ABSTRACT
Marxian economic theory differs fundamentally from bourgeois economics in admitting of no technical application. Bourgeois economics in all its forms, along with theorizations of its heterodox detractors, naturalizes capitalism. Thus, from its beginnings, the role of economic theory is conceived as promulgating policies to perfect capitalism, or to better support humanity in learning to live with capitalism, predict its oncoming ravages so as to devise protections from them and to conform to its dictates as the supposed natural way of organizing human affairs. Marxian economic theory produces complete, objective knowledge of capitalism for purposes of exposing it for what it really is. This knowledge is first put towards explaining ways the logic of capital impacts the open system of history. That is the project of Marxian political economy in the narrow sense. Secondly, it demonstrates what the study of capitalism, which uniquely in human history reveals its economic life transparently, offers for the study of other kinds of historical society where no ontological tendency exists toward separation of the substructure from the superstructure. It is that which constitutes the project of Marxian political economy in the comprehensive sense. Thirdly, in exposing how an upside-down society like capitalism meets general norms of economic life to reproduce a human society as a byproduct of value augmentation, Marxian economic theory shows how a socialist society will meet those same general norms to reproduce the material life of human society for the concrete purpose of human flourishing.
