We have accepted its language and its laws. Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property. It does not explain it. It grasps the material process of private property, the process through which it actually passes, in general and abstract formulae which it then takes as laws. It does not comprehend these laws - i.e., it does not show how they arise from the nature of private property.
Political economy fails to explain the reason for the division between labour and capital.
Similarly, competition is frequently brought into the argument and explained in terms of external circumstances. Political economy teaches us nothing about the extent to which these external and apparently accidental circumstances are only the expression of a necessary development. We have seen how exchange itself appears to political economy as an accidental fact. Do not let us repeat the mistake of the political economist, who bases his explanations on some fictitious primordial condition. Such a primordial condition explains nothing.