From the series Principles of Marxism
Marx asserts that production plays a determinant role within a unity
that includes the processes of circulation. In the fully developed form of Capital, the relationship between the relations of production and the relations of distribution is defined unequivocally.
The so-called distribution relations, then, correspond to and arise from historically determined specific social forms of the process of production [...]. The historical character of these distribution relations is the historical character of production relations, of which they express merely one aspect. Capitalist distribution differs from those forms of distribution which arise from other modes of production, and every form of distribution disappears with the specific form of production from which it is descended and to which it corresponds.
Historically determined relations of production and relations of distribution are inextricably linked: like Siamese twins, they live and die together. Marx sees the capitalist mode of production as a whole, a contradictory and therefore transient unity; but as it is a unity, the revolution does not harbour the illusion of being able to change the relations of distribution while leaving the relations of production intact.
Marx's scientific method does not simply explain the economy; it is the method of strategy. Lenin returned to these themes 40 years later in his essay The Characteristics of Economic Romanticism [1897] in the context of his battle against the populists, in particular against the Swiss economist Sismondi, the populists' main theoretical reference. Lenin wrote:
[Political economy's] subject is not by any means ‘the production of material values’, as is often claimed [...], but the social relations among people in production. [...] If, however, we consistently regard “production” as social relations in production, then both “distribution” and “consumption” lose all independent significance. Once relations in production have been explained, both the share of the product taken by the different classes and, consequently, “distribution” and “consumption” are thereby explained. And vice versa, if production relations remain unexplained (for example, if the process of the production of the aggregate social capital is not understood), all arguments about consumption and distribution turn into banalities, or innocent, romantic wishes.
In Critique of the Gotha Programme [1875] — a text written during his battle against the Lassalleans — Marx noted, referring to the third point of the programme, that it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it
.
Cervetto quotes these passages and, in a retrospective reflection on the decade of the restructuring crisis, he emphasises that the relationship between relations of production and relations of distribution is a strategic issue because it directly concerns the practice of the Marxist revolutionary movement
. He states that the process of production of total social capital unfolds in a cyclical movement, that social relations among people follow a similar cyclical movement, and finally that the struggles of the proletariat also follow a cyclical movement and manifest themselves in the relations of distribution and consumption. Given these conditions, if the revolutionary strategy does not understand distribution and consumption as aspects of the process of social capital production, one inevitably falls into economic romanticism and political subjectivism. One confuses a phase of the social capital cycle with the cycle itself. A subjective conception of time is confused with the objective time of the crisis of social capital
.
Cervetto makes the observation that Trotsky falls into economic romanticism when he analyses the social nature of the USSR, dissociating production from distribution, coming to see bourgeois distribution relations as distinct and contradictory to supposed socialist relations of production
.
In the “Introduction” to the Grundrisse, Marx illustrates his method of political economy
and sets out two alternative modes of analysis. The first course is the one taken by political economy historically at its inception
. It seemed right to start with the real and concrete
, such as the population. Population is an abstraction if, for instance, it disregards the classes of which it is composed
, but classes too would be meaningless without the elements on which they are based (wage labour, capital, etc.), which in turn presuppose exchange, the division of labour, price, etc. This method goes from the imagined concrete
to more and more tenuous abstractions until one arrived at the simplest determinations
. At this point, we should turn the investigation back to the population, which is no longer a chaotic conception of a whole, but a rich totality of many determinations and relations
.
This method proceeds from the concrete to the abstract and led to the identification of a few determining abstract, general relations
, such as the division of labour, value, and money, from which economic systems were developed which from the simple [concepts], such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, advanced to the State, international exchange, and world market
. This, says Marx, is obviously the correct scientific method. The concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many determinations, thus a unity of the diverse
. It should be noted that Marx identifies the abstract as the simplest concept, while common sense would tend to view the concrete as the simplest, as the most easily grasped conceptually.
For Marx, 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 mental concrete. This is, however, by no means the process by which the concrete itself originates
.
In Capital, Marx writes: The ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought
. In the “Introduction”, Marx uses exchange value as an example of scientific abstraction: Exchange value presupposes population, [a] population which produces under definite conditions [...]. Exchange value cannot exist except as an abstract, one-sided relation of an already existing, concrete, living whole. But as a category, exchange value leads an antediluvian existence
.
In the preface to Capital, Marx takes up and develops this consideration: 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, while 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 more easy to study than are the cells of that body
.
The aim of scientific analysis is to arrive at an understanding of the body as an organic whole
(the capitalist socio-economic formation, i.e., the concrete
) starting from the value form of the commodity
, which is the economic form corresponding to
the cell form, explored through a sort of microscopic anatomy
, whose operating tools are the concepts of value, labour, and money.
At the beginning of the third volume of Capital, Marx returns to this method of analysis with regard to the concept of economic law: the aim, he says, is to locate and describe the concrete forms which grow out of the movements of capital as a whole
, and to approach step by step the form which they assume on the surface of society, in the action of different capitals upon one another, in competition, and in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves
.
This is the method most consistent with the materialist, biological
conception of the capitalist mode of production as a living body in transformation. Lenin echoes this view: The fundamental idea of Marx [is] the idea of a historical-natural process of development of socio-economic formations
. Lenin applied this view and this method to the study of the development of capitalism in Russia.
Marx's ascent from the abstract to the concrete, from the skeleton of relations of production to the flesh and blood of the social body, extends to the entire socio-economic formation. This is the method used by Lenin in What the “Friends of the People” Are, and How They Fight the Social-Democrats and by Cervetto in Class Struggles and the Revolutionary Party. Marx studies all the relationships of social life, down to the manifestations of social psychologies, traditions, and cultures, which he traces back to the historical paths, spaces, and times in which the capitalist mode of production established itself in different areas of the world: thus to the struggles between classes and class fractions and to the political and State forms that these produced in the course of their struggles.
Cervetto emphasises that Marx conceived the fundamental idea
that the social organisation of the human species was a historical-natural process
because he applied the scientific findings of biology to society
. Marx's science was based on this materialist view, and Capital was its scientific product.