Thought For Today

"The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities" its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.” (Karl Marx Capital Vol 1)




Gray adds

Apart from the 150th anniversary of Darwin's On the Origins of the Species by Means of Natural Selection this year, this January marked the 150th anniversary since Marx's preface to A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy. In it, this famous paragraph

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.