PARIS^103In it Marx criticised the concept of labour found in the classical econo-
mists from whom he had just been quoting, on the general grounds that
their conceptions were superficial and abstract whereas his own gave a
coherent account of the essential nature of economics. Having started
from their presuppositions Marx claimed to show that the more the
worker produced the poorer he became. But this analysis remained super-
ficial:Political economy starts with the fact of private property, it does not
explain it to us. It conceives of the material process that private property
in fact goes through in general abstract formulae which then have for
it the value of laws.... But political economy tells us nothing
about how far these external, apparently fortuitous circumstances are
merely the expression of a necessary development. We have seen how
it regards exchange itself as something fortuitous. The only wheels that
political economy sets in motion are greed and war among the greedy:
competition.^127But because the classical economists had failed to understand the necessary
connection and development of different economic factors, they could
give no coherent account of economics. He, on the contrary, aimed 'to
understand the essential connection of private property, selfishness, the
separation of labour, capital and landed property, of exchange and compe-
tition, of the value and degradation of man, of monopoly and competition,
etc. - the connection of all this alienation with the money system'.^128 The
usual method of the economist was to suppose a fictitious primordial state
and to proceed from there; but this simply accepted as a fact what it was
supposed to be explaining: 'Similarly the theologian explains the origin
of evil through the fall, i.e. he presupposes as a historical fact what he
should be explaining.'^129
Before introducing his main point, Marx once more insisted on its
empirical basis. 'We start', he says, 'with a contemporary fact of political
economy.'^130 This fact was the general impoverishment and dehumanis-
ation of the worker. Marx developed the implications of this, thus intro-
ducing the theme of this section:
The object that labour produces, its product, confronts it as an alien
being, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour
is labour that has solidified itself into an object, made itself into a
thing, the objectification of labour. The realization of labour is its
objectification. In political economy this realization of labour appears
as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as a loss of the object
or slavery to it, and appropriation as alienation, as externalization.^131
Simply stated, what Marx meant when he talked of alienation was this: