Addendum to Previous Marx Blog Post

There is a debate in contemporary Marxist philosophy and economics over whether Marx's critique of political economy economy with respect to grasping the essence of the capitalist economic system is best construed as a project in which either (1) Marx draws a distinction between appearance and essence and subsequently proceeds to uncover the essence of the system (as outlined in the previous blog post), or (2) he instead seeks to reveal its essence only after he has systematically established all the essential conditions which make up the system and which in turn allow it to be what it essentially is. The former interpretation construes Marx's critique of political economy along Galilean lines wherein Marx presents a linear cause and effect account of the capitalist economic system, whereas the latter construes Marx as presenting a systematic dialectical account of the capitalist economic system in his critique of political economy by seeking to grasp it as a whole or a totality.

Despite the technical jargon being used here to frame this debate within Marxism, it basically all comes down to a philosophical discussion about whether we take the notion of essence to stand for the hidden causal foundations of the capitalist economic system or for what essentially makes it be what it is overall in terms of how all its parts fit together - similarly to how we might attempt to grasp, for example, any living organic system, whether at the level of the individual, species or ecosystem itself. Consequently, a key aspect of this discussion, is the debate over what's called 'essential conditions' versus 'essence', plus, but related to this, the methodological debate about the 'Galilean method of approximations' versus 'systematic dialectics'.

Now, while I have in my own philosophical account of Marx's critique of political economy emphasised a Galilean approach, I do not dismiss the systematic dialectical approach (whose origins lie in Hegel's philosophy). Indeed, one of the tasks in contemporary Marxist scholarship is to sort out how these two different methodological approaches and interpretations of Marx's critique of political economy can be brought coherently together.

But why does this all matter? It matters, in short, because we are ultimately trying to understand capitalism via Marx's critique of political economy. But to successfully do this, then we need to also understand the scientific/theoretical and methodological aspects of Marx's critique of political economy, since such an ultimate goal is predicated on the latter. Get Marx right, then we'll get what really matters - our understanding of capitalism - right (or, at least, as right as practicably possible).

At any rate, regardless of the outcomes of such a philosophical debate, it should not be forgotten that Marx himself took Capital. A Critique of Political Economy to be a work of science.

NB. Some of the pivotal figures in this debate have been, for example, Derek Sayer, Jorge Larrain, Sean Sayers, Allen W. Wood, Bertell Ollman, Ian Hunt, Moishe Postone, Patrick Murray,  Christopher J. Arthur, Geert Reuten, Tony Smith, Fred Moseley, and Michael Lebowitz.