Sociology: Marx’s Method of Political Economy
Contents
- Influence:
- Analysis:
- Method and Object of Analysis:
- Consciousness and Marx’s Critique of Abstraction:
Influence:
In his draught outline of his three-volume magnum opus Capital, which was later published as Grundrisse: Outline of the Critique of Political Economy, Marx discusses his technique of political economy. Classical political economists created a number of categories to describe the bourgeois relation of production and attempt to explain its contradictions. Marx, however, believes it to be insufficient since the internal connections between these categories prevent the expression of the true conflicts that exist between capital and labour. Based on his unique methodology, Marx created his own economic science that offers a critique of the capitalist system and reveals the tensions and contradictions that exist within it. The interpretation and veracity of Marxian economics' claims, however, are hotly contested.
Marx viewed the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, utopian socialism, and the Hegelian idealist system as bourgeois knowledge against which he developed his own critique while also incorporating several significant components from these systems of thought. These three fields of scholarship were crucial to understanding the nature of modern society during Marx's time. The Scottish political economist and philosopher Adam Smith lived from 1723 until 1790. In 1776, his book The Wealth of Nations was released. He's regarded as the founding figure of political economy. Stockbroker David Ricardo (1772–1823) was from England. He became a political economist after making a fortune in the stock market when he was young.
His 1817 book Principles of Political Economy and Taxation served as the foundation for a lot of the subsequent abstract economic theory. Ricardo was engaged in contemporary economic challenges, but his sharp analytical arguments were what really set him apart. German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) created a dialectical framework that placed emphasis on how ideas and events evolve from a thesis to an antithesis and ultimately to a synthesis. The Hegelian idea that history was not a random process but understandable and guided by objective laws, together with the dialectics that nothing remains the same and everything changes through time (for example, living is also dying), impacted Marx's thought.
According to Hegel, the development of reason or the spirit was the main driver of human social progress, and social institutions serve as a reflection of how this force has affected people's consciousness. This process was dialectical and not uniform, with inherent contradictions and conflicts that gave rise to newer synthesises made up of opposing propositions at each stage of its development. However, the resulting unity, like all other existence in the universe that is subject to the law of change, strove for newer contradictions and conflicts to emerge. Perfect definition and elaboration are difficult to achieve in dialectics. Everything in the world is temporary, finite, and exists via the passage of time, according to the fundamental theoretical tenets of dialectics.
Everything is made up of opposing qualities or forces. Gradual adjustments lead to a turning point, while quantitative adjustments bring about qualitative adjustments. The last one is that change does not occur in a circle but rather reaches a new level, as shown by a spiral helix. But Hegel is the one who gave rise to the contemporary idea of dialectic. Although Kant's treatment of antimonies in The Critique of Pure Reason influenced Hegel's thinking, Hegel saw dialectic as a vehicle for truth rather than a way to dispel illusion. His fervent belief in connectedness, or the interconnectedness of all parts of the universe, served as the foundation for Hegel's dialectic. The idealist and materialist camps of Hegel's adherents were at odds with one another.
While the latter regarded reason as an ever-evolving process in social development and change, the former considered the Prussian state and its absolute monarchy as the ultimate development or as its incarnation. One of the latter, Marx himself was influenced by another Hegelian, the materialist Ludwig Feuerbach, who chastised Hegel for his idealism views on the nature of the State. Feuerbach believed that the evolution of human wants was what gave rise to consciousness and that the human essence was at the centre of all things.
Marx lived during a time when there was a serious global financial crisis. He believed that the current state of economic knowledge was insufficient to account for the reality of overproduction, exchange issues, labour pains, and rising social class disparity.
He aimed to construct an appropriate technique of scientific inquiry capable of tackling the challenges in the current methods of classical political economy and based it on his materialist philosophy of history before setting out to solve these concerns in a comprehensive and exhaustive manner. In order to achieve this, he developed his own theories as well as critiques of the extant economic sciences in the renowned manuscript from 1857, also known as "Introduction." In his endeavour, Marx dealt with two fundamental concerns: the nature of the primary difficulties that the classical political economists had to deal with and the broad approach to analysis that was used to address them.
His economic analysis was based on the writings of British classical political economists Smith and Ricardo, particularly, which, in contrast to the prevailing neoclassical economics of the period, which was focused with the generation and distribution of surplus.
Analysis:
The sources, scope, and expansion of economic excess was the central issue facing political economy according to both Marx and the classical thinkers. Smith claimed that production, not commerce, is where surplus is found. Smith lacked what Marx regarded as a comprehensive labour theory of value that would have been able to explain trade in contemporary capitalism. Marx was critical of Smith, but he also adopted some of his ideas and expanded upon them in more organised ways.
Its main component, the labour theory of value, postulated that the labour put into producing commodities gave them value and determined their long-term prices, as opposed to market prices, which were short-term prices that might not always reflect values because they could be influenced by events and occurrences like wars, famine, etc. Compared to Smith, Ricardo created a more comprehensive labour theory of value. When he claimed that profit appeared in production by utilising (alive) labour and capital, Ricardo was more lucid than Smith on this (past labour). Smith and Ricardo's theories of value developing in production and based on labour were crucial to Marx's view of capitalist society.
For Smith, the creation and agglomeration of wealth depended on the growth and extension of the division of labour. As the division of labour in society as a whole and within particular industries grows, so does the degree of wealth. Within this division of labour, society's overall labour is performed, and each worker's claim to society's wealth is proportional to their place within the division of labour. Marx also rejected the notion of an atomized individual engaging in free-market production advanced by classical economists. Marx, in contrast to Smith, accepted the division of labour with considerable scepticism.
Marx acknowledged the cooperative nature of the division of labour under capitalism, but he also saw it as a cause of alienation. He thought that eventually, a social structure would emerge that eliminated most of the division of labour. Marx also criticised Smith's invisible hand, the unobservable force that, according to Smith, directs human self-interest to advance society as a whole. Adam Smith believed that people could produce outside of society and that they not only existed independently of it. Marx, on the other hand, thought that such a person could only exist in society as a member of a social class that participated in both the material production of society and the development of themselves as a distinct social class.
The requirement for the appropriation of the land, which serves as the foundation for the community and a source of labour and means, is this collective nature of the person. Unlike other economists, Marx believed that the advent of "free" wage labour was merely a passing phase in the history of social production of the human being as a social individual. The fundamental difference between Marx and his forebears was these fundamental relationships between human activity and the earth as mediated by labour.
The second significant contrast was to move away from the general nature of the field of capitalist production as abstract and ahistorical, which was subjected to the method of political economics in classical theorists and harshly attacked by Marx in his own method. Even though such an abstraction and its foundational components in classical economy were useful in illustrating the general phenomenon of production, they fell short in elucidating its particular facets, most notably the source of value in commodity-exchange. Marx's approach is both theoretical and historical.
Marx established his understanding of the nature of surplus value, capital, and capitalism by focusing on the concept of the commodity as the theoretical foundation. Marx's analysis is historically relevant because this stage requires the existence of certain institutional conditions. Markets and exchange must develop to the point where the exchange is regularised before exchange-value may exist. Marx believed that a commodity's value was defined by the amount of socially necessary labour that was required to make it. This labour was measured in terms of homogenous, abstract work, where different skill levels had varying values. As a result, the average amount of labour time needed to manufacture a commodity would define its worth.
The Commodity Form and Labour
Marx argues that the commodity form of a thing is given by human work, which he views as abstract universal labour. Without this analytical framework, it is impossible to comprehend how exchange works and how value is created throughout market societies. This view depends on an appreciation of the dual character of commodities in capitalism, consisting of use value and trade value. Marx looks at the origins of the commodity's exchange value rather than analysing the use value of the good. However, without the idea of use value, such analysis is not conceivable.
Marx focuses on exchange value when discussing abstract labour and surplus output in a capitalist society, even if use value is a given as the foundation of societal wealth, the material storehouse of exchange value, and only becomes real in individual or productive consumption. Marx observes that if we reject a commodity's use value, only its labor-produced nature remains as a property. However, even the result of labour has already undergone change in our hands. If we remove the use value, we also remove the physical components and forms that give it that use value. A table, a house, a ball of yarn, or any other useful object is no longer present.
It has lost all of its sensual qualities. Additionally, it is no longer a result of any particular type of productive labour, such as that of a joiner, mason, spinner, or another worker. The usefulness of the types of labour contained in the products of labour likewise diminishes along with it, which results in the elimination of the many concrete forms of labour. They are no longer able to be separated from one another and are collectively reduced to the same category of labor—abstract human labour. (Marx 1976:128). The trade of goods and services underpins capitalism. A good or service must be exchanged for another good or service in a market for it to have exchange value.
There must be some kind of constant, well-established market exchange in order for exchange-value to develop over time. A cooperative society does not distribute or redistribute objects in a manner that is natural, haphazard, or irregular. According to Marx, political economists believed that trade value was either a property of the good itself or developed in the very beginnings of a barter economy. Marx argues that in order for exchange values to be established, the division of labour must be sufficiently developed for people to not be self-sufficient and require others to provide them with goods or services.
Marx's discovery of the dual nature of labour contained in commodities also suggests that, in the capitalist mode of production, all particular human labour is stripped of its particular characteristics and reduced to simple, universal labour. To use Marx's own words: “Since capital as such is indifferent to every particularity of its substance, and exists not only as the totality of the same but also as the abstraction from all its particularities, the labour which confronts it likewise subjectively has the same totality and abstraction in itself”. (Marx 1973:296).
Method and Object of Analysis:
The most significant effect on Marx's methodology is the Hegelian dialectical philosophy. Simply defined, in Marx's Conception of Materialist History, "dialectics" is the approach and "abstraction" is the conscious that has crystallised in material reality (or, occasionally, misleadingly, false consciousness). Marx's approach has continued to be one of the hardest concepts to fully comprehend in terms of both theory and practise. It demonstrates that "truth" is a platform created for collectivity, for cultures to either become opposites (distinguish, offer each other "challenges," or to resolve differences and merge) or revolves primarily around social epistemology (theory) and the political struggle for consensus and coherentism (practise) (syncretism).
The term "political economy" is frequently used to describe Marx's approach, which has as much to do with "the method of analysis as it does with a specific object of study" (Best 2010:2). In actuality, the way that the distinction between method and object is purposefully obliterated by the Marxian political economy movement sets it apart from other analytical approaches. In other words, the historical development of the social formation itself reveals a shared identity between method and object (ibid). Marx's method goes beyond the formal analysis of capitalist production and exploitative labour processes to suggest a common goal for all people toward the full expression of their humanity manifesting itself in creative labour. This goal may be limited to formal analysis of capitalist production and exploitative labour processes.
Marx's critical political economy differs from bourgeois political economics in that it adopts a totalizing approach and integrates his early humanism viewpoints with the critical perspectives that served as the foundation for later or mature Marx as in Grundrisse.
The key distinction between Marxism and bourgeois ideology is the emphasis on the whole rather than the primacy of economic motivations in historical explanation. The core of the approach that Marx ingeniously adopted from Hegel and converted into the cornerstones of an entirely new science is the category of totality, the all-pervasive dominance of the whole over the parts.
The atomization of society into individuals who simply continue producing without rhyme or reason, the separation of the producer from the entire process of production under capitalism, and the division of labour into parts at the expense of the worker's individual humanity must all have had a significant impact on the thought, science, and philosophy of capitalism. The revolutionary nature of [Marx's] science is due, first and foremost, to its methodology, which emphasises the category of totality as the most important concept (Lukacs 1971:27).
Historicizing Dialectics:
Dialectical materialism, according to Marx's technique, is the first significant permutation of the Hegelian dialectic, and the main ways in which it differs from Hegel can be summed up by considering the key distinction between Idealism and Materialism. In summary, Marx concentrated on material forces as determining the direction of the world, whereas Hegel's dialectic argued that reason was the driving force in the cosmos. According to its own definition, dialectical materialism—also known as "the philosophy of Marxism, in contrast and relation to Marxist science, distinguished as historical materialism”—"is cross-bred from the union of two bourgeois philosophies: the mechanistic materialism of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, and Hegel's idealist dialectics.
Both the latter's idealism and the former's mechanicism, which are incompatible with materialism and dialectics respectively, are condemned as "metaphysical" and "ideological," respectively. (1983:120; Bottommore). Marx seeks to explain the dynamics of capitalist accumulation in terms chosen by classical political economists only, i.e., production, capital, commodity, exchange, money, labour, market, etc., but simultaneously mixes it with his radical political philosophy of man as its own creator and not just creator of immutable values in communities. Marx views the capitalist system as a stage in the development of mankind, in his conception of materialist history (or, tribes).
“Originally, exchange ‘both of human activity within production itself and of human products against one another […] = species activity and species spirit, whose real, conscious and true existence is social activity and social enjoyment’. When this original exchange becomes commodity exchange, and when common property becomes private property the real community of men is transformed into a caricature of itself. Commodity exchange mediates social intercourse; the bond of essential nature that links one man to another ‘appears as an inessential bond’; ‘instead, man’s separation from other men appears as his true existence’; ‘his power over the object appears as the power of the object over him, the lord of creation appears as the slave of his creation’.” (Fischer 1970:63)
What he refers to as a critique of political economy is his view that Smith and Ricardo's traditional political economy did not appropriately treat labour as the source of both the usevalue and the exchangevalue of its produce, known as a commodity. He suggests that the species-nature of man in its progressive growth is that of a creative labour and not only socially productive work by using analogies from natural sciences to understand the human world. Additionally, he demonstrates how the capitalist system, which is the most developed stage in the spatial and temporal organisation of this socially productive labour, also referred to as the Proletariat or the Working Class, is precarious in terms of both the development of its full productive capacities and, consequently, the negation of it as the purpose of the life of the human species.
The inevitable nature of this negation is based on an understanding of the effects of capitalist accumulation within private property relations on human conditions of existence, as observed by Marx in the industrial societies of France and Britain, which were found to be under tremendous physical and mental exploitation, creating conditions towards large-scale alienation in man from his own species—nature, which is his creative labour. This self-alienation "means that each man is alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life," according to the general definition.
According to Marx, this type of human nature development is historically conditioned, but rather than being an absolute need of production, it is one that is vanishing. The natural outcome and aim of this process is to destroy this basis as well as the form of the process.
“The contradiction between actual socialization of production and the fragmentation of property among a multitude of private interests denies the producers any control over the movements of their products, subject them to the autonomous power of the products, and distort human society into a society ruled by things, where man’s works oppose him as something alien to him, an alien world of historical ‘natural laws’, mysterious force of destiny, powerful institutions, gigantic fetishes”. (Fischer 1970:66)
Consciousness and Marx’s Critique of Abstraction:
In comparison to other species, humans have the most evolved type of consciousness. It is also a crucial component in the development of man's social structure. Marx says that
“It is just in his work upon the objective world that man really proves himself to be a speciesbeing. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world he has created” (Marx 1975:277).
Marx assumes in his methodological analysis the idea of not only "socially necessary" labour power, but also a central and already developed realm within commodity economies, which enables the accumulation and/or appropriation of surplus-production towards meeting basic and other social needs, in accordance with the level and stage in historical development of the man marked in the use and fabrication of instruments of labour, "by thus acting on the external world." This study of labour goes beyond the abstract labour that constitutes value and its social expression as exchange value:
Experience has shown that this transformation of concrete labour into simple or abstract labour is ongoing. A commodity could be the result of the most difficult labour, yet because of its value, it is compared to the end result of simple labour. As a result, these proportions appear to the producers to have been passed down through tradition. The various proportions in which diverse kinds of labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measurement are formed by a social process that occurs behind the backs of the producers. (Marx 1976:135).
Experience has shown that there is a steady reduction of concrete labour into simple or abstract labour. Despite the fact that a commodity may be the result of the most difficult labour, its worth posits it to be on par with the result of simple labour. The diverse ratios that different types of labour are reduced to using as their unit of measurement is determined by a social process that occurs behind the producers' backs; as a result, these ratios look to the producers to have been passed down through tradition. (Marx 1976:135).
The amount of abstract, socially necessary labour is a factor in how much value changes, but because labour has a dual nature, changes in the amount of concrete labor—that is, advancements in the material-technical process of production, particularly in labour productivity—are what drive changes in the amount of abstract, socially necessary labour. As a result, the entire system of value is founded on a grandiose system of spontaneous social accounting and comparison of the by various persons as components of the total social abstract work, produced products of labour of various types. This system is covert and imperceptible from the outside of occurrences. The development of material productive forces, which is the primary driver of societal progress in general, in turn, sets in motion this system of total social abstract work. (Rubin 1972:119-20).
In connecting the philosophical concept of labour, which entails the production of man's active species-life, "capable of development and change, of his own labour, as a living being objectifying himself in his work and confronting himself in the reality he has created," with its historical manifestation, that conscious activity of creative labour free from urgent physical need "is the anticipation of a state not yet achieved, or only sporadic" (Fischer 1970:51).
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