The living thoughts of Karl Marx : based on Capital: a critique of political economy / presented by Leon Trotsky.

  • Karl Marx
Date:
1940
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The living thoughts of Karl Marx : based on Capital: a critique of political economy / presented by Leon Trotsky. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/202 page 2
    and all of the categories of market economy seem to be accepted without analysis as self-evident, as if they were the natural basis of human relations. Yet, while the realities of the economic process are human labour, raw materials, tools, machines, division of labour, the necessity to distribute finished products among the participants of the labour process, and the like, such categories as “ com- modity, money, wages, capital, protit, tax, and the like are only semi-mystical reflections in men’s heads of the various aspects of a process of economy which they do not understand and which is not under their control. To decipher them, a thoroughgoing scientific analysis is indispensable. In the United States, where a man who owns a million is referred to as being “ worth ” a million, market concepts have sunk in deeper than anywhere else. Until quite recently Americans gave very little thought to the nature of economic relations. In the land of the most powerful economic system economic theory continued to be exceedingly barren. Only the present deep-going crisis of American economy has bluntly confronted public opinion with the fundamental problems of capitalist society. In any event, whoever has not overcome the habit of uncritically accepting the ready-made ideological reflections of economic development, whoever has not reasoned out, in the footsteps of Marx, the essential nature of the commodity as the basic cell of the capitalist organism, will prove to be forever incapable of scientifically compre¬ hending the most important manifestations of our epoch. MARx’s METHOD Having established science as cognition of the objective recurrences of nature, man has tried stubbornly and per¬ sistently to exclude himself from science, reserving for
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3