The Three Stages Of The Development Of Karl Marx’s Logic Of Social Criticism

Karl Marx’s discourses of social criticism were not always the same but changed and developed intricately throughout his life. Also, the logics behind Marx’s criticism of capitalist society in his different texts differed greatly from each other. These logics and their connections can be enunciated by clarifying how did Marx understand the society, how did he criticize it, and how to achieve his ideal society.In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx’s understanding of society rooted in perceptual experience and the right of property. Marx conducted an external ethical critique of alienated labor to make assaults on the society of private property. His route of liberation based on a mystical conception of history without adequate ammunition, in which alienation would be eliminated in the future.Marx abandoned his humanist labor-alienation conception of history in The German Ideology, and embraced a new conception of history which grasps society through the history of realistic material production. He also contended that objective contradiction between productive forces and exchange relations is the driving force of historical development, but he had not pointed out concrete forms of these contradictions. Thus, his critique depended on the clue of division of labor, which is not the essence of capitalist society.About ten years later, in Economic Manuscripts 1857-1858 (Grundrisse), political economy became the fulcrum of Marx’s social criticism. Chapter on Money analyzed abstract connection of commodities and money without introducing relations of production (in narrow sense), while Chapter on Capital played a critical role to grasp the essence of capitalism. Marx saw capitalist society through the lens of the concept of capital, underlining that capital should not be understood as material objects but relations and progressions. The critique of capitalist society was embodied in the narration of progressions of the capital, rather than constructing an external ethical critique. Meanwhile, Marx asserted that progressions of capital per se entail intrinsic limits and restrictions. As modern industry develops, labor of direct form would not be the main source of wealth. Then, labor-time would not be the yardstick of wealth, which would destroy the fundamental basis of capitalist society, i.e., the law of value. In this way, economic relations dominated by capital would reach the end by itself.