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 study, the question of a unified approach to the process of history is 
 inescapable. It is here that the crucial importance of the dialectical 
 view of totality reveals itself. For it is perfectly possible for 
 someone to describe the essentials of an historical event and yet be in 
 the dark about the real nature of that event and of its function in the 
 historical totality, i.e. without understanding it as part of a unified 
 historical process. 
  
 A typical example of this can be seen in Sismondi€s treatment of the 
 question of crisis. [17] He understood the immanent tendencies in the 
 processes of production and distribution. But ultimately he failed 
 because, for all his incisive criticism of capitalism, he remained 
 imprisoned in capitalist notions of the objective and so necessarily 
 thought of production and distribution as two independent processes, 
 €not realising that the relations of distribution are only the relations 
 of production sub alia species.€ He thus succumbs to the same fate that 
 overtook Proudhon€s false dialectics; €he converts the various limbs of 
 society into so many independent societies.€ [18] 
  
 We repeat: the category of totality does not reduce its various elements 
 to an undifferentiated uniformity, to identity. The apparent 
 independence and autonomy which they possess in the capitalist system of 
 production is an illusion only in so far as they are involved in a 
 dynamic dialectical relationship with one another and can be thought of 
 as the dynamic dialectical aspects of an equally dynamic and dialectical 
 whole. €The result we arrive at,€ says Marx, €is not that production, 
 distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they are 
 all members of one totality, different aspects of a unit. . . . Thus a 
 definite form of production determines definite forms of consumption, 
 distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these 
 different elements.... A mutual interaction takes place between these 
 various elements. This is the case with every organic body.€ [19] But 
 even the category of interaction requires inspection. If by interaction 
 we mean just the reciprocal causal impact of two otherwise unchangeable 
 objects on each other, we shall not have come an inch nearer to an 
 understanding of society. This is the case with the vulgar materialists 
 with their one-way causal sequences (or the Machists with their 
 functional relations). After all, there is e.g. an interaction when a 
 stationary billiard ball is struck by a moving one: the first one moves, 
 the second one is deflected from its original path. The interaction we 
 have in mind must be more than the interaction of otherwise unchanging 
 objects. It must go further in its relation to the whole: for this 
 relation determines the objective form of every object of cognition. 
 Every substantial change that is of concern to knowledge manifests itself 
 as a change in relation to the whole and through this as a change in the 
 form of objectivity itself. [20] Marx has formulated this idea in 
 countless places. I shall cite only one of the best-known passages: [21] 
  
 €A negro is a negro. He only becomes a slave in certain circumstances. A 
 cotton-spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. Only in certain 
 circumstances does it become capital. Torn from those circumstances it 
 is no more capital than gold is money or sugar the price of sugar.€ 
  
 Thus the objective forms of all social phenomena change constantly in 
 the course of their ceaseless dialectical interactions with each other. 
 The intelligibility of objects develops in proportion as we grasp their 
 function in the totality to which they belong. This is why only the 
 dialectical conception of totality can enable us to understand reality 
 as a social process. For only this conception dissolves the fetishistic 
 forms necessarily produced by the capitalist mode of production and 
 enables us to see them as mere illusions which are not less illusory for 
 being seen to be necessary. These unmediated concepts, these €laws€ 
 sprout just as inevitably from the soil of capitalism and veil the real 
 relations between objects. 
  
 They can all be seen as ideas necessarily held by the agents of the 
 capitalist system of production. They are, therefore, objects of 
 knowledge, but the object which is known through them is not the 
 capitalist system of production itself, but the ideology of its ruling 
 class. 
  
 Only when this veil is torn aside does historical knowledge become 
 possible. For the function of these unmediated concepts that have been 
 derived from the fetishistic forms of objectivity is to make the 
 phenomena of capitalist society appear as supra-historical essences. The 
 knowledge of the real, objective nature of a phenomenon, the knowledge 
 of its historical character and the knowledge of its actual function in 
 the totality of society form, therefore, a single, undivided act of 
 cognition. This unity is shattered by the pseudo-scientific method. Thus 
 only through the dialectical method could the distinction between 
 constant and variable capital, crucial to economics, be understood. 
 Classical economics was unable to go beyond the distinction between 
 fixed and circulating capital. This was not accidental. For €variable 
 capital is only a particular historical manifestation of the fund for 
 providing the necessaries of life, or the labour-fund which the labourer 
 requires for the maintenance of himself and his family, and which 
 whatever be the system of social production, he must himself produce and 
 reproduce. If the labour-fund constantly flows to him in the form of 
 money that pays for his labour, it is because the product he has created 
 moves constantly away from him in the form of capital.... The 
 transaction is veiled by the fact that the product appears as a 
 commodity and the commodity as money.€ [22] 
  
 The fetishistic illusions enveloping all phenomena in capitalist society 
 succeed in concealing reality, but more is concealed than the 
 historical, i.e. transitory, ephemeral nature of phenomena. This 
 concealment is made possible by the fact that in capitalist society 
 man€s environment, and especially the categories of economics, appear to 
 him immediately and necessarily in forms of objectivity which conceal 
 the fact that they are the categories of the relations of men with each 
 other. Instead they appear as things and the relations of things with 
 each other. Therefore, when the dialectical method destroys the fiction 
 of the immortality of the categories it also destroys their reified 
 character and clears the way to a knowledge of reality. According to 
 Engels in his discussion of Marx€s Critique of Political Economy, 
 €economics does not treat of things, but of the relations between 
 persons and, in the last analysis, between classes; however, these 
 relations are always bound to things and appear as things.€ [23] 
  
 It is by virtue of this insight that the dialectical method and its 
 concept of totality can be seen to provide real knowledge of what goes 
 on in society. It might appear as if the dialectic relations between 
 parts and whole were no more than a construct of thought as remote from 
 the true categories of social reality as the unmediated formulae of 
 bourgeois economics. If so, the superiority of dialectics would be 
 purely methodological. The real difference, however, is deeper and more 
 fundamental. 
  
 At every stage of social evolution each economic category reveals a 
  
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  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)