Part 8 (2/2)
The significance and tendency of these contradictions are sketched by Marx in the great finale, which properly belongs to the concluding chapter of the third volume:
”As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist means of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited, and therefore common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist employing many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, develop on an ever-extending scale the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constantly diminis.h.i.+ng number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the ma.s.s of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this, too, grows the revolt of the working cla.s.s, a cla.s.s always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter on the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with it, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”--(”Capital,” Vol. I. English edition, chap. 84.)
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Compare M. Beer, ”History of British Socialism,” Vol, I., pp.
245-270.
CONCLUSION.
An appreciation of Marx can only be arrived at by adopting the Marxian method. We must judge him in the same way as any other towering figure in the realm of thought or of action. Marx was a child of his time, and his system is a logical conception of certain economic and social phenomena of his age, owing something to the pioneer work and thinking of some of his predecessors.
Two important events dominated his thinking: the French Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution. Even apart from the statement of Arnold Ruge that in 1843-44 Marx had collected a vast amount of material for a history of the French National Convention, we know from the work he did between 1844 and 1852 how profound was the influence of the French Revolution on his intellectual life. Still deeper, however, were the traces left upon his mind by the studies he made on the economic transformation of England during the period 1700-1825.
Both events are obvious, catastrophic expressions of cla.s.s movements and cla.s.s conflicts, in which the middle cla.s.s, as the representative of a higher economic order, gains the victory over autocratic forms of feudal authority and oligarchic systems of organisation through State regulation, in which, however, at the same time, a new cla.s.s--the working cla.s.s--raises its head and begins to make a stand against the victor.
Marx was led to interpret these events in this way and to make them the basis of his conception of history chiefly through the influence of Hegel, Ricardo, and the English anti-capitalist school following upon Ricardo. To the end of his life he clung to the opinion that dialectic, as Hegel had formulated it, was indeed mystical but, when materialistically conceived, contains the laws of the movement of society. ”The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands in no wise hinders him from presenting in a comprehensive and intelligible manner its general processes.”--(Preface to second German edition of ”Capital,” 1873.)
The splitting up of the concept into contradictories, and the attainment of a higher positive through the negation of these contradictories, that was what, to Marx's mind, const.i.tuted the essence and the deepest meaning of the French Revolution and of the English Industrial Revolution. Society, the positive, split up into feudal and bourgeois, into two sharply divided contradictories, the bourgeoisie appearing as the negation, to be supplanted by the proletariat and so to make room for a Communist society, the higher synthesis.
What he got from Hegel in a mystical form found an economic expression in Ricardo and the anti-capitalist school. Ricardo's writings, which belong to the second decade of the nineteenth century and which formulate, in the guise of a system of economics, the antagonisms and the conflicts between industry and landed n.o.bility, presented themselves as a practical demonstration of the validity of dialectic.
The fundamental idea of Ricardo's system may be expressed as follows:
Capital is the motive force of society and the creator of civilisation, but the fruits of its activity are enjoyed not by capital but by the landed n.o.bility. That is the thesis; now for the proof. The value of all commodities which can be made in any quant.i.ty desired consists in the quant.i.ty of labour which is expended for the purpose of producing them. The value is expressed in the costs of production, the most important components of which are wages and profit. Wages and profit stand in opposition to one another: if wages rise, profit falls, and conversely. Wages consist in a definite quant.i.ty of the necessaries of life, sufficient to keep the worker effective. Wages must obviously rise whenever the cost of living rises. The facts show that this is actually the case. The following reasons make this clear. In consequence of the civilising effects of capital, there is an increase in the opportunities for work and in population, resulting in an increased demand for the necessaries of life. Agriculture must be extended, but agricultural land is limited and of varying quality. The extension of agriculture brings into use the inferior kinds of land, which demand a greater amount of labour for their cultivation. And as the amount of labour determines the value of the commodity, the cost of living increases, and there is a rapid rise in ground rents. The workers demand higher wages, whereby the profits of the employers are diminished. But there is still another circ.u.mstance to be taken into consideration. Whereas the prices of agricultural products rise, those of industrial products fall, since, in consequence of the invention of machinery and of the superior division of labour, smaller quant.i.ties of labour are required to produce manufactured goods. The result of the entire working of capital for the civilised community is accordingly the reduction of profits, the depreciation of capital, and the increase of wages. This latter, however, is of no advantage to the workers, for food prices rise higher and higher; on the contrary, the whole advantage falls to the landed n.o.bility, who do nothing for the furtherance of civilisation, but who, through ground rents and protective tariffs, receive everything.
We have, then, in Ricardo a system of economic contradictions between profit, wages, and rent, or between bourgeoisie, proletariat, and n.o.bility, in which the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat is still undeveloped.
The year of the publication of Ricardo's ”Principles” (1817) is the year which witnessed the rise of English Socialism. In that year, Robert Owen, in a public meeting in the City of London, declared himself a Socialist. Three years later appeared the first criticisms of Ricardo's political economy. In these it was argued that, according to Ricardo, labour is the source of value, yet he considers capital as the creative factor of society and the working cla.s.s as a mere appendage of capital. It must be the reverse; for the workers create values together with the surplus products which are appropriated by capital. In 1817, Robert Owen openly declares himself a Socialist; four years later appears the anonymous letter to Lord John Russell; Percy Ravenstone publishes his ”Criticism of Capitalism,” John Gray his Lecture, and Hodgskin his pamphlet on the unproductive nature of capital, in which he establishes the existence of a raging cla.s.s struggle.
The deep impression which these writings made on Marx is clearly seen in the second and third volumes of his ”Theories on Surplus Value.”
And he links on to them. He completed what Ricardo hinted at and what the anti-capitalist school deduced from Ricardo. How Marx continued and elaborated these deductions we haw already seen in Chapter 3, ”Outlines of Marx's Economics,” and Chapter 7, ”Surplus Value as the Motive Force of Society,” where capital is shown to be the ma.s.s of surplus value of which the workers have been deprived.
The deductions made by the English anti-capitalist school from Ricardo signified, politically, the first awakenings of the English workers to cla.s.s-consciousness, to the struggle against capital. Just as Ricardo's theory of value and rent was the battle-cry of capital against the aristocracy--a battle-cry which created the free trade movement and shattered the economic power of the landed n.o.bility, so the theory of value and surplus value was to become the battle-cry of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, the declaration of independence, so to speak, of the working cla.s.s. The English proletariat lacked a philosopher who could work out the idea to its logical conclusion, until Marx applied himself to the problem and solved it, so far indeed as philosophical problems can be solved, by a science which places itself at the disposal of a cla.s.s movement.
For it is impossible to set aside the view that Marx's theory of value and surplus value has rather the significance of a political and social slogan than of an economic truth. It is for Marx the basis of the cla.s.s struggle of the workers against the middle cla.s.s, just as Ricardo's theory of rent was the basis of the cla.s.s struggle of the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy, or as the doctrines of the social contract and of the natural rights of man formed the basis of the struggle of the middle cla.s.ses against autocracy and divine right.
Such militant philosophies need not in themselves be true, only they must accord with the sentiments of the struggling ma.s.s. It is with such philosophical fictions that human history works. Marx's theory of value explains neither the vast and unparalleled acc.u.mulation of wealth nor the movement of prices during the last sixty years. Wealth, measured in values, has, in the last few decades, increased by many times the increase in living labour-power. In this connection the old formula can be reversed: wealth increases in geometrical, living labour-power in arithmetical progression. The greatest difficulty in Marx is that the inventors and discoverers, the chemists and physicists, the pioneers and organisers of industry and agriculture, are not regarded by him as creators of surplus values. Thinkers, who by chemical researches and discoveries double the productive capacity of the soil and conjure forth values in millions from the waste products of industry: physicists who place new sources of power and new means of production at the disposal of mankind and multiply the productivity of labour; organisers who co-ordinate the forces of production and introduce new methods of working--all this creative and directive work, demanding, as it often does, an infinite amount of intensive intellectual effort, is not considered to increase the total sum of exchange values of the nation.
However, as far as the distribution of products is concerned, Marx's theory is, generally speaking, correct; distribution is carried out under the capitalist economic system not according to the amount of productive work done, but in proportion to the outlay of capital and the skill in commercial manoeuvring which obtains in the sphere of circulation.
Unique as an investigator of the laws of the proletarian movement, eminent and even a great pioneer as a sociologist, Marx is, in respect of economic theory, predominantly an agitator. His system, more than any other system of Socialism or of political economy, is the revolutionary expression of proletarian thought and feeling. His doctrines of value, surplus value, the economic determination of history, the evolution from Capitalism to Socialism, the political and economic cla.s.s struggle, will for long have the force of truth for the ma.s.ses and will continue to move them.
Marx's heart must have been filled with joy and gladness when, out of the elements of Hegel, Ricardo, and the English anti-capitalist school, out of his studies of the French Revolution, of the English Industrial Revolution, and of French and English Socialism there arose a unified system whose destiny it was to lead mankind out of the earth-bound history of the past into the new world wherein a spiritual civilisation should fully blossom forth. Man is to quit the realm of necessity and to enter into that of freedom, where he shall cease to be a tool for the profit of others and shall rise to have a purpose of his own, freely a.s.sociating himself with his fellow men to work in the service of all.
”The realm of freedom, indeed, only begins there where work conditioned by necessity and external utility ceases. According to the nature of the thing, therefore, it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must struggle with nature for the satisfaction of his needs, for self-preservation and self-reproduction, so too must the civilised man, whatever be the form of society or the methods of production obtaining. Side by side with his own evolution develops this const.i.tutional necessity, because his needs increase; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these needs likewise increase. Freedom in this sphere can only consist in this--that men in their social relations.h.i.+p, the a.s.sociated producers, should regulate this material exchange with Nature in a rational manner and bring it under their united control, instead of being governed by it as by some blind power; it should be carried on with the minimum expenditure of energy and under conditions most adapted to and most worthy of human nature. Yet it remains all the same a realm of necessity. It is beyond this where that development of human power, which may be called independent purpose, begins, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can only flourish upon the basis of that realm of necessity.”--(”Capital,” Vol. III., 2, p. 355.)
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