effort along the same lines: Marx wanted to reveal, in Capital, the inner work-
ings of capitalism, thereby arming revolutionaries with firm knowledge of
the enemy. Capitalstands or falls as a work of theory; if Marx’s theory is a
criticaltheory, this is because, having brought its readers to understand cap-
italism, it allows them to judge capitalism to be somehow faulty.
In this paper, I will challenge these common notions of Marx’s project in
Capitalby recasting Marx’s relationship to science in general, and to politi-
cal economy in particular. The standard reading of Capitalcannot make any
sense of numerous details of the text. Taking these textual details seriously,
as I will try to show, produces a radically unorthodox redescription of Marx’s
undertaking. I will begin with what I take to be the cornerstone of the com-
mon wisdom, namely a certain reading of the 1859 Preface to A Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy. In the first two sections of this paper, I will
attack this cornerstone by placing Marx’s famous comments within the tex-
tual and political context from which they are usually abstracted. This will
orient the reading of Capitalthat will follow in the next three sections. This
reading will show that, for Marx, a science of capitalism cannot possibly
ground our revolutionary action, but is rather a trial that teaches us the lim-
its of science as theory, and of knowledge as such.
1. At the Entrance to Science
The common wisdom regarding Marx’s turn to science has so much cogency
because it seems to be the plain meaning of Marx’s 1859 Preface, the pro-
logue to his first attempt at writing Capital. So many commentators agree on
the basic outline of the story because it is the story Marx himself tells. Therefore,
if I am to succeed at reformulating Marx’s encounter with science, I must
first wrestle with Marx’s own presentation of that encounter.
The 1859 Preface is composed of what he calls a “sketch of the course of
[his] studies,” an intellectual autobiography that traces his trajectory from
editor of the Rheinische Zeitungto surveyor of bourgeois political economy.
Marx portrays this development as a movement from ignorance to knowl-
edge. While engaged in journalism, he claims, he had run up against “so-
called material interests” involuntarily, and, he claims further, much to his
embarrassment. He says he resisted the first pushes of those around him
toward French socialism and communism, out of a principled unwillingness
to botch the job. Only after his researches in Paris did he come to see that
The Origin of Political Economy and the Descent of Marx • 33