Geoff Pilling

Marx’s Capital, Philosophy and Political Economy


Written: 1980;
Source: Marx's Capital, Philosophy and Political Economy;
Publisher: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1980;
Transcribed: Andy Blunden;
HTML Markup: Andy Blunden;
Proofed and Corrcted: by Chris Clayton, 2006.


Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Marx’s critique of classical economics

Introduction
The ahistorical nature of political economy
The main stages in the history of political economy
Ricardo’s achievement
The structure of Marx's work
The philosophy of empiricism
The problem of value and profit
Formal logic and the ‘exceptions’ to the law of value
Dialectics and formal logic
Marx's treatment of labour
Abstract labour
A ‘measure’ of value
Capital and surplus value
The class struggle

3. The Concepts of Capital

Introduction
The objectivity of concepts
Form and content of knowledge
Empiricism and the Empirical
Empiricism and the commodity
Abstract Identity
Capital and the productive forces
Use-value and value
Capital in general
The example of imperialism
A recent writer on ‘capital in general’
The reality of abstractions
The value concept
The concept of capital

4. The Significance of the opening chapters

The development of Marx’s investigation
The place of the opening chapters
Engels on Marx’s method
Althusser and the early chapters of Capital
The commodity and use-value
The formation of money
The elementary form of value
The development of the value-form

5. Some aspects of Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism

Fetishism and social being
Disappearance of fetishism
Fetishism as illusion
The ideality of value
Fetishism and economic crisis
The price of production and fetishism
The functions of money
Ricardo’s notion of money


Further reading:

Dialectics of the Abstract & Concrete in Marx's ‘Capital’, Ilyenkov 1960
Hegel & Capital, Cyril Smith
Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic, Hiroshi Uchida
Logic of Marx’s Capital, Tony Smith
I. I. Rubin Archive
Reading Capital, Louis Althusser