"Marx, Hegel, Ricardo:
The 'Inverted World' in the Heart of the Critique of Political Economy"
Loren Goldner
[This article was written for Wildcat (Germany), #73.]
“Yet the way that surplus-value is transformed into the form of profit, by way of the rate of profit, is only a further extension of that inversion of subject and object which already occurs in the course of the production process itself…This inverted relationship necessarily gives rise, even in the simple relation of production itself, to a correspondingly inverted conception of the situation… It is, as one can study in the case of the Ricardian school, a completely inverted attempt to want to attempt the laws of the rate of profit as laws of the rate of surplus value, or vice versa.” — Marx, Capital, vol. III, London, 1981, p. 136. [Translation slightly modified. All Marx quotes from Capital are from the Fowkes and Fernbach translations; page references without quotes are from the German edition (vols. 23–25 of the Marx-Engels Werke). Quotes from Theories of Surplus Value are from the MEW, Berlin 1956-1975; my translation.]
In the past forty years, it has become easier to draw a sharp line between Ricardo’s and Marx’s theory of value and between Ricardo’s economics and Marx’s critique of political economy.
Ricardo was for Marx the “most advanced capitalist viewpoint” in political economy. Marx’s “sensuous transformative activity” is, in the "Theses on Feuerbach," the “active side developed by idealism”, and in particular by the other “most advanced capitalist viewpoint”, the work of G.F.W. Hegel (1770–1832).