p Meanwhile, many other scientists and thinkers were steadily working on various questions in economic science, preparing the necessary prerequisites for identifying and studying production, the principal sphere of human activity. English scientists studying the material conditions of man’s life expressed some correct ideas, proclaiming that labour was the source of all social wealth, and formulating the labour theory of value, under which value was determined by the quantity of labour measured in time, with the exchange of commodities ultimately being an exchange of labour activity.

p In 1662, William Petty declared that the value of commodities was determined by the value of the labour going into their production. That value resulted from human labour was also accepted by John Locke. Adam Smith regarded profit as a product of the unpaid labour of wage workers. In this context, Marx wrote: “Important as it was to reduce value to labour, it was equally important [to present] surplus-value, which manifests itself in surplus-product, as surplus-labour. This was in fact already stated by Adam Smith."  [101•16 

p Thus, the question of man’s exploitation of man and of the social substance of production in class society, the most important question in the theory of social development, was about to be answered. But Smith and other classics of bourgeois political economy failed to show the substance of capitalist relations or to bring out the deep-going contradictions inherent in capitalism. They failed to show the role of production in the historical process and to go on to a theory of social development.

p Still, the question of social structure had been considerably advanced, as compared with the old notions of a solid “third estate" or the totally naive notions of “rich” and “poor”. Smith saw three classes in capitalist society—workers, capitalists and landowners—with wages, profit and rent, the form in which each derived its income.

p Thus, science was still about to tackle the most important sphere of human activity, production. English economists concentrated on a study of men’s material activity and did much in this line, making important advances in analysing capitalism and, in consequence, also creating the prerequisites for its scientific critique and for identifying its basic contradictions. The critique of capitalism did away with the unscientific view of that social system as setting the limits to all development. Indeed, social production and private appropriation did not in any sense mark the final point of the historical process.

p But the English economists only took the first few steps, for they did not have any intention of destroying capitalism and substituting another social system for it. On the contrary, they regarded capitalism as a “natural order" which best accorded with “human nature”. For philosophical materialism to be applied to the cognition of social life it was necessary to reveal its material basis, for which it was necessary to formulate a Marxist political economy as the economic basis for scientific communism. From then on, social thought could no longer develop without relying on dialectics and materialism, on Marxist political economy.

p A scientific analysis of the economy of bourgeois society became an instrument of vast importance in the struggle between united labour and 102 capital; the spread of the basic propositions of this theory became an important means for uniting the workers and establishing a working-class party to struggle for the defeat of the exploiters.

p Marx considered politico-economic questions in a broad philosophical light. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 he had come close to bringing out the characteristic features of capitalist exploitation, stressing that labour and capital were irreconcilably antithetical and discovering that the course of economic development itself led to revolution and the emancipation of the workers, which also implied the emancipation of all mankind. By then, Engels had come to live in Britain and was of great help to Marx in his studies of political economy. Engels had made a thorough study of the Chartist movement and Owen’s Utopian socialism, and had published an article, entitled “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, which was published in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher, containing some conclusions from his studies of economic theory.

p Marx and Engels integrated philosophical materialism and economic theory to show that man’s domination and his complete renascence involved the overthrow of the world of private property. Marx subsequently summed up his ideas in these words: “My investigation led to the result that legal relations as well as forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, following the example of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, combines under the name of ’civil society’, that, however, the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy."   [102•17 

The profound analysis of the economic basis of society helped to elaborate the view of world history and its motive forces. Hegel had paved the way for a correct understanding of the sources of society’s self-movement as a dialectical process, but he had hidden world history within the human mind, declaring it to be a product of man’s consciousness, of his thought, of his spirit. Economic studies helped to understand the social structure of society, but English thinkers did not consider the problem of the development of that structure and its contradictions, which worked changes in the structure itself. Although by the early 19th century, historical science had accumulated many important observations about social contradictions, it had not produced any coherent theory of the social process and had confined itself to a description of it.