On Marx's Capital

In 1867, the first volume of Marx’s magnum opus Das Kapital was published in Hamburg. Marx’s analyses of capitalism were rigorous and comprehensive. The work dealt with important Marxian concepts such as the division of labor (and a description of the degeneration of the social lives of workers to a thing-like status as mere tools of capitalists), surplus value (the observation that workers do not receive the use-value, but only the exchange-value of their labor), and the industrial reserve army (the account of how unemployment harms workers but tends to benefit capitalists by keeping down the price of labor). However, these detailed analyses and evaluations of existing capitalist societies stand in stark contrast to the comparatively superficial treatment of his conception of the economic workings of socialism.

As Lenin once said, "Marx did not leave us a 'Logic' (with a capital 'L'), but he did leave us the logic of 'Capital'". Above all political and economical implications, Das Kapital is the place where Marx's original Dialectic appears in its full difference from Hegel's (Dialectical) Logic. For Marx, such a single and abstract "Dialectical Logic" is impossible because humans deal each time with "the specific logic of a specific subject" ("die eigenthümlishe Logik des eigenthümlishen Gegenstandes", as Marx said once in Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie). So the dialectical "flow" of categories, each one into the next one, appears here primarily as the self-movement of Capital and production, and not as a self-movement of "pure" logical entities. Structurally, this opens a way to detecting various kinds of dialectical oppositions and contradictions, and also various kinds of measures and quantity/quality relations (structural options both neglected in Hegel's Logic).

In addition, Marx's "logic of Capital", as compared to Hegel's Logic, presupposes a different ontological status for logical concepts, and even a different status for dialectical demonstration (the latter is actually represented by the text of Das Kapital as a whole). To put the point in one statement, Marx's "logic of Capital" proved out to embody a kind of "materialistic Dialectic" which was not only ontologically but even structurally different from the one developed in Hegel's Logic. For me personally, this methodological implication of Das Kapital seems to exceed in its philosophical importance all that had been said there about the "division of labor", "surplus value" etc.