Social Ontology: Recasting Political Philosophy Through a Phenomenology of Whoness

摘要

Many years ago Michael Eldred was a co-author of Critique of Competitive Freedom and the Bourgeois-Democratic State: Outline of a Form-Analytic Extension of Marx's Uncompleted System (Kurasje, 1984). While not widely known, this work has greatly influenced a number of Marxian theorists concerned with the methodological framework of Marx's theory and his relationship to Hegelian dialectics. In contrast to the traditional reading according to which Marx's critique of political economy traces a supposed historical transition from simple commodity production to capitalism, Eldred and his co-authors insisted on a systematic reading in which capitalism is the object of investigation from the beginning, with transitions from one level of theoretical abstraction to another justified logically by the immanent contradictionsarising in the former. And in contrast to the traditional view that Marx's critique of political economy moves from a level in which values are calculated in terms of labor times to one in which money prices reign, these authors insisted that money is the only form in which value ever appears. The claims that Marx's theory should be evaluated by the standards of dialectical logic, and that the heart of Marx's position is found in his account of money as the value form, remain controversial. Whatever one's views on these matters, Eldred and his co-authors deserve great credit for their very significant contributions to debates on these and related issues.