When Marx (1992c: 26) noted “That the method employed in Das Kapital has been little understood, is shown by the various conceptions, contradictory to one another, that have been formed of it,” it was a testimony to the multiple interpretations of his approach. He had previously referenced his views on the study of political economy: “For an estimation of [Proudhon’s] work, which is in two fat volumes, I must refer you to the refutation I wrote. There I have shown, among other things, how little he had penetrated into the secret of scientific dialectics and how, on the contrary, he shares the illusions of speculative philosophy” (Marx 1985l: 29). The term
“scienti c dialectics” suggests Marx believed several conventions of science could and should be united with dialectical method. To help us understand how he accomplished this, this chapter introduces Marx’s central analytical procedures. These procedures include the logic and order of investigation, meth-ods of abstraction within structural and historical analysis, the use of certain positivist methods, and the presentation of results.
The Order and Logic of Investigation: Critique, Empirical Inquiry, and Analysis
“Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form,” Marx (1975k:
143) tells us. As an antidote to this problem, Marx employed “critique . . . [as]
a speci c form of analysis” (Sayer 1979: 105). In his moments of critique,
“Marx rarely collected data himself; he almost always worked as a critic of others’ theoretical positions or reinterpreted their ndings within a different theoretical framework” (Beamish 1992: 17). In this work, he distinguished between “vulgar” criticism, which is dogmatic, and “true” criticism, which examines the “inner” and “speci c” logic of theoretical views (Marx 1976a:
91). “True” criticism has both negative and positive moments. In negative critique, Marx provided “minatory effusions on what views everyone should avoid” (Carver 1983: 84; emphasis in the original). Among those things Marx advises us to avoid are the following:
• Avoid approaches that “invent mystical causes” and “high- own expres-sions, such as universal reason, God, etc.” (Marx 1982b: 96).
• Do not be one who “confuses ideas and things” (1982b: 96).
• Avoid positing “eternal laws” (1982b: 100).
• Do not be “dogmatic” (1982b: 100) or “doctrinaire” (1982b: 103).
• Avoid “sentimentalizing” and “banalities” (1982b: 104).
• Avoid “vague reasoning” and “magniloquent phrases” (Marx 1975e:
394).1
• Estimate theories on their “substance” and not by “casting suspicions on [an author’s] civil character” (Marx 1982d: 402).
• One should “distinguish between what a particular author actually says and what he believes he says” (Marx 1979d: 324).
• A “question . . . badly formulated . . . cannot be answered correctly” (Marx 1985l: 27).2
1 “‘Phrase-monger’ was in his mouth the sharpest censure – and whomever he once had recognized as a ‘phrase-monger’ he ignored forever. To think logically and to express your thoughts clearly – this he impressed on us ‘young fellows’ on every occasion” (Liebknecht 1901: 84–85).
2 Elsewhere Marx (1992e: 66) wrote: “We cannot solve an equation that does not comprise within its terms the elements of its solution.”
The goal of critique is self-clari cation and, one hopes, demysti cation (Appel-baum 1988: 69–86). As such, these principles inform our understanding of Marx’s critique of other traditions and, by extension, the manner in which he developed his own approach to dialectical method, historical materialist principles, and political-economic investigation.
After reading Lassalle’s Heraclitus, Marx (1936b: 105) wrote to Engels that Lassalle “will learn to his cost that to bring a science by criticism to the point where it can be dialectically presented is an altogether different thing from applying an abstract, ready-made system of logic to mere inklings of such a system.” To Lassalle, Marx (1983f: 316) noted, “I should, moreover, have liked to nd in the text proper some critical indications as to your attitude to Hegelian dialectic. This dialectic is, to be sure, the ultimate word in philosophy and hence there is all the more need to divest it of the mystical aura given it by Hegel” (emphasis in the original). Later, in a note in an early edition of Volume Two of Capital (omitted in later editions), Marx explained that over the course of his work “I have taken the liberty of adopting towards my master a critical attitude, disencumbering his dialectic of its mysticism and thus putting it through a profound change, etc.” (cited in Anderson 1992:
68). Marx’s dialectic was not to be a mystical-metaphysical system simply applied to or imposed upon the facts.
Marx had returned to Hegel after his critique of Kant (see Chapter One).
He found in both an internal contradiction that was expressed in their tau-tological arguments. For example:
The proofs of the existence of God are either mere hollow tautologies. Take for instance the ontological proof. This only means: ‘that which I conceive for myself in a real way, is a real concept for me’, something that works on me. In this sense all gods, the pagan as well as the Christian ones, have possessed a real existence (Marx 1975c, Appendix).
This concern was again advanced in Marx’s (1976a: 11) Critique of Hegel’s Phi-losophy of Law, where he argues that Hegel’s position “That the various aspects of an organism stand to another in a necessary connection arising out of the nature of the organism is sheer tautology. That if the political constitution is de ned as an organism, the various aspects of the constitution, the various authorities, behave as organic features and stand to one another in a rational relationship, is likewise a tautology.” Hegel’s argument is a self-referential,
illogical, form of knowledge, “an illusion of practical consciousness” (Marx 1976a: 62).
Rejecting tautological reasoning is but one moment in Marx’s critique of the Hegelian dialectic (as well as of Kant’s speculative philosophy). Marx (1976a:
9) criticized Hegel’s belief that the material world is “produced by the actual idea.” This is indicative of his tendency toward the “inversion of subject and predicate” (1976a: 12), a view which fails because of its “uncritical, mystical way of interpreting an old world-view in terms of a new one which turns it into nothing better than an unfortunate hybrid. . . . This uncritical approach, this mysticism, is . . . the mystery of the Hegelian philosophy” (1976a: 83;
emphases in the original). In depicting modern social relations as expressing an abstract universal, Hegel’s dialectic, “standing on its head” (Marx 1992c:
29), inverts subjects and predicates, forwards tautological arguments, offers false dualisms, mysti es his subjects through atomistic, idealist, and a priori assertions, falsely identi es some things and fails to speci cally identify oth-ers, and bases his philosophy on abstract generalities. “Turned right side up again” (1992c: 29), a non-metaphysical, non-mystical dialectic should not be an a priori theory in general application but rather a framework for reasoning mobilized during research as necessary.
Marx’s critiques continued with his engagement of Feuerbach. For him, Feuerbach’s approach “gives too much importance to nature and too little to politics” (Letter to Ruge, cited in McLellan 1973: 68) and “never arrives at the actually existing, active men, but stops at the abstraction ‘man’ and gets no further. . . . He gives not criticism of the present conditions of life” (Marx and Engels 1976: 41). Moreover, Feuerbach’s “discoveries about the nature of philosophy required still, for their proof at least, a critical settling of accounts with philosophical dialectic” (Marx 1988a: 17–18; emphasis in the original).
Feuerbach ultimately failed because his materialism and historicism did not inform one another. Thus, “As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist”
(Marx and Engels 1976: 40–41). Feuerbach’s approach was not just incomplete;
it was distorting.
The Poverty of Philosophy, one of Marx’s early forays into political economy, helped him hone his “dialectical critique of theoretical concepts and the use of concrete historical material to refute Proudhon’s position” (Beamish 1992: 47). Marx (1982b: 97) complained that Proudhon “no longer feels any
need to speak of the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, for his history takes place in the nebulous realm of the imagination and soars high above time and place.” It was Proudhon’s failure where, “instead of regard-ing economic categories as theoretical expression of historical relations of produc-tion, corresponding to a particular stage of development in material producproduc-tion, he garbles them into pre-existing eternal ideas, and how in this roundabout way he arrives once more at the standpoint of bourgeois economy” (Marx 1985l: 29; emphases in the original). For Marx (1982b: 102), many “categories are no more eternal than the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.”
This critical stance toward Proudhon was extended to conventional political economy. Marx (1973: 83) criticized Adam Smith and David Ricardo because they “still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual – the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth cen-tury – appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as historic result but as history’s point of departure.” Smith and Ricardo foisted their economics upon an ahistorical theory of abstract universal human nature, a form of individualistic reductionism (Paolucci 2001b).
In sum, Marx rejected Kant’s a priori speculative philosophy, Hegel’s mystical idealist dialectic, Feuerbach’s ahistorical materialism, Proudhon’s metaphysical political economy, and Smith and Ricardo’s ahistorical atomism.
Hegel and Kant failed because their philosophies were not empirically rooted, and Hegel’s particularly because its mysticism fundamentally obscured real relations. Feuerbach failed because his ahistorical materialism disallowed a proper conceptualization of change. Both speculative philosophy and tradi-tional political economy reversed the most important relationships in their models (inversions), held that mainly ideas structure the world (idealism), and posited unchanged transcendent forces across time and space (metaphysics).
This critique helped Marx see what to avoid in his own work.
Marx also advocated several principles for positive critique:
• “Ruthlessness – the rst condition for all criticism” (Marx 1936m: 346).
• Do not be “afraid of the results” or “con ict with the powers that be”
(Marx 1975k: 142).
• Criticism is against “raising a dogmatic banner [but rather should] help the dogmatists clarify their propositions for themselves” (1975k: 142).
• The starting point is “criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles” (1975k: 144; emphasis in the original).
• Criticism should also target “the theoretical existence of man . . . religion, science, etc.” (1975k: 143).
• Understand “present social conditions in their [intermeshing]” and do not ignore “the historical development of mankind” but rather study “the real course of history” (Marx 1982b: 95–97).
• It is important to “see our social institutions as historical products and to understand . . . their origin and development” (1982b: 100).
• Thus, make sure to “grasp the bond linking all forms of bourgeois produc-tion” and “understand the historical and transitory nature of the forms of production in any one epoch” (1982b: 100; emphasis in the original).
• Provide more “de niteness” and “attention to the actual state of affairs”
(Marx 1975e: 394).
• True science requires “more expert knowledge” than is available in com-monsense (1975e: 394).
• By extension, one should respect the inherent “fairness of making yourself at least suf ciently acquainted with the subject of your criticism” (Marx 1992i: 162).
In positive critique, even when objections were made about another’s work, if there were elements to fruitfully incorporate, Marx would do so. Though he objected to idealism, he held that the “outstanding thing in Hegel’s Phenom-enology” is viewing “the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle” (Marx 1988a: 149), a move which “sensitized him theoretically to contradictions and changes through opposition, to grasp the division of labor more fully as he incorporated more historical material into his knowledge interests” (Beamish 1992: 44). Marx (1988a: 15–16) saw Feuerbach’s Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy as the starting point for “positive, humanistic and natural criticism” and “a real theoretical revolution,” given his premise that “Sense-perception . . . must be the basis of all science” (1988a: 111; empha-ses in the original). He wrote to Feuerbach to praise him for allowing a new
“concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!” (Marx 19751: 354;
emphasis in the original). In political economy, although guilty of atomism,
he adopts from Smith and Mill the labor theory of value and a study of capitalism’s law-like features. Finally, in relating political economy to his communist project, Marx (1982b: 104) again referred to Proudhon: “The only point upon which I am in complete agreement with [him] is the disgust he feels for socialist sentimentalising” (emphasis in the original).
In order to facilitate its improvement, analysts have the duty to critique on their own work. Marx (1975b: 12) criticized his early work in law for its
“metaphysical propositions,” an approach “characteristic of idealism” and “a serious defect . . . the source of hopelessly incorrect division of the subject-mat-ter.” He faulted his “de nitions of concepts, divorced from all actual law” and his use of an “unscienti c form of mathematical dogmatism,” which when combined with the problems listed above, resulted in a “shallow classi ca-tion” (1975b: 12, 15). In his self-critique of his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx (1988a:
13–14) explained that the “intermingling of criticism directed only against speculation with various subjects themselves proved utterly unsuitable, hampering the development of the argument and rendering comprehension dif cult. Moreover the wealth and diversity of subjects to be treated, could have been compressed into one work in a purely aphoristic style; while an aphoristic presentation of this kind, for its part, would have given the impres-sion of arbitrary systematizing” (emphases in the original). His Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital critiques his rst edition by hold-ing that the new edition has a “clearer arrangement” with previous topics
“only alluded to . . . now expressly emphasized,” not to mention addressing
“occasional slips” (Marx 1992c: 22–23). Re exive critique pushes analysts to new insights and provides clues as to how to shore up their work’s weak-nesses, to make needed improvements, and to head off avoidable criticisms.
Thus, positive and negative critiques animate Marx’s engagement of several schools of thought, including his own, and helped him establish and pursue his research agenda. (See Tables 4.1 and 4.2.)
During and after his critique of intellectual traditions, Marx’s journalism and political-economic research studied relationships in the real world, things that were not esoteric, e.g., money, factories, wages, the working-day, the Paris Commune, the Beer Tax, bureaucracy, etc. These things indicated rela-tions of class interests and political power. In this work, he appealed to an array of scholars, books, periodicals and newspapers, the ndings of govern-ment commissions, the Blue books printed by the governgovern-ment in the British
Theorist Marx’s Critique Marx’s Alternative/
Negative Critique Negative and Positive Critique
Self-Clari cation
Letter to his father Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law
The German Ideology Grundrisse
The Holy Family Theses on Feuerbach Mathematical Manuscripts The Poverty of Philosophy Theories of Surplus-Value Ethnological Notebooks
Table 4.2
The Phases of Maturation of Marx’s Research
Museum, journals from the sciences, and even insider information: “Engels, indefatigable student of statistics, kept [Marx] supplied with all available information about the state of markets” (Sprigge 1962: 81). Marx used these sources as empirical evidence of structurally rooted patterns and constructed categories to analyze them.
Within analysis one must pick over previous theories, relevant data, and make sense of the relations between patterns and those things that seem chaotic. The initial inquiry has two primary goals: self-clari cation and systematic category construction (more on the latter below and in Chapter Five). In this process, Marx looks for forms of discourse that can be evalu-ated against what was learned through the moment of criticism. This is why he did not publish several of his works: Self-clari cation – about concepts, forms of logical reasoning, and methods of analysis and presentation – was often his goal. After self-clari cation and additional investigation, he would move toward writing up his results. Thus, Capital offers us “a systematic presentation, an apodictic arrangement of the concepts in the form of that type of demonstrational discourse that Marx calls analysis” (Althusser 1970:
50; emphasis in the original). Marx’s order of research, then, is inquiry rst (critique, observation, analysis of data), and then presentation of ndings (description and explanation of movement).
Abstracting Levels of Generality, the “Backward” Study of History, and the Synthesis of Historical and Structural Analysis In his discussion of the dialectical method, Bertell Ollman (2003) stresses Marx’s methods of abstraction. He explains how Marx abstracted data into seven “levels of generality” (2003: 86–99), used abstractions of “extension”
to help him analyze their interrelationships (2003: 73–86), and employed a
“backward” study of history (2003: 115–126). It is crucial to understand these methods if Marx’s overall analytical tack is to be grasped. Later, when we examine Marx’s use of conventional scienti c methods, it will be important to note how he used what Ollman (2002: 99–111) calls abstractions of “vantage point” in this analytical work.
Two of the most important moments of analysis are the investigation of the relations between history and structure (Schmidt 1981). Marx’s research on such questions does not begin without a sense of where to start. During
and after critique, Marx looks for those things in the past that made the present possible. The hidden qualities of realities in the present require an act of scienti c abstraction to get at them, practices we see him struggle with (and progressively master) in his Critique of Political Economy and the Grun-drisse. In Capital, Marx isolated the economic structure out of the total social formation in which it is found and broke it down into productive (Volume One), circulative (Volume Two), and distributive (Volume Three) spheres in order “to systematically isolate from the complex whole particular relations for examination” (Horvath and Gibson 1984: 18). The force of abstraction helped him to do this.
The force of abstraction allows inquiry to focus on speci c features of an object while providing a method for removing extraneous material from view.
This assists in estimating the features of a social structure. However, because there have been various types of social structures in history, the institutional structure that makes a social formation unique is rst grasped as a particular level of structural-historical experience and is then broken down through abstraction into its constituent parts, after which their internal relations can be pieced together.
The abstraction of “extension” conceptualizes spatial relations while specifying a level of generality in time “for treating not only the part but the whole system to which it belongs” (Ollman 2003: 74). In abstracting the extended interrelationships of parts and systems, although the “movement is from the most speci c, or that which sets it apart from everything else, to its most general characteristics, or what makes it similar to other entities,”
depending on the level of generality, some things will be brought into or out of view (2003: 74–75). The force of abstraction allows refocusing investigation so that which was previously abstracted out of view can be reincorporated back into a broader view where “each abstraction can be said to achieve a certain extension in the part abstracted, and this applies both spatially and temporally” (2003: 74). In this process, one establishes the context from which data are extracted and thus to which level (or levels) of historical generality subsequent abstractions refer or extend. Next, once abstractions are identi ed with a level of historical generality, one can then manipulate them in a way that corresponds to the simplicity or complexity of the given phenomena (Horvath and Gibson 1984: 12). There are six general rules:
1. Abstractions should be commensurable with the time/space location of data.
2. Analysts should not con ate what is speci c with what is general.
3. Abstractions should capture the essential structures of the system under
3. Abstractions should capture the essential structures of the system under