Political economy is often thought to apply only in relation to bourgeois society, but Engels explains why that conception is wrong. Political economy is the science of understanding the specific laws of motion of each mode of production, as well as those few general or natural laws that apply to all, such as The Law of Value. It is only that this science has, as yet, only been applied to bourgeois society. Marx had limited himself to that, in order to prove his own theory of historical materialism, to demonstrate how bourgeois society evolved naturally on the basis of material conditions and adaptation to them, in the same way that biological species evolve naturally.
Even so, in order to do that, Marx had had to examine the features of feudal society and the germ of bourgeois society that exists within it of commodity production and exchange, to see how this germ grows within the old society and dissolves it. In the same way, in analysing bourgeois society, the seed of its own destruction is discussed. It produces the proletariat, but, also, develops the productive forces to such a scale that they can only be owned and controlled on a social scale, by that proletariat, and that control requires an extension of the planning and regulation of production that arises in each enterprise, into a planning and regulation of the whole economy.
“But, political economy, as the science of the conditions and forms under which the various human societies have produced and exchanged and have always correspondingly distributed their products—political economy in this wider sense has still to be brought into being.” (p 191)
For Marxists, our prime concern is our analysis of bourgeois society, and its laws of motion, because that is where we are currently, and the function of Marxism is to act as the midwife of the new socialist society, to ensure its birth in the most efficient and painless manner, for humanity. In the future, in that socialist society, it will become possible to have the luxury of being able to use this method to analyse those previous modes of production. However, as I have described before, “Marxism” has failed to even properly analyse existing bourgeois society, and its current laws of motion.
More correctly, over the last century, “Marxism” has itself been corrupted and largely dissolved by its infection with petty-bourgeois moralism. It has failed to develop the analysis set out by Marx and Engels in the later chapters of Capital III, as well as in Anti-Duhring, in relation to the transitional nature of socialised capital, continuing to see it as no different to the previous monopoly of private capital. Consequently, instead of recognising the material reality of this socialised capital as the collective property of the working-class, and so the basis of the extension of the 18th and 19th century struggles for political democracy into a struggle for industrial democracy, it has, instead, seen its own collective property as its enemy, and driven it into, on the one hand, an economistic struggle for higher wages, and on the other a statist, reformist, social-democratic struggle merely to change the form of the socialised capital into statised capitalist property, as criticised by Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, and by Engels in his Critique of The Erfurt Programme.
“Although it first took shape in the minds of a few men of genius towards the end of the seventeenth century, political economy in the narrower sense, in its positive formulation by the Physiocrats and Adam Smith, is nevertheless essentially a child of the eighteenth century, and ranks with the achievements of the contemporary great French philosophers of the Enlightenment, with all the merits and defects of that period.” (p 192)
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