It was an immense advance when Adam Smith rejected all restrictions with regard to the activity that produces wealth --for him,it was labor as such,neither manufacturing,nor commercial,nor agricultural labor,but all of them.The abstract universality which creates wealth implies also the universality of the objects defined as wealth:they are products as such,or once more labor as such,but in this case past,materialized labor.How difficult and immense a transition that was is demonstrated by the fact that Adam Smith himself occassionally relapses once more into the Physiocratic system.It might seem that in this way merely an abstract expression was found for the ******st and most ancient relation in which human beings act as producers --irrespective of the type of society they live in.This is true in one respect,but not in another.
The fact that the specific kind of labor is irrelevant presupposes a highly-developed complex of actually existing kinds of labor --none of which is any more the all-important one.The most general abstractions arise on the whole only when concrete development is most profuse,so that a specific quality is seen to be common to many phenomena,or common to all.Then it is no longer perceived solely in a particular form.This abstraction of labor is,on the other hand,by no means simply the conceptual resultant of a variety of existing concrete types of labor.The fact that the particular kind of labor employed is immaterial is appropriate to a form of society in which individuals easily pass from one type of labor to another,the particular type of labor being accidental to them and therefore irrelevant.Labor,not only as a category but in reality,has become a means to create wealth in general,and has ceased to be tied as an attribute to a particular individual.This state of affairs is most pronounced in the United States,the most modern form of bourgeois society.The abstract category "labor","labor as such",labor sans phrase,the point of departure in modern economics,thus becomes a practical fact only there.
The ******st abstraction,which plays a decisive role in modern political economy,an abstraction which expresses an ancient relation existing in all social formations,nevertheless appears to be actually true in this abstract form only as a category of the most modern society.It might be said that phenomena which are historical products in the United States --e.g.the irrelevance of the particular type of labor --appear to be among the Russians (for instance)naturally developed predispositions.But in the first place,there is an enormous difference between barbarians having a predisposition which makes it possible to employ them in various tasks,and civilized people who apply themselves to various tasks.As regards the Russians,moreover,their indifference to the particular kind of labor performed is in practice matched by their traditional habit of clinging fast to very definite kind of labor from which they are extricated only by external influences.
The examples of labor strikingly demonstrates how even the most abstract categories (despite their validity in all epochs)--precisely because they are abstractions --are equally a product of historical conditions even in the specific form of abstractions,and they retain their full validity only for and within the framework of these conditions.
Bourgeois society is the most advanced and complex historical organization of production.The categories which express its relations,and an understanding of its structure,therefore,provide and 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 assimilated 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 phenomenon only bourgeois phenomenon.If one only knows rent,it is possible to understand tribute,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.