ABSTRACT
Classical political economy occasionally contradicts itself in this analysis. It often attempts directly, leaving out the intermediate links, to carry through the reduction and to prove that the various forms are derived from one and the same source. This is however a necessary consequence of its analytical method, with which criticism (Kritik) and understanding must begin. Classical economy is not interested in elaborating how the various forms come into being (genetisch zu entwickeln), but seeks to reduce them to their unity by means of analysis, because it starts from them as given premisses. But analysis is the necessary prerequisite of genetic presentation (genetische Darstellung), and of the understanding of the real, formative process in its different phases. Finally a failure, a deficiency of classical political economy is the fact that it does not conceive the basic form (Grundform) of capital, i.e. production designed to appropriate other people’s labour, as a historical form but as a natural form of social production.
