engleski

On Marx’s Epistemological Revolution: Capital and Critique of 'Commercialization Model'

Although written 150 years ago, Capital is to a great degree a contemporary book. It represents both a major epistemological leap in the development of the criticism of the orthodox political economy and understanding of the transition from feudalist to capitalist mode of production. This is particularly expressed in the subtitle of Capital, Marx’s comprehensive scientific project: “The Critique of Political Economy”. Despite the fact that Marx has been proclaimed dead on countless occasions, his analysis of conceptual categories of political economy and methodological patterns he develops in his work can hardly be ignored when researching origins of capitalism and its possible alternatives. Considering that the aim of Capital is not merely reduced to a presentation of political economy, but to the development of fundamental “critique” of the entire existing economic science, it is expected that Marx explicitly insisted on “scientific revolution” in his theoretical procedures. The thesis about Marx’s “epistemological revolution” will be elaborated using two topics which incorporate two completely different contemporary Marxist traditions. Essentially, we discuss the relationship between theory and history within the critique of political economy, as proposed by Michael Heinrich under the tradition known as “Neue Marx- Lektüre” and additionally, we introduce one part of the discussion on the “commercialization model” of capitalist development, as suggested by Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood in the context of the so- called “Political Marxism” tradition. We analyse the latter subject in a more detail as it illustrates the contemporary relevance of several specific epistemological novelties of Capital (and partly Grundrisse) and points to the vitality of recent theoretical contributions to the criticisms of transhistorical interpretations of capitalism that derive from Marx’s pioneering premises of the “so-called primitive accumulation”.

Marx

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