Chapter 1A – Historical Notes On The Analysis of Commodities - Part 1 of 8

Chapter 1A – Historical Notes OnThe Analysis of Commodities

Much of the contents of this section are covered in greater detail in Theories of Surplus Value, Part 1. Marx, also, here, sets out, briefly, the effect of other material conditions in affecting the specifics of historical development and forms, and their reflection in ideas. The reason that political economy, in Britain, first takes the form of Mercantilism, but, in France, Physiocracy, is that Britain succeeded Holland as being the premier merchant nation, whereas France's development proceeded on the basis of its agricultural production.

“A comparative study of Petty’s and Boisguillebert’s writings and characters – apart from illuminating the social divergence between Britain and France at the close of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth – would explain the origins of those national contrasts that exist between British and French political economy. The same contrast reappears in Ricardo and Sismondi.” (Note *, p 52)

The study of political economy over 150 years, starting with Petty and Boisgillebert, and ending with Ricardo and Sismondi, “is an analysis of the aspects of the commodity into two forms of labour – use-value is reduced to concrete labour or purposive productive activity, exchange-value to labour-time or homogeneous social labour.” (p 52)

Petty is, as Marx describes, “the Father of English political economy”. His method follows that of Descartes in Philosophy. The mathematician Descartes, in his “Discourse on Method”, and in his “Meditations”, set out to construct a philosophical method based upon the same principles as mathematics, in which nothing could be assumed unless verifiable and quantifiable. It was on that basis that he famously discounted the assumption of his own existence, only resolving it in his dictum Cogito Ergo Sum – I think, therefore, I am. In his “Political Arithmetick”, Petty says, “he proposes to speak “in Terms of Number, Weight or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men, to the Consideration of others” (Note **, p 52)

Petty, writing well before Smith, describes the division of labour and does so, Marx says, on a much grander scale.

“... he shows the advantages which division of labour has for production not only with the example of the manufacture of a watch – as Adam Smith did later with the example of the manufacture of a pin – but considers also a town and a whole country as large-scale industrial establishments.” (Note **, p 52)

On the basis of this understanding of division of labour, i.e. of a production of different use values by different types of concrete labour, Petty is able to discern the formation of a nation's material wealth as arising from this concrete labour, in conjunction with Nature.

“This conception of the source of material wealth does not remain more or less sterile as with his contemporary Hobbes, but leads to the political arithmetic, the first form in which political economy is treated as a separate science.” (p 52-4)

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