Marx’s Capital as expression of an innovative method

Abstract

Marx’s Capital owes its actuality not only to its content, but also toits method, historical materialism. The article inserts its development in a line ofcontinuity with naturalist materialism, which emerges in the phase of decline offeudalism. Historical materialism is conceived of as an advanced phase ofmaterialism, whose emergence coincides with the birth of a new mode ofproduction inside mature capitalism, characterized by the abolition of privateproperty and the consequent end of the division of society into classes. As part ofthe process of emergence of a new mode of production, antagonistic to theexisting one, it is constrained by the massified difusion of the official, nonmaterialistic,conceptions. Thus, it is limited to the initial phase of its development,fragmentary and dispersed. This view implies, however, that historicalmaterialism will in the future mode of production constitute the advancedsynthesis of the general scientific method in the realms of the sciences of society.