1. The starting-point is what is theoretically the most difficult: ‘Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences’ (p. 89). This is why Marx himself gives a number of warnings: the reading of the first volume, and particular its first chapter, is particularly arduous, and he was particularly worried about this difficulty for the French readership; which is why this chapter was the object of repeated revisions. Marx did everything to give these pages an accessible presentation, but, as he himself admitted, there is a level of difficulty that cannot be further reduced. It was impossible to defer the scientific exposition until later, so as to precede it with an initiation, a vulgarized (and thus not rigorous) presentation or a propaedeutic of method. As we know, the famous introduction to A Contribution, significantly unfinished, was not resumed in Capital. And so, no initiation into the object, no introduction to the method: simply encouraging prefaces. Science has to be directly entered, beginning with what Marx calls an ‘analysis of elements’, a ‘microscopic analysis’ (Preface to the first German edition). An analysis of this kind bears on the most general, most ‘abstract’ elements. This text, which basically follows on from the introduction to A Contribution, teaches us that the beginning of science is steep: ‘The power of abstraction must replace … microscopes and chemical reagents’ (p. 90). The book opens not with a transition but with a break: it is necessary to be broken in to a theoretical practice that can make the leap.
Once these principles of exposition have been defined, the task is to know how to apply them. A particular science is defined by its objects and its methods, which reciprocally delimit one another. In order to be able to start with the greatest abstraction, this delimitation must be given at the start. In other words: what are the concepts on which science is going to work. Where do they come from?
The starting-point has to be rigorous, but it cannot be absolutely enigmatic. In other words, it has to serve as its own introduction: either it does not have to be justified (otherwise we would embark on an infinite regress), or else it is simply unjustified, unjustifiable, arbitrary. In fact, the starting-point of Marx’s exposition is quite surprising: the first concept, that from which all the others are to ‘emerge’, is the concept of WEALTH. This is clearly not a scientific abstraction, but an empirical concept, falsely concrete, and close to those that the 1857 Introduction has taught us to denounce (see for example Marx’s critique of the idea of ‘population’). Wealth is an empirical abstraction; it is an idea that is falsely concrete (empirical) and incomplete in itself (it has no autonomous meaning, only in relation to a set of concepts that reject it). Wealth is an ideological notion, from which at first sight nothing can be drawn. From the standpoint of the process of investigation (the work of scientific research), it constitutes the worst possible start. But apparently this is not the case for the process of exposition, since it is starting from wealth that Marx presents the fundamental concepts of his theory. What should we think of this beginning?
A number of remarks make it possible to answer this question:
A) Marx does not require this idea to be actually productive. He applies to the empirical concept an empirical analysis: he breaks down wealth into its elements, in the mechanical sense of the term (the commodity is the ‘elementary form’, the cellular form of wealth); wealth is nothing other than an accumulation of commodities. This idea is ‘exploited’ within its own limits: there is no question of making it say something that it cannot say.
B) This idea, inasmuch as we are content in this way to describe it without adding anything to it, without endowing it with a secret that it has on the contrary precisely eliminated, has no need for justification: it says nothing more than that which its insufficiency entails. Thus, if it is not a legitimate starting-point, it is at least a practical one: it is the empirical object, immediately given, of ‘economic science’. And it is precisely in this capacity that it provides a framework for Adam Smith’s analysis, for example. Everything happens as if it played here the role of a reminder. What we are accustomed to understand by political economy is the study of wealth; if we start from the idea of wealth, we see that this idea breaks down into … But this concept clearly has no value in itself: it is profoundly transitive, serving as a transition to something else, and particularly to recall the link with the past of scientific research. This evocative function well shows that the concept does not owe its first place to its rigour, but on the contrary to its arbitrary character. It shows by its evident fragility the necessity to speak of something else, to enter on the difficult path that advances only on the basis of forgetting everything that preceded it.
This precarious starting-point, given in a few words, in three lines, displays one of the fundamental conditions of scientific rigour: the concepts on which rationality operates are not equivalents, placed on one and the same level of intelligibility; on the contrary, they are necessarily heterogeneous; they respond to one another only to the extent that they are mutually at odds. We shall rediscover this condition on several occasions.
C) The role of the idea of wealth can also be understood by contrast. This starting-point, in fact, is not without precedent in Marx’s work: the reflections on economics in the 1844 Manuscripts already start from this same basis. At that time, Marx took the concept of wealth from the economists because this concept deserved to be criticized: it drew its value from its critique. In fact, an analysis of this concept (not a mechanical analysis as is the case in Capital, but a critical one) displayed the contradiction that dwelled within it. Wealth is at the same time poverty: the wealth of nations is also the poverty of nations. Once this contradiction is made explicit, exhibited by criticism, the concept could be viewed as fertile: by the resolution of the contradiction it was possible to produce new concepts, filled with more meaning. In the 1844 Manuscripts, in fact, by starting from this kind of analysis of the contradiction contained in the idea of wealth, Marx was able to display the ‘actual economic fact’: pauperization and, along with it, alienated labour, thus presented dialectically. By the classic paths of Hegelian analysis (not the least paradox in these manuscripts is that the Hegelian method is in fact vehemently denounced there), Marx managed to make the (empty) concept of wealth produce a certain knowledge: the function of the concept was not in its precariousness but its essentiality, since it was here that the whole essence of the economic process was to be found.
It is very clear that in Capital Marx makes a very different use of the same starting-point: he no longer applies the method of resolution (of contradictions), because this resolution, by exhibiting the reality of an ‘appearance’, is basically the greatest of illusions. Resolution makes appear as fertile an idea in which there is in fact nothing, at least nothing more than is put into it. The ‘contradictions’ of wealth now no longer have anything to teach us. Marx no longer uses the idea for its supposed fertility, but on the contrary for its sterility: he makes it say precisely what has been put into it, not by going to seek by way of critique its presuppositions or conditions, but by asking it what it has to say, what meaning has been given to it. That is why he does not apply a critical analysis to it from outside, but only the mechanical analysis appropriate to it, dissecting it along its own lines. This suppresses the illusion of a reflection of the concept on itself (paradoxically interdependent with its dissolution) and of the spontaneous production, by unfurling, of a new knowledge. The idea of wealth cannot teach us more than was known by those who formed it, in a very empirical knowledge akin to what Marx so often calls ‘routine’: wealth is a collection of commodities. Thus, the starting-point is sufficiently arbitrary to run no risk of being taken seriously, and it is ‘immediate’ enough for there to be no need to seek its reasons, which would make us forget to forget it.
The product of this sterile idea, the commodity, ‘element of wealth’, is initially a concept of the same nature as that of wealth. But it is no longer susceptible to an empirical dissection: what is necessary, therefore, is to work it by the ‘power of abstraction’, to which Marx once more gives the name of analysis. This analysis will not necessarily be of the same type as the preceding one, yet nor will it be a critical analysis (which both dismantles and denounces the concept): it will be a search for preconditions, which will indeed end up encountering contradiction, but a contradiction very different from the Hegelian model of contradiction. At the same time, therefore, that the concept of wealth is abandoned, the concept of commodity is transformed, following the programme developed by Engels in the Preface to the English edition.
The analysis of the starting-point, analysis at the starting-point, thus does not exhaust the meaning of the method of analysis. In the same way as the concept of wealth, analysis as decomposition has only a provisional value. Analysis of wealth (decomposition into elements) in no way offers the model for subsequent analyses. In fact, the method will be put to the test, not of facts (as is de rigueur, if not rigorous, in a routine), but of other concepts: applied to the concept of commodity (presented, but not obtained, on the basis of that of wealth, but bearing on a quite different level), the concept of analysis will undergo more than one mutation.
2. However, it is appropriate to dwell a bit on this first analysis, since it has not said to us its last word. Along with it, in fact, a whole vocabulary appears, which we shall find again partially modified in subsequent analyses, and which characterizes the detail of the operation of analysis: this vocabulary or conceptual repertoire will also undergo significant mutations.
The question here bears on the terms that connect the ‘matter’ of the analysis to its products: ‘Wealth … appears as an “immense collection of commodities”.’ This expression has a number of equivalents that together define a single semantic unit:
comes into the world in the form of
appears as (erscheint als)
announces itself as
presents itself as
appears at first sight
is initially (ist zunächst)
presents itself under the aspect of
These expressions denote the same concept, which characterizes and defines the operation of analysis. This is the concept of form: the commodity is the elementary form of wealth. Analysis is a particular type of relation that brings together terms following a relation of form. A simple definition of this relation can be given:
If a appears as b, it is said by definition that
b is the form of a
a is the content of b
Example (see further on in the text):
Value appears as a relation of exchange between two commodities
The exchange relation is the form of value
Value is the content of the exchange relation
Other examples (which show that the notion of form is not simple but complex, since it can be specified variously):
– The commodity is the elementary form of wealth (p. 125)
– Use-value is the natural form of the commodity (p. 141)
– The exchange relation is the form of appearance of value (p. 126)
Can we say that in these three uses the word harbours a unique meaning? Does it denote a single process of analysis, the different phases of the same process, or different processes?
Such as it is presented, or rather used, in this beginning (wealth appears as commodity), the concept of form seems to denote: the empirical mode of existence of the thing, its manner of appearing, showing itself, manifesting itself. In this sense, wealth is indeed the very form of economic reality.
The starting-point of the analysis is based formally, methodically, on the concept of empirical form, to which the idea of wealth corresponds. One of the questions will be to know whether this form of appearing must be interpreted in terms of appearance, i.e., within the relation: appearance – reality, essence – manifestation. For the moment there is nothing to oppose this, but we can immediately say that the same will not apply to the form of value, since what defines value is that it does not show itself, does not appear (in which respect, we know, it is quite contrary to Falstaff’s lady friend, Mistress Quickly); the concept of value is empirically very thin: transparent. This therefore is the difficulty: either nothing has been understood at the starting-point, or else the notion of form, and along with it that of analysis, receives along the way a new definition that once again we have to extract. In fact, as we have just perceived, Marx uses the concepts that determine the form of reasoning in a very precise sense, but without stating this sense, without defining it explicitly, as if he did not need this definition. That would not make too much difficulty if the concepts were homogeneous: but if they are susceptible of different definitions, according to the degree of reasoning, it is because this change also contributes to defining them. The concept of form would then have a quite particular importance, because with it the status of the concept in general, as such, would be involved, at different levels of its usage: from its ‘natural form’ to its most abstract form.
It is just this difficulty that Engels refers to in his Preface to the English edition:
There is, however, one difficulty we could not spare the reader: the use of certain terms in a sense different from what they have, not only in common life, but in ordinary political economy. But this was unavoidable. Every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the technical terms of that science (p. 111). [There follows the example of revolutions in the conceptual vocabulary of chemistry.]
This text explicitly refers to the concepts that delimit the content of economic research; but it can also be related to the terms that give form to the reasoning, and serve to characterize not only the transition from traditional language to the scientific language of Capital, but also, within the scientific exposition itself, to the transition from one level of language to another, one type of reasoning to another. This transition is also a dislocation, the intrusion of a difference, a break, which are not the sign of an insufficiency, but the very preconditions of scientific expression.
In what other terms will the analysis present itself, in this differentiation that defines it in its own internality? The analysis of the commodity will teach us this.