Paul Mattick Jr, puts the point this way, ‘Marx’s critique – his “scientific revolution” – therefore involved not merely a reworking of economic categories but the construction of another set of concepts, explicitly social and historical ones’.31 Marx is often misinterpreted or misused because his ideas are forced into conceptual moulds that he set out to break. Not all of Marx’s concepts are ‘explicitly social and historical’ in nature, however.32 Marx has a place for generally applicable concepts, such as use value or the labour process, but there is no actual production in general:
All epochs of production have certain common traits, common characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element ... If there is no production in general, then there is also no general production.
We can make some generally applicable observations about production – for example, every labour process involves a place, objects of production, some means of production and living labour – but there is no production in general.34 Production always has a specific social form and purpose, and production always has a specific useful object as its end – ‘there is also no general production’. Use value and the labour process are among the generally applicable categories in Capital, whereas all the value categories, i.e. commodity, exchange value, value, money, capital, surplus value (as opposed to surplus product, a generally applicable category), wages, and more, are explicitly social and historical. All of the latter are proper to the capitalist mode of production, though they have often been mistaken for transhistorical abstractions, not only in classical and neoclassical economics but also by Marxists.
- [31] Mattick Jr 1993, p. 124. Likewise, Martha Campbell draws the consequence ‘there are no counterparts to Marx’s economic concepts in either classical or utility theory’ (Campbell 1993b, p. 152).
- [32] On the difference between general and determinate abstractions, see Murray 1988 (Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge), Chapter Ten.
- [33] Marx 1973, pp. 85–6. ‘It is entirely certain that human production possesses definite laws or relations which remain the same in all forms of production. These identical characteristics are quite simple and can be summarised in a very small number of commonplace phrases’ (Marx 1994, p. 236). Obviously, no such summary would count as a science.