GRUNDRISSE KARL MARX

When we consider a given country from a politic-conomic stand-point, we begin with its population, its subdivision into classes, location in city, country, or by the sea, occupation in different branches of production; then we study its exports and imports, annual production and consumption, price of commodities, etc. it seems to be the correct procedure to coomence with the real and the concrete, the actual prerequisite; in the case of political economy, to commence with population, which is the basis and the author of the entire productive activity of society. Yet on closer consideration it proves to be wrong. Population is an abstraction, if we leave out for example the classes of which it consists. These classes, again, are but an empy word unless we know what are the elements on which they are based, suvh as wagelabor, capital, etc. these imply, in their turn, exchange, division of labor, prise etc. capital, for example, does not mean anything without wage-labor, value, money, price, etc. if we start out, therefore, with population, we do so with a chaotic conception of the whole, and by closer analysis we sill gradually arrive at simpler ideas; thus we shall proceed from the imaginary concrete to less and less complex abstactions, until we arrive at the simplest determinations. This one attained, we might start on our return journey until we finally came back to population, but this time not as a chaotic notion of an integral whole, but as a rich aggregate of many determinations and relation. The form is the one which political economy had adopted in the past as its inception. The economists of the seventeent century, for example.always started out with the living aggregate: population, nation, state, several state, etc., but in the end the invariably arrived by means of analysis at certain leading abstract general priciples such as division of laour, money, value,, etc. as soon as these separate elements had been more or less established by abstract reasoning, there arose the systems of labor, demand, exchange value, and conclude with state, international exchange, and world market. The latter is manifestly the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is a combination of many determinations, i.e. a unity of diverse elements. Our thought it therefore appears as a process of synthesis, as a result, and not as a starting-point, although it is the real starting-poin and, therefore, also the starting-point of observation and conception. By the former method the complete conception passes into an abstract definition; by the latter the abstract definitions lead to be reproduction of the concrete subject in the course of reasoning. Hegel fell into the error, therefore, of considering the real as the result of self – coordinating, sel-absorbed, and spontaneously operating thought, while the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is but the way of thinking by which the concrete is grasped and is reproduced in our mind as concrete. It is by no means, however, the process which itself generates the concrete. The simplest economic category, say, exchange value implies the existences of population, population that is engaged in production under certain condition; it also implies the existence of certain types of family, caln, or state, etc. it can have no other existence except as an one-sided relation given concrete and living aggregate.