Abstract

The overall aim is to establish Marx's relation to the two major traditions of economics known to him, Classical and utility theory. Towards this end, the dissertation attempts to clarify the form of argument in Capital and to show how that argument is intended as a critique of political economy. The "Notes on Wagner" serves both purposes: Marx's description of his method guides the interpretation of Capital; his references to Capital in reply to Wagner's explanations show how Capital is supposed to function as critique. ;The interpretation of Capital presents the first three parts of Volume I as one continuous logical progression. This develops the conditions required to generate the phenomenon from which Marx begins, namely, that wealth in capitalist society consists of commodities. The conditions Marx identifies are the characteristics of capitalist production. By his account, this is a particular way of satisfying needs distinguished by its goal, surplus value, and the social relations required to realize this goal, the distribution of products by exchange and their production by the relation of wage labor to capital. By this interpretation, Marx's argument refers exclusively to capitalism. ;The interpretation of Marx's critique of Wagner maintains that the principal critical objective of Capital is to refute the nonsocial explanations of production and need given by Classical and utility theory. For these theories, economic relations are relations of people to objects governed by natural and transhistorical laws. According to Marx, these theories falsely reduce specifically capitalist relations to nonsocial terms. For Marx, economic relations are instead historically variable relations of people both to each other and to means of production and products. ;In Capital, the theory of value is meant to show both that capitalist production is social, substantiating Marx's position, and that it appears nonsocial, identifying the reason for political economy's misconceptions. In the Grundrisse, Marx proposed a different strategy of critique: to begin with transhistorical characteristics and refute Classical theory by defining them differently. This strategy reflects an incomplete understanding of Marx's differences with the Classicals and would have merely juxtaposed his definitions with theirs