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Critique Of Political Economy

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Critique of Political Economy

The Critique of political economy, or simply the initial critique of economy, represents a profound form of social critique that fundamentally challenges and ultimately rejects the conventional, often self-serving, methodologies employed in the distribution of resources. It's not merely a disagreement; it's a dismissal of what its proponents argue are fundamentally unrealistic axioms, deeply flawed historical assumptions, and the regrettable tendency to accept conventional economic mechanisms as immutable givens. It’s as if the economic establishment took one look at the universe, shrugged, and decided that this is simply how things must be.

This critique asserts, with a weary but firm conviction, that what is often paraded as the "conventional economy" is nothing more than one specific, historically contingent method of resource allocation. It's a system that emerged, quite conspicuously, alongside the dawn of modernity—that post-Renaissance Western societal construct that so many mistake for the zenith of human ingenuity, rather than just another phase in a long, often absurd, journey. To believe it is transhistorical, true for all human societies across all epochs, is a delusion that the critique systematically dismantles.

It's crucial to understand that critics of political economy aren't necessarily burdened by the ambition to conjure up their own grand theories for economic administration. That would be missing the point entirely. Instead, they commonly perceive "the economy" not as an inherent, self-evident force governed by universal laws, but rather as an intricate, often contradictory, bundle of concepts, deeply embedded societal practices, and normative assumptions. Consequently, they tend to regard the prevailing viewpoints within the field of economics itself as fundamentally faulty, if not outright pseudoscience. It's a rather polite way of saying much of it is intellectual masturbation.

While there are, naturally, various approaches to the critique of political economy today—because humans can't agree on anything, even disagreement—they all share a common thread: a relentless challenge to what these critics perceive as entrenched dogma. This dogma, they argue, insists upon the economy as an unavoidable and transhistorical societal category, rather than the fragile, constructed edifice it truly is.

John Ruskin

John Ruskin portrayed in his thirties

In the 1860s, the influential Victorian polymath John Ruskin unveiled his seminal essay, Unto This Last. He would later come to regard this work as his definitive contribution, the very core of his intellectual output. The essay, initially serialized in a magazine, proved so profoundly unsettling that its publication was prematurely halted due to the sheer volume of controversy it ignited. One might say it ruffled more than a few feathers among the comfortably ignorant.

While Ruskin is primarily remembered, perhaps regrettably, as an eminent art critic, it was precisely his deep immersion in the history of art that granted him an invaluable window into the social organization of pre-modern societies, particularly those of the Middle Ages. This unique perspective allowed him to draw stark, unflattering contrasts with the prevailing conditions of his own era. Ruskin wasn't just complaining; he was attempting to wield a rigorous methodological and scientific critique against the burgeoning new political economy, as it was being meticulously, and in his view, disastrously, crafted by the classical economists. He saw the entire intellectual framework as fundamentally unsound, built on sand.

Ruskin, with an almost cosmic exasperation, viewed the very concept of "the economy" as a collective intellectual failing, akin to a "collective mental lapse or collective concussion." He observed that the obsessive emphasis on industrial precision of his time was nothing short of a modern form of slavery—a rather inconvenient truth, wouldn't you say? So profound was Ruskin's conviction that the political economy of his day was "mad" that he famously quipped it held as much interest for him as "a science of gymnastics which had as its axiom that human beings in fact didn't have skeletons." A delightful, if horrifying, metaphor for the foundational absurdities he perceived.

He further elaborated that economics, as practiced, rested upon positions that were precisely as nonsensical. According to Ruskin, these axioms didn't just resemble thinking that humans lacked skeletons; rather, they posited that humans consisted entirely of skeletons, devoid of flesh, blood, or anything resembling actual life. He didn't dispute the truth value of this skeletal theory, mind you; he simply denied that such a theory could be successfully, or humanely, implemented in the world as it actually existed. He relentlessly attacked the sanctified notions of "natural laws," the mythical construct of "economic man," and the dominant understanding of value, tirelessly striving to expose the glaring inconsistencies and logical lacunae within the economists' grand pronouncements. He notably took issue with John Stuart Mill's rather convenient assumption that "the opinions of the public" were somehow adequately, even perfectly, reflected by fluctuating market prices, as if the market were a perfectly transparent mirror of human desire, rather than a distorted funhouse reflection.

It was Ruskin who ingeniously coined the term illth to describe unproductive wealth—a concept that, frankly, should be far more prevalent in our modern lexicon. Despite his profound and far-reaching insights, Ruskin is, regrettably, not widely recognized as a political thinker in our current epoch. Yet, in a testament to his undeniable impact, when a journalist in 1906 polled the inaugural generation of Labour Party members of Parliament in the United Kingdom about which book had most profoundly inspired them, Unto This Last emerged as the undisputed, chart-topping answer. A rather inconvenient historical detail for those who dismiss him as a mere aesthete.

... 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

Criticism

Predictably, not everyone was impressed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in their own comprehensive critiques, largely dismissed much of Ruskin's work as regrettably reactionary. His rather romanticized idealization of the Middle Ages, a period Marx and Engels viewed with considerably less nostalgia, led them to categorize him with a dismissive wave as a "feudal utopian." A label that, while perhaps somewhat accurate in its historical context, certainly missed the depth of his methodological foresight.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital

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Karl Marx stands, perhaps ironically, as the most renowned figure in the critique of political economy, a reputation solidified by his monumental three-volume magnum opus, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy). The first volume, the only one he lived to see published, appeared in 1867, a rather modest beginning for a work that would shake the foundations of economic thought. The subsequent volumes were meticulously compiled and published posthumously by his intellectual companion and benefactor, Friedrich Engels. It was Engels himself who, in 1844, laid some of the crucial groundwork for what Marx would later expand upon, through his own incisive Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy. One might say they were a formidable, if perpetually underfunded, intellectual tag team.

Marx's critique of political economy is far more than a simple academic exercise. It encompasses an exhaustive study and an unflinching exposition of the mode of production and the pervasive ideology of bourgeois society. At its heart lies his critique of Realabstraktionen (real abstractions)—those fundamental economic, and by extension, social categories that are inherent within what Marx termed the capitalist mode of production. Consider, for instance, the concept of abstract labour, a notion that, once examined, reveals itself as a social construct rather than a natural phenomenon. Unlike the classical economists who often mistook surface appearances for inherent truths, Marx was relentlessly concerned with tearing away the ideological veil. He sought to expose the underlying norms, the unspoken axioms, the intricate social relations, and the institutional structures that relentlessly reproduce capital, often at humanity's expense. It was an attempt to show the puppet strings, rather than just admiring the dance.

The central works within Marx's comprehensive critique of political economy include the Grundrisse, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and, of course, Das Kapital. The explicit naming of these works—for example, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, or Capital: A Critique of Political Economy—underscores the intentionality of his project. Marx frequently cited Engels' foundational article, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, within the pages of Das Kapital, acknowledging its pivotal role in shaping his thought.

A significant, and often contentious, aspect of Marx's legacy is how his work has been interpreted. Trotskyists and other Leninists have typically argued, either implicitly or explicitly, that these works constitute or contain "economical theories" that can be studied in isolation. This perspective was also the dominant understanding promoted by Soviet orthodoxy, which, in its typical fashion, sought to distill complex thought into digestible, politically expedient dogma. Consequently, a persistent and rather tiresome controversy revolves around whether Marx's project should be understood as a critique of political economy, as his titles suggest, or merely as another theory of economics, as the orthodox interpretation would have it. Despite this ongoing academic squabble, the critique of political economy remains arguably the most important and central intellectual endeavor within Marxism, an ongoing project that continues to inspire and provoke countless approaches both within and far beyond the confines of academia.

Foundational concepts

Marx's critique rests on several key, often unsettling, foundational concepts that challenge conventional wisdom:

  • Labor and capital as historically specific forms of social relations: This isn't just semantics. It posits that both "labour" and "capital" are not timeless, universal categories, but rather specific manifestations of social organization that arose under particular historical conditions. Furthermore, and perhaps most inconveniently, labor is emphatically not the sole source of all wealth. To believe so is to ignore the complex interplay of social forces and the often-hidden mechanisms of value creation and extraction.
  • Interdependence of labor and capital: Marx argued that labor and capital are two sides of the same debased coin. One cannot exist without the other in the capitalist mode of production; labor presupposes capital, and capital, in turn, presupposes labor. It's a symbiotic relationship, but one that is inherently unequal and rife with tension.
  • Money as a social construct: The idea that money is some transhistorical or natural phenomenon is, to Marx, a profound delusion. This critique extends to the entire economy and its specific categories within the prevailing mode of production. Any perceived "gains in value" are not due to some inherent magical quality of money itself, but are meticulously constituted through complex social relations. Money, in essence, is a crystallisation of social power, not a neutral medium of exchange.

Marx's critique of the methodology of economics

Marx, with his characteristic sharpness, drew a rather unflattering parallel between the worldview of contemporary economists and that of theologians, both of whom he considered similarly unscientific in their approach to social phenomena. It's a comparison that still stings today.

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

Marx continued to hammer home the point about the ahistorical thinking prevalent among modern economists in his Grundrisse. In this sprawling, foundational work, he notably critiqued the liberal economist John Stuart Mill, among others, for his implicit acceptance of bourgeois relations as "natural laws." Marx viewed any perspective that regarded the institutions of modernity as transhistorical as fundamentally devoid of genuine historical understanding. It was, to him, a willful blindness to the very processes that shaped society.

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)

German edition of Das Kapital, a famous critique of political economy written by Marx

According to the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, what Marx truly grasped, and what economists consistently failed to recognize, was that the value-form is not some essential, immutable aspect of reality. Instead, it is merely a specific, contingent feature of the capitalist mode of production, a construct rather than a natural law.

On scientifically adequate research

Marx, ever the realist, also offered a rather bleak critique concerning the very possibility of conducting genuinely scientific research in the domain of political economy. He understood the inherent biases and self-serving interests at play, which, frankly, make true objectivity a rather quaint fantasy. 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)

On vulgar economists

Marx, with a disdain that was both intellectual and moral, reserved some of his sharpest criticisms for what he deemed the "false critique" of political economy advanced by his contemporaries. These "vulgar economists," as he called them, often drew even more forceful condemnations than the classical economists he critiqued. In Marx's view, the errors and misdirections propagated by certain socialist authors were particularly egregious, as they led the nascent workers' movement dangerously astray. He unequivocally rejected Ferdinand Lassalle's "iron law of wages," dismissing it as mere phraseology—empty rhetoric that obscured the true dynamics of exploitation. Similarly, he rebuffed Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's rather ambitious, yet ultimately flawed, attempts to apply a Hegelian dialectic to political economy, seeing it as a misguided endeavor that reduced what was fundamentally social to mere subjective abstractions. Such intellectual missteps, he believed, only served to reinforce the very system they purported to challenge.

Interpretations of Marx's critique of political economy

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Diverse scholarly interpretations exist regarding Marx's critique. Some scholars perceive it primarily as a critique of commodity fetishism, viewing it as a profound commentary on modernity and its peculiar modes of socialisation. It’s an attempt to show that the things we create, the commodities, somehow gain a life of their own, obscuring the human labor and social relations that actually imbue them with value. Other academics, engaging with Marx's critique of political economy, suggest that it might assume a more Kantian tenor, transforming "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." In other words, they see it as an exploration of the inherent, irresolvable contradictions within the capitalist system itself, where the very foundations are at war with each other.

Contemporary Marxian

Regarding contemporary Marxian critiques of political economy, a general trend involves the explicit rejection of more naturalistically influenced readings of Marx. These readings, which often sought to portray Marx's ideas as akin to natural scientific laws, are now largely dismissed. Similarly, there's a widespread disavowal of what was later categorized as weltanschaaungsmarxismus (worldview Marxism), a rather comprehensive, all-encompassing philosophical system that gained considerable traction, particularly towards the end of the 20th century. It seems the desire for a neat, totalizing explanation of the universe is a hard habit to break, even for Marxists.

According to some scholars in this specialized field, it's a regrettable fact that contemporary critiques of political economy, particularly the nuanced German Ökonomiekritik, have been largely overlooked or, more charitably, neglected within the anglophone intellectual sphere. One might attribute this to a general aversion to anything that requires too much thought, or perhaps just a persistent status quo bias.

Differences between critics of economy and critics of economical issues

It's crucial to draw a distinction, if one possesses the necessary discernment, between those who genuinely engage in a critique of political economy and those who merely address "economical issues." The former undertakes a task of a more ontological character, delving into the very being of economic phenomena. These authors meticulously criticize the fundamental concepts and social categories that, through their continuous reproduction, establish and sustain "the economy" as a seemingly self-evident entity. They question the very fabric of its existence.

Conversely, many other authors, whom the true critics of political economy would dismiss as merely dealing with the superficial phenomena of the economy, operate under a fundamentally naturalized understanding of these complex social processes. They accept the existing framework as a given, rather than interrogating its artificiality. Consequently, the epistemological differences—the very ways of knowing and understanding—between genuine critics of economy and conventional economists can, at times, be vast, almost to the point of being irreconcilable. It's the difference between questioning the nature of reality and merely adjusting the furniture in the room.

In the weary eyes of the critics of political economy, those who merely critique economic issues are often, perhaps unwittingly, attempting to implicitly or explicitly salvage the very political economy they ostensibly question. These well-meaning, if misguided, authors might propose solutions such as a universal basic income or advocate for the implementation of a planned economy. While these proposals might offer temporary relief or alternative organizational structures, they often fail to challenge the deeper, ontological categories that underpin the entire system, thus leaving the fundamental problems intact, merely re-arranged.

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For those who still feel the need to understand this persistent human folly, here are some related topics that might further illuminate the critique of political economy: