The Communist Manifesto

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From The Grundrisse: The method of political economyWhen we consider a given country politico-economically, we begin with its population, itsdistribution among classes, town, country, the coast, the different branches of production, exportand import, annual production and consumption, commodity prices etc.It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus tobegin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of theentire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. Thepopulation 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 theyrest. 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, priceetc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception[Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, moveanalytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towardsever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there thejourney would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but thistime not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations andrelations. 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, withpopulation, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering throughanalysis 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 firmlyestablished and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simplerelations, 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 correctmethod. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, henceunity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process ofconcentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure inreality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception.Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; alongthe second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way ofthought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thoughtconcentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereasthe method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thoughtappropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means theprocess by which the concrete itself comes into being. For example, the simplest economiccategory, say e.g. exchange value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing inspecific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can neverexist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, livingwhole. As a category, by contrast, exchange value leads an antediluvian existence. Therefore, tothe kind of consciousness – and this is characteristic of the philosophical consciousness – forwhich conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as suchis thus the only reality, the movement of the categories appears as the real act of production –which only, unfortunately, receives a jolt from the outside – whose product is the world; and –but this is again a tautology – this is correct in so far as the concrete totality is a totality ofthoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product of thinking and comprehending; but not in anyway a product of the concept which thinks and generates itself outside or above observation andconception; a product, rather, of the working-up of observation and conception into concepts.The totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of a thinking head,which appropriates the world in the only way it can, a way different from the artistic, religious,practical and mental appropriation of this world. The real subject retains its autonomousexistence outside the head just as before; namely as long as the head’s conduct is merelyspeculative, merely theoretical. Hence, in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, mustalways be kept in mind as the presupposition.
Preface to Critique of Political Economy 29Preface to “A Contribution to the Critique ofPolitical Economy”January 1859. Excerpt... The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guidingprinciple of my studies can be summarised as follows.In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which areindependent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in thedevelopment of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of productionconstitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal andpolitical superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. Themode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political andintellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but theirsocial existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, thematerial productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of productionor – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within theframework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productiveforces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changesin the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immensesuperstructure.In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the materialtransformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with theprecision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short,ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as onedoes not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a periodof transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must beexplained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the socialforces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before allthe productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relationsof production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence havematured within the framework of the old society.Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examinationwill always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solutionare already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient,feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs markingprogress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the lastantagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense ofindividual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ socialconditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society createalso the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human societyaccordingly closes with this social formation....
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The Communist Manifesto

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