3. The Method of Political Economy - Part 2 of 7

Value, in its mature form as social/market value, also does not spring into existence ready formed, from nowhere, but is the result of this evolution of the product into the commodity, an evolution that occurs in the real world, quite independently of what goes on in men's heads. And, similarly, with the evolution of exchange-value, money and prices.

Indeed, initially, Men have no names for some of these categories, or else the names are used for quite different categories, themselves evolving alongside the evolution of material reality. Value, for example, was originally retained for describing use-value, rather than its later, scientific, meaning. No word existed for describing value, in this later sense, yet, as Marx describes, in Capital I, this did not change the fact that value existed, and was produced, as individual value, by labour, in the creation of products. And, although they did not use the term value, in this way, in their deliberations, it was still fundamental to their balancing of value and use-value, labour expended as against utility obtained, in maximising their welfare.

It is not the evolution of The Idea, in the mind, that effects these changes in the real world, but the evolution of the material world itself, and man's consideration of it, that brings about the evolution of the ideas in their heads, even if these ideas are then reflected back on to the real world.

“... 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.” (p 207)

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