From the series Principles of Marxism
The method of exposition in Marx’s economic analysis, which he summarised on various occasions, adopts the progression from the simplest to the most complex concepts. It is a method that, at first glance, appears to correspond to common sense — from easy to difficult — but which Marx explains by contradicting common sense. Common sense distorts knowledge, starting right from the elementary building blocks of the representation of reality, which requires scientific abstraction to understand. Opportunism will always set the prejudices of common sense against the science-party.
Marx writes, introducing Volume I of Capital: “The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is easier of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society the commodity-form of the product of labour — the value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy".
Volume I of Capital, Marx adds, “cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty”, “with the exception of the section on value-form”.
The microscopic anatomy of the cell of capital, the commodity, dissected with the scalpel of scientific abstraction, is formidably powerful. It is the foundation for understanding the mysteries of capital. We are surrounded by immense quantities of commodities of all shapes and uses. Consumer goods; raw materials; energy consumed in homes, offices, and factories; means of production; housing; industrial warehouses; land; means of transport; tourist travel; health care; these are all commodities. Capitalism appears as an endless fair of commodities that are constantly modified, modernised, and spread throughout every community on the planet. Everyone knows that each commodity is characterised by its specific utility, its use-value, and by its price. The price tells us that the use-value is the shell, the casket that contains an exchange-value. On the market, the buyer is looking for a particular use-value; the seller is interested in realising the exchange-value contained in the commodity he sells.
The price makes it possible to compare even the most disparate goods. For example, it can be said that a pair of shoes is worth as much as two shirts. Shoes and shirts are both products of labour. The exchange-value expresses the quantity of labour contained in each commodity, that is, the labour-time employed in its production. However, it is not a question of just any quantity of labour-time, but of socially necessary labour-time, meaning labour-time under the average prevailing social conditions, with respect to skills, technique, productivity, and contractual relations. The analysis proceeds in small steps in its run-up before taking the big leap. It dwells on labour to identify its links with value. In the commodity, we see two aspects of the labour that produced it: in every commodity there is an expenditure of labour-power, of capacity to work that we call abstract labour, because it is necessary for any type of productive activity. There is also a specific activity and labour skill, a concrete labour that gives form and functionality to the commodity. Concrete labour gives the commodity its use-value, abstract labour gives it its exchange-value.
The process in which Marx breaks down the commodity, by scientific abstraction, into its most intimate connections is vital because it contains the solution to the enigma of capital. When the capitalist, holder of the money-commodity, and the proletarian, holder of only his labour-power commodity, or his capacity to work, meet in the sphere of circulation, under certain historical conditions, an exchange takes place. The capitalist acquires the commodity labour-power by buying it at its exchange-value, consisting of the means of subsistence necessary for its production and reproduction: an exchange which, in the field of circulation, is entirely fair, as an exchange of equivalent values.
However, it is in the sphere of production that the use-value of labour-power is expressed. Namely, its capacity — in the given historical conditions of development of the productive forces — to operate for a labour-time greater than the time necessary for the production and reproduction of labour-power itself, thus endowing the commodity, produced for the capitalist, with an exchange-value greater than that of the capacity to work, i.e., higher than the worker’s salary. This surplus part of labour-time, “given as a gift” by the wage-earner to the capitalist, is the source of the income of all bourgeois fractions and of universal wealth accumulated in every form. This is the discovery of surplus value.
Marx wrote to Engels to emphasise the “simplicity” of the discovery: “the economists, without exception, have missed the simple fact that, if the commodity has the double character of use-value and exchange-value, then the labour represented in the commodity must also have a double character, thus the bare analysis of labour sans phrase, as in Smith, Ricardo, etc., is bound to come up against the inexplicable everywhere. This is, in fact, the whole secret of the critical conception”.
That “value as such has no ‘sub-star stance’ other than actual labour” had already been a discovery of Petty’s, “neatly elaborated by Ricardo”. On the other hand, the dual character of value as applied to labour was not yet understood.
How was Marx able to make this simple but great leap in his study of capital? Engels gave an equally simple and profound answer: because Marx saw, behind the relations that classical economics treated as relations between things, relations between people and between classes:
“Economics is not concerned with things but with relations between persons, and in the final analysis between classes; these relations, however, are always bound to things and appear as things. Some economists had an inkling of this connection in isolated instances, but Marx was the first to reveal its significance for the whole of economics, thus making the most difficult problems so simple and clear that even bourgeois economists will now be able to grasp them”.
In the Economic Manuscripts, in several passages, Marx illustrated the transformation, inherent in the capitalist mode of production, of social relations into relations between things. This did not prevent him from recognising precisely in this reification, in this dehumanisation of the system of bourgeois relations, the great merit of the most authoritative economist of the bourgeoisie, David Ricardo. He wrote in book XVI of the Manuscripts: “The reproach that is made against him, that in examining capitalist production he is unconcerned with ‘human beings’, keeping in view the development of the productive forces alone [...] without concerning himself with distribution and therefore consumption, is precisely what is great about him. The development of the productive forces of social labour is the historic task and justification of capital. It is exactly by doing this that it unconsciously creates the material conditions for a higher mode of production”.
It was the pseudo-socialists Proudhon, Sismondi, and the reformist epigones who wanted to humanise the capitalist mode of production. Communists want to abolish it because it has now exhausted its historical task.
Marx begins the first book of the Manuscripts in 1861 investigating money, posing the difficult question: “How does money become capital?". Let us follow Marx’s approach to see one aspect of his scientific method, namely, the meticulous search for every aspect of his object of investigation. His tools are scientific abstraction, logic, and history; historical observation usually follows logical exposition — the “logical method” precedes the “historical method”. Engels observes: “the logical method [...] is indeed nothing but the historical method, only stripped of the historical form and of interfering contingencies”.
Logic and history for Marx are not those of the Scholastics. Antonio Labriola defined Marx’s relentless analytical capacity as the “overextension of logic”. It is none other than a study based on the “science of logic”, on the dialectic transformed and armed with the materialist vision of the capitalist mode of production. The history of capitalist society is conceived as a historical-natural process and as the social praxis of antagonistic classes. Capital overflows with references to the history of classes. Its historical chapters, such as those on primitive accumulation, on the working day, or on the application of science to industry, are vivid depictions of the socio-economic formation, the flesh and blood covering the skeleton X-rayed by theory.
The systematic use of the logic of Capital is both a challenge and an exercise in thinking for young minds, besieged by the fog of received wisdom, by the pressure of digitalised imbecility, by the uncultured irrationality of narcissistic demagogues, and by the cultured ignorance of bad teachers.
Marx’s logic requires and teaches the patience and curiosity necessary to understand the real world.
Lotta Comunista, January 2023