THE foregoing chapters on earlier Socialists may be regarded as leading up to the full development of the complete Socialist theory, or as it is sometimes called, “scientific” Socialism. The great exponent of this theory, and the author of the most thorough criticism of the capitalistic system of production, is the late Dr. Karl Marx.
He was born in 1818 at Treves, his father being a baptized Jew holding an official position in that city. He studied for the law in the University of Bonn, passing his examination with high honours in 1840. In 1843 he married Jenny von Westphalen, sister of the well-known Prussian statesman of that name. Philosophy 231 and political economy, with especial reference to the great social problems of the age, were his special studies on leaving the university. These studies led him towards Socialism, the result of which was that he felt compelled to decline the offer of an important Government post. About this time he left Treves for Paris, where he became co-editor with Arnold Ruge of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, and he also edited the Socialist journal Vorwärts; but in less than a twelvemonth he was compelled to leave France for Brussels. In March 1848 he was driven from Belgium and fled to Cologne, where the revolutionary ferment was at its height. He at once undertook the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung, the leading revolutionary journal, which was suppressed on the collapse of the revolutionary movement in 1849.
We should mention that in 1847, in conjunction with his life-long friend, Frederic Engels, he put forward the celebrated “Communist Manifesto,” which subsequently served as the basis of the International Association.
After 1849 he went to Paris again, 275 where he continued but a short time, and then left France for London, remaining there with brief intermissions till his death, which took place in the spring of 1883.
The principal part he played in political action during his sojourn in England was the organisation of the International Association.
The most important among his works, besides Das Kapital, are Die Heilige Familie, written in conjunction with Frederic Engels; the Misére de la Philosophie the answer to Proudhon mentioned in our last chapter; 18 Brumaire, an anti-Napoleonic pamphlet; and Zur Kritik der Politischer OEconomie, which laid the foundation for his great work, Das Kapital.
The importance of this latter work makes it necessary for us to indicate the contents of the principal chapters, so as to form a brief sketch of the Socialist economy.191
Part I. deals with Commodities and 233 Money. The first chapter defines a commodity. A commodity, according to Marx, is briefly expressed as a socially useful product of labour which stands in relation of exchange to other useful products of labour. The value of such a commodity is primarily the amount of necessary social labour contained in it: that is to say, the average amount of labour carried through a certain portion of time necessary to its production in a given state of society. The student must take special note that when Marx uses the word value by itself it is always employed in this sense, that is, to put it in a shorter form, as embodied average human labour. The term use-value explains itself. Exchange-value means the actual relation of one commodity to another or to all others in the market. The ultimate issue of the various expressions of value is the money-form: but in the words of Marx the step to the money-form “consists in this alone, that the character of direct and universal exchangeability—in other words, that the universal equivalent form—has now by 234 social custom become identified with the substance gold.”
The second chapter deals with exchange. Exchange, says Marx, presupposes guardians or owners of commodities, since these cannot go to market of themselves. An article possesses for the owner no use-value where he seeks to exchange it: if it did, he would not seek to exchange it. “All commodities,” says Marx, “are non-use values for their owners and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently they must all change hands But this change of hands is what constitutes their exchange, and the latter puts them in relation with each other as values, and realises them as values.” Hence commodities must be realised as values before they can be realised as use-values.”
Commodities, then, find their universal value represented by one commodity from among them, which has in itself no use-value unless it be that of embodying and of symbolising the abstract quality of value.
Chapter III. deals with the circulation of commodities under the money-form. 235 Here Marx very justly observes, “It 1s because all commodities as values are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values—i.e. into money. Money as a measure of value is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour-time.”
This long and important chapter proceeds to discuss the theory of circulating money or of currency at considerable length and in great detail.
The problem to be resolved is as follows. The owner of money has to buy his commodities at their value, and to sell them at their value, and nevertheless at the end of the process to realise a surplus. This is the end and aim of his existence as a capitalist, and if he does not accomplish it, he is as a capitalist a failure. So that his development from the mere money-owner to the full-blown capitalist has to take place at once within the sphere of circulation and without it: 236 that is, he must follow the law of the exchange of commodities, and nevertheless must act in apparent contradiction to that law. This problem cannot be solved merely by means of the money which he owns, the value of which is, so to say, petrified. As Ricardo says, “In the form of money, capital has no profit.” As money, it can only be hoarded.
Neither can the surplus originate in the mere re-sale of the commodity, “which does no more than transform the article from its bodily form back into its money-form.” The only alternative left is that the change should originate in the use-value of the article bought with the money in the first instance, and on which the capitalist has to operate.
“In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend Moneybags must be so lucky as to find within the sphere of circulation, in the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption therefore is itself an embodiment of labour, and, consequently, 237 creation of value. The possessor of money does find on the market such a special commodity in capacity of labour, or labour-power.”
By labour-power or the capacity of labour Marx understands the whole of the mental and physical capacities in a human being which are brought into action in the production of commodities; in short, the man and all that is in him as a wealth-producing machine.
Now in order that the possessor of money should find this necessity to the accomplishment of his end and aim—viz. labour-power as a commodity of the market, various conditions are requisite.
“The man who is to exercise the labour-power for the capitalists’ benefit—the labourer—must be free,” that is, his labour must be at his own disposal, and also he must have nothing else to dispose of for his livelihood but his labour-power. On the other hand, any one who has to live by selling commodities other than labour-power must own the means of production, and also the means of subsistence while the commodities are 238 being got ready for the market, and being converted into money.
As to the value of this article necessary to the life of the capitalist, this labour-power, it is estimated like the value of every other commodity by the average time necessary for its production or reproduction; that is, the average time necessary in a given state of society; and in plain language this reproduction of labour-power means the maintenance of the labourer. “Given the individual, the production of labour-power consists in the reproduction of himself—or his maintenance.”
Labour-power is realised only in action, that is, when it has become actual labour, and is producing a commodity; so that, “the value of labour-power resolves itself into the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence. It therefore varies with the value of those means, or with the quantity of labour requisite for their production.”
The minimum limit of the value of labour-power is therefore determined by the value of these means. If the price of labour-power falls below that minimum, 239 it is destroyed: a higgling as to its price has to be gone through between the buyer and the seller, and the price is fixed by contract, though it is not realised until the labour-power is used up or embodied in the article produced by it. From what is stated above, it will be seen that this contract is made between two parties; on the one hand the workman or producer, who has no means of producing, on the other the possessor of money, who has all the means necessary for the producer to effectively exercise his faculty of production, and has therefore become a capitalist. “He who was before the money-owner now strides in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business: the other timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market, and has nothing to expect but—a hiding.”
The labour-process necessary to capitalism exhibits two characteristic phenomena: first the labourer works under the control of a capitalist, and 240 secondly the product of the labourer is the property of a capitalist, and not of the labourer, its immediate producer. This product appropriated by the capitalist is a use-value, “as for example yarn, or boots;” says Marx with a grin, “but although boots are in one sense the basis of all social progress, and our capitalist is a decided ‘progressist,’ the capitalist does not for his special purpose look upon them as boots, or any other use-value. He has primarily two objects in view: first he wants to produce a use-value, not, again, for the sake of its use, but in order that he may exchange it; and next, in order that his exchange may be fruitful to him, he wants to produce a commodity the value of which shall be greater than the sum of the values used in producing it—that is, the means of production and the labour-power.”
This he is able to accomplish as follows. He buys the use of the labour-power of the workman for a day, while a certain duration of labour in the day is enough to reproduce the workman’s expended labour-power—that is, to keep him alive. But the human machine is 241 in all cases capable of labouring for more hours in the day than is necessary for this result, and the contract between the capitalist and the labourer, as understood in the system under which those two classes exist, implies that the exercise of the day’s labour-power shall exceed this duration necessary for reproduction, and it is a matter of course that the buyer of the commodity labour-power should do as all buyers of commodities do—consume it altogether for his own advantage.192
It is by this avocation, the buying of labour-power in the market, and the consumption of all the results of its exercise beyond what is necessary for its reproduction, that the capitalist lives, just as the avocation by which the workman lives is the actual production of commodities.
Capitalism cannot be said even to begin before a number of individual owners of money employ simultaneously a number of workmen on the same terms, 242 that is to say, before the development of a concert of action towards profit among the employers, and a concert of action towards production for the profit of the employers among the employed.
“A greater number of labourers working together at the same time in one place (or, if you will, in the same field of labour), in order to produce the same sort of commodity under the mastership of one capitalist, constitutes, both historically and logically, the starting-point of capitalist production.”
It differs from the medieval system, that of the guilds and their craftsmen, by the greater number of the workmen employed; but this change to a new form of organisation made at once considerable difference in the rate and manner of production; there was less comparative expense of the means of production, such as buildings, tools, warehouses,etc.193 A 243 consequence of this concentration of workmen under one roof was the development of the function of direction in the master as independent of his qualities as a craftsman, and the forcing on the system of this function as a necessary part of production. The master of the guild-craftsman period held his place because he was a better workman and more experienced than his fellows; he did not differ from them in kind but in degree only; if he fell sick, for instance, his place would be taken by the next best workman without any disturbance in the organisation of the workshop; but the master of even the earliest period of capitalism was from the beginning unimportant as a workman (even when he worked, as he often did at first), but all-important as a director of work. “Simple co-operation,” says Marx, “is always the prevailing form, in those branches of production in which capital acts on a large scale,and division of labour and machinery play but a subordinate part.” This sentence leads to the next development of capitalism, that of the division of labour, and this brings us to the system of manufacture, as the word is generally 244 understood; though it has a final development, that of machinery and the factory. This period of the division of labour, more or less pure, extends from the middle of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries, when it was brought to perfection; but it must be understood that these systems overlapped one another considerably.
The division-of-labour or manufacturing system starts under two conditions.
The first is where the employer collects into one workshop workmen of various crafts, the results of whose labours are combined into one article, as, for example, a carriage-maker’s, in which wheelwright, coachbuilder, upholsterer, painter, etc., work each at his own occupation, and their products are combined into the one article, a finished carriage.
The other is the system in which the employer collects his workmen under one roof, and employs the whole of them as one machine in the simultaneous production of one article which has to go through various processes, these processes being apportioned to various parts of the workman-machine. This system affords a distinct example of evolution by means 245 of survival of the fittest; sudden increase of production seems to have been called for, and the work accordingly had to be reorganised by being apportioned to different workmen in order to save time. Thus this system is the reverse of that illustrated by the carriage-making, in which a number of crafts had to be combined into the manufacture of one article; whereas in this (pin or needlemaking may be taken as an illustration) a number of processes which once formed portions of one craft, now become each of them a separate craft in itself.
From this follows the complete interdependence of each human being forming a part of the workman-machine, no one of whom can produce anything by himself. The unit of labour is now no longer an individual, but a group.
But all these processes, however subdivided, and however combined, were still acts of handicraft; the same necessities which forced the simple co-operation of the first capitalistic period into division of labour, now forced the latter system to yet further development; though, 246 indeed, other causes besides merely economic ones were at work, such as the growing aggregation of people in towns and the consequent increasing division of labour in Society itself as to the occupations of its members.
This final development was the substitution of the machine and the complete factory-system for the “division-of-labour” and “workshop” systems. Under the new system the group of workmen, every member of which by the performance of a special piece of handicraft turned out some special part of the article made, gave place to a machine which produces the results of all these manoeuvres combined together; or to an association of machines acting in a group, as the workmen acted. The workman is no longer the principal factor in the work, the tools that he handled are now worked by a mechanism connected by another mechanism with the power, whatever it may be, that puts the whole in motion. This is the true machine of modern times, as contrasted with the mere tool-machine of the earlier period, which was an aid to 247 the workman and not a substitute for him. Furthermore, the workshop gives place to the factory, which is not a mere assemblage of machines under one roof, but rather a great machine itself, of which the machines are parts; as Marx says: “An organised system of machines to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automaton is the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have in place of the isolated machine a mechanical monster, whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motion of his giant limbs, at last breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.”
This is the machine that has produced the great revolution in production of our epoch. The workman once a handicrafts man, having all control over the article he produced, next became a part of a human machine, and finally has become the servant and tender of a machine; and by means of all this the fully developed modern capitalist has been brought into existence.
248 We have now come to the point where it is necessary to consider the circulation of commodities; the first means to this circulation being the establishment of a tertium quid, or universal equivalent. And in order to have a really universal equivalent it is necessary that use-value should be eliminated from it, since such an equivalent is required to express not the diverse qualities of all the various commodities, but the relative quantity of embodied human labour which they severally contain.
Money as a mere measure of value is imaginary and ideal, but the bodily form of it must express quantitatively equivalent abstract value—i.e. labour—and takes the form of the precious metals, finally of gold.
Gold has come to be the bodily form taken by the universal measure of value, partly because of its natural qualities—portability, durability, etc., but chiefly because the course of history has invested it with this function; and also because its value, instead of changing from, say, week to week, as is the case with other commodities, changes rather from century 249 to century, so that it may be considered stable relatively to them, just as one speaks of indigo as a permanent dye, which it is relatively to other dyes, although none are absolutely permanent.194
Paper money is promises to pay gold, which is directly exchangeable with all other commodities. Paper money, therefore, is merely a symbol of the exchange really effected by gold.
This universal equivalent takes the place of barter, which is the primitive and direct form of exchange,195 and at which stage the distinction between buyer and seller has not arisen. It now gives 250 place to the first form of indirect exchange, in which a third term is interposed between the articles that are to be parted with and acquired. Now for the first time the above distinction takes shape. The seller has a commodity which he does not propose to consume, and therefore he acquires with it money, with which money he buys in turn another commodity equal in quantity to that with which he has parted, but different from it in quality. Marx has indicated this transaction by the wellknown and useful formula, Commodity, Money, Commodity: C—M—C.
The habit of hoarding, which is common amongst ancient societies, and also among barbarous peoples, is a natural concomitant of this stage of exchange, and is the first germ of capital. It 1s brought about by the arrest of the above process at its first phase thus, C—M— , the seller of the commodity does not go on to buy. Under these conditions money becomes a social power; and being a commodity like other commodities, can be acquired by private persons, whom it invests with social power. Therefore in 251 those states of society which had not outgrown their primitive social ethics, money was considered the embodiment of all evil.
This stage of exchange marks the precommercial use of money; after a while it tends to develop into another stage, which carries the exchange a step further. The holder of a commodity which he does not propose to consume exchanges it for money, which he again exchanges for a commodity to be used, not for his personal consumption, but to be exchanged once more for money. He would have no object in doing this if his aim were merely that of the simple exchanger (C. M. C.), namely, to obtain an article of consumption different in kind from that which he has exchanged, since in money there is no inherent difference of quality, and therefore whatever difference there may be must be one of quantity. Accordingly the object of the exchanger in this second stage is amount, not kind. In going through his process of exchange (the formula for which may be stated thus—
C-M-C-M-C),
[include figure here]the second quantum of money must be 252 more than the first, or else he will have failed in his object; will have made a bad bargain, as the phrase goes. On the other hand, though this form of exchange differs essentially it nevertheless connects itself with the earlier form, in which money occurs only as the middle term between commodity and commodity, thus distinguishing it from simple barter, because even in the later form the result of the merchant’s transaction is a commodity with which he intends to begin a fresh transaction—
C-M-C-M-C.
[same figure again]This is the form of exchange which was the practice of the developed classical world in its commercial operations. The break up of the Roman Empire, and the confusion that followed, dislocated this commerce, and largely brought exchange back again to its earlier and simple form of the exchange of a commodity for money with which to buy another commodity to be consumed, which was for the most part the character of the exchange of the Middle Ages.
The second form of exchange leads without a break into the third or modern 253 form of Capitalistic Exchange, in which the exchanger, beginning with money, buys a commodity in order to exchange it for money; which money, as in the foregoing stage, must be more in quantity than that with which he began, or his transaction will be a failure. This process differs from that of the lastmentioned stage of exchange in that the result of the transaction is always money, and not a true commodity (that is, a use-value), the latter in the long-run appearing only nominally in the transaction.
To make this clearer, we may give concrete examples of the three forms of exchange.
In the first stage, illustrated by the proceedings of the craftsman of the time of Homer, which were pretty much those of the medieval craftsman also, the village potter sold his pots, and with the money he got for them, which, possible trickery apart, represented just the value or embodied labour of the pots, he bought meal, oil, wine, flesh, etc., for his own livelihood, and consumed them.
The merchant of the later classical period shipped, say, purple cloth from 254 Sidon to Alexandria, sold his cloth there, and with the money bought gum-Arabic (from the Soudan) and frankincense (from Arabia), which he sold at Athens, where again he shipped oil for another market. He always handled the actual goods he professed to trade in, and the wares which he thus exchanged against the universal equivalent, money, were of various kinds. Similar commerce went on in the Middle Ages, as with the merchants of Amalfi, Venice, etc., side by side with the primitive barter of the feudal manor, and of the market-town with its corporation and guilds.
The modern man of commerce, on the contrary, necessarily begins his transaction with money. He buys, say, indigo, which he never sees, receives for it more money than he gave for it, and goes on steadily in this process, dealing (unlike the ancient carrier-merchant) with one class of goods only; and all the goods in which he deals represent to him so much money: they are only present in his transactions nominally. Money is the be-all and end-all of his existence as a commercial man.
This is an example of the pure form 255 of capitalistic exchange, wherein money is exchanged for commodities, and these again for money plus an increment; the formula for which, as given by Marx, is M-C—M.
The next question we have to consider is how the surplus, the increment above-mentioned, obtained by this process of exchange, is realised,—or, in plain language, where it comes from.
Marx now shows “how the trick 1s done,” that is, the process by which the capitalist exploits the labourer under the present system of wages and capital.
We now come to the two instruments which the capitalist uses in his exploitation of labour, and which are named constant and variable capital; constant capital being the raw material and instruments of production, and variable capital the labour-power to be employed in producing on and by means of the former.
The labourer, as we have seen, adds a value to the raw material upon which he works; but by the very act of adding a new value he preserves the old; in one character he adds new value, in another he merely preserves what already existed. 256 He effects this by working in a particular way, e.g. by spinning, weaving, or forging, that is, he transforms things which are already utilities into new utilities proportionately greater than they were before.
“It is thus,” says Marx, "that the cotton and spindle, the yarn and the loom, the iron and the anvil become constituent elements of a new use-value.” That is, in order to acquire this new value, the labour must be directed to a socially useful end, to a general end, that is, to which the general labour of society is directed, and the value added is to be measured by the average amount of labourpower expended; i.e. by the duration of the average time of labour.
Marx says: “We have seen that the means of production transfer value to the new product so far only as during the labour-process they lose value in the shape of their old use-value. The maximum loss of value that they can suffer in the process is plainly limited by the amount of the original value with which they came into the process, or in other words by the labour-time necessary for their production. Therefore, the 257 means of production can never add more value to the product than they themselves possess independently of the process in which they assist. However useful a given kind of raw material, or a machine, or other means of production may be, though it may cost £150, or say 500 days’ labour, yet it cannot under any circumstances add to the value of the product more than £150. Its value 1s determined not by the labour-process into which it enters as a means of production, but by that out of which it has issued as a product. In the labour-process it only serves as a mere use-value, a thing with useful properties, and could not therefore transfer any value to the product unless it possessed such value previously. The matter is succinctly put as follows: “The means of production on the one hand, labourpower on the other, are merely the different modes of existence which the value of the original capital assumed when from being money it was transformed into the various factors of the labour-process. That part of capital that is represented by the means of 258 production, by the raw material, auxiliary material, and the instruments of labour, does not in the process of production undergo any quantitative alteration of value. I therefore call it the constant part of capital, or more shortly constant capital.”
At first sight it might be thought that the wear and tear of the machinery, and the seeming disappearance of part of the auxiliary material (as e.g. the mordants used in dyeing cloth or yarn, or the gums, etc., used in textile printing) contradict this statement as to the alteration of value; but on closer view it will be seen that the above wear and tear and apparent consumption enter into the new product just as much as the visible raw material does; neither are really consumed, but transformed.
In the following chapters Marx enters into an elaborate and exhaustive analysis of the rate of surplus-value, i.e. of the rate at which the creation of surplus-value takes place; and he also deals with the important subject of the duration of the working-day. But as this 1s after all a matter of detail, in spite of its 259 very great interest and importance we must omit it, as it would carry us beyond the scope of this chapter.
Marx distinguishes between absolute and relative “surplus-value”; the absolute being the product of a day’s labour over and above the necessary subsistence of the workman, whatever the time necessary for the production of a definite amount of product may be. The relative “surplus-value,” on the other hand, is determined by the increased productivity of labour caused by new inventions, machinery, increased skill, either in manipulation or the organisation of labour, by which the time necessary for the production of the labourer’s means of subsistence may be indefinitely shortened.
It will be seen once again from all this, that whatever instruments may be put into the hands of the labourer to bring about a result from his labour, in spite of all pretences to the contrary, the one instrument necessary to the capitalist is the labourer himself living under such conditions that he can be used as a mere instrument for the production of profit. 260 The tools, machinery, factories, means of exchange, etc., are only intermediate aids for putting the living machine into operation.
Marx now goes on to trace the development of the capitalist in the present epoch, indicating the latest phase of the class-struggle; he points out the strife of the workman with the machine, the intensification of labour due to the constant improvement of machinery, etc. He then gives what may be called a history and analysis of the Factory Acts, the legislation to which the employing class found themselves compelled, in order to make it possible for the “free” workman to live under his new conditions of competition; in order, in short, to keep the industrial society founded by the machine-revolution from falling to pieces almost as soon as it was established.
The point of the intensification of labour is so important that it demands a word or two in passing; the gist of the matter as put forward by Marx resolves itself into this: As the organisation of production progresses towards 261 perfection, the wear and tear of the workman in a given space of labour-time is increased; and this is true of the organisation of the “division-of-labour” period, only it is limited by the fact that the man himself is the machine, and no such limitation exists in the period of fully-developed machinery, in which the workman is an adjunct of the machine, which latter dictates to its supplement, the workman, in its constant craving for increasing productivity, the amount of wear and tear of his body in each hour’s work. This emphasizes as plainly as possible the subjection of the man to the machine.
Marx also deals with the theory of compensation to the workman displaced by machinery; that is, the common view, that by the labour-saving of machinery, which at first sight would seem to tend to the lessening of the number of men employed, more capital is set free for employment. But, says Marx: “Suppose a capitalist to employ 100 workmen at £30 a-year each in a carpet factory. The variable capital annually laid out amounts therefore to £3000. Suppose 262 also that he discharges fifty of his workmen, and employs the remaining fifty with machinery that costs him £1500. To simplify matters we take no account of buildings, coal, etc. Further, suppose that the raw material annually consumed costs £3000 both before and after the change. Is any capital set free by this metamorphosis? Before the change the total sum of £6000 consisted half of constant, half of variable, capital. The variable capital, instead of being one-half is only one-quarter of the total capital. Instead of being set free, a part of the capital is here locked up in such a way as to cease to be employed in labour-power ; variable has been changed into constant capital. Other things remaining unchanged, the capital of £6000 can in future employ no more than fifty men. With each improvement in machinery, it will employ fewer.”
And again: “The labourers when driven out of the workshop by machinery, are thrown upon the labour-market, and there add to the number of workmen at the disposal of the capitalists. In Part VII. of this book it will be seen 263 that this effect of machinery, which, as we have seen, is represented to be a compensation to the working class, is on the contrary a most frightful scourge. For the present, I will only say this: The labourers that are thrown out of work in any branch of industry, can no doubt seek for employment in some other branch. If they find it, and thus renew the bond between them and the means of subsistence, this takes place only by the intermediary of a new and additional capital that is seeking investment; not at all by the intermediary of the capital that formerly employed them, and was afterwards converted into machinery.” The remainder of this Part V. of Marx deals with various questions connected with the Great Industry, and the changes produced by it on Society. Part VI. deals with the transformation of the value or price of labour-power into wages; with time wages, piece wages, and the national differences of wages. Part VII. deals with the important subject of the accumulation of capital; first, with its simple reproduction, afterwards with the 264 conversion of surplus-value itself back into capital, and with the transition of the laws of property, that characterise the production of commodities, into the laws of capitalistic appropriation. This part also contains a sarcastic refutation of the now exploded stupidity (scarcely to be called a theory) of “abstinence” as the source of interest; it also deals with the old wages-fund theory and other fallacies of bourgeois economy, concluding with a long and elaborate chapter on the general law of capitalistic accumulation in its various aspects. The last Part (XIII) treats of the socalled primitive accumulation, of which Marx says: “This primitive accumulation plays in political economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell upon the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people, one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal élite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance and more in riotous living. The legend of 265 theological original sin tells us certainly how man is to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority, that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. ... In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and ‘labour’ were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the present year of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.”
Marx then proceeds to give an instance of one important form of 266 “Primitive Accumulation,” the expropriation of the peasants from the land, taking affairs in England as a type of this idyllic proceeding; as also the legislation at the close of the Middle Ages against vagrants, etc., that is, against those who had been expropriated; and the enactments for the forcing down of wages. He then describes the birth of the capitalist farmer of modern times, and the reaction of the agricultural revolution on the town industry; the creation of the home-market for industrial capital, etc. A chapter follows on the historical tendency of capitalistic accumulation to work out its own contradiction; it becomes necessary again to quote a passage as it bears reference to the future of Society: “The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property,196 as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalistic 267 production begets with the inexorability of a law of Nature its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him property based on the acquisitions of the capitalistic era; i.e. on co-operation, and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalistic private property, is naturally a process incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.”
A chapter on certain middle-class economist notions respecting colonisation ends the first volume of Marx's epoch-making work, a volume expounding the salient principles of the new economy.197
191. We must remind the reader that we do not profess to offer more than some hints to the student of Marx. Anything approaching to an abstract of Das Kapital would take up space far beyond the limits of the present little work.
192. Says Mr. Boffin in Dickens's Mutual Friend, when he wants to make a show of striking a somewhat hard, but reasonable bargain: “When I buy a sheep, I buy it out and out, and when I buy a secretary, I expect to buy him out and out,” or words to that effect; and the reasonableness of the conditions are accepted on all hands.
193. The master worker of the guild-system was not really a master at all even after he began to employ journeymen, because their number was limited very closely, and they were all sure to become masters in their turn: the real “employer of labour” was the guild, and the “master” of that period was simply a foreman of the guild; the great change consisted in the breaking down of the position of the guild as employer, and the turning of its foreman into a real owner or capitalist.
194. As a deduction from this, we may say that while on the one hand there was no abstract necessity for the measure of value taking the form of gold, though there was a necessity for it to take a form embodying a certain definite amount of labour, yet, on the other hand, since it has taken that form, labour notes, or mere promises to pay which are of no value in themselves, cannot, as long as exchange lasts, take the place of gold, which is a commodity having a value in itself, and the particular commodity that has assumed that function through historical selection.
195. There are transitional stages between barter pure and simple and exchange operated by a universal equivalent, which only partly fulfilled this office: e.g. cattle, in the primitive ancient period, from which the name for money (pecunia) is derived; or ordinary woollen cloth, as in the curious and rather elaborate currency of the Scandinavians before coin was struck in Norway: which currency, by the way, has again, in the form of blankets, been used even in our own times in the Hudson Bay Territory.Back
196. It is important not to misunderstand this phrase as used here. The labour of the Middle Ages, though individual from its mechanical side, was from its moral side quite definitely dominated by the principle of association; as we have seen, the “master” of that period was but a delegate of the guild.Back
197. A second volume was published the year after Marx’s death, and Frederic Engels is now at work preparing the third and final volume for publication.Back