The Collection of Texts in 1847 and the Birth of Marx’s “View of Capital in the Relations of Production”—A Defence of the “Mature Beginnings of Marx’s View of Capital”
China Social Science Review
No.2, 2025
The Collection of Texts in 1847 and the Birth of Marx’s “View of Capital in the Relations of Production”—A Defence of the “Mature Beginnings of Marx’s View of Capital”
(Abstract)
Liu Enzhi
The collection of texts in 1847 represented by The Poverty of Philosophy and Wage-Labour and Capital marked the birth of Marx’s “view of capital in the relations of production,” and Marx thus entered the mature period of his critical theory of capital. Kong Weiyu of Nanjing University has different viewpoint from the author, in Kong’s opinion, the change that took place in 1847 was nothing more than a matter of the application of historical materialism, but the fact is that the simple application of historical materialism is not sufficient to reach the heights of the view of capital in the relations of production. At that time, Marx clearly realized that the content expressed by economic categories is not mere objects, but relations of production hidden behind the appearance of objects. Although the terminology used by Marx had not yet acquired a perfect theoretical form, he had already grasped the triple substance of capital as a relation of self-expansion, a relation of wage-labour and a relation of power domination.