The economic cell form

Marx and Engels stated that there was only one science: history, embracing nature and society. This contribution explores the influence of three decisive natural science developments in Marx’s critique of political economy, namely, Darwinism, thermodynamics, and cell biology. It examines the least-discussed of these influences: cell biology. This reflects Marx’s decision to begin Capital with the commodity form as the economic cell form of the capitalist mode of production. The chapter asks whether his account of the two methods of political economy in the 1857 Introduction adequately anticipates Marx’s method in Capital. It does not: cell biology suggested a third method. Hence this text identifies six parallels between cell biology and Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production and investigates the heuristic implications of starting with the commodity as the elementary form of the capital relation. Nonetheless, these similarities affect the process of discovery more than they do the substantive focus of Marx’s research in critical political economy or his order of presentation, where Hegelian influences remain. The contribution also discusses the limits of metaphors drawn from the natural sciences in the critique of social formations. It concludes with some general comments on discovery, methods, and the logical-historical-empirical method of presentation.