Critique of political economy
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Critique of political economy or simply the first critique of economy is a form of social critique that rejects the conventional ways of distributing resources. The critique also rejects what its advocates believe are unrealistic axioms, flawed historical assumptions, and taking conventional economic mechanisms as a given or as transhistorical (true for all human societies for all time). The critique asserts the conventional economy is merely one of many types of historically specific ways to distribute resources, which emerged along with
modernity Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period (the modern era) and the ensemble of particular Society, socio-Culture, cultural Norm (social), norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the ...
(post-Renaissance Western society). Critics of political economy do not necessarily aim to create their own theories regarding how to administer economies. Critics of economy commonly view "the economy" as a bundle of concepts and societal and normative practices, rather than being the result of any self-evident economic laws. Hence, they also tend to consider the views which are commonplace within the field of economics as faulty, or simply as pseudoscience. There are multiple critiques of political economy today, but what they have in common is critique of what critics of political economy tend to view as dogma, i.e. claims of the economy as a necessary and transhistorical societal category.


John Ruskin

In the 1860s, John Ruskin published his essay '' Unto This Last'' which he came to view as his central work. The essay was originally written as a series of publications in a magazine, which ended up having to suspend the publications, due to the severe controversy the articles caused. While Ruskin is generally known as an important art critic, his study of the history of art was a component that gave him some insight into the pre-modern societies of the Middle Ages, and their social organisation which he was able to contrast to his contemporary condition. Ruskin attempted to mobilize a methodological/scientific critique of new political economy, as it was envisaged by the classical economists. Ruskin viewed the concept of "the economy" as a kind of "collective mental lapse or collective concussion", and he viewed the emphasis on precision in industry as a kind of slavery. Due to the fact that Ruskin regarded the political economy of his time as "mad", he said that it interested him as much as "a science of gymnastics which had as its axiom that human beings in fact didn't have skeletons." Ruskin declared that economics rests on positions that are exactly the same. According to Ruskin, these axioms resemble thinking, not that human beings do not have skeletons but rather that they consist entirely of skeletons. Ruskin wrote that he did not oppose the truth value of this theory, he merely wrote that he denied that it could be successfully implemented in the world in the state it was in. He took issue with the ideas of "natural laws", " economic man", and the prevailing notion of value and aimed to point out the inconsistencies in the thinking of the economists. He critiqued John Stuart Mill for thinking that "the opinions of the public" was reflected adequately by market prices. Ruskin coined '' illth'' to refer to unproductive wealth. Ruskin is not well known as a political thinker today but when in 1906 a journalist asked the first generation of Labour Party members of Parliament in the United Kingdom which book had most inspired them, ''Unto This Last'' emerged as an undisputed chart-topper.


Criticism

Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.
Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...
made them reject him as a "feudal utopian".


Karl Marx

Marx is probably the most famous critic of political economy, with his three-volume ''magnum opus'', (''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy''), as one of his most famous books (''Capital'' volume 1 appeared in 1867; the later volumes were published posthumously, by
Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.
Marx's companion Engels engaged in critique of political economy in his 1844 '' Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy'', which helped lay down some of the foundation for what Marx was to take further. Marx's critique of political economy encompasses the study and exposition of the mode of production and ideology of bourgeois society, and its critique of (real abstraction), that is, the fundamental economic, i.e. social categories present within what for Marx is the capitalist mode of production, for example abstract labour. In contrast to the classics of political economy, Marx was concerned with lifting the ideological veil of surface phenomena and exposing the norms, axioms, social relations, institutions, and so on, that reproduced capital. The central works in Marx's critique of political economy are , '' A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy'' and . Marx's works are often explicitly named for example: ''A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy'', or ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy''. Marx cited Engels' article '' Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy'' several times in . Trotskyists and other Leninists tend to implicitly or explicitly argue that these works constitute and or contain "economical theories", which can be studied independently. This was also the common understanding of Marx's work on economy that was put forward by Soviet orthodoxy. Since this is the case, it remains a matter of controversy whether Marx's critique of political economy is to be understood as a critique of the political economy or, according to the orthodox interpretation, another theory of economics. The critique of political economy is considered the most important and most central project within Marxism, which has led (and continues to lead) to numerous approaches advanced within and outside academic circles.


Foundational concepts

* Labour and capital are historically specific forms of social relations, and labour is not the source of all wealth. * Labour is the other side of the same coin as capital, labour presupposes capital, and capital presupposes labour. * Money is not in any way something transhistorical or natural, which goes for the whole economy as well as the other categories specific to the mode of production, and its gains in value are constituted due to social relations rather than any inherent qualities.


Marx's critique of the methodology of economics

Marx described the view of contemporaneous economists and theologians on social phenomena as similarly unscientific. Marx continued to emphasize the ahistorical thought of the modern economists in the , where he among other endeavors, critiqued the liberal economist Mill. Marx also viewed the viewpoints which implicitly regarded the institutions of modernity as transhistorical as fundamentally deprived of historical understanding. According to the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, what Marx understood, and what the economists failed to recognise was that the value-form is not something essential, but merely a part of the capitalist mode of production.


On scientifically adequate research

Marx offered a critique regarding the idea of people being able to conduct scientific research in this domain. He wrote:


On vulgar economists

Marx criticized what he regarded as the false critique of political economy of his contemporaries, sometimes even more forcefully than when he critiqued the classical economists he described as vulgar economists. In Marx's view, the errors of some socialist authors led the workers' movement astray. He rejected Ferdinand Lassalle's iron law of wages, which he regarded as mere phraseology. He also rejected Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's attempts to do what Hegel did for religion, law, and so on for political economy, as well as regarding what is social as subjective, and what was societal as merely subjective abstractions.


Interpretations of Marx's critique of political economy

Some scholars view Marx's critique as being a critique of commodity fetishism and the manner in which this concept expresses a criticism of modernity and its modes of socialisation. Other scholars who engage with Marx's critique of political economy affirm the critique might assume a more Kantian sense, which transforms "Marx's work into a foray concerning the imminent antinomies that lie at the heart of capitalism, where politics and economy intertwine in impossible ways."


Contemporary Marxian

Regarding contemporary Marxian critiques of political economy, these are generally accompanied by a rejection of the more naturalistically influenced readings of Marx, as well as other readings later deemed (worldview Marxism), that was popularised as late as toward the end of the 20th century. According to some scholars in this field, contemporary critiques of political economy and contemporary German have been at least partly neglected in the anglophone world.


Differences between critics of economy and critics of economical issues

One may differentiate between those who engage in critique of political economy, which takes on a more ontological character, where authors criticise the fundamental concepts and social categories which reproduce the economy as an entity. While other authors, which the critics of political economy would consider only to deal with the surface phenomena of the economy, have a naturalized understanding of these social processes. Hence the epistemological differences between critics of economy and economists can also at times be very large. In the eyes of the critics of political economy, the critics of economic issues merely critique certain practices in attempts to implicitly or explicitly rescue the political economy; these authors might for example propose universal basic income or to implement a planned economy.


Others


Contemporary


Economists

* Richard D. Wolff * Steve Keen * John Komlos * Edward S. HermanHerman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. ''Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.'' New York, Pantheon Books, 2002. * Yanis Varoufakis


Sociologists

* Orlando Patterson, John Cowles professor of sociology at
Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
, argues that economics is a pseudoscience.


Philosophers

* Slavoj Žižek


Linguists

* Noam Chomsky


Historians

* Moishe Postone


Historical


Historians

* Thomas Carlyle * Roman Rosdolsky


Poets

* Carl Jonas Love Almqvist * August Strindberg


Miscellaneous

* Paul Lafargue


See also

*
Anti-work Critique of work or critique of labour is the critique of, or wish to abolish, Work (human activity), work ''as such'', and to critique what the critics of works deem wage slavery. Critique of work can be Existentialism, existential, and focus ...
* Chinese economic reform * Critique of work * Katrine Marçal * Hans-Georg Backhaus * Helmut Reichelt * Humanistic economics * Moishe Postone * Neue Marx-Lektüre


References


Bibliography

* * Johnsdotter S, Carlbom A, editors. ''Goda sanningar: debattklimatet och den kritiska forskningens villkor''. Lund: Nordic Academic Press; 2010. * Braudel F. ''Kapitalismens dynamik''. ('' La Dynamique du Capitalisme)'' y utg.
Gothenburg Gothenburg ( ; ) is the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, second-largest city in Sweden, after the capital Stockholm, and the fifth-largest in the Nordic countries. Situated by the Kattegat on the west coast of Sweden, it is the gub ...
: Daidalos; 2001. * Ankarloo D, editor. ''Marx ekonomikritik''. Stockholm: Tidskriftsföreningen Fronesis; 2008. * Eklund K. ''Vår ekonomi: en introduktion till världsekonomin.'' Upplaga 15. Lund: Studentlitteratur; 2020. * Tidskriftsföreningen Fronesis. ''Arbete''. Stockholm: Tidskriftsfören. Fronesis; 2002. * Baudrillard J. '' The Mirror of Production''. Telos Press; 1975. * Marx K. ''Till kritiken av den politiska ekonomin''. y utg. Göteborg: Proletärkultur; 1981.


Further reading


Articles


Scholarly articles

* Alan Christopher Finlayson, Thomas A. Lyson, Andrew Pleasant, Kai A. Schafft and Robert J. Torres "Invisible Hand": Neoclassical Economics and the Ordering of Society" Critical Sociology 2005 31: 515 DOI: 10.1163/156916305774482183 * Backhaus, H. G. (1969). Zur Dialektik der Wertform. Thesis Eleven, 1(1), 42–76. (In German) * Granberg, M. (2015). The ideal worker as real abstraction: labour conflict and subjectivity in nursing. Work, Employment and Society, 29(5), 792–807. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017014563102 * Granberg, Magnus "''Reactionary radicalism and the analysis of worker subjectivity in Marx's critique of political economy''" * Mau, Søren (2018). ''Den dobbelte fordrejning: Begrebet fetichisme i kritikken af den politiske økonomi''. Slagmark – Tidsskrift for idéhistorie, (77), 103–122. https://doi.org/10.7146/slagmark.vi77.124228 * Paul Trawick and Alf Hornborg. (2015) ''Revisiting the Image of Limited Good: On Sustainability, Thermodynamics, and the Illusion of Creating Wealth'', Current Anthropology, Vol. 56, No. 1 pp. 1–27, The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research


Romantic critique of political economy articles

* Mortensen, Anders – ''Att göra "penningens genius till sin slaf". Om Carl Jonas Love Almqvists romantiska ekonomikritik'' – Vetenskapssocieteten i Lund. Årsbok (in Swedish).


Books


Critique of political economy

* Bernard Steigler (2010) – '' For a New Critique of Political Economy'' * Bonefield Werner (2014) – ''Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason'' * Gibson-Graham, J. K. – ''The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy'' * Baudrillard, Jean ''– The Mirror of Production'' * Baudrillard, Jean – For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign * Lawson, T. (1997). ''Economics and reality''. Routledge. * Nelson, Robert Henry. ''Economics as religion : from Samuelson to Chicago and beyond''; foreword by Max Stackhouse. 2001. * Marçal, Katrine ''Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men'' English edition of Att uppfinna världen * Marçal, Katrine 2012 – ''Det enda könet'' (''Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?'')


On Marx critique of political economy

* Murray, Patrick (2016) – ''The mismeasure of wealth – Essays on Marx and social form'', Brill * Kurz, Robert, 1943–2012. ''The substance of capital'' / Robert Kurtz ; translated from German by Robin Halpin. 2016.


= Neue Marx-Lektüre

= *


= History

= * Bryer, Robert – ''Accounting for History in Marx's Capital: The Missing Link'' * Kurz, Robert, 1943–2012'', Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus: ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft (also known as: The Satanic Mills) – 2009 – Erweit. Neuasg. '' * Pilling, Geoff, ''Marx's Capital, Philosophy and Political Economy''


= Classic works

= * * Marx, Karl – '' Grundrisse''
Ruskin, John, Unto this Last
LibriVox.


Essays

* Postone, Moishe â€
Necessity, Labor and Time: A Reinterpretation of the Marxian Critique of Capitalism


External links


1995–2004 Conference Papers – Critique Of Political Economy / International Working Group on Value Theory (COPE-IWGVT)


* ttp://crisiscritique.org/political11/CC3_Complete-1.pdf Critique of Political Economy – a 2016 edition of the philosophy journal: crisis and critique * A lecture regarding Marx's critique of political economy.
Texts translated to english from a contemporary German group critical of political economy
{{Political philosophy Criticisms Critique of political economy Philosophy of economics Social philosophy