“The analysis of material social relations (i.e., of those that take shape without passing through man's consciousness: when exchanging products men enter into production relations without even realising that there is a social relation of production here)—the analysis of material social relations at once made it possible to observe recurrence and regularity and to generalise the systems of the various countries in the single fundamental concept: social formation. It was this generalisation alone that made it possible to proceed from the description of social phenomena (and their evaluation from the standpoint of an ideal) to their strictly scientific analysis, which isolates, let us say by way of example, that which distinguishes one capitalist country from another and investigates that which is common to all of them.” (p 140)
It is the determination of social relations as a function of production relations, and production relations as a function of the productive forces that enables the analysis of the development of social formations to be undertaken scientifically, on the basis of a series of natural laws.
“The subjectivists, for instance, although they admitted that historical phenomena conform to law, were incapable of regarding their evolution as a process of natural history, precisely because they came to a halt before Man's social ideas and aims and were unable to reduce them to material social relations.” (p 141)
Marx's analysis, in Capital, is an analysis of the development of social formations on the basis of not just a mass of empirical data, but of the uncovering and application of those natural laws, primarily The Law of Value, to it, in order not just to describe the capitalist system, but to explain how it comes into being, how it reproduces itself, and develops, and how it ultimately negates itself via the process of capital accumulation, which abolishes capital itself as private property, converting it into socialised capital, in the form of cooperatives and joint stock companies, which are the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism.
“The whole point, however, is that Marx did not content himself with this skeleton, that he did not confine himself to “economic theory” in the ordinary sense of the term, that, while explaining the structure and development of the given formation of society exclusively through production relations, he nevertheless everywhere and incessantly scrutinised the superstructure corresponding to these production relations and clothed the skeleton in flesh and blood.” (p 141)
Its on this basis that Marx can explain the nature of the state as a class state, whose purpose is not neutrality or some abstract, functional, efficient running of society, but is to defend and expand the interests of the ruling-class, even where that ruling social class may not even itself be fully conscious of what its own interests actually are. As Marx says, if reality was observable simply from surface appearance, there would be no requirement for science, to uncover the underlying reality. And, this state does not extend only to the bodies of armed men, but also, more significantly, to the ideological arms of the state, in the media, the universities, schools, churches, as well as nowadays, via the welfare state and so on.
“It will now be clear that the comparison with Darwin is perfectly accurate: Capital is nothing but “certain closely interconnected generalising ideas crowning a veritable Mont Blanc of factual material.” And if anybody has read Capital and contrived not to notice these generalising ideas, it is not the fault of Marx, who, as we have seen, pointed to these ideas even in the preface... Just as Darwin put an end to the view of animal and plant species being unconnected, fortuitous, “created by God” and immutable, and was the first to put biology on an absolutely scientific basis by establishing the mutability and the succession of species, so Marx put an end to the view of society being a mechanical aggregation of individuals which allows of all sorts of modification at the will of the authorities (or, if you like, at the will of society and the government) and which emerges and changes casually, and was the first to put sociology on a scientific basis by establishing the concept of the economic formation of society as the sum-total of given production relations, by establishing the fact that the development of such formations is a process of natural history.” (p 142)
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