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Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat

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If you grow up in a capitalist society, like the United States, you will be inclined to all sorts of odd beliefs, about human nature, laws of economics, and earning one's pay, for example. These beliefs will condition how you feel about, for example, labor unions. Academic economics is an expression of this tendency. As such, the best it can be, without a lot of pushback from within and without, is confused. Since it is confused, one can find self-contradictions in its teachings, and one will find which theoretical trends are marginalized and which are valorized have little to do with the worth of their contents. (Note that one can argue about specific self-contradictions and the worth of specific trends independently of one's opinions about the above claims.)

I suggest that one can find some such claims in some of the texts of Karl Marx. And those specific texts are still worth exploring. I refer to, for example:
  • The Poverty of Philosophy (I suppose specifically, Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, is a more narrow reference)
  • The distinction between "Classical political economy" and "Vulgar political economy" in the author's preface to the second edition of Capital
  • Capital, Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter I, Section 4: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof
  • Capital, Volume 3, Part Seven: The Revenues and Their Sources
  • Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, Addenda: Revenue and Its Sources. Vulgar Political Economy

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