The Dialectics Of The Abstract And The Concrete In Marx S Capital

The book presents an integral Marxist conception of the dialectics and methodology of scientific theoretical cognition, of the dialectical interrelation between the abstract and the concrete, of the unity of the historical and the logical, of the correlat

This book argues that the dialectic of Marx's Capital has a systematic, rather than historical, character. It sheds new light on Marx's great work, while going beyond it in many respects.

Kosik writes that the history of a text is in a certain sense the history of its interpretations. In the fifteen years that have passed since the fust (Czech) edition of his Dialectics of the Concrete, this book has been widely read and interpreted throughout Europe, in diverse centers of scholarship as well as in private studies. A faithful English language edition is long overdue. This publication of KosIk's work will surely provoke a range of new interpretations. For its theme is the characterization of science and of rationality in the context of the social roots of science and the social critique which an appropriately rational science should afford. Kosik's question is: How shall Karl Marx's understanding of science itself be understood? And how can it be further developed? In his treatment of the question of scientific rationality, Kosik drives bluntly into the issues of gravest human concern, not the least of which is how to avoid the pseudo-concrete, the pseudo-scientific, the pseudo-rational, the pseudo historical. Starting with Marx's methodological approach, of "ascending from the abstract to the concrete", Kosik develops a critique of positivism, of phenomenalist empiricism, and of "metaphysical" rationalism, counter posing them to "dialectical rationalism". He takes the category of the concrete in the dialectical sense of that which comes to be known by the active transformation of nature and society by human purposive activity.

In Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism Levant and Oittinen provide a window into the subterranean tradition of ‘creative’ Soviet Marxism and E.V. Ilyenkov, whose ‘activity approach’ offers an anti-reductionist Marxist theory of the subject.

In Marx ́s Capital, Method and Revolutionary Subjectivity, Guido Starosta develops a methodologically-minded critical reconstruction of the Marxian critique of political economy, which is shown to be a materialist inquiry into the social and historical determinations of revolutionary subjectivity.

Offers a fresh interpretation of Marx's great work. This book shows how the novelty and lasting interest of Marx's theory arises from the fact that, as against the project of a 'pure' economics, it is formulated in concepts that have simultaneously an economic and a political aspect, neither of these being separable from the other.

Marx’s Capital has of course been widely read; this revival of a systematic study by Geoffrey Pilling, originally published in 1980, argues powerfully that, in order to understand Capital fully, it is necessary to have read and understood Hegel’s Logic. This argument leads to a detailed examination of the opening chapters of Capital, and a re-examination of their significance for the work as a whole. Pilling emphasizes the fundamental nature of the break between Marx’s Capital and all forms of classical political economy, and stresses the revolutionary nature of Marx’s critique of political economy as one of the foundations of Capital. He also lays particular emphasis on the philosophical aspects of the work, so often neglected by British commentators, and puts forward the view that Marx’s notion of fetishism, often looked upon as incidental to his work, is in fact central to his entire critique of political economy.