Bai Gang and Wang Xuchun: Re-examining the "Research Method" and "Method of Presentation" in Marx's *Capital*
Ever since the birth of Capital, there has been a continuous debate regarding how to understand its "method." Although Althusser provided an early "epistemological" methodological reconstruction of Capital, his interpretation remained primarily within the sense of "theoretical practice" and failed to form a holistic structural analysis of capitalist society. To correctly understand the method of Capital, a singular interpretive approach—relying solely on the research method of "rising from the concrete to the abstract" or the method of presentation of "rising from the abstract to the concrete"—can easily lead to a narrowing of the connotations of Marx’s dialectical method and its materialist horizon. Therefore, to grasp the method of Capital in its entirety, one must understand the "method of research" and the "method of presentation" as a unified whole. Only then can one truly grasp the "critical and revolutionary" methodological essence of Capital.
I. The Two Paths of Political Economic Inquiry: "Method of Research" and "Method of Presentation"
When specifically discussing the method of political economy in the Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx clearly proposed and demarcated "two paths" of political economic research. The first path refers to the research method that moves from the sensory concrete to the rational abstract, grasping the laws of internal identity behind the appearance of things. Taking the population of a specific country as a research object, Marx pointed out that when political economy faces the chaotic appearance of a nation's population, it begins its research with more detailed determinations such as the classes that constitute the population, production and consumption, and commodity prices. "Thinking must find the common, identical, and primary thing behind the endlessly changing external phenomena that makes them manifestations of the same essence." Thus, Marx noted: "By means of ever closer determinations, I would arrive analytically at increasingly simple concepts; from the imagined concrete I would arrive at ever thinner abstractions until I had reached the simplest determinations." By analyzing all the elements and developmental forms that constitute the object behind the ever-changing phenomena, and exploring the internal relations of these forms, one can obtain the universal essence of the object. Marx summarized this first path as the "historically traversed path of economics at its inception," which manifested as starting from the "living whole, from population, nation, state, several states, etc.," and analyzing "decisive abstract general relations, such as division of labor, money, value, etc." Marx also vividly used the word "evaporate" [1]: through the method of abstraction, the elements of internal identity are "evaporated" out, and their forms of development and connections with other objects are explored to obtain the simple determinations that constitute the object's essence.
However, as a concrete totality, a real object is synthesized from many categories. A holistic understanding of the object cannot be obtained through a single abstract determination alone. In other words, grasping an object solely through the method of research inevitably leads to treating the essential determinations of the object as immutable "universal formulas" to be mechanically applied, while the specific determinations that create the thing are discarded as "false appearances." This undoubtedly results in a "nearsightedness" of thought and understanding, thereby obscuring those things "enveloped" within the internal elements and relations of the object—things that are "dynamically generated" in the object's historical development. Consequently, the rich internal determinations of the object are canceled, and even the object itself and its historical specificity are abolished. Therefore, thought must delve into the historical specificity of the object from a holistic perspective. Through the mediation of abstract determinations at each level of the object's total determinations and relations, it discovers that the essence of the object undergoes a movement of "self-creation" and "dynamic generation" in history. The object of knowledge is not a static abstract determination, but a specific concrete totality that realizes "self-reproduction" on this basis.
Therefore, regarding the order of presenting all the categories of the object, Marx pointed out: "It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition... But on closer inspection this is found to be wrong." Continuing with the example of population, Marx noted: "The population 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 they rest, such as wage-labor, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labor, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage-labor, value, money, price, etc." As a complex totality of relations, capital's own elements are manifested through various phenomena; without analysis, things like value, money, and price cannot be understood, nor can capital itself. On this basis, Marx summarized the second path as the method of presentation: starting from the abstract laws of identity, gradually "rising" to a rich totality with many determinations and relations, and penetrating deep into the historical specificity of the object. In "political economic research," it is divided into the following sections: (1) general abstract determinations, which therefore belong more or less to all social forms; (2) the categories that form the internal structure of bourgeois society and serve as the basis for the fundamental classes; (3) the summary of bourgeois society in the form of the state; (4) international relations of production, international division of labor, and international exchange; (5) the world market and crises. Therefore, in the order of presenting the specific categories of the object, "from the abstract to the concrete" is the correct method of presentation in political economic research.
As the form of manifestation of the method of presentation, "from the abstract to the concrete" is not an a priori method of logical deduction, but is itself a logical method—or rather, the object itself is presented in a logical form. In Marx's view, Hegel could be called "the first to present the general forms of motion of the dialectic in a comprehensive and conscious manner." In the Science of Logic, Hegel explained the method of presentation: "It begins from simple determinateness and the succeeding ones are ever richer and more concrete. For the result contains its beginning and its course has enriched it by a fresh determinateness"; the universal, as the basis, "preserves itself in its specialization, in the judgment and reality," and "at each stage of its further determination it raises the entire mass of its preceding content, and by its dialectical advance it not only does not lose anything or leave anything behind, but carries with it all that it has acquired and enriches and densifies itself within itself"; "each step of the advance in the further determination, while withdrawing from the indeterminate beginning, is also a back-ward approach to it, so that what at first sight appeared to be different—the retrospective grounding of the beginning and the progressive further determining of it—fall together and are the same thing."
From this, we can distinguish two approaches to presentation. One is championed by empiricism, which treats certain natural attributes of a "thing" as universal axioms, viewing the relationship between the universal and the particular as that of "genus" and "species." Here, moving from the abstract to the concrete is merely a unidirectional progression from "genus determination" to "species determination." This empiricist way of thinking "conceives of economic phenomena as arising from a flat space, where immediate mechanical causality prevails, so that a specific effect is linked to a causal object, i.e., another phenomenon, and the internal necessity of this effect can only be understood within a sequence of given existence." However, due to the incompleteness of empiricism’s category determinations, it fails to reach the level of the object's historical specificity. As Lenin pointed out: "Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clericalism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes)." [2]
The other approach is "abstract to concrete" in the sense of Hegelian dialectics. It is a transition and progression from the simplest categories—those lack content-determinations and constitute the "cellular form" of the object—toward concrete categories that are more structurally complex and increasingly rich in content-determinations. It is a process of "step-like" leaping of things from the level of quantity to the level of quality, from universality to historical specificity, and from lower-order forms to higher-order forms. At the same time, it is a "spiral" upward movement of the successive unfolding and periodic resolution of the internal contradictions of things, possessing a dialectical character of climbing step by step. This dialectical way of thinking synthesizes all categories into a dynamic structure through their interconnections. Althusser viewed this "connection" as the "force" of the structural whole acting upon the categories, arguing that "the existence of the whole structure consists in its effects, in short, the structure is nothing other than the specific combination of its own elements; it is nothing apart from the effects of the structure." In the generative process of this "dynamic structure" from the abstract to the concrete, the former constitutes the basis of the latter, while the latter, as the "differentiated" form of the former, is not "a priori" deduced from the former, but rather endows the former with new qualitative determinations by delving into historical specificity. From this perspective, the dialectical mode of presentation is not a unidirectional process. On the one hand, cognition reaches an essential understanding of the object’s totality by means of abstract determinations; on the other hand, abstract determinations can only endow themselves with completeness and receive full explanation within a concrete, total structure. Logically, the process of "advancing" is simultaneously a process of "retreating"—a "two-way" approach through which cognition reaches truth via reflection.
The reason Marx proposed the "two paths" in the Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and emphasized the second path as the "scientifically correct method" was his intention to make a formal distinction between the method of research and the method of presentation. First, the method of research differs from the method of presentation: "Research has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyze its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the material is now ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction." In this, the "concrete" in the method of research is the phenomenal concrete presented at the level of sensory intuition; it is the starting point of reality and the starting point of cognition, and thus a given "empirical concrete." Conversely, the "concrete" in the method of presentation is the reorganization of the "empirical concrete" at the level of reason; it is the endpoint of cognition, and thus a "rational concrete." Therefore, "on the first path, the full conception was evaporated into yield abstract determinations; on the second, the abstract determinations lead to the reproduction of the concrete by way of thought." Second, the "scientificity" of the "second path" Marx emphasized as the "scientifically correct method" is reflected in the sequential order of categories appearing in the process of presentation. One must never conclude that the research method of the "first path" is "unscientific" simply because Marx viewed the "second path" as "scientific." To believe that Capital only utilizes the "abstract to concrete" method of presentation would undoubtedly obscure the materialist horizon within Marx’s dialectic.
Thus, it is evident that Marx’s citation of the "two paths" traversed by political economic research was essentially to distinguish the method of research from the method of presentation. It was to further emphasize the methods and rules that research and presentation work should follow, in order to prevent political economic inquiry from conflating the two methods in the sequence of presenting categories.
II. The Dialectic of Capital: The Unity of "Method of Research" and "Method of Presentation"
To master Marx’s method of research and method of presentation at a holistic level and avoid a one-sided understanding of the two, one must return to the specific context of Capital. The Russian economist I.I. Kaufman once charged that Marx’s method of research was "strictly realist," while his method of presentation was "German dialectics." Judging "from the external form of presentation," Kaufman suggested that "Marx is the greatest idealist philosopher, and what is more, a 'bad' German idealist philosopher." Marx subsequently responded, arguing that Kaufman had not accurately grasped the dialectic used in Capital and had therefore failed to understand the method of research and the method of presentation from a perspective of totality. In other words, Marx did not intentionally divide his dialectical method into a method of research and a method of presentation for the sake of explaining the method of Capital; it was only because of Kaufman’s misreading of the division between the two methods that Marx formally distinguished and explained them.
The reason Kaufman failed to accurately understand the dialectic of Capital was primarily his failure to grasp the essential difference between Marx’s dialectic and Hegel’s, mistakenly viewing Capital as a "reproduction of Hegelian logic." In his view, "the most important thing is the law of the change of these phenomena," [3] namely, "the law of their transition from one form into another, from one order of association into another." According to Kaufman’s line of reasoning, the method of presentation is nothing more than "a system that organizes categories in a fixed sequence, such that one category can be logically deduced from another." In other words, the textual structure of Capital is a chain constructed of pure concepts, much like Hegel’s Science of Logic. This line of thought can be understood as: "Economic categories possess an inherent power of ascent within a certain scope, and they unfold concrete categories themselves—this is the correct method for economics." Within this, capitalist social relations are merely abstract logical relations composed of commodities, money, capital, and surplus value, rather than the real relations between wage labor and capital.
In reality, Hegel focused on the logical structure of transitions between categories rather than the material structure. His logic became a set of pure rules that excluded material content and isolated itself, reducing the logic of matter to a logic of concepts produced by Spirit [4] itself. "Hegel’s Encyclopedia begins with Logic, with pure speculative thought, and ends with Absolute Knowledge, with the self-conscious, self-comprehending philosophic or absolute—i.e., superhuman—abstract mind." In other words, Hegel started from Spirit, using abstract concepts to replace real concrete conditions and using the movement of ideas to explain the development of real history. He "regarded the whole process of moving from the abstract to the concrete as the self-generation of the concept, as the original 'in-itself' developing through the form of alienation toward its future result, which is nothing other than its beginning." In Marx’s view, "The philosophic mind is nothing but the alienated world-mind, which thinks within its self-alienation—i.e., it conceives itself abstractly." The logic Hegel used to mediate real history to obtain pure truth was merely "the money of the mind"; he failed to realize that the logical structure itself is merely a theoretical expression of real society. "What has philosophical significance here is not the logic of the matter, but the matter of the logic. Logic does not serve to prove the state, but the state serves to prove logic." Hegel fell into "speculative illusion," thereby "reversing the order of things through abstraction, treating the self-generation process of abstract concepts as the self-generation process of concrete reality." On this basis, Marx vividly described Hegel’s philosophy as "logical, pantheistic mysticism." Similarly, Proudhon—the "Quesnay [5] of the metaphysical side of political economy"—sought to apply Hegel’s logical system to his own political economy. However, in Marx’s view, Proudhon "degraded Hegel's dialectic to the most wretched proportions." Marx believed: "Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production. M. Proudhon, the true philosopher, being the one who has taken things upside down, sees in actual relations nothing but the incarnation of these principles, of these categories." Proudhon’s "building the edifice of an ideological system by means of the categories of political economy" undoubtedly "isolates the individual parts of the social system... converting the various members of society into so many separate societies, following one another." In this sense, we can fully say that Kaufman’s understanding of the "dialectic" of Capital was built on the theoretical foundation of the "metaphysics of political economy"; Kaufman was the "Russian Proudhon."
In the Afterword to the Second German Edition of the first volume of Capital, Marx emphasized: "My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of 'the Idea', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos [creator] of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea'. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought." Marx here explicitly explains the essential difference between himself and Hegelian dialectics—it is not the matter of the logic, but the logic of the matter. Dialectics is merely a way of thinking that mentally reproduces the logic of the matter itself, rather than being the generative process of Spirit itself. Marx’s "analytical method, which starts from a specific socio-economic period, has nothing in common with the method of German professors who concatenate concepts ('with words a system may be built')." Marx pointed out: "I do not start from 'concepts,' and hence not from the 'concept of value,' so I have no need to 'split' it. My starting point is the simplest social form in which the labor-product presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the 'commodity'." Regarding this, Marx also emphasized: "This study resulted from an analysis of a given economic structure, not from talk about the concepts and words 'use-value' and 'value'." In a letter to Kugelmann, Marx noted: "Lange says quite naively that I 'move with rare freedom' in the empirical material. He has no idea that this 'free movement in the material' is nothing but a description of a method of treating the material—namely, the dialectical method." In other words, only after the research work on the "structure of the material" is completed can the work of presentation reflect the "life of the material" in the mind. Therefore, all this "confronts us as if it were an a priori [6] construction."
In Karl Marx, 'A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy', Engels viewed Marx’s dialectic as a method where "the logical and the historical coincide," arguing that the logical mode is "nothing but the historical mode," "wherever history begins, the process of thought must also begin, and its further progressive development will be nothing but the reflection, in abstract and theoretically consistent form, of the historical process; a corrected reflection, but corrected according to the laws of the real historical process itself." Rosenthal called the method described by Engels the "logical method of investigation," considering it "a concrete manifestation of the dialectical method in solving the important question of how and by what means the scientific research process of objective reality should proceed." It is the internal unity of the research method and the method of presentation, an "artistic whole." The research method and the method of presentation are the forms in which Marx's dialectic is expressed in the overall structure of Capital; any approach that separates these two methods to study the methodology of Capital in isolation will, to some extent, obscure the holistic vision of Marx’s dialectic. The two methods are collectively expressed in Capital as: appropriating the material—analyzing historical forms; exploring the internal connections of forms—determining the general abstract relations of decisive significance, establishing the connections between categories, and reflecting the structure and life of the material in thought. The most important task among these is to establish an "a priori structure"—that is, the structure of the material itself—within the processing of chaotic and disordered material.
In Capital, the object of study is not Hegel’s "incorporeal reason"—the abstract system of concepts itself—but the capitalist mode of production itself, i.e., "what I have to examine in this work is the capitalist mode of production and the relations of production and forms of intercourse that correspond to it." Unlike Hegel’s goal of obtaining pure absolute truth, the ultimate goal of Marx’s "critique of political economy" lies in "laying bare the economic law of motion of modern society." This law can only be revealed by specifically analyzing the various moments that constitute the totality of capital—production, distribution, exchange, and consumption—and the necessity of the differences within a single unity. That is to say, the ultimate goal of the creation of Capital is to reproduce the "rational concrete" of capital in the mind. Therefore, the capitalist mode of production as a "rational concrete" is necessarily achieved through "the establishment of its own concept, which in turn presupposes the determination of the specific existence and connection of the various levels of the overall structure." In other words, "to establish an economic concept is to strictly define it as a level, element, or sphere of the structure of a mode of production." What kind of structure, then, should be used to express the relationship of the totality acting upon various elements? Or rather, how can the concept of the causality of the capital structure be explained? Marx used the metaphors of "general illumination" and "ether" [7] to point out: "In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to others." Just as "general illumination" affects and determines the color and specific gravity of all other objects. Therefore, "It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society." The factors that determine "what position various economic relations occupy historically in the sequence of successive social forms" lie in "their structure within modern bourgeois society." Thus, the sequence of categories, the logical progression, and the causal relationships in the system of political economy are determined by the overall structure subsumed under capital relations. The structure of thought is the theoretical structure in the mind that presents the economic categories and their movement process in a conceptual way. While the structure of the material, as the organic structure of the capitalist mode of production itself, is an "in-itself structure," the "a priori structure" in thought is the reproduction of the "in-itself structure" in the mind—a dynamic "for-itself structure" presented by establishing a conceptual system. This process is both the rational application of the dialectical mode of thinking and the external expression of the unified structure of the research method and the method of presentation.
Lenin once pointed out: "Athough Marx left no 'Logic' (with a capital L), he left the logic of Capital." Logic is not the doctrine of the laws of thought itself, but the doctrine of the "laws of development of 'all material, natural and spiritual things'," the doctrine of the "entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition." Any attempt to build an edifice of ideological systems through the categories of political economy will fall deep into the mire of metaphysics. The German poet Heine once said that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was the "sword that decapitated deism"; we could likewise say that Marx's critique of political economy in Capital is the "sword that decapitated Hegel's logical pantheism." Although Marx borrowed Hegel’s logic, he also deconstructed it to a certain extent; what runs through Capital is a de-transcendentalized, materialist logic. In this sense, the subtitle of Capital—Critique of Political Economy—could entirely be replaced with "Critique of Hegelian Logic"; Hegelian logic attains new life and complete reality in Capital.
III. The Methodological Revolution of Capital: From "Abstraction" to the "Power of Abstraction"
The reason Marx achieved a "critique" of political economy in the dialectical sense is that he emphasized: "in the analysis of economic forms, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The power of abstraction must replace both." In the sense of methodological critique, the "power of abstraction" in the method of Capital is neither equivalent to the "reality" in classical political economy—intuitive abstraction—nor equivalent to "abstraction" itself in German classical philosophy—speculative abstraction. As a form of "real abstraction," its meaning points directly to the logic of the real object. As the New Dialectics scholar [Chris] Arthur has said, if Capital is the true wealth of dialectics, it is not due to the application of some abstract universal method, but because the movement of matter itself demands the expression of corresponding logical categories. This is precisely where the essence of Capital as dialectic lies, and where Marx achieves his methodological revolution.
As early as the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx critiqued the respective theoretical defects of old materialism and idealism. In his view, the problem with old materialism was that "the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively." The problem with idealism was that it "developed the active side abstractly," though "idealism, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such." Here, Marx points out the methodological characteristics of both—one proceeding from the perspective of objective contemplation and the other from subjective abstraction—while distinguishing and establishing his own methodology based on the perspective of practice, which unifies subject and object.
Specifically, the movement from the "concrete to the abstract" and then from the "abstract to the concrete" is the developmental and ascending process of cognition, in which "abstraction" serves as the pivot transforming "sensuous concrete" into "rational concrete." Classical political economists failed to understand the true meaning of "abstraction," viewing the "abstract" and the "concrete" as spatially homogeneous. They focused their attention on the level of the natural attributes of things, thereby severing the connections between them and causing "all concrete historical determinations of the object to disappear." Consequently, the "abstraction" of classical political economy was "extremely incomplete," "formal," and "false." While the German classical philosopher Hegel viewed the "abstract" and the "concrete" as spatially heterogeneous, he "inverted" their relationship and set them in opposition. In his system, "abstraction" attained an independent status, as if "the essence of things existed outside their manifestations, the universal outside the particular, and the law without its concrete expression." Therefore, Hegel "fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete and reproduces it as a spiritually concrete. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being." In reality, "abstraction" is a means to achieve the mind’s goal of cognizing the "concrete," rather than the goal of cognition itself. "The ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought." [8] Classical political economy and German classical philosophy failed to realize this; they either obscured the dialectical vision of the method of presentation with the method of research, or obscured the materialist vision of the method of research with the method of presentation. They failed to read the essence of "abstraction" through the essential "concrete" existence within a holistic vision of research and presentation methods.
Distinguishing himself from the objective realm of old materialism and the subjective realm of idealism, Marx turned his gaze toward the realm of social practice within the entire scope of history. He noted in The German Ideology: "Where speculation ends—in real life—there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men." Only the social totality of the historical forms of development in which humans and nature interact serves as the foundation and standard for theoretical research and presentation. In other words, "Whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice." Cognition is "completed outside the object because it is the result of the acting subject. The manifestation of cognition is expressed entirely in the structure of the real object in the differentiated forms of essence and non-essence, surface and depth, internal and external." Therefore, true abstraction originates neither from the transcendental forms of thought itself nor from the contemplative forms of the object. "It is directly of a social nature; its origin lies in the spatial-temporal realm of communication between people. It is not man, but the actions of men, the reciprocal actions between men, that produce this abstraction." From an epistemological perspective, "this practice has its objective structural premises; it has another side, which is the view of reality as a 'complex of processes.'" Although the essence of truth lies in representing reality, this "reality" does not remain at the contemplative level of empirical facts. To put it another way, this "reality" is not a ready-made fact, but a deeper "thing" that is dynamically generated. This "thing," generated in history as human practice, possesses an epistemological "transcendental" premise.
This deep-level "thing," as a product of human practical activity and social relations, is the "being-as-being" of real society; that which it refers to is a substance as ontology, and simultaneously a subject. Hegel pointed out: "The true is to be understood and expressed not only as substance, but equally as subject." "Being-as-being," as the "subject" of real society, is essentially a complex relation. Any other "being" possesses the specific concrete form of "being-as-being" only when enveloped in the relations of the "subject." Just as "a Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money." [9] Without a doubt, the transformation Marx achieved through the "power of abstraction"—from the level of "things" to the level of "relations," from surface issues to deep-seated issues, reaching into the depths of history—is the prerequisite for grasping "being-as-being."
Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism in Capital is the key to understanding these issues. In Marx’s view, the commodity—a "simple and trivial" thing—is actually "a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." The "queerness" of the commodity actually stems from its fetishistic character. "The commodity-form... reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses." Within this, the "perceptibility" of the commodity is its inherent natural attribute, while its "imperceptibility" is its social attribute. If we regard the "perceptibility" (natural attribute) of the commodity as "being," then its "imperceptibility" (social attribute) is "being-as-being." However, "the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things." In reality, the natural and social attributes of the commodity are inverted; the relations between people become relations between things. By virtue of the "power of abstraction," Marx thoroughly stripped away this "mystical veil" [10] shrouding the commodity, discovering the mediating links connecting capitalist relations of production and reification. Capitalist relations of production, as "being-as-being," mediate the process of material production, giving the capitalist mode of production the dual determination of producing material content and social form. On one hand, it realizes the process of satisfying consumption through productive labor—producing use-value; on the other hand, through relations of production, it determines the process by which productive labor realizes the valorization of value—producing value itself. By mediating a series of links such as commodities, labor, and money, capital achieves a shift from material production to value production. This causes abstract value to be expressed as exchange-value, concrete labor as abstract labor, and the productive process of labor as a process of valorization. Thus, at the level of the social totality, it presents two "faces": the production of material content (appearance) and the "self-reproduction" of social form (essence). Therefore, the dual determination within the commodity exists as a state of contradiction from beginning to end. It lies, on one hand, in the need to satisfy the specific consumption of the individual, and on the other, in the need to satisfy the valorization of all value at the social level. These two sides manifest as a dialectical unity of opposites in the process where valorization, mediated by capital relations, dominates labor production. Consequently, while producing a vast amount of social material wealth, it also produces the negative factors that limit itself. In other words, as "real abstraction" [11]—the "power of abstraction"—manifests on an ever-grander scale within the expanding organic composition of capital production, its real power for self-dissolution becomes increasingly potent. Thus, Marx used the "power of abstraction" to provide a dialectical presentation of the synchronic structure of the capitalist social totality. Through the antagonistic and dynamic process of development between the material content of social production and the social form of capitalist relations of production, he endowed the "power of abstraction" with a "dialectical" reflective dimension, thereby conducting a critique of the premises of the capitalist system within a diachronic perspective.
Marx’s "power of abstraction," as a dialectical force of abstraction, not only elevated the study of political economy to a new level—a critical field where the inherent unity of the materialist conception of history and dialectics, and the consistency between the logical process and the historical process, are fully displayed—but also revealed the true existential condition of human beings under the capitalist system. Marx pointed out in The Poverty of Philosophy: "If an Englishman transforms men into hats, a German transforms hats into ideas. The Englishman is Ricardo... the German is Hegel." Specifically, Ricardo reflected the relations between people as relations between things, replacing human social attributes with the natural attributes of things. Hegel, meanwhile, deduced the logical relations between things as logical relations between ideas, turning the theoretical system constructed by reason into a subjective metaphysical system detached from real human life. In doing so, he betrayed the original value-intent of rationalism to "discover man," and instead became "shackles for man" or even "obscured man." Classical political economy and German classical philosophy reflected the "real abstraction" of human social relations as "objective abstraction" and "subjective abstraction," thereby transforming humans into the abstract "rational man" of an idealized blueprint, ignoring the existential state and true life experiences of humans in actual history.
Standing on the ground of thorough materialism, Marx reduced Hegel’s "internal logic of thought" to the "internal logic of history," thereby providing a historical explanation of the logic of social development—"staying all the time on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice." He explained the "history of ideas" as the history of human material practice. In Marx's view, history is no longer a self-consciousness receding into reason, but the practical activity of changing real society through successive generations leveraging productive forces and relations of production. And "this sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse... is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as 'substance' and 'essence of man.'" Therefore, human essence is investigated not from the abstract "rational man" of an idealized blueprint, but from concrete material productive activity. Although classical political economy proceeded from reality, it saw only "things" and failed to see the "social relations" behind them—"Economics deals not with things but with relations between persons, and, in the last resort, between classes; these relations are, however, always bound to things and appear as things." [12] Classical political economy essentially served as a propaganda tool for capitalist ideology and concealed the facts of class contradiction. Through the superficial "equality" of capitalist commodity exchange, Marx discovered the hidden contradictory relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, as well as the existential predicament of humans suffering under the "abstract rule" of capital in contemporary society.
Thus, it is evident that the methodological revolutionary significance of Capital as a "critique of political economy" lies neither in viewing empirical facts from the contemplative form of the object (as did classical political economy) nor in abstractly narrating the general movement of dialectics from the active form of the subject (as did Hegel). Rather, it lies in the critical inheritance of the "power of abstraction" from both. This allowed Marx to ascend to the commanding height of examining the real capitalist world, "seeing the whole domain of modern social relations as clear and plain as day." It allowed the rotating axis around which the entire modern social system revolves—the relationship between capital and labor—to receive a scientific explanation for the first time. Consequently, dialectics truly became Marx’s most powerful revolutionary weapon for critiquing capitalist society.
(The author’s affiliation: Jilin University) Source: Inner Mongolia Social Sciences, No. 3, 2025 Web Editor: Paul