The Method of Political Economy

The next essay in our collection, Document 9, was written by Heinrich Cunow in 1905 and returns to fundamental questions of methodology. Whereas revi­sionists were rejecting Marx’s conclusions because capitalism appeared not to conform to the predictions in Capital, Cunow responded that they were simply imitating empirical political economy, which ‘seeks to provide explanations for the economic processes taking place before our eyes, and often only for the outward form of those processes’, paying no regard to implicit logical patterns.

Following Cunow's essay on the essential principles of Marx's research method, we turn to Rudolf Hilferding's review of Wilhelm Liebknecht's The History of the Theory of Value in England.^{[51] [52] The issue that Hilferding addresses involved the social determination of forms of human labour. On the one hand, labour is a physiological fact (the expenditure of human energy in production), but value-creating labour is simultaneously a specific economic category of capitalist society. Liebknecht understood ‘the concept of labour, as the value­principle, in physiological terms', to which Hilferding replied that capitalist production and the labour spent upon it must be regarded ‘not as a natural but as a social fact':}

Labour is a social and especially an economic category only when indi­vidual labour is regarded in its specific social form, in its social function.

The universal abstraction of labour as value logically presupposed generalised commodity exchange. The social form of wage-labour, in turn, presupposed private ownership of the means of production. The labour that concerned Marx was not a matter of physiology but rather the social category of wage­labour, whose value is the objective cost of reproducing labour power (means of subsistence and the educational costs involved in the reproduction of skilled labour, according to prevailing social standards), which in turn determines the value of commodities, the rate of surplus value, the tendency towards the social average rate of profit, and thus ultimately the distribution of all the productive forces of capitalist society. Wage-labour, Hilferding wrote, is ‘an historicalform, through which the proportional distribution of the total labour of society, required for production [Herstellung] of the social product, asserts itself in a society characterised by the fact that the connection of social labour takes place through the private exchange of individual labour products’.

Document 11, also written by Hilferding, is a review of Isaiah Rosenberg’s Ricardo and Marx as Value Theorists.^[53] Its theme is ‘Marx’s formulation of the problem of theoretical economics’, and Hilferding’s argument again turns on the distinction between what is natural and what is social. Classical political economy had taken the social form of wealth in capitalist society to be a natural and pre-given fact, whereas Marx focused on the historically changing circum­stances in which production occurs.

Marx wrote that ‘The wealth of societies, in which the capitalist mode of pro­duction prevails, appears as an “immense collection of commodities”; the indi­vidual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity’.^[54] As an object that has no use-value for its owner but only for someone who purchases it, the commodity becomes the mediator of production relations between people. Analysis of the com­modity revealed how use-values take on the form of exchange-values, which in turn regulate the distribution of labour between the different branches of production. The task of political economy was to discover in the exchange act, as the basic process in which social relations manifest themselves, the law that makes commodity production possible. As Hilferding commented, ‘The law that shows how the exchange is regulated is therefore, at the same time, the law of motion of society. Finding that law of motion was the task that Marx posited as the problem of theoretical economics’. Only then, Hilferding wrote, ‘could Marx arrive at the basic distinction between concrete labour, cre­ating use-value, and abstract, social, value-creating labour, and thus show the starting-point of political economy’.

By identifying the ‘social substance’ of the commodity, by demonstrat­ing that the question under consideration, behind the seemingly material relations of the commodities, is actually human relationships, moreover, human relationships within very specific relations of production in com­modity-producing society - i.e. through the discovery of the fetish char­acter of the commodity - the ‘mystery’ of society was then resolved.^{[55] [56] [57] [58]}