Marxian Theory as the Science of Human-Social «Praxis».

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Marxian Theory as the Science of Human-Social «Praxis».

Dear Reader,

In 1845, at the beginning of his extraordinary career as ‘the original Marxian’, Karl Marx wrote the following as the eighth thesis of the eleven, foundational theses of his famous “Theses on Feuerbach”:

“Social life is essentially practical.  All mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”

[Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers [Moscow: 1968], p. 667].

I see all of Marx’s subsequent writings in his dialectical, immanent critique of classical capitalist political economy -- the Grundrisse manuscript, the book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the book Capital, volume I, the manuscripts for Capital, volumes II & III, posthumously published via Engels’s editorship, and the manuscript for volume IV, Theories of Surplus-Value -- as an implementation of the precept -- of the insight, and of the principle, quoted above -- on a colossal scale.

In these works, Marx’s ‘praxical’ analysis revealed how the phenomena that we modern humans have experienced, and continue to experience, in and as capitalist society, are the products of the daily activities that we undertake, in “personifying” wage-labor, or in “personifying” capital, or in “personifying” and enacting still other social relations of production that are part of modern society.

This, our daily social life «praxis», takes on patterns which are initially unknown to us, and unintended by us -- “laws” -- which can come to be known by us only through Marx’s kind of analysis of that, our actual activity, our factual practice of human social life.  

By analyzing -- and by comprehending, by scientifically knowing -- the social practice of modern society, Marx rationally solved, and devastatingly, immanently critiqued, the mysteries, the fetishisms, and the other mystifications, of the ideology-vitiated “science” of classical bourgeois political economy, and, by extension, of the ideology-vitiated “science” of “modern economics”, which extended those fetishisms and mystifications.

Marxian theory, as massively manifested in Marx’s writings on his critique of political economy, is the science -- the knowing, the comprehension -- of actual human social «praxis».

It is that same science of human «praxis» which we intend to extend in this blog.

Regards,

Miguel