[Marxism] Preface to the first edition of Capital

[Ed George]

[With baited breath]

What you have to bear in mind here is that Marx makes this comment
while warning the reader of the potential difficulty of his book.

The 'difficulty' of science that he refers to is not the difficulty of
investigation (though this too will be difficult for its own reasons)
but that of exposition. How Marx saw the difference between the two is
illustrated by his comment in the Afterward to the Second German
Edition of capital (just before he made his celebrated remark about
Hegel's dialectic 'standing on its head'):

'Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of
inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to
analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner
connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be
adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the
subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear
as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.'

Why this difference between investigation and exposition? In the
beginning of the Grundrisse Marx makes a similar comment, but, this
time, with more explanatory content:

'It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, […]
thus to begin, in economics, with, e.g., the population […]. However,
on closer examination this proves false. The population is an
abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is
composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not
familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour,
capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of
labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage
labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with
the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I
would then, by means of further determination, move analytically
towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards
ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest
determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until
I had finally 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.