Abstract
While the Aristotelian lineage of Marx’s thinking has been much discussed, the full import of this influence not been adequately appreciated. Many scholars have rightly shown that Marx makes use of Aristotelian concepts throughout his oeuvre, but they have usually done so in a haphazard and unsystematic manner. In so doing, they have failed to account for the true depth of this inheritance. For Marx does not merely cherry-pick Aristotelian ideas at random; rather, the basic categories of his own theory arise from an emphatic encounter with Aristotle’s entire nexus of metaphysical concepts. Indeed, without discounting the all-important influence of Hegel as well, this study aims to show that the edifice of Marxian philosophy and revolutionary social theory rests upon his transformative appropriation of the Aristotelian system. If we wish to understand the true nature of Marxian theory and praxis, these ancient foundations must be excavated and brought to the light of day. Specifically, I argue that the main progression of concepts, which comprises the essence of Marx’s theoretical elaboration of the inner nature of capitalist production, rests upon the very progression of concepts at the heart of Aristotle’s metaphysical system. Aristotle’s Metaphysics can concisely be expressed by the following series of concepts: ousia → form/matter → energeia/dynamis → entelecheia (most concretely expressed by the Prime Mover, i.e., as “thought thinking itself”). Likewise, Marx’s social ontology of capitalist production can be understood according to its own progressive series of essential concepts, namely: commodity → value-form/use-value → valorization-process/labor-process → value-valorizing-itself. It is my contention that this latter series is definitively grounded upon the former, meaning that Marx’s social ontology of capitalism is fundamentally Aristotelian in nature. In order to thoroughly demonstrate the nature of Marx’s foundational Aristotelianism, this study is broken up into two parts. It is, therefore, a synthetic work. In Part I, a relatively comprehensive exegesis of Aristotle’s nexus of metaphysical concepts is given. The intricacy of the analysis is meant to not only provide a compelling portrait of Aristotle’s Metaphysics on its own terms, but is done in order to show the true depth of the lineage of this conceptual framework in Marx’s theory. It is precisely this depth and systematicity that has too often been ignored in the scholarship about the relationship between these two thinkers. In Part II the manner in which Marx appropriates the Aristotelian categories is discussed in detail. I argue that Marx’s understanding of the central contradiction of capital is precisely related to the Aristotelian notions of energeia (activity) and ousia (substance), and demonstrate how the Aristotelian system directly undergirds the essential concepts of Marx’s own systematic theory.