Reading Capital: Part II Continued (The Sublime Object of Political Economy)

So, now we come again to the question—what is the object of the economic theory in Capital? What is the difference between Marx’s KO and that of his predecessors?

To arrive at Marx’s KO, we must give an account of the structure of the KO of Political Economy.

Political Economy takes its object as given (empiricism) and measurable. In other words, it occupies itself with facts, rather than the creation of concepts which open the space of facts. But this must mean it simply adopts concepts which are ready to hand, or blindly and unconsciously creates them.

In fact, in place of a well-defined conceptual grounding, Political Economy founds its plane of facts on the dimension of satisfaction of the needs of assumed human subjects. These human subjects are also merely given or assumed as facts. But what gives the given? Ideology, that’s what!

In keeping with the nature of an ideological discourse, Political Economy pretends to deal with economic phenomena as eternal givens.