Bourgeois society is the most advanced and complex historical organisation of production.The categories which express its relations,and an understanding of its structure,therefore,provide an insight into the structure and the relations of production of all formerly existing social formations the ruins and component elements of which were used in the creation of bourgeois society.Some of these unassimilated remains are still carried on within bourgeois society,others,however,which previously existed.only in rudimentary form,have been further developed and have attained their full significance,etc.The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape.On the other hand,rudiments of more advanced forms in the lower species of animals can only be understood when the more advanced forms are already known.Bourgeois economy thus provides a key to the economy of antiquity,etc.But it is quite impossible (to gain this insight)in the manner of those economists who obliterate all historical differences and who see in all social phenomena only bourgeois phenomena.If one knows rent,it is possible to understand tribute,tithe,etc.,but they do not have to be treated as identical.
Since bourgeois society is,moreover,only a contradictory form of development,it contains relations of earlier societies often merely in very stunted form or even in the form of travesties,e.g.,communal ownership.Thus,although it is true that the categories of bourgeois economy are valid for all other social formations,this has to be taken cum grano salis ,for they may contain them in an advanced,stunted,caricatured,etc.,form,that is always with substantial differences.What is called historical evolution depends in general on the fact that the latest form regards earlier ones as stages in the development of itself and conceives them always in a one-sided manner,since only rarely and under quite special conditions is a society able to adopt a critical attitude towards itself;in this context we are not of course discussing historical periods which themselves believe that they are periods of decline.The Christian religion was able to contribute to an objective understanding of earlier mythologies only when its self-criticism was to a certain extent prepared,as it were potentially.
Similarly,only when the self-criticism of bourgeois society had begun,was bourgeois political economy able to understand the feudal,ancient and oriental economies.In so far as bourgeois political economy did not simply identify itself with the past in a mythological manner,its criticism of earlier economies-especially of the feudal system against which it still had to wage a direct struggle-resembled the criticism that Christianity directed against heathenism,or which Protestantism directed against Catholicism.
Just as in general when examining any historical or social science,so also in the case of the development of economic categories is it always necessary to remember that the subject,in this context contemporary bourgeois society,is presupposed both in reality and in the mind,and that therefore categories express forms of existence and conditions of existence --and sometimes merely separate aspects --of this particular society,the subject;thus the category,even from the scientific standpoint ,by no means begins at the moment when it is discussed as such .This has to be remembered because it provides important criteria for the arrangement of the material.For example,nothing seems more natural than to begin with rent,i.e.,with landed property,since it is associated with the earth,the source of all production and all life,and with agriculture,the first form of production in all societies that have attained a measure of stability.
But nothing would be more erroneous.There is in every social formation a particular branch of production which determines the position and importance of all the others,and the relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine the relations of all other branches as well.It is as though light of a particular hue were cast upon everything,tingeing all other colours and modifying their specific features;or as if a special ether determined the specific gravity of everything found in it.Let us take as an example pastoral tribes.(Tribes living exclusively on hunting or fishing are beyond the boundary line from which real development begins.)A certain type of agricultural activity occurs among them and this determines land ownership.It is communal ownership and retains this form in a larger or smaller measure,according to the degree to which these people maintain their traditions,e.g.,communal ownership among the Slavs.Among settled agricultural people-settled already to a large extent-where agriculture predominates as in the societies of antiquity and the feudal period,even manufacture,its structure and the forms of property corresponding thereto,have,in some measure,specifically agrarian features.Manufacture is either completely dependent on agriculture,as in the earlier Roman period,or as in the Middle Ages,it copies in the town and in its conditions the organisation of the countryside.In the Middle Ages even capital --unless it was solely money capital --consisted of the traditional tools,etc.,and retained a specifically agrarian character.The reverse takes place in bourgeois society.Agriculture to an increasing extent becomes just a branch of industry and is completely dominated by capital.The same applies to rent.In all forms in which landed property is the decisive factor,natural relations still predominate;in the forms in which the decisive factor is capital,social,historically evolved elements predominate.
