Marxism: and the Very Idea of Critical Political Economy

Abstract

Locating Marxism within the spectrum of critical approaches to international political economy (IPE) invites us to reflect on the very idea of critical political economy. Marx could claim copyright on it, since he named his intellectual project the critique of political economy from the mid-1840s onwards. The object of this critique is dual: at once the concepts and theories of especially those whom Marx describes as the classical political economists (above all, Adam Smith and David Ricardo) and the capitalist mode of production that these categories simultaneously reveal and conceal. Marx takes the notion of critique itself from the classical idealist tradition in German philosophy. Here the relevant figure is less G.W.F. Hegel (deconstructing whose political thought represented the starting point of Marx’s trajectory towards materialism and communism) than Immanuel Kant. Kant sought precisely to develop a critical philosophy—hence the titles of his three major works—the Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgement. Kant understood critique not so much as the demolition of an opponent’s position, the exposure of falsehoods and fallacies, than as the establishing of limits. Thus the mistake of metaphysics, Kant argued, was to try to arrive at truths by reason alone, going beyond the boundaries of sense experience.