When examining a given country from the standpoint
of political economy, we begin with its population, the division of the
population into classes, town and country, the sea, the different branches of
production, export and import, annual production and consumption, prices, etc.
It would seem to be the proper thing to start with the real and concrete
elements, with the actual preconditions, e.g., to start in the sphere of
economy with population, which forms the basis and the subject of the whole social process of production. Closer consideration
shows, however, that this is wrong. Population is an abstraction if, for
instance, one disregards the classes of which it is composed.
These classes in turn remain empty terms if one does not know the factors on
which they depend, e.g., wage-labour, capital, and so on. These presuppose
exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing
without wage-labour, without value, money, price, etc. If one were to take
population as the point of departure, it would be a very vague notion of a
complex whole and through closer definition one would
arrive analytically at increasingly simple concepts; from imaginary concrete
terms one would move to more and more tenuous abstractions until one reached the most simple definitions. From there it would be
necessary to make the journey again in the opposite direction until one arrived
once more at the concept of population, which is this time not a vague notion
of a whole, but a totality comprising many determinations and relations. The
first course is the historical one taken by political economy at its inception.
The seventeenth-century economists, for example, always took as their starting
point the living organism, the population, the nation, the State, several
States, etc., but analysis led them always in the end to the discovery of a few
decisive abstract, general relations, such as division of labour, money, and
value. When these separate factors were more or less clearly deduced and
established, economic systems were evolved which from simple concepts, such as
labour, division of labour, demand, exchange-value, advanced to categories like
State, international exchange and world market. The latter is obviously the
correct scientific method. The concrete concept is concrete because it is a
synthesis of many definitions, thus representing the unity of diverse aspects.
It appears therefore in reasoning as a summing-up, a result, and not as the
starting point, although it is the real point of origin, and thus also the
point of origin of perception and imagination. The first procedure attenuates
meaningful images to abstract definitions, the second leads from abstract definitions
by way of reasoning to the reproduction of the concrete situation. Hegel
accordingly conceived the illusory idea that the real world is the result of
thinking which causes its own synthesis, its own deepening and its own
movement; whereas the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is
simply the way in which thinking assimilates the
concrete and reproduces it as a concrete mental category. This is, however, by
no means the process of evolution of the concrete world itself. For example,
the simplest economic category, e.g., exchange-value, presupposes population, a
population moreover which produces under definite conditions, as well as a
distinct kind of family, or community, or State, etc. Exchange-value cannot
exist except as an abstract, unilateral relation of an already existing
concrete organic whole. But exchange-value as a
category leads an antediluvian existence. Thus to
consciousness-and this comprises philosophical consciousness – which regards
the comprehending mind as the real man, and hence the comprehended world as such as the only real world; to consciousness, therefore, the
evolution of categories appears as the actual process of production – which
unfortunately is given an impulse from outside – whose result is the world; and
this (which is however again a tautological expression) is true in so far as
the concrete totality regarded as a conceptual totality, as a mental fact, is
indeed a product of thinking, of comprehension; but it is by no means a product
of the idea which evolves spontaneously and whose thinking proceeds outside and
above perception and imagination, but is the result of the assimilation and
transformation of perceptions and images into concepts. The totality as
a conceptual entity seen by the intellect is a product of the thinking intellect which assimilates the world in the only way open
to it, a way which differs from the artistic, religious and practically
intelligent assimilation of this world. The concrete subject remains outside
the intellect and independent of it – that is so long as the intellect adopts a
purely speculative, purely theoretical attitude. The subject, society, must always be envisaged therefore as the pre-condition of
comprehension even when the theoretical method is employed.
But have not these simple categories also an
independent historical or natural existence preceding that of the more concrete
ones? This depends. Hegel, for example, correctly takes ownership, the simplest
legal relation of the subject, as the point of departure of the philosophy of
law. No ownership exists, however, before the family or the relations of master
and servant are evolved, and these are much more
concrete relations. It would, on the other hand, be
correct to say that families and entire tribes exist which have as yet only possessions
and not property. The simpler category appears thus as a relation of
simple family or tribal communities to property. In societies
which have reached a higher stage the category appears as a comparatively
simple relation existing in a more advanced community. The concrete substratum
underlying the relation of ownership is however always
presupposed. One can conceive an individual savage who has possessions;
possession in this case, however, is not a legal relation. It is incorrect that
in the course of historical development possession gave rise to the family. On
the contrary, possession always presupposes this "more concrete legal
category". One may, nevertheless, conclude that the simple categories
represent relations or conditions which
may reflect the immature concrete situation without as yet positing the more
complex relation or condition which is conceptually expressed in the more
concrete category; on the other hand, the same category may be retained as a
subordinate relation in more developed concrete circumstances. Money may exist
and has existed in historical time before capital,
banks, wage-labour, etc. came into being. In this respect
it can be said, therefore, that the simpler category expresses relations
predominating in an immature entity or subordinate relations in a more advanced
entity; relations which already existed historically before the entity had
developed the aspects expressed in a more concrete category. The procedure of
abstract reasoning which advances from the simplest to more
complex concepts to that extent conforms to actual historical
development.
It is true, on the other hand, that there are certain highly developed, but
nevertheless historically immature, social formations which employ some of the
most advanced economic forms, e.g., cooperation, developed division of labour,
etc., without having developed any money at all, for instance Peru. In Slavonic
communities too, money – and its pre-condition, exchange – is of little or no
importance within the individual community, but is used
on the borders, where commerce with other communities takes place; and it is
altogether wrong to assume that exchange within the community is an original
constituent element. On the contrary, in the beginning exchange tends to arise
in the intercourse of different communities with one another, rather than among
members of the same community. Moreover, although money begins to play a
considerable role very early and in diverse ways, it is known
to have been a dominant factor in antiquity only among nations developed in a
particular direction, i.e., merchant nations. Even among the Greeks and Romans,
the most advanced nations of antiquity, money reaches its full development,
which is presupposed in modern bourgeois society, only
in the period of their disintegration. Thus the full
potential of this quite simple category does not emerge historically in the
most advanced phases of society, and it certainly does not penetrate into all
economic relations. For example, taxes in kind and deliveries in kind remained
the basis of the Roman empire even at the height of
its development; indeed a completely evolved monetary system existed in
Labour seems to be a very simple category. The notion of labour in this
universal form, as labour in general, is also extremely old. Nevertheless
"labour" in this simplicity is economically considered just as modern
a category as the relations which give rise to this
simple abstraction. The Monetary System, for example, still regards wealth
quite objectively as a thing existing independently in the shape of money.
Compared with this standpoint, it was a substantial advance when the
Manufacturing or Mercantile System transferred the source of wealth from the
object to the subjective activity – mercantile or industrial labour – but it
still considered that only this circumscribed activity itself produced money.
In contrast to this system, the Physiocrats assume that a specific form of
labour – agriculture – creates wealth, and they see the object no longer in the
guise of money, but as a product in general, as the universal result of labour.
In accordance with the still circumscribed activity, the product remains a
naturally developed product, an agricultural product, a product of the land par
excellence.
It was an immense advance when Adam Smith rejected all restrictions with
regard to the activity that produces wealth – for him it was labour as such,
neither manufacturing, nor commercial, nor agricultural labour, but all types
of labour. The abstract universality which creates wealth
implies also the universality of the objects defined as wealth: they are
products as such, or once more labour as such, but in this case past,
materialised labour. How difficult and immense a transition this was is demonstrated by the fact that Adam Smith himself
occasionally relapses once more into the Physiocratic system. It might seem
that in this way merely an abstract expression was found for the simplest and
most ancient relation in which human beings act as producers – irrespective of
the type of society they live in. This is true in one respect, but not in
another.
The fact that the specific kind of labour is irrelevant presupposes a highly
developed complex of actually existing kinds of labour, none of which is any
more the all-important one. The most general abstractions arise on the whole only when concrete development is most
profuse, so that a specific quality is seen to be common to many phenomena, or
common to all. Then it is no longer perceived solely
in a particular form. This abstraction of labour is, on the other hand, by no
means simply the conceptual resultant of a variety of concrete types of labour.
The fact that the particular kind of labour employed is immaterial is
appropriate to a form of society in which individuals easily pass from one type
of labour to another, the particular type of labour being accidental to them
and therefore irrelevant. Labour, not only as a category but in reality, has
become a means to create wealth in general, and has ceased to be tied as an attribute to a particular individual. This
state of affairs is most pronounced in the
The example of labour strikingly demonstrates how even the most abstract categories,
despite their validity in all epochs – precisely because they are abstractions
– are equally a product of historical conditions even in the specific form of
abstractions, and they retain their full validity only for and within the
framework of these conditions.
Bourgeois society is the most advanced and complex historical organisation
of production. The categories which express
its relations, and an understanding of its structure, therefore, provide an
insight into the structure and the relations of production of all formerly
existing social formations the ruins and component elements of which were used
in the creation of bourgeois society. Some of these unassimilated remains are still carried on within bourgeois society, others,
however, which previously existed. only in rudimentary
form, have been further developed and have attained their full significance,
etc. The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. On the other hand,
rudiments of more advanced forms in the lower species of animals can only be understood when the more advanced forms are
already known. Bourgeois economy thus provides a key to the economy of
antiquity, etc. But it is quite impossible (to gain
this insight) in the manner of those economists who obliterate all historical
differences and who see in all social phenomena only bourgeois phenomena. If
one knows rent, it is possible to understand tribute, tithe, etc., but they do
not have to be treated as identical.
Since bourgeois society is, moreover, only a contradictory form of
development, it contains relations of earlier societies often merely in very
stunted form or even in the form of travesties, e.g., communal ownership. Thus,
although it is true that the categories of bourgeois economy are valid for all
other social formations, this has to be taken cum grano salis, for
they may contain them in an advanced, stunted, caricatured, etc., form, that is always with substantial differences. What is called historical evolution depends in general on the fact
that the latest form regards earlier ones as stages in the development of
itself and conceives them always in a one-sided manner, since only rarely and
under quite special conditions is a society able to adopt a critical attitude
towards itself; in this context we are not of course discussing historical
periods which themselves believe that they are periods of decline. The
Christian religion was able to contribute to an objective understanding of
earlier mythologies only when its self-criticism was to a certain extent prepared,
as it were potentially. Similarly, only when the self-criticism of bourgeois
society had begun, was bourgeois political economy able to understand the
feudal, ancient and oriental economies. In so far as bourgeois political
economy did not simply identify itself with the past in a mythological manner,
its criticism of earlier economies-especially of the feudal
system against which it still had to wage a direct struggle-resembled the
criticism that Christianity directed against heathenism, or which Protestantism
directed against Catholicism.
Just as in general when examining any historical or social
science, so also in the case of the development of economic categories is it
always necessary to remember that the subject, in this context contemporary bourgeois
society, is presupposed both in reality and in the mind, and that therefore
categories express forms of existence and conditions of existence – and
sometimes merely separate aspects – of this particular society, the subject;
thus the category, even from the scientific standpoint, by no means
begins at the moment when it is discussed as such. This has to be remembered because it provides important criteria for the
arrangement of the material. For example, nothing seems more natural than to
begin with rent, i.e., with landed property, since it is associated with the
earth, the source of all production and all life, and with agriculture, the
first form of production in all societies that have attained a measure of
stability. But nothing would be more erroneous. There
is in every social formation a particular branch of production
which determines the position and importance of all the others, and the
relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine the relations of all
other branches as well. It is as though light of a particular hue were cast
upon everything, tingeing all other colours and modifying their specific
features; or as if a special ether determined the
specific gravity of everything found in it. Let us take as an example pastoral
tribes. (Tribes living exclusively on hunting or fishing are beyond the
boundary line from which real development begins.) A certain type of
agricultural activity occurs among them and this determines land ownership. It
is communal ownership and retains this form in a larger or smaller measure,
according to the degree to which these people maintain their traditions, e.g.,
communal ownership among the Slavs. Among settled agricultural people-settled
already to a large extent-where agriculture predominates as in the societies of
antiquity and the feudal period, even manufacture, its structure and the forms
of property corresponding thereto, have, in some measure, specifically agrarian
features. Manufacture is either completely dependent on agriculture, as in the
earlier Roman period, or as in the Middle Ages, it copies in the town and in its conditions the
organisation of the countryside. In the Middle Ages
even capital – unless it was solely money capital – consisted of the
traditional tools, etc., and retained a specifically agrarian character. The
reverse takes place in bourgeois society. Agriculture to an increasing extent
becomes just a branch of industry and is completely dominated
by capital. The same applies to rent. In all forms in which landed property is the
decisive factor, natural relations still predominate; in the forms in which the
decisive factor is capital, social, historically evolved elements predominate.
Rent cannot be understood without capital, but capital
can be understood without rent. Capital is the economic power that dominates
everything in bourgeois society. It must form both the point of departure and
the conclusion and it has to be expounded before
landed property. After analysing capital and landed property separately, their
interconnection must be examined.
It would be inexpedient and wrong therefore to
present the economic categories successively in the order in which they have
played the dominant role in history. On the contrary, their
order of succession is determined by their mutual relation in modern bourgeois
society and this is quite the reverse of what appears to be natural to them or
in accordance with the sequence of historical development The point at issue is
not the role that various economic relations have played in the succession of
various social formations appearing in the course of history; even less is it
their sequence "as concepts" (Proudhon) (a nebulous notion
of the historical process), but their position within modern bourgeois society.
It is precisely the predominance of agricultural peoples in the ancient world which caused the merchant nations – Phoenicians,
Carthaginians – to develop in such purity (abstract precision). For capital in
the shape of merchant or money capital appears in that
abstract form where capital has not yet become the dominant factor in society.
Lombards and Jews occupied the same position with regard to mediaeval agrarian
societies.
Another example of the various roles which the same categories have played
at different stages of society are joint-stock companies, one of the most
recent features of bourgeois society; but they arise also in its early period
in the form of large privileged commercial companies with
rights of monopoly.
The concept of national wealth finds its way into the works of the
economists of the seventeenth century as the notion that wealth is created for
the State, whose power, on the other hand, is proportional to this wealth – a
notion which to some extent still survives even among
eighteenth-century economists. This is still an unintentionally hypocritical
manner in which wealth and the production of wealth are proclaimed to be the goal of the modern State, which is regarded merely
as a means for producing wealth.
The disposition of material has evidently to be made in such a way that (section) one comprises general abstract definitions, which therefore appertain in some measure to all social formations, but in the sense set forth earlier. Two, the categories which constitute the internal structure of bourgeois society and on which the principal classes are based. Capital, wage-labour, landed property and their relations to one another. Town and country. The three large social classes; exchange between them. Circulation. The (private) credit system. Three, the State as the epitome of bourgeois society. Analysis of its relations to itself. The 44 unproductive" classes. Taxes. National debt. Public credit. Population. Colonies. Emigration. Four, international conditions of production. International division of labour. International exchange. Export and import. Rate of exchange. Five, world market and crises.