With this method we begin with the first and simplest relation which is historically,actually available,thus in this context with the first economic relation to be found.We analyse this relation.The fact that it is a relation already implies that it has two aspects which are related to each other.Each of these aspects is examined separately;this reveals the nature of their mutual behaviour,their reciprocal action.Contradictions will emerge demanding a solution.But since we are not examining an abstract mental process that takes place solely in our mind,but an actual event which really took place at some time or other,or which is still taking place,these contradictions will have arisen in practice and have probably been solved.We shall trace the mode of this solution and find that it has been effected by establishing a new relation,whose two contradictory aspects we shall then have to set forth,and so on.
Political economy begins with commodities ,with the moment when products are exchanged,either by individuals or by primitive communities.
The product being exchanged is a commodity.But it is a commodity merely by virtue of the thing ,the product being linked with a relation between two persons or communities,the relation between producer and consumer,who at this stage are no longer united in the same person.Here is at once an example of a peculiar fact,which pervades the whole economy and has produced serious confusion in the minds of bourgeois economists --economics is not concerned with things but with relations between persons,and in the final analysis between classes;these relations however are always bound to things and appear as things .Although a few economists had an inkling of this connection in isolated instances,Marx was the first to reveal its significance for the entire economy thus making the most difficult problems so simple and clear that even bourgeois economists will now be able to grasp them.
If we examine the various aspects of the commodity,that is of the fully evolved commodity and not as it at first slowly emerges in the spontaneous barter of two primitive communities,it presents itself to us from two angles,that of use-value and of exchange-value,and thus we come immediately to the province of economic debate.Anyone wishing to find a striking instance of the fact that the German dialectic method at its present stage of development is at least as superior to the old superficially glib metaphysical method as railways are to the mediaeval means of transport,should look up Adam Smith or any other authoritative economist of repute to see how much distress exchange-value and use-value caused these gentlemen,the difficulty they had in distinguishing the two properly and in expressing the determinate form peculiar to each,and then compare the clear,simple exposition given by Marx.
After use-value and exchange-value have been expounded,the commodity as a direct unity of the two is described as it enters the exchange process .The contradictions arising here may be found on pp.20and 21.We merely note that these contradictions are not only of interest for theoretical,abstract reasons,but that they also reflect the difficulties originating from the nature of direct interchange,i.e.,simple barter,and the impossibilities inevitably confronting this first crude form of exchange.The solution of these impossibilities is achieved by investing a specific commodity --money --with the attribute of representing the exchange-value of all other commodities.Money or simple circulation is then analysed in the second chapter,namely (1)money as a measure of value,and,at the same time,value measured in terms of money,i.e.,price ,is more closely defined;(2)money as means of circulation and (3)the unity of the two aspects,real money which represents bourgeois material wealth as a whole.This concludes the first part,the conversion of money into capital is left for the second part.
One can see that with this method,the logical exposition need by no means be confined to the purely abstract sphere.On the contrary,it requires historical illustration and continuous contact with reality.A great variety of such evidence is therefore inserted,comprising references both to different stages in the actual historical course of social development and to economic works,in which the working out of lucid definitions of economic relations is traced from the outset.The critique of particular,more or less one-sided or confused interpretations is thus substantially given already in the logical exposition and can be kept quite short.
The economic content of the book will be discussed in a third article.
Written between August 8and 15,1859
