Logic and history of the capitalist mode of production: theoretical and methodological issues

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study what Marx means by the term “history.” To this end, the author seeks to dispel a historicist interpretation of the term, emphasizing the logical character of Marx’s investigation. Having conceptualized the logical model of the capitalist mode of production and its immanent temporality, Marx can also conceptualize how this mode of production “begins” and “ends”, which means that capital finds, at the moment of its genesis, conditions that do not qualitatively correspond to its full functioning. This logical fact points to the internal historicity of the capitalist mode of production, that is, to the ideal moment zero of its life, when it begins to develop in in the midst of another mode of production. Hence the need to analyze the different phases of subsumption, which indicate how capital develops the bases that correspond to its qualitative nature and reaches its posited condition, that of capital that has become capital. When one speaks of the capitalist mode of production as a historical phase of human reproduction in nature, one must understand that this is a logical temporality: this is the meaning of “historicity” in Marx.