ABSTRACT
We have tried to show throughout our examination of Capital that Marx regarded political economy as above all an historical science. The aim of Capital was to investigate the law of motion of a determinate mode of production, namely capitalism. Political economy was an expression of a society where the products of man’s labour were exchanged on the market and above all the reflection of a situation where these conditions became generalized. Political economy is a product of capitalism and it will disappear along with the disappearance of commodity production. Marx, therefore, had one quite specific aim in Capital: it was to lay bare the law of motion of modern society. Marx’s theory of historical materialism summarized the nature of the conditions which had been at the basis of the transition between the various modes of production. This theory, the materialist conception of history, is tested out in Capital against modern society. Thus Capital is not identical with historical materialism as some have thought. It is Marx’s effort to reveal the specific form taken by the contradictions which provide the driving force for the transition to socialism, that is for the overthrow of capitalist society. The theoretical limitations of political economy were rooted in this: the struggle of classes within capitalism was as yet not an extensive or intensive enough phenomenon with a power sufficient to pose the question of the overthrow of capitalism. Marx’s critique of political economy set out to provide a conscious, scientific reflection of this emergence of the working class in its struggle to overthrow capitalism and effect the transition to socialism. It set out deliberately to reflect, in a scientific manner, the process whereby the working class-the most decisive component in the productive forces of modern society-came into increasingly severe conflict with the very limitations of bourgeois economy. This is really what Lenin meant when he spoke of Capital being a ‘testing out’ of the materialist conception of history. It is this aim of Marx-to express in scientific form the historical-material interests of a new social force as yet unconscious of itself-that gives to Marx’s work its powerfully polemical character. It is this highly polemical character which has led many of Marx’s opponents to see his work as wholly tendentious, as a work incompatible with the canons of science. In connection with this type of attack-commonplace amongst the ‘legal Marxists’ of the last century-Lenin retorted:1
This polemical nature of Capital certainly marks it off from anything found in the previous work of political economy. Marx, as we have already sufficiently stressed, valued highly the work of Ricardo. But Ricardo’s writing was dispassionate in the extreme. This is clear
enough from the tone of his polemic with Malthus. Malthus for Marx was the ‘shameless sycophant’ who prostituted science on behalf of the landed interest. One might have thought that Ricardo-whose work reflected the emergence of industrial capital-would have been involved in bitter exchanges with his adversary. This was far from the case. According to a contemporary observer, ‘Ricardo’s discussion with Malthus and others was carried out in the same peaceful fashion as a chess game or a debate on mathematical problems.’ This is explicable in the following terms: while the Ricardo-Malthus polemic was undoubtedly concerned with very real problems (corn laws, banking legislation, etc.) which certainly affected the material interests of the landowner and the bourgeoisie none the less what was at issue, in the final analysis, was a conflict between two factions of a property-owning class. Despite their differences both factions had an overall interest in the preservation and perpetuation of the existing social order. Marx, on the other hand, came forward as the representative of a classs whose historical interests lay in the most decisive and farreaching social progress; not in the replacement of one class by another but in the abolition of classes. Because the proletarian revolution posed issues which far transcended-in their depth and scope-those of all previous social revolutions, the theoretical struggle involved in the preparation of such a revolution inevitably had a sharper, more polemical character, not previously found.
