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 facts themselves and to promote this activity to the status of science. 
  
 By contrast, in the teeth of all these isolated and isolating facts and 
 partial systems, dialectics insists on the concrete unity of the whole. 
 Yet although it exposes these appearances for the illusions they are € 
 albeit illusions necessarily engendered by capitalism € in this 
 €scientific€ atmosphere it still gives the impression of being an 
 arbitrary construction. 
  
 The unscientific nature of this seemingly so scientific method consists, 
 then, in its failure to see and take account of the historical character 
 of the facts on which it is based. This is the source of more than one 
 error (constantly overlooked by the practitioners of the method) to 
 which Engels has explicitly drawn attention. [8] The nature of this 
 source of error is that statistics and the €exact€ economic theory based 
 upon them always lag behind actual developments. 
  
 €For this reason, it is only too often necessary in current history, to 
 treat this, the most decisive factor, as constant, and the economic 
 situation existing at the beginning of the period concerned as given and 
 unalterable for the whole period, or else to take notice of only those 
 changes in the situation as arise out of the patently manifest events 
 themselves and are therefore, likewise, patently manifest.€ 
  
 Thus we perceive that there is something highly problematic in the fact 
 that capitalist society is predisposed to harmonise with scientific 
 method, to constitute indeed the social premises of its exactness. If 
 the internal structure of the €facts€ of their interconnections is 
 essentially historical, if, that is to say, they are caught up in a 
 process of continuous transformation, then we may indeed question when 
 the greater scientific inaccuracy occurs. It is when I conceive of the 
 €facts€ as existing in a form and as subject to laws concerning which I 
 have a methodological certainty (or at least probability) that they no 
 longer apply to these facts? Or is it when I consciously take this 
 situation into account, cast a critical eye at the €exactitude€ 
 attainable by such a method and concentrate instead on those points 
 where this historical aspect, this decisive fact of change really 
 manifests itself ? 
  
 The historical character of the €facts€ which science seems to have 
 grasped with such €purity€ makes itself felt in an even more devastating 
 manner. As the products of historical evolution they are involved in 
 continuous change. But in addition they are also precisely in their 
 objective structure the products of a definite historical epoch, namely 
 capitalism. Thus when €science€ maintains that the manner in which data 
 immediately present themselves is an adequate foundation of scientific 
 conceptualisation and that the actual form of these data is the 
 appropriate starting-point for the formation of scientific concepts, it 
 thereby takes its stand simply and dogmatically on the basis of 
 capitalist society. It uncritically accepts the nature of the object as 
 it is given and the laws of that society as the unalterable foundation 
 of €science€. 
  
 In order to progress from these €facts€ to facts in the true meaning of 
 the word it is necessary to perceive their historical conditioning as 
 such and to abandon the point of view that would see them as immediately 
 given: they must themselves be subjected to a historical and dialectical 
 examination. For as Marx says: [9] 
  
 €The finished pattern of economic relations as seen on the surface in 
 their real existence and consequently in the ideas with which the agents 
 and bearers of these relations seek to understand them, is very 
 different from, and indeed quite the reverse of and antagonistic to 
 their inner. essential but concealed core and the concepts corresponding 
 to it.€ 
  
 If the facts are to be understood, this distinction between their real 
 existence and their inner core must be grasped clearly and precisely. 
 This distinction is the first premise of a truly scientific study which 
 in Marx€s words, €would be superfluous if the outward appearance of 
 things coincided with their essence.€ [10] Thus we must detach the 
 phenomena from the form in which they are immediately given and discover 
 the intervening links which connect them to their core, their essence. 
 In so doing, we shall arrive at an understanding of their apparent form 
 and see it as the form in which the inner core necessarily appears. It 
 is necessary because of the historical character of the facts, because 
 they have grown in the soil of capitalist society. This twofold 
 character, the simultaneous recognition and transcendence of immediate 
 appearances is precisely the dialectical nexus. 
  
 In this respect, superficial readers imprisoned in the modes of thought 
 created by capitalism, experienced the gravest difficulties in 
 comprehending the structure of thought in Capital. For on the one hand, 
 Marx€s account pushes the capitalist nature of all economic forms to 
 their furthest limits, he creates an intellectual milieu where they can 
 exist in their purest form by positing a society €corresponding to the 
 theory€, i.e. capitalist through and through, consisting of none but 
 capitalists and proletarians. But conversely, no sooner does this 
 strategy produce results, no sooner does this world of phenomena seem to 
 be on the point of crystallising out into theory than it dissolves into 
 a mere illusion, a distorted situation appears as in a distorting mirror 
 which is, however, €only the conscious expression of an. imaginary 
 movement.€ 
  
 Only in this context which sees the isolated facts of social life as 
 aspects of the historical process and integrates them in a totality, can 
 knowledge of the facts hope to become knowledge of reality. This 
 knowledge starts from the simple (and to the capitalist world), pure, 
 immediate, natural determinants described above. It progresses from them 
 to the knowledge of the concrete totality, i.e. to the conceptual 
 reproduction of reality. This concrete totality is by no means an 
 unmediated datum for thought. 
  
 €The concrete is concrete,€ Marx says,[11] €because it is a synthesis of 
 many particular determinants, i.e. a unity of diverse elements.€ 
  
 Idealism succumbs here to the delusion of confusing the intellectual 
 reproduction of reality with the actual structure of reality itself. For 
 €in thought, reality appears as the process of synthesis, not as 
 starting-point, but as outcome, although it is the real starting-point 
 and hence the starting-point for perception and ideas.€ 
  
 Conversely, the vulgar materialists, even in the modern guise donned by 
 Bernstein and others, do not go beyond the reproduction of the 
 immediate, simple determinants of social life. They imagine that they 
 are being quite extraordinarily €exact€ when they simply take over these 
 determinants without either analysing them further or welding them into 
 a concrete totality. They take the facts in abstract isolation, 
 explaining them only in terms of abstract laws unrelated to the concrete 
 totality. As Marx observes: 
  
 €Crudeness and conceptual nullity consist in the tendency to forge 
 arbitrary unmediated connections between things that belong together in 
 an organic union.€ [12] 
  
 The crudeness and conceptual nullity of such thought lies primarily in 
 the fact that it obscures the historical, transitory nature of 
 capitalist society. Its determinants take on the appearance of timeless, 
  
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 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)