presently the dominant phenomenon of real life; since it now represents the principal and practically the sole source of wealth and prosperity; since it is the starting point and the destination, the central point of all other economic processes; and since every economic phe­nomenon today only has practical and vital significance insofar as from one side or the other, either positively or negatively, it involves capital - it is per­fectly understandable that a theory that aims to comprehend the latter must embrace the whole of modern economic life, including its causes and con­sequences.

It might occur to another reader to ask: What sort of science is this, in the strict sense of the word, when it intends from the outset not to investigate the general laws that regulate a given order of phenomena but rather to explain only a certain portion of the facts of this order? After all, that is not science but only a practical appendage to it, the purpose being to apply existing scientific results in order to explain phenomena that are not understood by the general public. Are not the general laws of economic life one and the same, whether they are applied to the present or to the past? But that is precisely where Marx disagrees. For him no such universal laws exist. One must conclude from his work that a direct investigation of the economic phenomena belonging to dif­ferent historical stages of economic development led him to deny the existence of any economic laws common to all stages. In his opinion, to the contrary, every major historical period has its own laws, which govern life only so long as that period lasts. And just as soon as it passes through a given period of develop­ment, leaves one stage behind and enters into another, it begins to be governed by different laws. In a word, economic life, from this perspective, turns out to be a phenomenon perfectly analogous to what we observe in other orders of biological phenomena that we discuss in terms of a history of development. The lower organisms, while they remain at that level, are subject to their laws of structure, growth, nourishment, etc. When we turn to organisms at ensuing stages of development, we encounter such extensive anatomical refinements and physiological facts that quantitative difference becomes qualitative, with new qualities also entailing new laws. Observation of economic life reveals exactly the same thing. Close analysis of the internal structure and properties of actual phenomena has time and again persuaded numerous researchers, ever since the forties, of the error in the view of earlier economists, who regarded the nature of economic law as being identical to the laws of physics and chem­istry. Analysis has led them, to the contrary, to conclude that if an analogy is to be made, it is between social laws and the laws of biology. In social life, as in physiological life, the history of development, i.e. the changeability and perfection of forms, represents the most distinguishing characteristic of phe­nomena. A direct and more penetrating analysis of phenomena has shown that social organisms differ one from the other no less profoundly than do botanical and zoological ones. The social organism of Asiatic despotism; the organism that could be observed among classical peoples; the organism represented by feudal society; and finally, the organism of modern capitalist society - all of them differ one from the other such that any laws, based upon observing fea­tures common to all of them, would not explain their most interesting features. One and the same phenomenon, because of differences in the structure of these organisms, of their diverse organs, and of the conditions within which the organs must function, etc., can therefore be subject to completely differ­ent laws according to the different stages of development that different social organisms represent. For example, Marx refuses to recognise a law of popu­lation growth that is one and the same, always and everywhere, for all times and all places. He claims, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of reproduction. He does not reject the Malthusian law on these grounds, but he does strictly define the limits within which it retains its force, i.e. the conditions in which the phenomena governed by it occur. What hap­pens in economic life depends upon the degree of productivity of the economic forces, i.e. their capacity to produce one consequence or another. With differ­ences in productivity, the consequences will also differ along with the laws that govern them.

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Thus, in undertaking to examine and explain the capitalist economic order, Marx formulated in strictly scientific terms the objective that a precise investig­ation of economic life might have. A study that has in view neither the interests of archaeology nor those of a purely contemplative love of wisdom can focus only upon real life itself. However, such a study is far from having merely a popularising significance. Its scientific purpose is to reveal the particular laws that govern the emergence, existence, development and death of a given social organism and its replacement by another, higher one. And that is the genuine value of Marx's book.

It is obvious that, as a purely scientific study, the book presupposes that the reader knows not only how to receive unfamiliar ideas but also how to follow them critically throughout the entire research that gives rise to them. In this regard, as we have already noted, the work by Marx presents greater difficulties than those from other socialists. He presupposes a well-prepared reader, one who is familiar not just with the history of culture in general and of economic culture in particular, but, more importantly, one who has mastered the findings of economic science. Marx himself indicates that he expects a reader who wishes to learn something new, and therefore one who already knows all that is old, and for whom Marx's theory will be not be new simply because the reader is generally unfamiliar with the science of political economy.

The volume that has now appeared begins with analysis of exchange pro­cesses. By analysing the different forms that exchange assumes at different stages of development, Marx demonstrates that there is a continuous internal connection between these forms, that one form gives rise to another that con­tains within it the nucleus of elements whose development gives rise to a higher and more complex form. Thus, the simplest form of exchange, during the period of so-called natural economy, already contains within itself the nuc­leus whose development gives birth to the complex phenomena of monetary exchange.^[346] Ascertaining the general law of exchange, Marx shows that com­modity circulation, insofar as it involves the exchange of products, is unable to provide the capitalist with any surpluses beyond his expenditures. In order to achieve such surpluses, circulation must expand to include human labour power that is bereft of any economic independence. Application of the gen­eral law of exchange to labour power, as a commodity, enables the capitalist to acquire from circulation more than he spends, to receive a profit. The point is that, according to the law of exchange, every commodity is paid for accord­ing to the average and necessary costs of its production, expressed in terms of the labour expended. But labour power produces more than is required for its production (i.e. its sustenance). Consequently, paying labour according to the same norm that applies to any other commodity, the capitalist can acquire for his own use the difference between the value of labour and the value of the products of labour. Marx calls this difference surplus value (Mehrwert). These surpluses in excess of expenditures, and the pursuit of them, constitute the principal distinguishing characteristic of the capitalist order of economic life. To acquire profit at the expense of wages, to spend as little as possible on labour and to acquire as much as possible from it - that is capitalism’s practical slo­gan. Corresponding to the fundamental significance that, according to Marx’s doctrine, capital and its profit from wage expenditures have in our day, the main part of the first volume is devoted to a detailed portrayal and analysis of the phenomena involved in the exploitation of labour by capital, and of the conditions in which it occurs and develops or else is delayed in its develop­ment. Marx initially portrays the capitalist’s endeavour to acquire profit on his capital, in the form of the previously mentioned surplus value, by means of lengthening the working day. Here he outlines the development of English law concerning the length of the working day in the factory. Then Marx turns to successive main ways of acquiring the greatest possible difference between the value of labour and the value of its products. These include increasing the pro­ductivity of labour and curtailing the costs of its maintenance relative to what it produces. Simple cooperation of a large mass of homogeneous labour; divi­sion of labour, or cooperation of large masses of dissimilar labour; and finally, extensive application of machinery - such are the main ways adopted. In the closing chapter Marx analyses the historical conditions of capital’s formation and clearly demonstrates the process of its formation in the theory and practice of colonisation.

I. K-n.