Economics: A little bit of Marxist Political Economy.

The "main task" of Marx's Capital was in Marx's terms “lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society.” This economic law of motion is comparable to that of Earth's motion. People used to assume that our planet didn't move, so now people are accustomed to assuming that our modern social organization that we live in is eternal and unchangeable. But Capital has taught us that things which present themselves as motionless are in fact in motion and capable of movement. Capital is a book that awakens the oppressed and destroys their illusions, lets us know of our troubles, reveals a path to sweep those troubles aside and give us liberating hope of a better world.

Capital is a crucial piece in the puzzle on how to analyse capitalism. For political economy to be a science, it must be capable of establishing principles for the masses of people, who are submerged in troubles, into the opposite-intelligent and happy people. Capital indeed contains such a value.

Marx wants to reveal the historical laws of bourgeois society. Regarding this, we can find the following passage in the postface to the second edition of that work:

"It will be said...that the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. But this is exactly what Marx denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist...On the contrary, in his opinion, every historical period possesses its own laws...As soon as life has passed through a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws...The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when the likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of the phenomena shows that social organism differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals"

Each historical period has distinct laws and Capital elucidates the specific laws of capitalist society.

Every effort is being made, from all directions, to prevent those submerged in troubles from locating their source. This source can be traced back to organization of society and if we wish to eliminate these troubles, we must revolutionise this organization. But first its important to analyse reality, to know the world we are living in so that we can change it. If we are to thourghly comprehend reality and this world, our method of cognition must be correct. This correct method is called the materialist dialectic. I would like to expand more on this materialist perspective, and then elucidate on the nature of dialectical understanding.

What economic mechanism is prevalent in present society? If we were to take an idealist perspective, we would most likely cover our ears and cross our arms. However, we are dialectical materialists and believe that our materialist method is the correct standpoint, an objective, scientific understanding, so we begin to use our ears and observe everything going on around us. We must see what the average person see's, so they can agree with what we see, the clear and indisputable facts that will satisfy everyone. Because we begin with what the people think, our studies and thoughts are reliable and truthful.

So we begin with clear facts. In the postface to the second edition of Capital, there is the following passage regarding this:

"Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence.... If in the history of civilization the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilization, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point."

Our life of economics is revealed in the people's eyes as a fact-In order to survive, we know that labour must be taken from the natural world in order to create basic necessities {food, clothing, shelter}. In a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, Marx writes:

"Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labor. It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labor in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves."

This means that people, in order to survive, must have the compulsion to create things through labour. If labour ceases, so does humanity. Also, humanity has needs, the labour produced in societies must be distributed to different sectors of production at a given quantity to meet these needs. This is a natural law that exists in any form of social organization as long as humanity exists. The difference that occurs between different social organizations is the type of phenomenal form that this natural law is manifested in. All of this, in the words of Marx, is "self-evident" even to a child. Likewise, in today's social organization, it evident that labour must repetitvely produce things to meet needs and maintain our lives. Moreover, all the products produced are commodities, this means that social production is carried out through the method of commodity production. This means that the natural law mentioned above is manifested as commodity production.

To be continued...