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I am thinking here of some fictional person who has lived in
buildings all her life. She does not know what wind is.
She is not even aware that the air which she is immersed in
is a form of matter; she thinks it is empty space. Then she
looks out of the windows and sees the trees sway. She makes
the conclusion: there must be something which is pushing and
pulling those trees. She does not see what it is, and she
only sees the effects of it, but this is enough to make some
intelligent conclusions about the wind. Marx proceeds in
the same way. He looks at the surface, the market, and
makes inferences from this about what must be going on in
the invisible sphere of production. Especially when he sees
contradictions on the surface he knows that his field of
vision is insufficient; he has to take a look at the
underlying layers in order to explain this contradiction. |
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