> "...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, which is precisely the opposite of that
> which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to
> historical development. The point is not the historic position of the
> economic relations in the succession of different forms of society."
This and the rest of the text are drawing out the implications for "method" of the ontology constitutive of historical materialism.
A key concept of that ontology is "internal relations," the idea that the essence of the individual is constituted by "the "ensemble of the social relations."
If this is true, then by starting from the "abstract," i.e. an individual fact considered in isolation from its "relations" in the above sense, we can reach the "concrete," this "ensemble," via its relation to the fact (e.g. by means of such an investigation of some particular "religious sentiment," Marx's own example in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach, we can reach "the ensemble of the social relations" from which the "essence" of the "individuality" characterized by this sentiment is derived), a "concrete" that is "a rich totality of many determinations and relations."
By this method, we reveal the "essence" lying behind any particular abstract "fact."
The presentation of what has been uncovered, since it is a presentation of "essence," can't take as its starting point the particular abstract fact from which the investigation set out.
For the same reason, as is asserted in the passage quoted above, the presentation can't be historical.
Thus, although "as a category ... exchange value leads an antediluvean existence," the form it takes it capitalism is specific to "the ensemble of the social relations" that is capitalism.
"the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole."
Moreover, this form itself develops with the development of capitalism from the monetary and mercantile systems of its infancy to its mature industrial form, a form characterized by the exploitation of "labour" within the labour process.
This "labour" has itself a specific form derived from the specific "ensemble of the social relations" within which it is embedded, i.e. it is expressive of the particular kind of "alienated" "individuality" constituted by this "ensemble." Thus, comparing Russian peasant labour with mature capitalist wage-labour (best exemplified, he claims here and repeats in Capital, by wage-labour in the US), he claims
"there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply themselves to everything. And then in practice the Russian indifference to the specific character of labour corresponds to being embedded by tradition within a very specific kind of labour, from which only external influences can jar them loose."
The conclusion from this example is:
"This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations."
"Labour seems a quite simple category. The conception of labour in this general form – as labour as such – is also immeasurably old. Nevertheless, when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, ‘labour’ is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction. The Monetary System [19] for example, still locates wealth altogether objectively, as an external thing, in money. Compared with this standpoint, the commercial, or manufacture, system took a great step forward by locating the source of wealth not in the object but in a subjective activity – in commercial and manufacturing activity – even though it still always conceives this activity within narrow boundaries, as moneymaking. In contrast to this system, that of the Physiocrats posits a certain kind of labour – agriculture – as the creator of wealth, and the object itself no longer appears in a monetary disguise, but as the product in general, as the general result of labour. This product, as befits the narrowness of the activity, still always remains a naturally determined product – the product of agriculture, the product of the earth par excellence.
"It was an immense step forward for Adam Smith to throw out every limiting specification of wealth-creating activity – not only manufacturing, or commercial or agricultural labour, but one as well as the others, labour in general. With the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity we now have the universality of the object defined as wealth, the product as such or again labour as such, but labour as past, objectified labour. How difficult and great was this transition may be seen from how Adam Smith himself from time to time still falls back into the Physiocratic system. Now, it might seem that all that had been achieved thereby was to discover the abstract expression for the simplest and most ancient relation in which human beings – in whatever form of society – play the role of producers. This is correct in one respect. Not in another. Indifference towards any specific kind of labour presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer predominant. As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone. On the other side, this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society – in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category ‘labour’, ‘labour as such’, labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society. One could say that this indifference towards particular kinds of labour, which is a historic product in the United States, appears e.g. among the Russians as a spontaneous inclination. But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply themselves to everything. And then in practice the Russian indifference to the specific character of labour corresponds to being embedded by tradition within a very specific kind of labour, from which only external influences can jar them loose.
"This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#3
Ted