I would emphasize that what distinguishes Marx's work is that he rejects the split between economics and sociology where economics largely assumes itself to examine the given factors of technical production whereas the social influences are accidental features upon the essence of their science.
Marx however considers the relationship between production nd social relations as insperable and even his principle of historical materialism is based on not arbitrary axioms for the sake of a consistent system but based in things which much be empirically true and are hard to refute because they reflect concrete universals, a particular which explains other particulars. This is not something brought down by the nominalism which denounces abstract universals which have no necessary connection to a particular but do reflect an arbitrary classification.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdfThe first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, [is that humans] must be in a position to live in order to be able to "make history". But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life24.
I'd argue it reflects a methodologically superior approach to investigating things is why I think there is great appeal in Marxism for those who go into in-depth and are able to recognize the dicing up and breaking of the integrity of Marx's thought such as in the analytical Marxists who seem to have no sense of the tradition in which Marx's thought grows from.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1f.htmTo determine whether the abstract universal is extracted correctly or incorrectly, one should see whether it comprehends directly, through simple formal abstraction, each particular and individual fact without exception. If it does not, then we are wrong in considering a given notion as universal.
The situation is different in the case of the relation of the concrete universal concept to the sensually given diversity of particular and individual facts. To find out whether a given concept has revealed a universal definition of the object or a non-universal one, one should undertake a much more complex and meaningful analysis. In this case one should ask oneself the question whether the particular phenomenon directly expressed in it is at the same time the universal genetic basis from the development of which all other, just as particular, phenomena of the given concrete system may be understood in their necessity.
Is the act of production of labour implements that kind of social reality from which all other human traits may be deduced in their necessity, or is it not? The answer to this question determines the logical characterisation of the concept as a universal or non-universal one. Concrete analysis of the content of the concept yields in this case an affirmative answer.
Analysis of the same concept from the standpoint of the abstract logic of the intellect yields a negative answer. The overwhelming majority of beings that are undoubtedly individual representatives of the human race do not directly conform to this definition. From the standpoint of old non-dialectical logic this concept is too concrete to be justified as a universal one. In the logic of Marx, however, this concept is genuinely universal exactly because it directly reflects the factual objective basis of all the other traits of man which have developed out of this basis factually, historically, the concrete universal basis of anything that is human.
In other words, the question of the universal character of a concept is transferred to another sphere, that of the study of the real process of development. The developmental approach becomes thereby the approach of logic. This approach also determines the proposition of materialist dialectics to the effect that the concept should not express the abstractly universal but rather that universal which, according to Lenin’s apt formula, embodies in itself the richness of the particular, the individual, the single, being the concrete universal.
This richness of the particular and the individual is naturally embodied not in the concept as such but rather in the objective reality which is reflected in the concept, that particular (and even individual) sensually given reality whose characteristics are abstracted as definitions of a universal concept.
Thus, it is not the concept of man as a being producing labour implements that contains in itself the concepts of all the other human traits but rather the actual fact of producing labour implements contains in-itself the necessity of their origin and development. It is not the commodity concept or value concept that contains in itself the entire diversity of other theoretical definitions of capitalism but rather the real commodity form of links between producers is the embryo from which all the ‘riches’, including the poverty of the wage workers, develop. That was why Marx was able to reveal all the contradictions of modern society in his analysis of simple commodity exchange as an actual, directly observable relation between men.
Nothing of this sort, naturally, is to be observed in the concept of commodity. In his polemics with bourgeois critics of Capital, Marx had to emphasise the fact that the first sections of this book do not contain an analysis of the concept of commodity at all but an elementary economic concreteness called commodity relation – a real sensually contemplated fact, and not an abstraction existing in the head.
This is a logical point but it is a kind of logic that is inseparable from the empirical investigation also, abiding by Hegels point with the owl of minerva that philosophy can go no further than history, understanding things in retrospect or in their embryonic form at best. Hegel makes short work of how Kant posits thought as independent and pre-existing experience, a kind of shell which empirical experiences go through. Not realizing that concepts develop out of human activity in the real world and hence an emphasis on the reproduction of man a thus the unity of man with the conditions of nature changing one another overcoming an epistemology that posed man or reality independent of one another.
Marx also had a very different goal in his work of Capital, which relies on an intense study of political economy but wasn't simply a continuation of it but a criticism of it. Marx sought to show the ideological limitations admist the scientific investigation of his predecessors. He also wasn't attempting to make consistent the very system that he wanted to lay bare as having essential contradictions which couldn't be outlined in some unproblematic logical fashion but the real logic of which was contradictory.
For example, consider the labor theory of value and the idea that once and for all we might find the measure of value. Implicit in which seems the idea to predict and manage the chaotic system of production which is capitalism
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This inability to see in money the universal measure of value led not only to a series of mistakes about the determination of the general price level. It was directly connected with Ricardo’s false search for an invariable measure of value. This is a problem we have already looked at, but can return to briefly in the light of the discussion of fetishism. To insist, as we have done, that fetishism is a phenomenon of the very being of capital amounts to exactly the same as insisting that the ‘measurement’ of all commodities in one alienated (money) commodity is an objective, necessary process and not the ‘invention’ of man. All those who think there can be some invariable measure of value in fact completely misunderstand the nature of capital. It is because man’s production relations are indirect, relations mediated through things, that there can never be any invariable measure of value, be it ‘labour’, ‘money’ or the currently fashionable Sraffian ‘standard commodity’. Values are measured spontaneously, becoming embodied in one commodity (money) because the production relations are not, and cannot be, planned in advance. To deny this is to deny one of the basic qualities of capitalism as a mode of production. The task of true science here is therefore not to invent fictitious ‘measures’ but to demonstrate how this spontaneous process of measurement actually takes place. The neo-Ricardian school does not even begin to understand this point. All those who wish to discover some standard of value in effect want to transform capitalism into a system capable of conscious planning. In short they want to retain capital while removing its contradictions. Stressing the need for money as a ‘thing’ in which the values of all commodities must be alienated...
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This futile search for a standard of value for the ‘economist’s stone’, should perhaps enable us to put into some perspective the work of those who believe that Marx’s work suffers from precisely the absence of such a standard. It is no accident that there is no trace of the notion of fetishism in the work of what might he called the ‘Sraffa School’ which has returned to Ricardo for some answers to the current crisis in economic theory. For it is precisely this school which has grappled with what we have tried to show is a quite mistaken problem – namely the search for some abstract standard of value – be it a ‘standard’ or ‘composite’ commodity. Nor is it any accident that this school has ‘discovered’ (one hundred years after Marx!) that capital is a social relation. No doubt this is a welcome advance over the orthodox conception that capital is a stock of goods used in the production of other goods. But in the light of what we have tried to show it must be said that it is quite inadequate merely to stress that capital is no mere thing but a social relation. This was not Marx’s position: he insisted always that capital was a social relation, but one affixed to ‘things’. Marx’s qualification to Galiani involved no small quibble. For in this caveat to Galiani is expressed the essential point of Marx’s notion of fetishism, a notion which is fundamental to his entire analysis of capitalist economy.
The last paragraph emphasizing something important with Marx which the issue of fetishism and how the material forms of production also hide the social relations. See this confusion over the ideality of money where people speak of money as simply the sum of people's belief in it having value rather than an objective value derived from the relations of production itself, not dependent on anyone's consciousness/belief but a suprasensous quality inherent to a sensuous/empirical object not due to its own qualities but its place within social relations.
It is the social relations which Marx is trying to show which are historical contingent but which in economics are often treated as a natural given, as if capitalism was simply an extension of production rather than a fundamental change in the qualitative relations of both production and social relations.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/ch00.htmThere is a tight conceptual relationship between Marx's economic theory and his sociological theory, the theory of historical materialism. Years ago Hilferding pointed out that the theory of historical materialism and the labor theory of value have the same starting point, specifically labor as the basic element of human society, an element whose development ultimately determines the entire development of society.[1]
The working activity of people is constantly in a process of change, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, and in different historical periods it has a different character. The process of change and development of the working activity of people involves changes of two types: first, there are changes in means of production and technical methods by which man affects nature, in other words, there are changes in society's productive forces; secondly, corresponding to these changes there are changes in the entire pattern of production relations among people, the participants in the social process of production. Economic formations or types of economy (for example, ancient slave economy, feudal, or capitalist economy) differ according to the character of the production relations among people. Theoretical political economy deals with a definite social-economic formation, specifically with commodity-capitalist economy.
The capitalist economy represents a union of the material-technological process and its social forms, i.e. the totality of production relations among people. The concrete activities of people in the material-technical production process presuppose concrete production relations among them, and vice versa. The ultimate goal of science is to understand the capitalist economy as a whole, as a specific system of productive forces and production relations among people. But to approach this ultimate goal, science must first of all separate, by means of abstraction, two different aspects of the capitalist economy: the technical and the social-economic, the material-technical process of production and its social form, the material productive forces and the social production relations. Each of these two aspects of the economic process is the subject of a separate science. The science of social engineering - still in embryonic state - must make the subject of its analysis the productive forces of society as they interact with the production relations. On the other hand, theoretical political economy deals with production relations specific to the capitalist economy as they interact with the productive forces of society. Each of these two sciences, dealing only with one aspect of the whole process of production, presupposes the presence of the other aspect of the production process in the form of an assumption which underlies its research. In other words, even though political economy deals with production relations, it always presupposes their unbreakable connection with the material-technical process of production, and in its research assumes a concrete stage and process of change of the material-productive forces.
Marx's theory of historical materialism and his economic theory revolve around one and the same basic problem: the relationship between productive forces and production relations. The subject of both sciences is the same: the changes of production relations which depend on the development of productive forces. The adjustment of production relations to changes of productive forces - a process which takes the form of increasing contradictions between the production relations and the productive forces, and the form of social cataclysms caused by these contradictions - is the basic theme of the theory of historical materialism.[2] By applying this general methodological approach to commodity-capitalist society we obtain Marx's economic theory. This theory analyzes the production relations of capitalist society, the process of their change as caused by changes of productive forces, and the growth of contradictions which are generally expressed in crises.
Political economy does not analyze the material-technical aspect of the capitalist process of production, but its social form, i.e., the totality of production relations which make up the "economic structure" of capitalism. Production technology (or productive forces) is included in the field of research of Marx's economic theory only as an assumption, as a starting point, which is taken into consideration only in so far as it is indispensable for the explanation of the genuine subject of our analysis, namely production relations. Marx's consistently applied distinction between the material-technical process of production and its social forms puts in our hands the key for understanding his economic system. This distinction at the same time defines the method of political economy as a social and historical science. In the variegated and diversified chaos of economic life which represents a combination of social relations and technical methods, this distinction also directs our attention precisely to those social relations among people in the process of production, to those production relations, for which the production technology serves as an assumption or basis. Political economy is not a science of the relations of things to things, as was thought by vulgar economists, nor of the relations of people to things, as was asserted by the theory of marginal utility, but of the relations of people to people in the process of production.
Political economy, which deals with the production relations among people in the commodity-capitalist society, presupposes a concrete social form of economy, a concrete economic formation of society. We cannot correctly understand a single statement in Marx's Capital if we overlook the fact that we are dealing with events which take place in a particular society. "In the study of economic categories, as in the case of every historical and social science, it must be borne in mind that as in reality so in our mind the subject, in this case modern bourgeois society, is given and that the categories are therefore but forms of expression, manifestations of existence, and frequently but one-sided aspects of this subject, this definite society." ". . .In the employment of the theoretical method [of Political Economy], the subject, society, must constantly be kept in mind as the premise from which we start." [3] Starting from a concrete sociological assumption, namely from the concrete social structure of an economy, Political Economy must first of all give us the characteristics of this social form of economy and the production relations which are specific to it. Marx gives us these general characteristics in his "theory of commodity fetishism," which could more accurately be called a general theory of production relations of the commodity capitalist economy.
I state this as Marx seemed to be diced up for purposes which loses the unity of his actual work and thus the revolutionary implications of it, as is typical to academics in their eclecticism. One tries to appropriate Marx for economics and then wonders why he seems redundant when his thought is largely reduced for losing sight of the important concepts to his work such as commodity fetishism, earlier treated under the notion of alienation.
Part of which is that it is difficult to step inside Marx's way of thinking from the outset as he is from a fundamentally different tradition of thought due to the line from German Idealism to Marx.
All sorts of things like saying money has value objective but it's also socially contingent seems to be contradictory when one doesn't understand
ideality for example.
The unity is so important because that is really the function of a marxist methodology, to synthesize in order to find the correct path through one sided dualities. Because in their one sidedness they make impossible an analysis to overcome themselves, the presupposition of independence of things reflect a qulitie of abstractions but not of reality. As such, ana analysis which is able to integrate two, such as social relations in connection to production, is worthwhile in illuminating things which aren't accessible otherwise. TO help illustrate the point, a Marxist in their introduction to synthesizing understanding of the relationship between thought and language, where some treated them as synonymous and others treated them as an independent. As both try to avoid the issue in breaking the connection. Similia thing comes in reducing man to that of an ape with no distinction of essentially being human or to present him as being independent of such evolutionary origins, simply god given.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ch01.htmThe first of these forms of analysis begins with the decomposition of the complex mental whole into its elements. This mode of analysis can be compared with a chemical analysis of water in which water is decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen. The essential feature of this form of analysis is that its products are of a different nature than the whole from which they were derived. The elements lack the characteristics inherent in the whole and they possess properties that it did not possess. When one approaches the problem of thinking and speech by decomposing it into its elements, one adopts the strategy of the man who resorts to the decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen in his search for a scientific explanation of the characteristics of water, its capacity to extinguish fire or its conformity to Archimedes law for example. This man will discover, to his chagrin, that hydrogen burns and oxygen sustains combustion. He will never succeed in explaining the characteristics of the whole by analysing the characteristics of its elements. Similarly, a psychology that decomposes verbal thinking into its elements in an attempt to explain its characteristics will search in vain for the unity that is characteristic of the whole. These characteristics are inherent in the phenomenon only as a unified whole. When the whole is analysed into its elements, these characteristics evaporate. In his attempt to reconstruct these characteristics, the investigator is left with no alternative but to search for external, mechanical forms of interaction between the elements.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
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