Interesting how knowledge develops isn't it?

A young froend of mine has been saying to me: "Andy, generalised commodity production is the Notion of capitalism, OK, but what is the essence of capitalism? Some say that the essence of capitalism is production of surplus value".

This troubled me for some time. I chide myself for not having forwarded this problem to you correspndents, and sticking to my individual method.

Anyway, I scanned my books and could not find a decisive answer.

The other night, I realised: surplus value is the essence of economy, and thus in particular, production of surplus value is the essence of capitalism, and generalised commodity production is the (germ) Notion of capitalism, and the Being of economy is the millions of human beings producing and reproducing the means of life. This Being is Marx's "premises of the materialist method", this essence is why Marx spends so much time tracing out the various forms of value from barter up to the use_value-exchange_value of commodity production; and the specific notion of this mode of production is commodity production, found in germ in ancient times, and generalised in capitalism.

Being - Essence - Notion.

My mind has been racing since. How can I have done all this and not really understood!!

The unity of Being (the existing stage of development of the forces of production in a given intersection), and Essence (the production of surplus value) is the notion, which proves to be generalised commodity production.

The Being of philosophy is the so-called "historical context", the millions of people labouring and struggling, and the particular position of the philosopher in that life-process; its Essence is its view of the relation of consciousness to the objective world, which develops through a series of contradictory opposites (idealism-materialism in particular, empiricism-rationalism, criticism/naivity, etc etc), and the notion of each specific philosophy (if it deserves the name) is it's own defining Notion (tabula rasa, Substance, or whatever).

I find it not possible to just pluck Essence and Notion out of the air, a knowledge of each subject matter is essential!

...

What do others think. Has this been obvious all along? It does not contradict what I have been saying, but it seems much clearer to me now. Or am I flying off on one of my awful tangents?

Andy