About the Marxian theory of history in “Pre-capitalist economic formations”*

Abstract

In the "laboratory-text" of the Formen, Marx tries to determine the abstract lines of the process of multilinear development of the forms of property, starting from the natural unity of the workingman with its material premises until the capitalist form of privatisation of property: He puts into effect a very elevated conceptual abstraction that uses in particular the categories of the Hegelian logic of reflection, which is the only one to permit him to go into an analysis of the "dialectic" of the forms of property in its abstraction. It's a dialectic which stays inside the typical transformation produced by the reproduction, and it's not a super-historical dialectic and general, characteristic of a philosophy of history. The Marxian dialectic doesn't appear therefore as the Hegelian logic developed on a materialistic base, but as a heuristic abstraction of which ontological e methodological implications must be considered in regard to a Marxist theory of history.