Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/303

Rh viz. trading nations, and even in most cultured antiquity, in Greece and Rome, it attains its full development, which constitutes the prerequisite of modern bourgeois society, only in the period of their decay. Thus, this quite simple category attained its culmination in the past only at the most advanced stages of society. Even then it did not pervade (?) all economic relations; in Rome e. g. at the time of its highest development taxes and payments in kind remained the basis. As a matter of fact, the money system was fully developed there only so far as the army was concerned; it never came to dominate the entire system of labor.

Thus, although the simple category may have existed historically before the more concrete one, it can attain its complete internal and external development only in complex (?) forms of society, while the more concrete category has reached its full development in a less advanced form of society.

Labor is quite a simple category. The idea of labor in that sense, as labor in general, is also very old. Yet, "labor" thus simply defined by political economy is as much a modern category, as the conditions which have given rise to this simple abstraction. The monetary system, e. g. defines wealth quite objectively, as a thing (?) in money. Compared with this point of view, it was a great step forward, when the industrial or commercial system came to see the source of wealth not in the object but in the activity of persons, viz. in commercial and