everything else that has a semblance of reality, and reduce themselves to a few purely logical "notions," a correct "conception" of which gives one the key to the science of political economy quite irrespective of the knowledge of the facts of life, which seem to be an entirely negligible quan tity to our great "modern" scientist.
Contrast with all this the opening sentence of Marx's Kapital:—"The wealth of those societies in which the cap italist mode of production prevails presents itself as an im mense accumulation of commodities." With one mighty stroke of the pen all the conditions and limitations of the problem are given, the picture put in its historical setting! No soaring in the air, superior to space and time. No gen eralizations that may fit everything in general and nothing in particular. But a real, live situation, with a definite burning problem. No wonder that instead of losing him self in generalities or wasting himself on definitions of all sorts of "conceptions" and "notions," he delves right into the heart of the problem, and declares immediately that "our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity." This he immediately proceeds to do. And how he does it!
To be sure, he does not do it to the entire satisfaction of his critics, but we shall see that this is due mainly to failure on their part to understand his work, as is the claim of Böhm-Bawerk about the supposed purely logical argument employed by Marx. Where these critics do understand Marx, their dissatisfaction with his argument is due to their lack of knowledge of the subject itself.
Solonimski, for instance, objects to Marx's analysis for the reason that in this analysis "the conception of labor becomes independent of the purposes and necessities for which it was undertaken," and the value created by labor "becomes an independent quality inherent in the commodity irrespective of its usefulness and exchange-value." Aside from the evidently absurd statement that according to Marx the exchange-value of a commodity is inherent in the com-
