The Main Points Of Argumentation Applied By Karl Marx And...

In this essay, I will reconstruct the main points of argumentation applied by both Karl Marx and Georg Lukacs in two of their well-known works, Estranged Labor and History and Class Consciousness. I will compare the two with one another in order to develop a comprehensive overview of the difficult and complex relationship between alienation, production, the commodity structure, the ideological applications of the capitalist system and the way in which they are extended into every facet of real life processes through the processes of reification and objectification. Though a majority of this essay will be dedicated to exploring the thinkers’ explication of the role and function of political economy in their texts, it will also investigate the focus of Marxist style critique on the concept of value rather than on the concept of right. Both of the texts at hand deal with distinction of value and right to varying degrees; for instance, in Reification, Lukacs’ distinction between the qualitative and the quantitative, and the shift from the former to the latter via the emphasis on rational calculation and its effect on the judicial process for instance, opens up a way of thinking about the notion of right as the quantified limitations of the legal basis of the human applied over the qualitative realities that are concealed behind them (more on this later). In a similar vein, the way in which Marx explains in Estranged Labor the â€Å"abstract formulae† that political economy