ONTOLOGY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY IN THE MARXIAN CRITICISM OF CAPITALIST SOCIETY: MARX READER DE HEGEL (PART I)

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze some elements of how the Marxian interpretation of Hegel's ontology and political philosophy reflects in his critique of capitalist political economy, with emphasis on Marx's critique of Hegel's conception of labor, and its relationship with the critique of the value form (Wertform) as a substance of the capital accumulation process. In order to do so, it focuses, synchronously, on two aspects related to the question, which divide the exhibition into two parts: In this Part I, it analyzes some ontological (Hegelian) elements situated in the formation of the Marxian concept of labor and, consequently, also in his critique of capital as a social form resulting from the historical development of labor itself. In this phase, it begins to explain how this process of Marxian research occurs under a double and simultaneous theoretical-critical bias established between, on the one hand, the ontological perspective of the subject (the worker) determined by the strange labor (entfremdete Arbeit), and, on the other hand, a critical perspective on political economics taken from the relationship of this strange labor with the private property of the means of production. In Part II, in addition to finishing off some openings left in Part I, it analyzes how this itinerary will influence the core of Marxian criticism, both in relation to the Hegelian concept of labor, as well as to the mature criticism presented in Capital, in order to corroborate the thesis of the ineradicable warp between ontology and political economy. It then qualifies at the level of dialectical method and logic, the concepts of labor and capital, as well as the dialectical question of mediation (Vermittlung) and its logical relationship with the broader movement of Spirit (Geist) and Idea (Idee), from how Marx analyzes them in Hegel. Finally, it concludes with a brief analysis of the political gravity of the ontological observation that underlies the entire Marxian critique of capitalist political economy.