A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Glossary

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"Production in General" and the Robinsonades: Marx's opening target in the 1857 Introduction: classical economists' habit (in Smith and Ricardo) of starting from an isolated hunter or fisherman as if individuals naturally precede society. Marx calls these figures "Robinsonades," "the fiction and only the aesthetic fiction" of eighteenth-century thought, projecting the free, unattached individual of emerging bourgeois society backward as humanity's supposed natural starting point: "Man is in the most literal sense of the word a zoon politikon... an animal which can develop into an individual only in society."; Related: The 1857 Introduction

A

Abstract Universal Labor: Marx's term for labor stripped of its concrete, particular character — the digging of gold, weaving of silk, or raising of wheat treated purely as expenditures of "human muscles, nerves, brain," interchangeable and comparable by quantity alone. "Labor which creates exchange value is, therefore, abstract general labor": it is the substance every commodity's exchange-value ultimately measures, as distinct from the concrete, useful labor that produces a commodity's particular use-value.; Related: Exchange-Value, Socially Necessary Labor-Time, The Twofold Character of Labor
Adam Smith (on Value): The economist Marx credits with generalizing labor — in its social form as division of labor — into the sole source of material wealth, but faults for confusion at the higher levels of his own theory: Smith "constantly confuses the determination of the value of commodities by the labor-time contained in them with the determination of their value by the value of labor," and imagines the labor-time law held only in a pre-capitalist "paradise lost" rather than under capitalism itself.; Related: James Steuart, David Ricardo

B

Base and Superstructure: The architectural metaphor at the center of the Preface's historical theory: "The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness." Marx adds the theory of revolution that follows from it: when "the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production," those relations "turn into their fetters," and "the period of social revolution" begins.; Related: The Materialist Conception of History
Benjamin Franklin: The American Marx credits with the first genuinely clear statement of labor as the measure of value, quoting Franklin's 1721 pamphlet: "the riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase." Marx praises the insight but notes Franklin never grasped that the labor measuring value must be abstract universal labor rather than the concrete labor of any particular trade, so he "fails to recognize in money the direct embodiment of this alienated labor."; Related: William Petty, Socially Necessary Labor-Time
Boisguillebert: The French economist Marx pairs with Petty as co-founder of classical political economy, who "reduces the exchange value of a commodity to labor-time" via his concept of "true value" (la juste valeur) set by free competition distributing labor correctly among trades. Marx contrasts Boisguillebert's fierce hostility to money — attacking the greed for gold at Louis XIV's court — with Petty's enthusiasm for it, reading the difference as an enduring split between French and English political economy.; Related: William Petty, David Ricardo

C

Commodity Mystification: Marx's early formulation of what Capital would later call fetishism: the way "a social relation of production takes the form of an object existing outside of individuals," so that relations between people appear as relations between things. "In money this mystification appears only more strikingly than in commodities," and Marx notes that economists who mock earlier illusions about money commit the same error the moment they analyze "higher economic forms," such as capital.; Related: Money as the Universal Equivalent, Exchange-Value

D

David Hume's Quantity Theory of Money: The monetary theory Marx examines and criticizes in Chapter II, in which the value of money is set purely by the relative quantities of money and commodities in circulation — so that, in Marx's illustrative case, if a country holds two million ounces of gold against one million quarters of grain, a quarter trades for two ounces, and would trade for twenty ounces if the gold supply were tenfold. Marx shows Ricardo inherited and applied this theory in ways that required, in his words, "violence to actual facts."; Related: Thomas Tooke, David Ricardo
David Ricardo: The economist Marx treats as bringing classical political economy's labor theory of value to its sharpest, most consistent form, showing that the determination of value by labor-time governs capitalist production even where it seems to contradict it. Marx quotes Lord Brougham's remark that "Mr. Ricardo seemed as if he had dropped from another planet," while criticizing Ricardo for treating capitalist commodity exchange as an eternal natural form — even projecting it back onto a "primitive fisherman and primitive hunter" consulting London Exchange annuity tables.; Related: Adam Smith (on Value), Sismondi
Direct Barter: The "original natural form of exchange" Marx traces as the historical origin of money, arguing it begins not inside primitive communities but "where they end, on their borders," at points of contact with other communities — with slaves, cattle, and metals typically becoming the first money because they were the goods first drawn into that border exchange. Marx criticizes economists who treat money as merely a technical fix for barter's inconveniences, arguing this obscures that the difficulties themselves arise from the deeper contradiction between use-value and exchange-value.; Related: Money as the Universal Equivalent

E

Exchange-Value: The commodity's other aspect: "a quantitative relation, as a proportion in which use-values are exchanged for one another," so that, in Marx's example, "a volume of Propercius and eight ounces of snuff may represent the same exchange value, in spite of the dissimilar use-values of tobacco and elegy." Marx argues exchange-value is ultimately a measure of the "congealed labor-time" embodied in a commodity — the substance that lets qualitatively different goods be compared as equivalent quantities of the same thing.; Related: Use-Value, Socially Necessary Labor-Time, Abstract Universal Labor

H

Hoarding: The practice Marx analyzes as money withdrawn from circulation and accumulated for its own sake, requiring the owner to "sell as much as possible and buy as little as possible, as old Cato had taught: 'patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse'" (the head of a household should be a seller, not a buyer). Marx treats hoarding as a necessary moment in money's development once it becomes possible to stop a sale's proceeds from immediately becoming a purchase.; Related: Money as Medium of Circulation, Means of Payment

M

Misère de la Philosophie: Marx's 1847 book against Proudhon, cited in the Preface as the place where "the leading points of our theory were first presented scientifically, though in a polemic form" — an early public statement of the value theory this 1859 book develops at length, aimed specifically against Proudhon's mutualist economics.; Related: Rheinische Zeitung
Money as Means of Payment: The function money takes on once buying and selling separate in time — credit, debt, and deferred payment — making money "the universal commodity of all contracts." Marx notes that "the extent to which money is developed as the exclusive means of payment indicates the degree to which exchange value has taken hold of production in its depth and breadth," tying this monetary function directly to how thoroughly capitalist relations have penetrated a society.; Related: Money as Medium of Circulation, World Money
Money as Measure of Value: The first of the three functions Chapter II works through: "Gold becomes the measure of value only because all commodities estimate their exchange value in it." Marx stresses that a change in gold's own value — say, from a new gold discovery — does not disturb its function as measure, since all commodities' prices shift together and "retain the same proportion to each other," just as a ratio survives being scaled up or down.; Related: Money as the Universal Equivalent, Money as Medium of Circulation
Money as Medium of Circulation: Money's second function analyzed in Chapter II: coin passing from hand to hand as the vehicle of commodity exchange, distinct from its role as the abstract measure in which prices are stated. Marx traces how this function drives money to "constantly disappear in the very process of circulation by being realized all the time in use-values," in contrast to the hoard, which withdraws money from that flow.; Related: Money as Measure of Value, Hoarding, Means of Payment
Money as the Universal Equivalent: Marx's account of how one commodity comes to stand in for the exchange-value of all others: through repeated exchange, one commodity (his running example is linen, later gold) is singled out as the article in which every other commodity's value is expressed, becoming "the particular commodity which thus appears as the specially adopted expression of the exchange value of all other commodities." "Money is a crystallization of the exchange value of commodities which they themselves form in the process of exchange" — not, Marx insists, a symbol or convenience invented from outside the system.; Related: Exchange-Value, Money as Measure of Value, Commodity Mystification

P

Peel's Bank Act: Sir Robert Peel's 1844–45 banking legislation, invoked at the opening of Chapter II via a parliamentary anecdote: Gladstone remarked that "not even love has made so many fools of men as the pondering over the nature of money." Marx uses the episode to introduce his claim that money's apparent mystery dissolves once its evolution out of the commodity form is properly understood — the real difficulty is theoretical, not technical.; Related: Commodity Mystification, Money as Measure of Value
Production and Consumption (Dialectical Identity): The 1857 Introduction's argument that production and consumption are not separate, sequential stages but interpenetrate each other: "Without production, no consumption; but, on the other hand, without consumption, no production." Marx works through the point with concrete examples — "a garment becomes a real garment only through the act of being worn" — and the reciprocal claim that production doesn't just supply consumption's object but actively shapes its manner and creates the want itself, as when the availability of cooked meat and utensils changes what "hunger" means.; Related: The 1857 Introduction, Production and Distribution
Production and Distribution: The section of the 1857 Introduction examining how textbook economics treats distribution (rent, wages, interest, profit) as a separate sphere from production, when in fact the same categories (capital, land, labor) appear as both agents of production and forms of distribution. Marx also uses the section to attack the assumption that private property is production's necessary and natural prerequisite, noting "history points rather to common property... as the primitive form."; Related: Production and Consumption (Dialectical Identity), The 1857 Introduction

R

Rheinische Zeitung: The Cologne newspaper Marx edited in 1842–43, whose coverage of "forest thefts," the condition of Mosel peasants, and free trade debates he credits in the Preface as his first exposure to economic questions — the practical spur that sent him from law and philosophy into political economy in the first place.; Related: The Materialist Conception of History

S

Sir James Steuart: The Scottish economist Marx credits as the first Briton to elaborate a general system of bourgeois economics, distinguished by his sharp separation of labor that creates exchange-value — which he calls "industry" — from labor that simply produces use-values. Marx values Steuart's historical awareness, gained from watching feudal labor decay in Scotland and on the Continent, that commodity production is "specifically capitalistic in its character" rather than a natural, universal condition.; Related: Adam Smith, William Petty
Sismondi: The economist Marx presents as closing the classical school on the French side, as Ricardo closes it in England — emphasizing, against Ricardo, the specifically social character of value-creating labor and defining economic progress as reducing value to the labor "sufficient to satisfy" society's actual demand. Marx frames Sismondi's relentless attacks on large industrial capital as an echo of Boisguillebert's earlier attacks on money: "In Ricardo political economy reached its climax... while Sismondi supplemented it by impersonating its doubts."; Related: David Ricardo, Boisguillebert
Skilled Labor as a Multiple of Simple Labor: Marx's account of how the theory of value handles skilled work: "such reduction does take place, for, as exchange value, the product of the most skilled labor is, when taken in a certain proportion, equivalent to the product of unskilled average labor." A day of skilled labor might count as three days of unskilled labor — Marx declines to work out the exact laws governing this reduction here, leaving it for later treatment.; Related: Abstract Universal Labor, Socially Necessary Labor-Time
Socially Necessary Labor-Time: The standard by which exchange-value is actually measured — not the time any particular worker happens to take, but "the labor-time which is required for the production of another specimen of the same commodity under the same general conditions of production." Marx illustrates the concept's abstraction with a chemical analogy: "The conversion of all commodities into labor-time is no greater abstraction nor a less real process than the chemical reduction of all organic bodies to air."; Related: Exchange-Value, Abstract Universal Labor

T

The 1857 Introduction: Marx's unfinished methodological draft, unpublished in his lifetime and printed here as an appendix, working through production, distribution, exchange, and consumption as an interconnected whole rather than separate boxes. Marx wrote it in 1857 but set it aside once he restructured his planned work — its material was meant, per the translator's preface, to migrate into a projected history-of-political-economy volume of Capital that was never completed.; Related: Production in General, Production and Consumption
The Materialist Conception of History: The single dense paragraph in the 1859 Preface that became one of Marx's most quoted statements: "The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness." Marx traces the idea to his own break with Hegel — the discovery that legal and political forms "are rooted in the material conditions of life" rather than in the progress of the human mind.; Related: Base and Superstructure
The Twofold Character of Labor: Marx's foundational distinction between labor as the concrete, useful activity that produces a use-value (tailoring produces a coat) and labor as the abstract, homogeneous substance that produces exchange-value. "Tailoring, e.g., in its material manifestation as a distinct productive activity, produces a coat, but not the exchange value of the coat" — the latter comes only from abstract universal labor, a specifically social form belonging to commodity-producing society, not a natural property of the work itself.; Related: Use-Value, Exchange-Value, Abstract Universal Labor
Thomas Tooke: The economist Marx credits with empirically demolishing the Ricardian quantity theory of money through decades of work on his History of Prices, tracking commodity prices in Britain from 1793 to 1856. Tooke began as a believer in Ricardo's currency theory but was driven by the evidence itself to conclude there was no direct, mechanical connection between the volume of currency and the level of prices — restoring, in Marx's account, Steuart's more concrete conception of money against Hume's abstraction.; Related: David Hume's Quantity Theory of Money, James Steuart

U

Use-Value: The first half of the commodity's "twofold aspect," defined in Chapter I as an object's concrete usefulness — "any thing necessary, useful or pleasant in life." Marx stresses that use-value has "a substance of their own, independent of" any social form: "one can not tell by the taste of wheat whether it has been raised by a Russian serf, a French peasant, or an English capitalist." As such, use-value as such "lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy" — it only becomes economically interesting once it also carries exchange-value.; Related: Exchange-Value, The Twofold Character of Labor

W

William Petty: The English economist Marx credits, alongside Boisguillebert, as founding classical political economy's analysis of value. Petty "reduces use-value to labor" and pioneers seeing concrete labor's social character through the division of labor, but Marx faults him for defining exchange-value simply as money (gold and silver), a residue of "the ideas of the monetary system" that mistakes labor spent mining precious metal for the source of value in general.; Related: Boisguillebert, The 1857 Introduction
World Money: The final, fullest form of money Chapter II arrives at: gold and silver functioning across national boundaries, stripped of the local coin-stamps and legal-tender status that operate only within a given state. Marx treats world money as the point where money most purely appears as "the material representative of material wealth" in general, moving between nations to settle balances of trade.; Related: Money as Means of Payment, Money as Measure of Value