No subject

arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic
conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and
relations. The former is the path historically followed by economics at
the time of its origins. The economists of the seventeenth century,
e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation,
state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering
through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general
relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as
these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and
abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the
simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange
value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world
market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct
method.’

In other words, once you look at an actually-existing concrete
phenomenon, you see that its existence is premised on and conditioned by
determining factors, which are in turn premised on and conditioned by
others. As you strip away the successive layers of determinations
– i.e. as you, literally, ‘abstract’ – you
arrive at the ‘simplest determinations’, beyond which you
cannot go (and ‘simplest’ in the sense of ‘least
complicated’, rather than ‘easiest’). From here, you
can retrace your steps, and reconstruct the real phenomenon, not as mere
empirical fact, but analytically, as a ‘rich totality of many
determinations and relations’; in short, you can see what it is
that it is really composed of, and what makes it, in its dynamic
existence’ as it is. Marx concludes this remark with his
celebrated comment that the ‘The concrete is concrete because it
is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the
diverse.’

If we can see the passage from empirically-observed phenomenon to the
simplest determinations, and that from simplest determinations to the
phenomenon as a ‘rich totality’ as two links in a chain,
then it is this second link which forms the methodological structure of
Capital.

Many people, on reading Capital for the first time, ask themselves why
it starts where it does: why does Marx start with the commodity; why is
the commodity for Marx the fundamental element with which to begin his
analysis. To answer this it is necessary to see what it was that Marx
intended to achieve in Capital. He set out his aim in the Preface to the
First German Edition as ‘to lay bare the economic law of motion of
modern society’ (for which latter term we can read
‘capitalist’ society). Now it is interesting that the
Grundrisse, which was Marx’s working draft of his
‘Economics’, follows a quite different structure. In this
work Marx starts not from the ‘simplest determinations’, but
from complex reality:

‘The object before us, to begin with, material production.

‘Individuals producing in Society – hence socially
determined individual production – is, of course, the point of
departure. […]

‘Whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always
production at a definite stage of social development – production
by social individuals. It might seem, therefore, that in order to talk
about production at all we must either pursue the process of historic
development through its different phases, or declare beforehand that we
are dealing with a specific historic epoch such as e.g. modern bourgeois
production, which is indeed our particular theme. However, all epochs of
production have certain common traits, common characteristics.
Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction in
so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus
saves us repetition. Still, this general category, this common element
sifted out by comparison, is itself segmented many times over and splits
into different determinations. Some determinations belong to all epochs,
others only to a few. […]’

It is over the course of the Grundrisse that Marx traces the complexity
of determinations that lie behind not ‘socially determined
individual production’ in the general sense but ‘socially
determined individual production’ in its concrete manifestation in
then contemporary capitalist society. Practically the concluding remark
of the manuscript of the Grundrisse as it has passed down to us is
practically the opening line of Capital: ‘The first category in
which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the commodity.’
Capital therefore takes up with what the Grundrisse left off on; and
over the course of the former the simplest determination –
abstract labour as the substance of value – acts as the starting
point from which additional determinations are layered in to build up
the complex picture of bourgeois society as a ‘rich totality of
many determinations and relations’.

How does Marx arrive at the conclusion that ‘the first category in
which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the commodity’
(Grundrisse) and ‘our investigation must therefore begin with the
analysis of a commodity’ (Capital)? Marx’s argument, being
based on the fact that material production ‘is always production
at a definite stage of social development’, consists in eliding to
what is specific to material production in capitalist society, which is
that the products of labour are products produced for exchange and not
for consumption by their producers. What the quantitative determinant of
exchange is (socially necessary abstract social labour) becomes, then,
the first – most simple – determination upon which
successive determinations are accreted over the course of the
work’s three volumes. This premise, this most ‘simple’
(in the sense alluded to above) determination is the ‘difficult
beginning’ to which Marx refers in the Preface. The beginning is
difficult *because* it is abstract, or, rather, it is difficult because
why it is abstract is something to which the reader is not privy to,
given the structure of the book, at this stage of the exposition.

It is worth reflecting on what ‘abstract’ here really means.
Just after the comment from the Grundrisse cited at the beginning, Marx
describes his method as one of ‘rising from the abstract to the
concrete’. The direction of movement indicated is significant.
‘Abstract’ in this conception is not something ‘up in
the air’, for it is not an a priori and arbitrary construction,
raised above reality, but something ‘below’, beneath the
surface of reality, hidden in its depths. The abstract must be, not
constructed, but identified; and it is identified through the method of
abstraction, which is the method of filleting away layers determinations
to arrive at the ‘simplest’, in a movement from complexity
to simplicity, from less to more fundamental. As the Grundrisse advises
us, once this is done, then more secondary determinations can be
re-added in, in a process of ‘de-abstraction’, of
concretisation, rising again from the depths to complex totality. This
is the method of Capital; and it is the method of scientific exposition
– necessarily initially difficult because necessarily initially
abstract, in this sense.


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