The critique of Marx to the metaphysics of political economy

Abstract

In developing his materialist conception of history, Marx creates, at the same time, a critique to the Hegelian thought next to a critique of political economy. Those critiques are mainly concentrate in his works written throughout his youth, in particular the Misery of Philosophy. Based on this work of Marx, the present paper aims to discourse on the metaphysics of political economy, whose critique is directed mainly to Proudhon responding to the work Philosophy of Misery, in which Proudhon tries to provide, in a metaphysical bias, the bases for the social problems, applying the Hegelian dialectic to the method of political economy. For Marx, the Proudhonist ideology, which is expressed in that work, is totally reformist and utopian. In contrast to the Proudhonist thought, and explaining simultaneously the foundations that constitute the theory of social being, which is woven by the capitalist mode of production, Marx publishes in 1847 his work the Misery of Philosophy in response to Proudhon's Philosophy of Misery.