Marx's Normative Understanding of the Capitalist System

Abstract

This paper challenges the contemporary Marx scholarship's emphasis on questioning whether Marx's critique of capitalism should be understood in normative terms. The emphasis on the normativity of Marx's critique of the capitalist system has obscured Marx's normative understanding of that system. Marx understands the material structures constitutive of the capitalist organization of society as based on implicit social norms that are dependent on subjects' recognition of them—norms that only assume a material form as a result of such recognition but that cannot be unrecognized without material transformation. Marx inherits this rational sense of norms and their bindingness from Kant and Hegel, a sense that consists in the explanation of intentional states in terms of normative statuses and of normative statuses in terms of normative attitudes.