Marx’s Criticisms of Political Economy and Speculative Philosophy: A Comparative Analysis

• In Event: Thinking with Tocqueville, Rousseau, and Hegel

Abstract

Marx holds that the activity of production, “the material production of immediate life”, is the essential feature of being human, and he considers his interpretation to be epistemologically superior to the two disciplines that he criticizes most frequently, speculative philosophy and political economy. Grasping Marx’s interpretation of the human and of human history thus requires revealing the details of his criticisms of these two disciplines. In this paper, I present a comparative analysis of Marx’s criticisms of the two disciplines in question, which reveals Marx’s own perspective and interpretation in depth.
Although Marx’s criticisms of the two disciplines differ by their context, the methods and conceptualizations of political economy and speculative philosophy point to a common problem: a faulty categorization of the human. For Marx, private property designates for political economy a universal law in relation to which the human “essence” is defined. Political economy thus reduces the human to an economic category, failing to recognize the alienation of labor which dehumanizes the human. Speculative philosophy, on the other hand, reduces human beings to a philosophical category, representing the human through metaphysical categories such as “essence” and “existence”. Real individuals, their actions and conditions, are not taken into account in these categories.
Although the categorizations of both political economy and speculative philosophy can be considered faulty, I argue that there is a crucial difference between the two: the reduction of human being by speculative philosophy remains in the domain of consciousness, while political economy reflects the practical reality from the perspective of the material production of life. The perspective of the political economy, on which the practice of speculative philosophy with its metaphysical categorizations also rests, is therefore the primary problem for Marx.

Author

• Eylem Dogan, Independent Scholar