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Marx-Comments On James Mill-Sažeto
Marx-Comments On James Mill-Sažeto
Marx-Comments On James Mill-Sažeto
Make sure that you understand the following key ideas and think about their
significance.
Page XXV. Paragraph 1: The abstract law and the real movement
Is this distinction a particular feature of economic laws? Or of social laws? Or of all
laws? What is the real content of this distinction as a critique of political economy?
Does it have a wider application in social theory?
Page XXVII
What is `the secret contained in the lie of moral recognition’?
Marx now moves back to exchange to develop further the philosophical critique that
he began in relation to money at the beginning of the text. What is the difference
between the exchange of human activity `within production itself and of human
products against one another’? Why is this `equivalent to species activity and species-
spirit’? How does this relate to Adam Smith’s idea of the propensity of humans to
`truck, barter and exchange’? What is human nature? What is the `true community’?
Why does this community appear `in the form of estrangement’?
Why does Marx counterpose the idea of the community as being produced directly by
the life-activity of individuals to the idea of the true community as coming into being
through reflection and counterpose men as an abstraction to men as real, living
particular individuals? What would Marx think of post-modernism?
The critique comes back to political economy which `defines the estranged form of
social intercourse as the essential and original form corresponding to man’s nature’.
What does Marx mean by this?
Page XXIX
What is the significance of Marx’s distinction between the purpose of labour and the
mode of existence of labour?
Is the division of labour a bad thing? Or is it the exchange of the products of labour as
values that is a bad thing? Does Marx distinguish the two here? What is the
difference? Look at the second half of page XXXIII for a description of human
exchange.
In the middle of the page we have the first formulation of the theory of alienated
labour that is developed shortly afterwards in the 1844 manuscripts. Compare the two
passages.
`Just as the concept of the equivalent, the value, already implied the alienation of
private property, so money is the sensuous, even objective existence of this
alienation’. Is this just rhetoric? What is its theoretical basis?
Page XXX
`Political economy is only able to grasp this whole development as a fact, as the
outcome of fortuitous necessity’. Marx started off by contrasting real living
individuals to abstractions. Now he seems to be denouncing political economy for its
empiricism. Is Marx offering a metaphysical, anti-empiricist critique of political
economy?
The rest of the text does not really add anything more. The bottom of page XXXI and
top of page XXXII develops the phenomenology of exchange a little bit, drawing
heavily on Hegel and getting a bit rhetorical.
At the bottom of page XXXII Marx contrasts alienated property with ‘true property’.
There is an interesting discussion of means and ends at the top of page XXXIII that
adds something to the discussion.