Part 6 (2/2)
”In order to work out their own emanc.i.p.ation, and with it that higher form of life which present-day society inevitably opposes, the protracted struggle must pa.s.s through a whole series of historical processes, in the course of which men and circ.u.mstances alike will be changed. They have no ideal to realise; they have only to set free the elements of the new society, which have already developed in the womb of the collapsing bourgeois society.”--(Marx, ”Civil War in France.”)
The means of production will gradually be socialised, production will be placed on a co-operative basis, education will be combined with productive work, in order to transform the members of society into producers. So long as the transition period lasts the Communist maxim, ”From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs,” cannot become operative. For this period is in every respect--economic, social, and intellectual--still tainted with the marks of the old society, and ”rights cannot transcend the economic structure of society, and the cultural development which it determines.”--(Criticism of Gotha Program.) To each will be given according to his deeds.
”Accordingly the individual producer will receive back what he gives to society, after deductions for government, education, and other social charges. He will give society his individual quota of labour.
For example: the social working day consists in the sum total of individual working days; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day which he contributes; his share thereof. He will receive from society a certificate that he has performed so much work (after deducting his work for social funds), and with this certificate he will draw from the social provision of articles of consumption as much as a similar quant.i.ty of labour costs. The same quant.i.ty of labour as he will give to society in one form he will receive back in another.... The right of producers will be proportionate to the work they will perform: the equality will consist in the application of the same measure: labour.”
Because performances will vary in accordance with unequal gifts and degrees of diligence, an unequal distribution will actually take place during the transition period. Only in a fully developed Communistic society, after the distinction between intellectual and physical labour has disappeared, when productive activity has become a first need of life, when the all-round development of the individual and the productive forces has been achieved, and all the springs of co-operative riches flow abundantly; only then can the narrow middle-cla.s.s idea of rights be improved on, and the Communist principle of equality be put into operation.
Marx, who reasoned on strictly economic lines, and placed the emanc.i.p.ation of the working cla.s.s as the highest goal, to which all other political and economic movements are subordinated, did not mistake the economic, political, and historical role of the nation: this is shown by the Communist Manifesto, where the creation of the national State by the bourgeoisie is indicated. He mocked at the young enthusiasts who thought they could brush aside the nation as an obsolete prejudice, but, in spite of this, he considerably under-estimated the unifying force of national feeling, considered from a biological and cultural point of view. He divided civilised mankind into antagonistic cla.s.ses, and a.s.sumed that the economic dividing lines would prove to be more effective than national and political boundary lines. He was, therefore, through and through international. Marx demanded that the national Labour Parties should act internationally as soon as there was a possibility of the collapse of the capitalist domination. He reproached the original Gotha program with the fact that ”it borrowed from middle-cla.s.s Leagues of Peace and Freedom the phrase of the international brotherhood of peoples, whereas it was necessary to promote the international combination of the working cla.s.ses in a common struggle against the ruling cla.s.ses and their Governments.” Marx had no confidence in the pacifism of the bourgeoisie.
IV. OUTLINES OF THE ECONOMIC DOCTRINES.
1. _Capital._
As we already know, Marx became a Socialist in the year 1843. As a believer in dialectics, he knew that Socialism can only be understood by a knowledge of the movement operating in middle-cla.s.s society and its developing forces. His investigations in 1843-4 led to the result that political economy forms the basis of bourgeois society.
Henceforth political economy became the chief department of his studies. His comprehensive studies of French and English economists, especially Sismondi and Ricardo, and the anti-capitalist literature of England of the years 1820-40, which were connected with the Ricardian theory of value, furnished him with a wealth of suggestions and materials for the criticism of political economy, for the source and origin and development and decline of capitalism, written from the standpoint of the working cla.s.s and the coming Socialistic society.
Such a work is ”Capital.” It consists of three volumes. Only the first volume (1867) was carried through the press by Marx himself. The other two volumes he only sketched, and they were completed and published by Engels after Marx's death.
The first volume deals with the origin and tendencies of large industrial capital, with the immediate and simple process of commodity production, so far as it concerns the relations between employer and worker, the exploitation of the proletariat, wages and labour time, and the influence of modern technique on the condition of the worker.
We see in the first volume the effect of the factory system in creating capital. Its chief figure is the producing, suffering, rebellious working cla.s.s. In the second volume, the employer appears on the market, sells his commodities, and sets the wheels of production again in motion, so that commodities will continue to be produced. In the third volume, the realisation process of the undertakings of the capitalist cla.s.s, or the movement of capital as a whole is exhibited: cost of production, cost price, total gains and their division into profit, interest and ground rent. The first volume presents the greatest difficulties. The tremendous efforts of the author to produce a masterpiece unnecessarily refined and sublimated and overloaded with learning the doctrines of value and surplus value until they attained the level of a philosophy, an example of Hegelian logic. He played with his subject like an intellectual athlete. That Marx could handle complicated economic questions in a clear, vigorous manner is shown by the third volume, which is written just as it came out of the author's head, and without the apparatus of learning subsequently erected, without the crutches of notes and polemico-philosophical excursions.
To understand ”Capital” it is necessary to bear in mind that (1) Marx regarded the scientifically discovered principles as the real inner being of things, practice he regarded as the superficial appearance of things, capable of being apprehended empirically; for example, Value is the theoretical expression, Price the empirical; Surplus Value is the theoretical, and Profit the empirical expression; the appearances apprehended by experience (Price and Profit) deviate indeed from theory, but without the theory they cannot be understood; (2) he looked at the capitalist economic system as being essentially free from external hindrances and disturbances, free from invasions both by the State and the proletariat: the Labour struggles of factory protection laws of which Marx speaks in ”Capital” serve rather to perfect the productive forces than to restrict the exploiting proclivities of sovereign capital.
2. _Value._
The life and motion of capitalistic society appears as an infinite net of exchange operations, formed out of numerous entwined meshes.
Through the medium of money, men continually exchange the most varied commodities and services. A ceaseless buying and selling, an uninterrupted series of exchanges of things, and labour power--this const.i.tutes the essential part of human relations in capitalistic society. An economic map of these relations, graphically displayed, would not be less confusing than an astronomical map which exhibited the manifold and intersected orbits of the heavenly bodies. And yet there must be some rule or law which operates in this seeming medley of movements; for men do not work or exchange their goods by hazard, like savages who give their entire lumps of gold or rough diamonds for a necklace of gla.s.s pearls. The English and French economists in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, amongst whom Petty (1623-87), Quesnay (1694-1759), Adam Smith (1723-96), and Ricardo (1772-1823) were the most original, sought for the laws which regulated exchange operations, and their theories were designated by Marx as cla.s.sical bourgeois economy. Following up their investigations, Marx declared: Every commodity, that is, every thing or good produced under Capitalism and brought to the market possesses a use value and an exchange value.
The use value is the utility of the commodity to satisfy a physical or mental need of its user: a commodity without use value is not exchangeable or saleable. As use values, commodities are materially different from each other; n.o.body will exchange a ton of wheat for a ton of wheat of the same kind, but he will for clothes.
In what measure will commodities exchange with one another? The measure is the exchange value, and this consists in the trouble and quant.i.ty of labour which the production of a commodity costs. Equal quant.i.ties of labour are exchanged with each other on the market. As exchange values, as the embodiment of human labour, commodities are essentially equal to each other, only quant.i.tatively are they different, as different categories of commodities embody different quant.i.ties of labour. It is obvious that the quant.i.ties of labour will not be calculated according to the working methods of the individual producers, but according to the prevailing social working methods.
If, for example, hand-weaver A requires twenty hours for the production of a piece of cloth, which in a modern factory will be produced in five hours, the cloth of the hand-weaver does not therefore possess four-fold exchange value. If hand-weaver A demands of consumer B an equivalent of twenty working hours, B answers that a similar piece of cloth can be produced in five hours, and therefore it only represents an exchange value of five working hours. Thus, according to Marx, the exchange value of a commodity consists in the quant.i.ty of socially necessary labour power which its reproduction would require.
This quant.i.ty of labour is no constant factor. New inventions, improvements in labour processes, increase in the productivity of labour, etc., cause a diminution in the quant.i.ty of labour necessary for the reproduction of a commodity; its exchange value, or expressed in terms of money, its price, will therefore sink, provided that other things (demand, medium of exchange) remain equal.
Consequently, labour is the source of exchange value, and the latter is the principle which regulates exchange operations. Exchange value even measures the extent of the commodity wealth of society. Wealth may increase in volume, but decrease in value, in so far as a less quant.i.ty of socially necessary labour becomes necessary for its reproduction.
The more progressive a country is industrially and the higher the level of its civilisation, the greater is its wealth, and the smaller is the quant.i.ty of labour which must be expended on the creation of wealth. In the practical Labour politics of our times, this is expressed in higher wages and shorter working hours.
It was said above that use value is a basic condition for the exchange of the individual commodity. This does not exhaust the role of use value. The quant.i.ty of use value of which society has need determines the quant.i.ty of the exchange values to be created. If more commodities are required than society requires, the superfluous commodities have no exchange value, in spite of the labour that is expended on them.--(”Capital” (German), Vol. III., 1, pp. 175-176.)
The complete realisation of exchange values or the social labour that is performed depends, as is seen, on the adaptation of supply to demand, and is a matter of organisation, of social direction.
We have noticed that the Marxian theory of value is related to that of the cla.s.sical economists, but they are by no means the same thing.
Apart from some improvements and definitions which Marx made, they are distinguished by the following conceptions: In the cla.s.sical theory of value, the capitalist who directs production and provides with his capital the tools and raw materials of labour, markets the finished commodity, and keeps going the processes of reproduction, appears as the only creator of value: the wage worker is only one of his means of production. In the Marxian theory of value, on the other hand, the wage worker who transforms the raw materials into commodities, or removes the raw materials to the place of production, appears as the sole creator of value. Value is only created by the worker in production, and in distribution connected therewith.
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