Towards a critical ontology of socio-economic transformation processes: Marx’s contribution

The aim of the article is to contribute to a critical ontology of socio-economic transformation processes. Elements for such an ontology, it argues, can be found in the interaction between three foundational aspects of Marx’s thought: the notion of labour as a human social activity; the meaning and implications of the notion of alienation; and the relationship between quantitative and qualitative changes. After analysing these elements, the article discusses possible developments for an ontology of socio-economic transformation processes and concludes that Marx’s fundamental contribution to such an ontology is to show that the emergence of a new system of division of labour as a qualitative transformation requires a change in the relationships between the entities of an already existing system of division of labour that gives it a new functionality and a new direction. Marx teaches us that we need to identify the turning points in change processes and that, in this last respect, emergence is not a gradual process. The article argues that, in more general terms, the notion of emergence as a process of change in the functionality of an existing system of relationships to which a new direction is given can be used as a method to analyse socio-economic transformation processes at different levels of social reality. Thus understood, emergence involves the rejection of any form of reductionism in the social sciences.