ABSTRACT

In his outline of a critique of political economy, Marx states that he is to articulate the ‘self-criticism of bourgeois society’ (Marx 1973: 106). He claims, that is, to combine an understanding of the historical dynamic of the basic economic structures of the capitalist mode of production with an understanding of the way that they unfold on the surface of society. Thus he effectively claims to account for the total social process, in an analysis encapsulated in the concept of ‘modern bourgeois society’. In his rough draft of 1857-8, capitalism is conceived of not as an inalterably crystallized structure, but as an ‘organic system’ (Marx 1973: 278).