For example,taxes in kind and deliveries in kind remained the basis of the Roman empire even at the height of its development;indeed a completely evolved monetary system existed in Rome only in the army,and it never permeated the whole complex of labour.Although the simpler category,therefore,may have existed historically before the more concrete category,its complete intensive and extensive development can nevertheless occur in a complex social formation,whereas the more concrete category may have been fully evolved in a more primitive social formation.
Labour seems to be a very simple category.The notion of labour in this universal form,as labour in general,is also extremely old.Nevertheless "labour"in this simplicity is economically considered just as modern a category as the relations which give rise to this simple abstraction.The Monetary System,for example,still regards wealth quite objectively as a thing existing independently in the shape of money.Compared with this standpoint,it was a substantial advance when the Manufacturing or Mercantile System transferred the source of wealth from the object to the subjective activity --mercantile or industrial labour --but it still considered that only this circumscribed activity itself produced money.In contrast to this system,the Physiocrats assume that a specific form of labour --agriculture --creates wealth,and they see the object no longer in the guise of money,but as a product in general,as the universal result of labour.In accordance with the still circumscribed activity,the product remains a naturally developed product,an agricultural product,a product of the land par excellence .
It was an immense advance when Adam Smith rejected all restrictions with regard to the activity that produces wealth --for him it was labour as such,neither manufacturing,nor commercial,nor agricultural labour,but all types of labour.The abstract universality which creates wealth implies also the universality of the objects defined as wealth:they are products as such,or once more labour as such,but in this case past,materialised labour.How difficult and immense a transition this was is demonstrated by the fact that Adam Smith himself occasionally relapses once more into the Physiocratic system.It might seem that in this way merely an abstract expression was found for the simplest 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 labour is irrelevant presupposes a highly developed complex of actually existing kinds of labour,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 labour is,on the other hand,by no means simply the conceptual resultant of a variety of concrete types of labour.The fact that the particular kind of labour employed is immaterial is appropriate to a form of society in which individuals easily pass from one type of labour to another,the particular type of labour being accidental to them and therefore irrelevant.Labour,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 "labour","labour as such",labour sans phrase ,the point of departure of modern economics,thus becomes a practical fact only there.The simplest abstraction,which plays a decisive role in modem 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 labour --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 civilised people who apply themselves to various tasks.As regards the Russians,moreover,their indifference to the particular kind of labour performed is in practice matched by their traditional habit of clinging fast to a very definite kind of labour from which they are extricated only by external influences.
The example of labour 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.
