Abstraction in the Marxian Oeuvre: Tendencies, Laws and Dialectics

Theofanis Papageorgiou and Panayotis Michaelides

Review of Political Economy, 2024, vol. 36, issue 1, 233-255

Abstract: Abstraction has taken very different terminologies revolving around the relation between reality and thought. In this framework, the debate on the issue of crisis is fueled by different, often one-sided and ideologically contradictive, uses of abstraction. In this work, we attempt to show that without an adequate grasp of the role of abstraction, and without sufficient flexibility in making the needed abstractions, most interpreters of Marx — Marxists and non-Marxists alike — have constructed versions of his theories that suffer in their very form from the same rigidity, inappropriate focus, and one-sidedness that Marx saw in bourgeois ideology. In this framework, we argue that Marx's abstraction is not ‘other things equal', i.e. ceteris paribus, but ‘nothing equal'. In the same vein, we argue that the capitalist process is a ‘non-equilibrium' process. Instead of ‘laws', we argue that tendencies and contradictions may be found in the Marxian oeuvre. Furthermore, we argue that the isolation of the third Volume of Marx's capital from the rest of the Marxian oeuvre facilitates the interpretation of Marx's method in terms of ‘mechanical materialism’.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2021.2018193

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