Critique

The aim of the chapter is to explain the concept of ‘critique of political economy’ (CPE) in Marx’s mature work. Starting from the different meanings CPE assumes, I will try to explain the peculiarities of such a critical project. In particular, I will focus the attention on CPE as a critique of capital as objective-subjective totality: on the one side, as a system of social production whose aim is the valorisation of capital, based on the appropriation of unpaid labour and generating a system of socialisation of production increasingly becoming autonomous from the social agents which establish it; on the other side, as the place of constitution of the categories of political economy, whose defect cannot only be brought back to the methodological lack of the economists because such categories, as a part of the capitalistic reality itself, are products of capitalistic social relationships. What emerges from this perspective is that CPE, as the presentation of the system of capitalistic relationships, is the critique of a specific science put forth by means of the critique of its own specific object.