Karl Marx: A Biography

THE 'ECONOMICS' 281

of 'civil society', that, however, the anatomy of civil society is to be

sought in political economy.^61

Marx then, in a famous and often quoted passage, summed up the

'guiding thread' of his subsequent studies of political economy. This

summary contained four main points:

1. The sum total of relations of production - the way men organised their

social production as well as the instruments they used - constituted the

real basis of society on which there arose a legal and political super-

structure and to which corresponded definite forms of social conscious-

ness. Thus the way men produced their means of subsistence

conditioned their whole social, political and intellectual life.

2. At a certain stage in their evolution the forces of production would

develop beyond the relations of production and these would act as a

fetter. Such a stage inaugurated a period of social revolution.

3. These productive forces had to develop to the fullest extent possible

under the existing relations of production before the old social order

would perish.

4. It was possible to pick out the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern

bourgeois modes of production as progressive epochs in the economic

formation of society. There bourgeois relations of production were the

last ones to create a divided society and with their end the pre-history

of human society would be brought to a close.

Marx added a few more biographical details, described his views as
'the result of conscientious investigation lasting many years'^62 and finished
with a quotation from Dante against any intellectual compromise.
The most striking thing about the Critique of Political Economy itself -
particularly after the alarms and excursions accompanying its writing - is
how little substance it contains. Almost half the book consists of a critical
exposition, with much quotation, of previous theorists on value and
money. The rest is in two sections, the first on commodities and the
second on money. Both were rewritten several years later in the first three
chapters of Capital, the first section being expanded and the second
condensed. The first section was the more important, but broke off after
enunciating a few basic propositions. Marx began by defining a commodity
as 'a means of existence in the broadest sense of the word'^63 and, quoting
Aristode, explained that a commodity had both a use-value and an
exchange-value. The concept of use-value was not difficult but there was
a problem as to how objects could be made equivalent to each other as
exchange-values. The key to this problem was labour: 'Since the exchange-