1998 article, originally published in The handbook of economic methodology, edited by John Davis, D. Wade Hands, and Uskali Mäki, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 283–7.

(For its abstract see the Abstracts of all chapters, p. 2)

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Karl Marx (1818–1883) was not only an economist but also a sociologist, philosopher and political activist. Although he is perhaps best known for a political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848 jointly with Friedrich Engels, his main scientific work is an economic analysis of capitalism, as laid down in Das Kapital, a treatise of 2200 pages in three volumes (1867, 1885, 1894 – the latter two posthumously edited by Engels). The method of the latter work will be the main focus of this article.

Marx’s Capital is an investigation of the characteristic form of the capitalist mode of production. It proceeds by presenting a movement from abstract to concrete (complex) categories. Starting with an analysis of the commodity, exchange and money, he develops the social forms of capital and capitalist production, showing how these are reproduced by definite social relations (Volume I). Having constituted capital as a social form distinct to this mode of production he traces its internal structure of circulation and reproduction (Volume II), and moves on to the dynamics of the market and production, the connection between the industrial and the financial system and distribution (Volume III). What is the method adopted by Marx in this presentation?

Before explicating key terms such as ‘mode of production’, ‘social form’ and ‘abstract–concrete’, let us first consider Marx’s view on the study of history: ‘historical materialism’. A brief pronouncement of it is to be found in the Preface to his Critique of Political Economy (1859), where Marx states that legal relations and political institutions are to be comprehended from “the material conditions of life”, and that the “anatomy” of the latter “has to be sought in political economy”. Thus

in the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. (Marx 1859, pp. 20–1)

If we turn to Marx’s main work, Capital, the text quoted above seems hardly helpful. We can see why Marx undertook the study of “the economic structure” of capitalist society, but not how. However, from Marx’s writings, especially the critiques of his political economic predecessors, three main methodological principles can be discerned. First is the difference between general and determinate categories, the former applying to societies – or more particularly, to productive activity – generally, the latter to historically specific “modes” or “social forms” of production (Murray 1988, ch. 10). Thus capitalism is regarded as a particular social form of production with specific determinate categories applicable to it. In this context Marx criticises, for example, Smith and Ricardo for applying determinate ‘capitalist’ economic categories to other (previous) social formations, thus muddling the understanding of their specificity. The concept of ‘social form’ is indeed a key to Marx’s work. In capitalism, human labour and its products necessarily take the ‘value-form’ (money), and this form begets so much a life of its own that it dominates the content (even if the latter – labour, production, the product – remains a necessity). The form, money, has become the subject and object of this mode of production. From this springs Marx’s famous account of alienation and money-fetishism: human relations have become (like) relations between things (Capital I, ch. 1; also Economico-philosophical Manuscripts of 1844).

This takes us to the second methodological principle: immanent exposition and critique. Whereas ‘mere criticism’ takes some prescriptivist stand, external to the object of inquiry, an immanent critique takes its stand from within the object of inquiry, showing its internal inconsistencies and contradictions. This ‘method of critique’ considers that its object of inquiry is reflexive; it conceives that what is investigated is already a social reality which has its own self-interpretation. Marx’s Capital, then, is an immanent exposition and critique of a social reality (capitalism) as well as of the theoretical expression of capitalist social relations in the discourse of political economy. This aspect of Marx’s method, brilliantly set out by Benhabib (1986, chs. 1–4), is indicated in the subtitle of Capital, “A critique of political economy”, as well as by the appearance of the term ‘critique’ in many other titles of Marx’s writings.

A third methodological principle is the requirement for a hierarchy of determinations within the set of determinate categories, although this also applies to those general categories that remain at work along the determinate ones. Since in Marx’s presentation the capitalist mode of production is shown to be an organic unity, “knowledge of it must take the form of a system of related categories rather than a series of discrete investigations” (Arthur 1992, x; cf. Marx’s Introduction, 1953). More specifically Marx sets out, as already indicated, a system of categories layered from abstract to concrete and complex. Thus in the course of Capital we are gradually led into ever more concrete levels of abstraction, each made explicit by a conceptual ‘transformation’ (Verwandlung). The famous value-price transformation (conversion) is merely one of many; whilst one can apply quantitative operations at some definite level of abstraction, some scholars doubt if it makes sense at all to apply them between levels of abstraction: see, for example, Smith 1990, pp. 169–71.

Most commentators agree that Marx’s method in Capital is indeed a movement in stages from abstract to concrete categories. There is, however, disagreement on the status of each of the levels, as well as on the mode of progression from one level to the other. For a long time the method has been looked upon as a logical-historical approach (an interpretation propagated by Engels), or as a method of successive approximation where one starts with simplifying assumptions that are gradually being dropped (propagated by Sweezy 1968 [1942]). Other interpretations have focused on the particular dialectic adopted by Marx (see, for example, the contributions and references in Moseley 1993; Moseley and Campbell 1997; Arthur and Reuten 1998; Norman and Sayers 1980) and which some argue to be a ‘systematic dialectic’. The former two interpretations do not deny Marx adopting a dialectic; it is, however, de-emphasised in their accounts.

Anyway, it should be stressed that the presentation in Capital is not a deductive argument, nor does the movement from abstract to concrete mean that the former is non-empirical. Indeed, Volume III seems to get to an empirical level – as it is commonly understood – and mainstream economists therefore have always felt more at ease commenting on this rather than the earlier two volumes. However, the ‘abstract’ Volume I is loaded with often very detailed empirical descriptions and references to statistical reports. How are we to account for this?

Consider the abstract categories of Capital I that refer to relations within a historically determinate mode of production, that is, the capitalist. Take for example ‘surplus-value’. Then the phenomenal empirical expressions of such a category may be visible (for example, struggle over the length of the working day), to the extent that the categorical development to the concrete is a simple expression of that abstract category; not, however, to the extent that the categorical development is a complex one, especially where the totality of the system inverts its appearances (as with interest or ‘productivity of capital’) or reverses its dynamic (as in the case of tendencies and countertendencies). The empirical references at each stage, then, must be carefully selected accordingly. Now of course, at first sight, this seems to have a circular flavour (note, though, that such empirical references are not meant to be a proof: they are, at that stage, illustrations). However, and this is the important point, for Marx it is, at any stage, the apparent insufficiency in comprehending more complex empirical phenomena that must drive the presentation forward to the more complex concrete categories. But cannot we then dispense with the abstract categories once we have reached their concretisation? No, the point is that the concrete categories derive meaning from their interconnection with the abstract categories, their “inner structure”. At the end of the movement from abstract to concrete, “the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinants”. (These issues are elaborated upon in Marx’s Introduction to the Grundrisse, 1953, written in 1857, from which the last sentence has been quoted.)

Regarding Marx’s method there are, as indicated, three strands of interpretation, and the extent to which Marx may be considered an heir of Hegel’s dialectic has always been controversial. Two factors have contributed to this controversy. The first is the order of and delay in the appearance in print of Marx’s work, both in the original German and in English translation. For brevity, I will merely give two examples. In 1932, two philosophically and anthropologically important works of Marx appeared in German: The German Ideology (with Engels) and the Economico-philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (English translation 1938–63). A key 1857–58 manuscript, the Grundrisse, drafting Capital in a rather dialectical style, received its full German publication in 1953 and its English version only in 1973 (its Introduction had appeared in a German journal in 1903). Thus several times a new Marx seems to be on the stage, and in particular the 1932 and 1953 works quite changed the dialectical interpretation.

The second factor is that, throughout his writings over a period of 40 years, Marx was not consistent in his appreciation of Hegel’s dialectic (he in fact reread some of Hegel’s work several times). For some authors (for example, Althusser 1965) there appears to be “an epistemological break” in Marx’s work: later on in his life he is supposed to have taken a radical break from the human, anthropological and Hegelian orientation of his youth. Arthur (1986) convincingly argues for a continuity both in terms of method and general problematic of the research programme. With this, Arthur does not deny Marx’s radical critique of Hegel. As Murray (1988, p. 221) expresses it in an important study of Marx’s method, “Hegel was Marx’s chief mentor and antagonist”. Whereas Murray de-emphasises the Hegelian dialectic for Marx’s method (similarly, for example, Mattick 1993), Tony Smith (1990) in a most original contribution has shown how the whole of Capital can be read as a systematic dialectic (see the entry, ‘Dialectical Method’).¹ Still others take the position that Capital provides important systematic-dialectical and form-theoretical outlines that need, however, reconstruction and further development (Backhaus 1969; Reuten and Williams 1989; Arthur 1993; Reuten 1995).

This takes us, finally, into the issue that Marx’s method and theory cannot be equated with Marxian method and Marxian theory. Marx laid the foundations for a particular tradition of several methodological styles of research. However much these styles may diverge, they have in common the three general methodological characteristics set out earlier on: (1) the difference between general and historically determinate categories, (2) the method of immanent exposition and critique, and (3) setting out a system of determinate interconnected layers of categories for concretely grasping empirical reality. For better or worse, this distinguishes the Marxian tradition from mainstream approaches to methodology.

Reader’s guide. Marx’s texts on method have been collected in Carver (1975). Marx’s method must, of course, be judged from his own work. The first chapters of Capital especially are difficult, but they are essential to the appreciation of the method. Arthur (1992) provides in 15 pages a good and accessible introduction to the work, emphasising various methodological aspects. Some recent methodological assessments are in the collections edited by Moseley (1993), Bellofiore (1998), Moseley and Campbell (1997), and Arthur and Reuten (1998); earlier ones are Mepham and Ruben (1979) and Schmidt (1969), the latter with by now ‘classical’ contributions from, for example, Backhaus, Iljenkow and Zelený. Bonefeld et al. (1992) extends from Marx to recent Marxian theory.