3. The Method of Political Economy
Marx describes the superficial nature of bourgeois political economy, which begins with a description of general abstractions such as nation, society, population, production and distribution. But, even an analysis that begins on this basis, to be scientific, must look into each of these categories, and determine their reality, and fundamental nature.
“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.” (p 205-6)
The economists of the 18th century, therefore, were always led back to a few important abstractions, and 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.” (p 206)
Hegel's idealist dialectic saw the process as being one of the unfolding of The Idea, through a process of rational thought in Men's heads (actually the heads of philosophers), which then became materialised in the real world, via their actions upon it (actually via the actions of the state advised by the philosophers).
“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.” (p 206)
In other words, as described, before exchange-value can exist, in its mature form, commodity production and exchange must become generalised in large, liquid markets, and this does not occur overnight. Before it reaches that stage, commodity production and exchange exists in varying degrees of development. Its only when towns become large enough to sustain sizeable markets that the process develops qualitatively. Commodity production and exchange dates back around 7,000 years, and, within this period, it also takes the form, as described by Marx, of the exchange of commodities still essentially for the purpose of direct consumption. That is certainly the case with systems of barter.
And, before even this barter can take place, on the basis of exchange-values, it is necessary that the values of the exchanged commodities be known, or else the relation of one to the other cannot be established, or else, as with the exchange of surplus products, takes place arbitrarily. This is reflected in the fact that the commodity is first a product, with its own individual value, before it can become a commodity with a market value/exchange-value.
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