第9章

Production also changes in consequence to changes in distribution --e.g.concentration of capital,different distribution of the population in town and countryside,and the like.Production is,finally,determined by the demands of consumption.There is an interaction between the various aspects.Such interaction takes place in any organic entity.

Marx intended this to be the Introduction to his Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy(1859),but,as his Preface to that work notes,he decided to omit it.

The unfinished rough draft,which was found among Marx's papers after his death.First published 1903,in Die Neue Zeit.Would become the first manu in the Grundrisse.

I.PRODUCTION,CONSUMPTION,DISTRIBUTION,EXCHANGE (CIRCULATION)3.The Method of Political Economy 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 the whole 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-labor,capital,and so on.These presuppose exchange,division of labor,prices,etc.For example,capital without wage-labor,without value,money,prices,etc.is nothing.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 definition.

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 tis inception.The 17th 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 labor,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 labor,division of labor,demand,exchange value,advanced to categories like state,international exchange and world market.This 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,unilateralrelation 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 mental 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 who think 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 the 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 precondition of comprehension,even when the theoretical method is employed.