The Moral in "The Capital". An Attempt on Revision of Marxist Critique of Political Economy

In the article the modern German philosopher, a theorist of Frankfurt school Axel Honneth, following the leading representatives of the Western Marxism, recognizes essential distinction between historico-political writings of Marx and his later works on economy. He discovers the specificity of this deep divergence in the fact that Marx, explaining the social processes in these two bodies of his works, uses different categories of temporality and applies different theories of action. The author clearly shows that in Marx’s historical and political works moral intentions of collective actors are crucial in determining social actions, while in later works on political economy they play no role any longer, since all the processes of development of society are explained there by expansion of the logic of capital. Conclusions drawn from the moral aspects of collective action in Marx’s historical and political writings, are applied in this work to the conceptual expansion of the Marx’s analysis of capital, which, according to Honneth, is too narrowly based on “utilitarian premises”. Honneth is convinced that only after expanding the conceptual foundations of “Capital” by sociological context we can clearly see the normative conflicts accompanying capitalist activity. According to the author, only by including morality in the political economy we can reveal the influence of social struggles on the internal relations of the capitalist market economy. In his opinion, this is a necessary start for the construction of any practically oriented social theory.

моральные конфликты, временность, теория капитала, структурный анализ, теория действия, moral conflicts, temporality, theory of capital, structural analysis, theory of action

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