Internationalism No. 85, March 2026 Special Issue, Page IV From the series Principles of Marxism Marx investigates the very complex relationship between abstractions and social development and concludes that the most general abstractions arise on the whole only with the most profuse concrete development, when one phenomenon is seen to be common to many, common to all . The abstraction of labour , as labour in general , is very ancient, but is just as modern a category as the relations which give rise to this simple abstraction . When the main activity is commerce, labour overlaps with the idea of making money. The physiocratic system, which sees land as the central source of wealth, instead points to agriculture as the form of labour par excellence (productive labour). Only with Adam Smith was there an immense advance , because he discarded any definiteness of the wealth-producing activity — for him it was labour as such...