Analytical Cognition in the Marxian Critique of Political Economy

The article considers the role of analytical cognition within the Marxian critique of political economy. Like Aristotle and Hegel, Marx argues that any reflection on the forms of human life must proceed in an opposite direction to that of real development: it begins when the latter is already complete. Classical political economy, too, proceeded in this way: from price, by force of “analytical” generalization, it arrived at value. However, the transition from price to value brought about not only scientific acquisitions, but also profound conceptual distortions. The latter are indicated by Einleitung of 1857 and Capital, which explain that if a thinking organism lived on analysis alone it would remain shrouded in the veils that the commodity and money fetishism draw round the circulation of value. In the last part of the article, I claim that Marx finally escapes this fetishism by articulating a complex recompositional strategy, which opens up a new field of relations between objects, a new supraindividual, albeit “fractured”, social objectivity (Gegenständlichkeit).