Marx's Critical/Dialectical Procedure (RLE Marxism)

✍ Scribed by H. T. Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 269
• Series: Routledge Library Editions: Marxism, Vol. 19
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book, first published in 1991, demonstrates that Marx is the legitimate founder of what was to become the critical theory of society. It argues that in order to justify a new conception of humans as collective, cultural and historical beings, Marx undertook a radical critique of the theoretical/analytical method of his predecessors and his contemporaries in political economy, philosophy and the natural sciences. While elements of the methods of some of these thinkers – most conspicuously from the work of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel – were present in Marx’s thought, he achieved a new synthesis of procedural, epistemological and ontological methods.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures and tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Marx’s critique of political economy as a problem-posing framework
Political economy and its critique
Science and method
'Nature’ and labour
Labour and 'value'
Surplus value and labour
2 Conceptualization and critique in Marx and today
Critique and/as practice
A procedure not a method
On the logical and actual status of 'facts'
Common goals, but different procedures
Reality and reason in science and life
3 The meaning and significance of Marx’s critique of the method of political economy
Knowledge and method in the Grundrisse
Perception, observation and thought
Dialectics: thinking and comprehending
The theorist and/in society
4 Making analytical and practical sense of Marx’s critical/dialectical procedure
Concrete totality as concrete totalization
Phases, levels and types of/in the procedure
Materialism, concretion and natural necessity
Logic and contradiction in the critical/dialectical procedure
Political economy, science, logic
5 Ontological underpinnings of the critical/dialectical procedure
Essence and nature
Wholes, forms and laws
Materialist dialectics and/as essentialism
Contradiction and totality in the cell form
The cell form and the value form
6 Retroduction and empiricism in Marx’s practice and theory of understanding
Anomaly and discovery in natural science
Retroduction: Marx's analytic procedure?
Aristotle and knowledge of the phenomenal as real
Showing why the phenomenal is not essential
The practice of concrete totality
7 Labour as the objective basis of materialist dialectics
Abstract(ed) labour
From abstract(ed) to concrete labour
Reflection and/as labour
Labour and/as the dynamic motion of thought
A procedure for concrete world production
Appendix: Capitalism, science and the possibility of political economy
Notes
Index
Author Index
Subject Index