ABSTRACT
The reason why Marxists, who are so devoted in other matters to the maxim that "The truth is always concrete", are just the last ones to give up overvaluing the abstractions of pure economics, is that there is bound up for them in that science a proletarian ideology. The classical political economy had also contained an ideological element. In order to formulate its laws of production and exchange, it had made the assumption that every man acts all business relations upon a motive of reasoned self-interest. Marx put his proletarian ideology exactly in the place of that original ideology of the business class. The class struggle as a contradiction between two generalizations—the capitalist forces of production and the capitalist production-relations—and inferring the victory of the proletariat as a logical conclusion according to the Hegelian system, that Marx arrives at that "iron necessity" of socialism, which is supposed to rest upon the overwhelming assemblage and analysis of facts in "Das Kapital".
