Philosophy and economy

pp. 93-132

in: Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the concrete, Berlin, Springer, 1976

Abstract

The reader who has to plough throughCapital several times in order to comprehend its specialized economic sense and to get the clear meaning of concepts such as value, falling rate of profit, surplus value, the processes of producing capital and surplus value, etc., does not usually ask about the overall meaning of Marx's work. The question either never enters his mind, or he is satisfied with answering it with some general considerations in which comprehending the text never becomes a problem. In addition, because Marx's text is a difficult work, the average reader studies it as presented in a political economy textbook, designed to popularize the complex subject-matter. However, what are the difficult passages of the text, what passages are seen that way, and what does a popularization entail? First of all, Marx's extensive text is abridged.