> As I pointed out, this is not what Marx claims.
>
> "The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas,
> but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the
> imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the
> material conditions under which they live, both those which they find
> already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises
> can thus be verified in a purely empirical way."
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
>
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: Although , Carrol might bring to this exchange the quote below :
>
>
> Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To understand the
> first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of
> commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty. That
> which concerns more especially the analysis of the substance of value
> and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it was possible,
> popularised. [1] The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the
> money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human
> mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom
> of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of
> much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an
> approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more
> easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of
> economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents
> are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in
> bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour — or
> value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form. To the
> superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon
> minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same
> order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.
>
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm
If he did, he would have missed the meaning of "abstraction" in the sense Marx makes use of in the passage from "the method of political economy" I also quoted.
For that meaning, the "abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours". It's the character of actual "labour" within a specific set of "internal relations", those that define capitalism.
Thus when we move from it, as one of "the forms peculiar to existing reality", to these relations (which we can do because as an "abstraction" in this sense it reveals this "concrete" as its relational "essence") we can develop "the true reality" as the "obligation" and "final goal" of existing reality. The internal relations of wage labour constitute it as a form of "estrangement" "giving the greatest impulse ... to the integral development of every individual producer". This is one of the main ways capitalist "production" "begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature".
The relation of "abstraction" in this ontological "internal relations" sense to "method", is also set out in the following passage from Engels:
"When we consider and reflect upon nature at large or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.
"But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately, its nature, special causes, effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of natural science and historical research: branches of science which the Greeks of classical times on very good grounds, relegated to a subordinate position, because they had first of all to collect the material. The beginnings of the exact natural sciences were first worked out by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period, [25] and later on, in the Middle Ages, by the Arabs. Real natural science dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, and thence onward it has advanced with constantly increasing rapidity. The analysis of nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature that have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constants, not as essentially variables, in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the preceding centuries." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/introduction.htm
Whitehead, who uses "abstraction" in this same sense to mean the "abstracting" of "details" from the "internal relations" - the "concrete" - constitutive of the them (i.e. "detaching them from their natural or historical connection"), calls the mistake to which Engels points here - "the habit of habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole" - the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".
Marx attributes this "fallacy" to classical political economy in the Grundrisse:
"Individuals producing in Society – hence socially determined individual production – is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, [1] which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. This is the semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the Robinsonades, great and small. It is, rather, the anticipation of ‘civil society’, in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual – the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century – appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history’s point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature. This illusion has been common to each new epoch to this day. Steuart [2] avoided this simple-mindedness because as an aristocrat and in antithesis to the eighteenth century, he had in some respects a more historical footing." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm
Like "labour" in capitalism, however, this "eighteenth century individual" of classical political economy is a real "abstraction", another of "the forms peculiar to existing reality" from which we can develop, by moving from it to the "concrete" - i.e. the "internal relations" - constitutive of its "essence" (again in the sense specified in the sixth and seventh theses on Feuerbach, theses that use the terms "abstraction" and "abstract" in the sense I'm elaborating), "the true reality" as the "obligation" and "final goal" of "existing reality".
This is because the "concrete" reveals this "abstraction" - capitalist motivation - to be a form of capitalist "estrangement" and "therefore hastening to its annulment".
Here again we are starting from "a form of theoretical and practical consciousness" - classical political economy (in this case, from its delineation of "the eighteenth century individual" in terms what well be revealed by "critique" to be "passions" in Hegel's sense, a real "abstraction" whose character as an "abstraction" classical political economy ignores).
Ted