On the criticism of political economy

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First edition, Berlin 1859

With the work On the Critique of Political Economy , Karl Marx published for the first time an elaborated form of his theory of the capitalist mode of production in 1859 , which he and Engels later presented in detail in the 3 volumes Das Kapital , published in 1867, 1885 and 1894.

Emergence

The text, written between August 1858 and January 1859, was published by Franz Duncker in Berlin. Marx had already drafted an introduction in August 1857, but he did not use it.

He justifies this in the foreword with considerations on the correct method of presentation, because "any anticipation of results that have to be proven seems disturbing, and the reader who wants to follow me at all must decide to rise from the individual to the general" , as Marx in Writes foreword from January 1859. Much of the preliminary work was done from September 1857 to August 1858 Marx published the first time from 1939 to 1941, as Grundrisse (rough draft) , which together with the 1904 introduction published as Grundrisse be called . In his major work Das Kapital , published in 1867, Marx further changed and differentiated the approach and presentation of the theory and added further historical examples.

content

The focus is on the value of goods in its double form of representation of use value and exchange value , concrete and abstract work , working time as a quantitative measure of work , money , precious metals , circulation , accumulation , base and superstructure , production and trade crises .

Marx also describes the wrong view of economic relations within bourgeois society and among bourgeois economists:

“The fact that a social production relationship presents itself as an object outside the individual and the specific relationships that they enter into in the production process of their social life are presented as specific properties of a thing, this perversion and not imagined, but prosaically real mystification characterizes all social forms of Labor that sets exchange value. It only appears more striking in money than in goods. "

For this purpose, he will coined the term “ commodity fetish ” in Capital .

Significance for the interpretation of the criticism of political economy

A review of Marx's work published in August 1859 as well as the afterword to the third volume of Capital , both of which come from Friedrich Engels , are the starting point for a so-called “historical” reading of the critique of political economy. This interprets the so-called “simple form of value ” of the commodity as a historical model of an isolated exchange, disregarding the capitalist determination, while capitalism only begins historically later with the transformation of money into capital. On the other hand, the “logical” reading assumes that Marx in the publications of 1859 and 1867 represented an already developed capitalist society using the categories of value, commodity and money only at different levels of conceptual abstraction ( dialectical representation method ). This interpretation was first put forward in the 1920s by Isaak Ilyich Rubin and again by representatives of the new Marx reading in the 1970s.

output

  • On the criticism of political economy. First issue . Franz Duncker (W. Besser's publishing house), Berlin 1859 digitized
  • Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW) Vol. 13, pp. 7–160, Dietz, Berlin 1971
  • On the Critique of Political Economy (Urtext) . In: Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe . Department II. Volume 2. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1980, pp. 17-94.
  • On the criticism of political economy. First issue . In: Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe . Department II. Volume 2. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1980, pp. 95–245.

literature

  • Inge Schliebe, Ludmilla Kalinina: Reviews of Marx's work "On the Critique of Political Economy" from 1859 . In: Contributions to Marx-Engels research . Issue 1, Berlin 1977, pp. 103-123. Digitized
  • Hannes Skambraks: Introduction to Marx's work “On the Critique of Political Economy” . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1982.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ MEW Vol. 13, p. 615
  2. ↑ On the Critique of Political Economy , Foreword, MEW Vol. 13, page 7
  3. ↑ MEW Vol. 42, pp. 19-875
  4. ↑ On the Critique of Political Economy , MEW Vol. 13, pp. 34–35
  5. ^ Ingo Stützle (2004): The question of the constitutive relevance of monetary goods in Marx's Critique of Political Economy , Section 2.3 (pdf; 112 kB), Marx Society

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