"A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy"

From MarxWiki

In the manuscript “Critique of Political Economy,” Marx asserts that the abstractions which provide the basis for modern (bourgeois) economics are a “quasi historico-philosophical” fiction (Marx 266, 268). Rousseau’s conception of natural man as an autonomous individual who only interacts socially based on personal motives and needs is not only illogical, it is the perfect model upon which to base bourgeois economic, social, and political theories and explanations of existing social conditions.

“[…] In ‘bourgeois society,’ […] the different forms of social union confront the individual as a mere means to his private ends, as an outward necessity. But the period in which this view of the isolated individual becomes prevalent is the very one in which the interrelations of society (general from this point of view) have reached the highest state of development” (Marx 267-8).

According to Marx, the intentional aim of modern economists is “trying to prove the eternal nature and harmony of existing social conditions” (Marx 279). They can only achieve this appearance of natural balance within existing social conditions, and economics at large, by presenting production as a purely economic process, and confining all political factors to the realm of distribution. Modern economics defines production and distribution as contradistinctive: production is the ahistorical, eternal, and thereby apolitical phenomenon; and distribution varies with historical context and depends upon social chance (Marx 272, 275). “Their object is rather to represent production in contradistinction to distribution—see Mill, e. g.—as subject to eternal laws independent of history, and then to substitute bourgeois relations, in an underhand way, as immutable natural laws of society in abstracto” (Marx 272).

Marx discusses the use of economic tautologies (i.e. property is a prerequisite of production, and production a prerequisite of society) to leap from the model of property in general to an historically specific from of property, private property; and set this specific form as a universally necessary condition of social production and prosperity (Marx 273). Liberal economic views of past economies are at best anachronistic in their application of contemporary abstractions such as “labor in general” (Marx 299). One of the principal points of On Capital is that the concept of labor in general only exists in a capitalist context. That is, capitalism reduces all human labor to be qualitatively equal and quantitatively comparable (Marx 59-60).

Marx refutes a simple linear progression within the economic cycle among production, exchange, distribution, and consumption (Marx 275). Instead, he presents these elements as an organic unit, within which production still predominates, but shares mutually-determining relations to consumption and distribution (Marx 276, 282). Through this model of the economic process as an organic whole, Marx asserts that production cannot be isolated from the social chance which gives distribution is political cast. It is in fact the relations of production which determine distribution.

“The subdivisions and organization of distribution are determined by the subdivisions and organization of production […] not only insofar as the [distribution of] material goods are concerned […]; but also as regards its form, since the definite manner of participation in production determines the particular form of distribution […]” (Marx 284).

Distribution becomes quite literally, not just about products, but about the allotment of means of production and also an assignment of workers among types of production (Marx 286). “[…] Before distribution of products, it is first, a distributions of the means of production, and second, […] it is a distribution of the members of society among the various kinds of production” (Marx 286).