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Critique of political economy |
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Critique of political economy or simply the first critique of economy is a form of social critique that rejects the conventional ways of distributing resources. The critique also rejects what its advocates believe are unrealistic axioms, faulty historical assumptions, [1] and taking conventional economic mechanisms as a given [2] [3] or as transhistorical (true for all human societies for all time). [4] [5] The critique asserts the conventional economy is merely one of many types of historically specific ways to distribute resources, which emerged along with modernity (post-Renaissance Western society). [6] [7] [8]
Critics of political economy do not necessarily aim to create their own theories regarding how to administer economies. [1] [3] [9] [10] Critics of economy commonly view "the economy" as a bundle of concepts and societal and normative practices, rather than being the result of any self-evident economic laws. [3] [11] Hence, they also tend to consider the views which are commonplace within the field of economics as faulty, or simply as pseudoscience. [2] [12]
There are multiple critiques of political economy today, but what they have in common is critique of what critics of political economy tend to view as dogma, i.e. claims of the economy as a necessary and transhistorical societal category. [3] [13]
In the 1860s, John Ruskin published his essay Unto This Last which he came to view as his central work. [14] [15] [16] The essay was originally written as a series of publications in a magazine, which ended up having to suspend the publications, due to the severe controversy the articles caused. [15] While Ruskin is generally known as an important art critic, his study of the history of art was a component that gave him some insight into the pre-modern societies of the Middle Ages, and their social organisation which he was able to contrast to his contemporary condition. [15] [17] Ruskin attempted to mobilize a methodological/scientific critique of new political economy, as it was envisaged by the classical economists. [1] [11]
Ruskin viewed the concept of "the economy" as a kind of "collective mental lapse or collective concussion", and he viewed the emphasis on precision in industry as a kind of slavery. [8] [18] Due to the fact that Ruskin regarded the political economy of his time as "mad", he said that it interested him as much as "a science of gymnastics which had as its axiom that human beings in fact didn't have skeletons." [11] Ruskin declared that economics rests on positions that are exactly the same. According to Ruskin, these axioms resemble thinking, not that human beings do not have skeletons but rather that they consist entirely of skeletons. Ruskin wrote that he did not oppose the truth value of this theory, he merely wrote that he denied that it could be successfully implemented in the world in the state it was in. [11] [15] He took issue with the ideas of "natural laws", "economic man", and the prevailing notion of value and aimed to point out the inconsistencies in the thinking of the economists. [1] He critiqued John Stuart Mill for thinking that "the opinions of the public" was reflected adequately by market prices. [19]
Ruskin coined illth to refer to unproductive wealth. Ruskin is not well known as a political thinker today but when in 1906 a journalist asked the first generation of Labour Party members of Parliament in the United Kingdom which book had most inspired them, Unto This Last emerged as an undisputed chart-topper.
... the art of becoming 'rich', in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbours shall have less. In accurate terms, it is 'the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our own favour'.
— John Ruskin, Unto This Last
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded much of Ruskin's critique as reactionary. His idealisation of the Middle Ages made them reject him as a "feudal utopian". [15]
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Marxian critique of political economy |
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Marx is probably the most famous critic of political economy, with his three-volume magnum opus, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy), as one of his most famous books (Capital volume 1 appeared in 1867; the later volumes were published posthumously, by Friedrich Engels.) [20] Marx's companion Engels engaged in critique of political economy in his 1844 Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy , which helped lay down some of the foundation for what Marx was to take further. [21] [22] [23]
Marx's critique of political economy encompasses the study and exposition of the mode of production and ideology of bourgeois society, and its critique of Realabstraktionen (real abstraction), that is, the fundamental economic, i.e. social categories present within what for Marx is the capitalist mode of production, [24] [25] for example abstract labour.[ clarification needed ] [3] [26] [ verification needed ] [27] In contrast to the classics of political economy, Marx was concerned with lifting the ideological veil of surface phenomena and exposing the norms, axioms, social relations, institutions, and so on, that reproduced capital. [28]
The central works in Marx's critique of political economy are Grundrisse , A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Das Kapital. Marx's works are often explicitly named – for example: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, or Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. [29] [20] [13] Marx cited Engels' article Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy several times in Das Kapital. Trotskyists and other Leninists tend to implicitly or explicitly argue that these works constitute and or contain "economical theories", which can be studied independently. [30] [31] [32] This was also the common understanding of Marx's work on economy that was put forward by Soviet orthodoxy. [33] [30] Since this is the case, it remains a matter of controversy whether Marx's critique of political economy is to be understood as a critique of the political economy or, according to the orthodox interpretation another theory of economics. [34] [35] The critique of political economy is considered the most important and central project within Marxism which has led to, and continues to lead to a large number of advanced approaches within and outside academic circles. [13] [36] [37]
Marx described the view of contemporaneous economists and theologians on social phenomena as similarly unscientific. [10] [45]
Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations, therefore, are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws that must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and as such, eternal.
— Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy [46]
Marx continued to emphasize the ahistorical thought of the modern economists in the Grundrisse , where he among other endeavors, critiqued the liberal economist Mill. [47] Marx also viewed the viewpoints which implicitly regarded the institutions of modernity as transhistorical as fundamentally deprived of historical understanding. [48] [49]
Individuals producing in society, and hence the socially determined production of individuals, is, of course, the point of departure. The solitary and isolated hunter or fisherman, who serves Adam Smith and Ricardo as a starting point, is one of the unimaginative fantasies of eighteenth-century romances a la Robinson Crusoe; and despite the assertions of social historians, these by no means signify simply a reaction against over-refinement and reversion to a misconceived natural life. No more is Rousseau's contract social, which by means of a contract establishes a relationship and connection between subjects that are by nature independent, based on this kind of naturalism. ... The individual in this society of free competition seems to be rid of natural ties, etc., which made him an appurtenance of a particular, limited aggregation of human beings in previous historical epochs. The prophets of the eighteenth century, on whose shoulders Adam Smith and Ricardo were still wholly standing, envisaged this 18th-century individual – a product of the dissolution of feudal society on the one hand and of the new productive forces evolved since the sixteenth century on the other – as an ideal whose existence belonged to the past. They saw this individual not as a historical result, but as the starting point of history; not as something evolving in the course of history, but posited by nature, because for them this individual was in conformity with nature, in keeping with their idea of human nature. This delusion has been characteristic of every new epoch hitherto.
— Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Introduction)
According to the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, what Marx understood, and what the economists failed to recognise was that the value-form is not something essential, but merely a part of the capitalist mode of production. [50]
Marx offered a critique regarding the idea of people being able to conduct scientific research in this domain. [51] He wrote:
In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean, and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest. The English Established Church, e.g., will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income. Nowadays atheism is culpa levis [a relatively slight sin, c.f. mortal sin], as compared with criticism of existing property relations.
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Preface to the First German Edition)
Marx criticized what he regarded as the false critique of political economy of his contemporaries, sometimes even more forcefully than when he critiqued the classical economists he described as vulgar economists. In Marx's view, the errors of some socialist authors led the workers' movement astray. He rejected Ferdinand Lassalle's iron law of wages, which he regarded as mere phraseology. [52] He also rejected Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's attempts to do what Hegel did for religion, law, and so on for political economy, as well as regarding what is social as subjective, and what was societal as merely subjective abstractions. [53] [38]
Some scholars view Marx's critique as being a critique of commodity fetishism and the manner in which this concept expresses a criticism of modernity and its modes of socialisation. [54] Other scholars who engage with Marx's critique of political economy affirm the critique might assume a more Kantian sense, which transforms "Marx's work into a foray concerning the imminent antinomies that lie at the heart of capitalism, where politics and economy intertwine in impossible ways." [13]
Regarding contemporary Marxian critiques of political economy, these are generally accompanied by a rejection of the more naturalistically influenced readings of Marx, as well as other readings later deemed weltanschaaungsmarxismus (worldview Marxism), [33] [55] [56] that was popularised as late as toward the end of the 20th century. [9] [55]
According to some scholars in this field, contemporary critiques of political economy and contemporary German Ökonomiekritik have been at least partly neglected in the anglophone world. [57]
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Feminist critique of economics |
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There has been a growing literature on feminist critiques of economics in the 21st century. [58] [59] [60] [61] But feminist critiques of economics can be found as early as the beginning of the 18th century. [62] According to Julie A. Nelson, feminist critiques of economics should start from the premise that "economics, like any science, is socially constructed". [63] These feminists therefore argue economics is a field socially constructed to privilege Western, and heterosexual persons that identify as male. [64] [65]
They generally incorporate feminist theory and frameworks to show how economics communities signal expectations regarding appropriate participants to the exclusion of outsiders. Such criticisms extend to the theories, methodologies and research areas of economics, in order to show that accounts of economic life are deeply influenced by biased histories, social structures, norms, cultural practices, interpersonal interactions, and politics. [64] Feminists often also make a critical distinction that masculine bias in economics is primarily a result of gender, not sex. [63] But feminist critiques of economics, and the economy, can also include other views such as concern with an ever increasing rate of environmental degradation. [66]
One may differentiate between those who engage in critique of political economy, which takes on a more ontological character, where authors criticise the fundamental concepts and social categories which reproduce the economy as an entity. [3] [10] [11] [67] [68] While other authors, which the critics of political economy would consider only to deal with the surface phenomena of the economy, have a naturalized understanding of these social processes. Hence the epistemological differences between critics of economy and economists can also at times be very large. [47]
In the eyes of the critics of political economy, the critics of economic issues merely critique certain practices in attempts to implicitly or explicitly rescue the political economy; these authors might for example propose universal basic income or to implement a planned economy. [9] [30] [67] [69]
Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, political theorist, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his intellectual endeavours. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.
In political philosophy, the means of production refers to the generally necessary assets and resources that enable a society to engage in production. While the exact resources encompassed in the term may vary, it is widely agreed to include the classical factors of production as well as the general infrastructure and capital goods necessary to reproduce stable levels of productivity. It can also be used as an abbreviation of the "means of production and distribution" which additionally includes the logistical distribution and delivery of products, generally through distributors; or as an abbreviation of the "means of production, distribution, and exchange" which further includes the exchange of distributed products, generally to consumers.
In Marxist philosophy, commodity fetishism is the perception of the economic relationships of production and exchange as relationships among things rather than among people. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism presents economic value as inherent to the commodities, and not as arising from the workforce, from the human relations that produced the commodity, the goods and the services.
Use value or value in use is a concept in classical political economy and Marxist economics. It refers to the tangible features of a commodity which can satisfy some human requirement, want or need, or which serves a useful purpose. In Karl Marx's critique of political economy, any product has a labor-value and a use-value, and if it is traded as a commodity in markets, it additionally has an exchange value, defined as the proportion by which a commodity can be exchanged for other entities, most often expressed as a money-price.
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, and social transformation. Marxism originates with the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive "Marxist theory". Marxism has had a profound effect in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.
Moishe Postone was a Canadian historian, sociologist, political philosopher and social theorist. He was a professor of history at the University of Chicago, where he was part of the Committee on Jewish Studies.
Surplus labour is a concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It means labour performed in excess of the labour necessary to produce the means of livelihood of the worker. The "surplus" in this context means the additional labour a worker has to do in their job, beyond earning their own keep. According to Marxian economics, surplus labour is usually uncompensated (unpaid) labour. Marx's first analysis of what surplus labour means appeared in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a polemic against the philosophy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. A much more detailed analysis is presented in the volumes of Theories of Surplus Value and Das Kapital.
Time–space compression is an idea referring to the altering of the qualities of space–time and the relationship between space and time that is a consequence of the expansion of capital. It is rooted in Karl Marx's notion of the "annihilation of space by time" originally elaborated in the Grundrisse, and was later articulated by Marxist geographer David Harvey in his book The Condition of Postmodernity. A similar idea was proposed by Elmar Altvater in an article in PROKLA in 1987, translated into English as "Ecological and Economic Modalities of Time and Space" and published in Capitalism Nature Socialism in 1990.
Throughout modern history, a variety of perspectives on capitalism have evolved based on different schools of thought.
Neo-Marxism is a collection of Marxist schools of thought originating from 20th-century approaches to amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, typically by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions such as critical theory, psychoanalysis, or existentialism. Neo-Marxism comes under the broader framework of the New Left. In a sociological sense, neo-Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and power, to Marxist philosophy.
Value criticism is a social theory which draws its foundation from the Marxian tradition and criticizes the contemporary mode of production. Value criticism was developed partly by critical readings of the traditions of the Frankfurt School and critical theory. Prominent adherents of value criticism include Robert Kurz, Moishe Postone and Jean-Marie Vincent.
The socialist mode of production, also known as socialism or communism, is a specific historical phase of economic development and its corresponding set of social relations that emerge from capitalism in the schema of historical materialism within Marxist theory. The Marxist definition of socialism is that of production for use-value, therefore the law of value no longer directs economic activity. Marxist production for use is coordinated through conscious economic planning. According to Marx, distribution of products is based on the principle of "to each according to his needs"; Soviet models often distributed products based on the principle of "to each according to his contribution". The social relations of socialism are characterized by the proletariat effectively controlling the means of production, either through cooperative enterprises or by public ownership or private artisanal tools and self-management. Surplus value goes to the working class and hence society as a whole.
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, also known as Capital and Das Kapital, is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy and critique of political economy written by Karl Marx, published as three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894. The culmination of his life's work, the text contains Marx's analysis of capitalism, to which he sought to apply his theory of historical materialism "to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society", following from classical political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The text's second and third volumes were completed from Marx's notes after his death and published by his colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.
Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx's critique of political economy. However, unlike critics of political economy, Marxian economists tend to accept the concept of the economy prima facie. Marxian economics comprises several different theories and includes multiple schools of thought, which are sometimes opposed to each other; in many cases Marxian analysis is used to complement, or to supplement, other economic approaches. Because one does not necessarily have to be politically Marxist to be economically Marxian, the two adjectives coexist in usage, rather than being synonymous: They share a semantic field, while also allowing both connotative and denotative differences. An example of this can be found in the works of Soviet economists like Lev Gatovsky, who sought to apply Marxist economic theory to the objectives, needs, and political conditions of the socialist construction in the Soviet Union, contributing to the development of Soviet Political Economy.
The Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, often simply the Grundrisse, is an unfinished manuscript by the German philosopher Karl Marx. The series of seven notebooks was rough-drafted by Marx, chiefly for purposes of self-clarification, during the winter of 1857–8. Left aside by Marx in 1858, it remained unpublished until 1939.
Various Marxist authors have focused on Marx's method of analysis and presentation as key factors both in understanding the range and incisiveness of Karl Marx's writing in general, his critique of political economy, as well as Grundrisse andDas Kapital in particular. One of the clearest and most instructive examples of this is his discussion of the value-form, which acts as a primary guide or key to understanding the logical argument as it develops throughout the volumes of Das Kapital.
Crisis theory, concerning the causes and consequences of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in a capitalist system, is associated with Marxian critique of political economy, and was further popularised through Marxist economics.
This article is about scholarly criticism of Karl Marx’s idea about the form of value in capitalist society. Marx himself provided a first starting point for this scholarly controversy when he claimed that Capital, Volume I was not difficult to understand, "with the exception of the section on the form of value." Friedrich Engels argued in his Anti-Dühring polemic of 1878 that "The value form of products... already contains in embryo the whole capitalist form of production, the antagonism between capitalists and wage-workers, the industrial reserve army, crises..." Nowadays there are many scholars who feel that Marx’s theory of the value-form was misinterpreted for more than a hundred years. This allegedly had effect that the radical meaning of Marx’s critique of capitalism as a whole was misunderstood or diminished, so that it became just another version of economics.
Capital is a central concept in Marxian critique of political economy, and in Marxian thought more generally.
Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory is a 1993 book by the scholar Moishe Postone released by Cambridge University Press. In the book Postone presents a reinterpretation of Marx's critical theory. The book provides a reexamination of the core categories in Marx's critique of political economy.
... Ruskin attempted a methodological/scientific critique of political economy. He fixed on ideas of 'natural laws', 'economic man' and the prevailing notion of 'value' to point out gaps and inconsistencies in the system of classical economics.
'To criticize Political Economy' means to confront it with a new problematic and a new object: i.e., to question the very object of Political Economy
Den klassiska nationalekonomin, som den utarbetats av John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith och David Ricardo, betraktade han som en sorts kollektivt hjärnsläpp ... [Transl. Ruskin viewed the classical political economy as it was developed by Mill, Smith, and Ricardo, as a kind of 'collective mental lapse'.]
Marx arrives at conclusions and formulates new terms that run directly counter to those of Smith, Ricardo, and the other classical political economists.
Ruskin's criticism of Mill is that he based the science of political economy on 'the opinions of the public' as expressed by market prices, i.e. on 'fuddled' thought induced by contemplating the shadow of value rather than thinking upon, by implication, a true (Platonic) object of cognition.
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(help)Engels var också först med att kritiskt bearbeta den nya nationalekonomin; hans 'Utkast till en kritik av nationalekonomin' kom ut 1844 och blev en utgångspunkt för Marx egen kritik av den politiska ekonomin[Engels was the first to critically engage the new political economy his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy came out in 1844 and became a starting point for Marx's own critique of the political economy]
'There are no counterparts to Marx's economic concepts in either classical or utility theory.' I take this to mean that Marx breaks with economics, where economics is understood to be a generally applicable social science.
Marx consistently reveals the social abstraction of the substance of value and capital, i.e. abstract labour, as a Realabstraktion dominating individuals in bourgeois society through money and capital.
'Economic' categories, appearing as inhuman things with a mind of their own – prices, money, interest rates – are for Marx the disguised form of relations between people.
The expression 'critique of political economy' figures repeatedly in the title or programme of Marx's main works ... To these we may add a great many unpublished pieces, articles and sections in polemical works.
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)Marx's critique of classical political economy as a critique of the fetishistic (that is, ahistorical) understanding of economic categories, which identifies the appearance of capitalist society with the universal and transhistorical economic laws of nature. Marx, in contrast, comprehends those economic categories as 'specific social forms' and reveals the underlying social relations that bestow an objective validity of this inverted world where economic things dominate human beings.
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ignored (help)The aim is, rather, to present production – see e.g. Mill – as distinct from distribution, etc., as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded. This is the more or less conscious purpose of the whole proceeding. In distribution, by contrast, humanity has allegedly permitted itself to be considerably more arbitrary. Quite apart from this crude tearing-apart of production and distribution and of their real relationship, it must be apparent from the outset that, no matter how different distribution may have been arranged in different stages of social development, it must be possible here also, just as with production, to single out common characteristics, and just as possible to confound or to extinguish all historic differences under general human laws.
Second, Marx's concern is always with social and historical specificity, as against looking for or finding what others would consider being given and universal.
Social phenomena exist, and can be understood, only in their historical context.
... a number of important critical- theoretical approaches to the critique of political economy ... have been largely neglected in the anglophone world.
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(help)It could be argued that Ruskin, like Plato, is addressing the problems of society as a whole rather than addressing economic issues. Nonetheless, he approaches such concerns through a critique of political economy.
This is the Žižekian lesson: Marx's critique of political economy is not only a critique of the classical political economy (Smith, Ricardo...), but it is also a form of critique, a transcendental one according to Žižek, which allows us to articulate the elementary forms of social edifice under capitalism itself. And this 'transcendental' framework, cannot be other than philosophical.