Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/71

Rh the air, but constructs separate stories of the building, before it has laid the foundation. Without dwelling any longer on the physiocrats and omitting quite a number of Italian economists who in some more or less ingenious ideas came close to a correct analysis of the nature of commodity, we pass at once to the first Briton who elaborated the general system of bourgeois economics. . His idea of exchange value as well as all the abstract categories of political economy still seem to be with him in the process of differentiation from the material elements they represent and therefore appear quite vague and unsettled. In one place he determines real value by labor-time ("what a workman can perform in a day"), but immediately creates confusion by introducing the elements of wages and raw material. In another place his struggle with the material substance of the subject he treats of is revealed even more