2/Triumph of the method of Marx General Overview part 1 Melvin P.
The triumph of what is fundamentally an intellectual movement proceeding from the assumptions and conclusions of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels is so absolute in its resounding victory that no one in modern society can approach an analysis of society without using the methodology pioneered by these men. Our free market economy is referred to as capitalism or the capitalist mode of production due to Karl Marx, who popularized and coined the terms. It was none other than Marx who coined the concept of relations of production and mode of production as fundamental categories of material relations in society. Relations of production embody property relations or the relations of segments of society to property; group relations in a specific system of production and the relations of people to one another, identified and clarified by the existing technological application. Marx gave the world this conception of society and the world accepts it as a "given" outside the man who "gave." The universal triumph of the method of Marx is so complete that the individual who comes of age and enters intellectual engagement encounters various modes of expressions coined by Marx. The gigantic hand of Marx has reshaped the form and structure of the world lexicon. As a method of approach one encounter the "Marx dialectic" - as distinct from the philosophic form articulated by Hegel, as "Marxism" due to the previously existing body of literature using axioms created or attributed to Marx. It was of course Marx who taught the workers - and his self professed purpose was education of the workers and his material activity towards this purpose was to join and form associations on behalf of laboring humanity, an approach that seeks not to explain society, but to unravel its constituent parts on the basis of the internally connected infinite interactive material relations of reality and discern fundamentality. From Marx earliest days of organizing what can be called an "intellectual expression" of his conception of the working class movement, or in the language of the "Marxist movement" an "subjective expression of the objective process," scores of distinguished intellectual have rallied to his banner. From time to time with the method of Marx is confused with the ideological mode of expression that articulates the method. Fortunately, an intimate component of the methodology of Marx establishes a conceptual framework, which draws a sharp distinction between ideological forms and expressions, modes of expressions and the internally cohesive movement "logic" of that which is being expressed. Ideological modes of conception are prehistoric by definition, predating the emergence of society defined as the unity of the productive forces and social relations of production, which together are referred to as the mode of production in man material life. Frederick Engels refers to this prehistoric mode of ideological expression as "ancient bunk" as much as its existence remains un-deciphered to a large extent. Nevertheless, one would not resist - as methodology, an attempt to separate an ideological mode of expression from the act or process of cognitive functioning. Sovietism as an "ism" is an ideological mode of expression as distinct from a specific method of inquiry into the law system that governs the self-movement of matter. Sovietism as an "ism" was an ideological current that more than less articulated or sought to articulate the development and evolution of the industrial production of commodities on a basis of public property relations, or the absence of private owners of the industrial infrastructure and all its diverse components. The men and women who occupied important positions in the state system that sought to protect those property relations manifested a material commitment to teach its society and indeed a vast segment of the world's population the doctrine of Marx and through this doctrine the method of approach peculiar to Marx. What is exceptionally interesting as a special field of inquiry is the apparent connection of the material elements of life that tend to bound and bind ideological expressions to material factors in opposition to the ceaseless striving of the mind to overcome or unravel its own modes of expression. The contribution made by the educational apparatus of the Soviet State in penetrating major areas of the world market and literally publishing a diverse expression of the method of Marx remains difficult to estimate and historic in its outreach. For various reasons, which cannot be abstracted from the quantitative developments in the historic expansion of the system of capitalist commodity production, Marx doctrine or rather method of inquiry called materialist dialectics has remained the focus of sharp dispute as an analytical tool. For purposes of teaching their population the method of Marx, the Soviet State generally presented dialectics in the form of the basic components that constitute the application of dialectic approach. The triumph of Marx method is such that hardly anyone disputes the conception of contradiction - the internal unity and strife of poles, that constitutes the self-movement of matter. Acknowledgment of contradictory phenomena most certainly predates Marx, but the penetration of philosophic expression of "contradictions" as a mode of inquiry is inseparable from the name of Marx in today's world population. In their inquires Marx and Engels did not confine themselves to pointing to the presence of all the contradiction in this or that process as though they were of equal importance, but singled out the essential contradiction upon which other depended. Further in the application of materialist dialectic both men singled out two basic forms of self-movement, development and composition: antagonistic movement as process development and non-antagonistic movement as process development. Marx wrote a comprehensive view of the power of capital - its law of value, in the three volumes called Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production: The process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Further writings are contained in the three-volume set, under the title Theories of Surplus Value. In Capital Marx begins from the simplest, basic relations of merchant-capitalist society - the exchange of commodities. He at once shows the ambiguity, the contradictory characteristic of a "commodity," an article made simply for sale, as a unity of price (cost and cost/price as modes of expression of exchange value) and value (use-value), discloses its internal contradictions, the ambiguous character of the labor that creates the article, the concrete labor on the one hand and one the other the abstract labor that creates the value. Marx further shows that the internal contradiction concealed in the commodity finds the forms of its movement in the external contradiction, which emerges as the relation of the relative and the equivalent forms of value, which are polar opposites, indissolubly connected with each other. The further development of this relationship, which reflects the development of the commodity, goes through three stages of a simple, a developed and finally a universal form of value. In the last of these three stages, the article takes on the double form of the commodity itself and its monetary equivalent. The development of money, in its different functions, being the result of the extension and complication of commodity relations and at the same time the condition of the development of these relations, is the further form of development of these relations, is the further form of development of its initial contradictions. Marx shows further the process of the development of money into capital, the internal contradiction of the general form of movement of capital and the continual resolution of this contradiction in the buying and selling of labor power. The appearance of the latter denotes the higher development of the initial contradiction, the development of the law of value on a very universal scale. At this point development takes place more quickly and with more intensity than formerly, because the separation of the means of production from the producer (and the stage of development of commodity relations that we are discussing inevitably leads to such a separation) the basic productive power - labor power, is turned into a commodity. Production of commodities for sale becomes capitalist. Thus we arrive at the basic means of production of a new social structure. The conversion of money into capital denotes the development of the law of value into a new qualitatively unique law-system - into the law of Surplus Value, which is the "source of the self-movement" of capitalism. Marx shows that the capitalist organization of production "denotes the concentration in great workshops of the up-until-now disconnected means of production and their conversion by this means from the productive forces of separate persons into social productive forces" but under conditions of individual appropriation. He further shows how the pursuit after a continuous increase in the rate of surplus value, which depends on the physiological limitations of the working day and the resistance of the working class, leads to the growth and intensification of the contradictions between the social character of production and individual appropriation - that basic contradiction of capitalism, leads to the growing of simple capitalist co-operation into manufacture, and thence into production by machinery. Marx showed that the increase of the rate of exploitation requires an uninterrupted expansion of production - which reproduction leads to the concentration and centralization of capital and consequently to the ruin of small scale capitalist. From another point of view, the same process of capitalist reproduction creates an industrial reserve army, and ever more and more intensifies class contradictions. Marx discloses in all its terrible nakedness the general law of capitalist accumulation, with the absolute impoverishment of the working class as its obverse side, thus showing the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism (capitalist property relations). In disclosing the essence of capitalism and its deep, ever changing contradictions, Marx shows the emergence on their basis, of contradictory phenomena. To this are devoted the second and third volumes of Capital, where Marx shows the process of the circulation of capital and its reproduction, and the division of surplus value into the forms of profit of enterprise, interest, profits of commerce and ground rent. Marx shows here how the law of value is developed in its external forms, growing into a law of costs of production. He shows how production is expanded, how the organic composition of capital grows and how, under the influence of this, the rate of profit falls although the hope of its rise is the very thing, which drives capitalism to develop the forces of production. He further shows how capitalist contradictions ever more and more intensify, finding their temporary solution in certain characteristic phenomena - crisis, depression, recovery, boom, the trade cycle, which appears as the forces of production emerge in ever more irreconcilable conflict with the social law of their development. The social structure of capitalism hampers the development of productive forces. The bourgeoisie becomes unable to control production. The movements of capitalist contradictions gives rise to the necessity and also to all the conditions and possibilities of the collapse of capitalism. This is the picture unfolded by Marx in Capital . . . (Textbook of Marxist Philosophy, prepared by the Leningrad Institute of Philosophy under the direction of M. Shirokov, 1937 Chapter IV pages 178, 179 &180) This first picture/model of the totality of the process/shape of capitalist commodity production and its internally cohesive self movement remains unsurpassed in theoretical depth and the standard by which all models of capitalist reproduction have measure themselves. Marx himself never meant for any of his writings to be treated as static unchanging categories, existing outside the boundaries that define limitations of all processes. Without question a new and "popular" form of Marx method will arise capable of being griped and grasped on a mass scale. Until its emergence is witnessed certain modes of expression from the previous phase of capital development are with us. end part 1
