Karl Marx

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This volume of Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 was translated from the German text contained in Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I, Bd. 3. Corrections were made of typographical errors and the author’s obvious slips spotted by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. when preparing the latest Russian edition (K. Mapκc, Φ. HΓC, 3 PaHHu npou3βe∂ehu, 1956).

The Appendix to the present volume contains Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy by F. Engels, translated from the German text contained in Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I, Bd. 2.

The present volume was translated by Martin Milligan, who also supplied notes on Hegelian terminology and most of the footnotes.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2007, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, in 1961.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.

Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 / Karl Marx ; translated and edited by Martin Milligan.—Dover ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: Foreign Languages Pub. House : Moscow, 1961.

9780486113203

1. Capital. 2. Economics. I. Title.

HX39.5.A224 2007

335.4’12—dc22

2007002151

Manufactured in the United States of America Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y 11501

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

INTRODUCTION

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

PREFACE

WAGES OF LABOUR

PROFIT OF CAPITAL

RENT OF LAND

[ESTRANGED LABOUR]

[ANTITHESIS OF CAPITAL AND LABOUR. LANDED PROPERTY AND CAPITAL]

[PRIVATE PROPERTY AND LABOUR. VIEWS OF THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM AND PHYSIOCRACY, ADAM SMITH, RICARDO AND HIS SCHOOL]

[PRIVATE PROPERTY AND COMMUNISM. VARIOUS STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNIST VIEWS. CRUDE, EQUALITARIAN COMMUNISM AND COMMUNISM AS SOCIALISM COINCIDING WITH HUMANENESS]

[THE MEANING OF HUMAN REQUIREMENTS WHERE THERE IS PRIVATE PROPERTY AND UNDER SOCIALISM. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EXTRAVAGANT WEALTH AND INDUSTRIAL WEALTH. DIVISION OF LABOUR IN BOURGEOIS SOCIETY]

[THE POWER OF MONEY IN BOURGEOIS SOCIETY]

[CRITIQUE OF THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC AND PHILOSOPHY AS A WHOLE]

APPENDIX - OUTLINES OF A CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

INTRODUCTION

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are a rough draft of Karl Marx’s first economic investigation. The subject of this unfinished work, which has come down to us incomplete, is a criticism of the bourgeois political economy and the bourgeois economic system.

The title given by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, embraces three manuscripts. The first and earliest is largely of a preparatory nature; Marx’s own observations and conclusions alternate in it with passages from bourgeois and petty-bourgeois economists. Just the four last pages have survived of the second manuscript. The third manuscript consists of supplementary remarks to the missing pages of the second manuscript. They refer to such matters as private property and labour, private property and communism, and the power of money in bourgeois society. A large section of the third manuscript is devoted to a critical analysis of Hegelian dialectic and Hegelian philosophy on the whole.

In all three manuscripts emphasis is laid on the “estrangement of labour,” or the “alienation of the labourer” in capitalist society. The category of “estrangement” was prominent in Hegel’s philosophy and particularly in Feuerbach’s philosophic criticism of religion. However, Hegel spoke of the alienation of self-consciousness and Feuerbach of the alienation of the abstract, non-historical and non-class man. Marx speaks of the “estrangement,” or “alienation,” of the labourer. He imparts an entirely new economic, class and historical content to the conception of “estrangement.” By “estrangement,” or “alienation,” Marx means the forced labour of the labourer for the capitalist, the appropriation by the capitalist of the product of a worker’s labour and the separation of the labourer from the means of production which, being in the capitalist’s possession, confront the labourer as an alien, enslaving power. Here Marx comes close to an exposition of the characteristic features of capitalist exploitation.

As he criticises the bourgeois economists from the standpoint of socialism Marx reveals and emphasises the “inimical mutual antithesis” of labour and capital. He shows that the more wealth a labourer produces under capitalism the poorer he grows, that the very process of the economic development of capitalist society leads inevitably to revolution and raises the question of workers’ emancipation, which, as he points out, “contains universal human emancipation.”

Speaking of the “estrangement of labour” as of an economic fact, Marx underscores that reference is made to real, objective life and that the struggle to eliminate this “estrangement” is a practical revolutionary struggle for a communist remodelling of all society. He notes the tremendous importance of material production—“the ordinary industrial production”—in man’s history and its influence on religion, law, morals, science, art, etc. Unlike Hegel and Feuerbach, Marx turns to a specific, materialistic study of man, stressing the latter’s active part in nature and society.

In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx is still under the strong influence of Feuerbach, which comes to the surface, in particular, in his overestimating Feuerbach and in the fact that he makes use of such Feuerbachian concepts as “man—the species being,” “naturalism,” “humaneness,” etc., in proving some of the points of the new world outlook he was then developing, although he does impart to these terms a new content. It is not just the Feuerbachian terminology, but the Hegelian as well, that Marx still uses in all three of his manuscripts. But in spite of Feuerbach’s appreciable influence, Marx begins in this early work to lay the foundation of that revolutionary materialistic world outlook which was soon further developed in The Holy Family and, in particular, The German Ideology.

The Appendix contains Frederick Engels’s Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, which he began in late 1843 and completed in early 1844. In it Engels “examined the principal phenomena of the contemporary economic order from a socialist standpoint and concluded that they were necessary consequences of the rule of private property” (Lenin). In this his first and as yet insufficiently mature work in the sphere of social science Engels began a critique of bourgeois political economy and with it a critique of capitalist society from the point of view of the enslaved and exploited masses. In criticising the bourgeois economists, Engels dealt at length with the misanthropic Malthusian theory of population. He proves the utter absurdity of this “theory” and lays special stress on the part played by scientific progress in developing the productive forces of society.

The Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

(The translator offers the following notes on certain important German terms which are frequently used in the material translated in the present volume, partly to explain the way in which they have been translated, and partly as an aid to understanding the texts.)

Aufheben (past tense: aufhob, p.p. aufgehoben; noun: Aufhebung).

Aufheben (literally “to raise up”) has two opposed meanings in popular speech. (i) It can mean “to abolish,” “to cancel,” “to annul,” “to do away with,” etc. (ii) It can mean “to preserve.” Hegel, valuing the word just because of this double, negative and positive, meaning (see The Logic of Hegel tr. Wallace, 2nd ed., p. 180), uses it to describe the positive-negative action by which a higher logical category or form of nature or spirit, in superseding a lower, both “annuls” it and “incorporates its truth.” Unfortunately, there is no single English word with the same double meaning, except “sublate,” a technical term adopted for the purpose by some translators of Hegel; but as this is likely to be unintelligible to the general reader, it has not been used in the present volume. Instead, “supersede” has generally been used to render aufheben, where it seemed that the word was being used in this double, positive-negative sense, and occasionally it has been rendered as “transcend.” Where, on the other hand, it seemed that aufheben was being used simply or predominantly in its commonplace negative sense, the negative words listed above—“abolish,” “annul,” etc.—have been employed.

Entäussern (p.p. entäussert; noun: Entäusserung).

The ordinary dictionary meanings of entäussern are “to part with,” “to renounce,” “to cast off,” “to sell,” “to alienate” (a right, or one’s property). The last of these best expresses the sense in which Marx usually uses this term. For “alienate” is the only English word which combines, in much the same way as does entäussern, the ideas of “losing” something which nevertheless remains in existence over-against one, of something passing from one’s own into another’s hands, as a result of one’s own act, with the idea of “selling” something: that is to say, both “alienate” and entäussern have, at least as one possible meaning, the idea of a sale, a transference of ownership, which is simultaneously a renunciation. At the same time, the word entäussern has, more strongly than “alienate,” the sense of “making external to oneself,” and at times, when this has seemed to be the aspect of its meaning uppermost in the author’s mind, the word “externalise” has been used to render it in English. Veräussern, whose occurrence is noted at one point in the text, means “to sell” and “to alienate” in the same way as entäussern, but without the overtone of “renunciation” or of the counter-position of the thing alienated to the one who has alienated.

Entfremden (p.p. entfremdet; noun: Entfremdung).

The ordinary dictionary meanings for entfremden are “to estrange,” “to alienate,” but in the present volume “estrange” has always been used. The reason is not only that “alienate” was needed for entäussern (see above), but also that entfremden is only equivalent to “alienate” in one sense of the English word—in the sense in which we speak of two people being “alienated,” or of someone’s affections being “alienated.” Entfremden has not the legal-commercial undertones of “alienate,” and would not be used, for instance, to describe a transfer of property. Hence, despite the fact that translators of Marx have often rendered entfremdet as “alienated,” “estranged” seems better, especially as Marx does also use entäussert, which Wis the equivalent of “alienated” in its legal-commercial sense.

Wesen

There is no English word with the same range of meaning as Wesen.

Wesen can mean, for one thing, “essence,” and some translators of Marx have treated it as if it could mean nothing else. But even when it does mean “essence,” “essence” should be understood, not in the sense of something super-mundane or rarefied, but almost in the opposite sense of the “solid core” of something—its essential, as against its inessential, characteristics—its “substance” as against its accidental features—the “essential nature” or even the “very being” of something.

But secondly, Wesen is also the quite commonplace German word for a “being,” in such phrases as “a human being” (ein menschliches Wesen); or the “Supreme Being” (das höchste Wesen).

Thirdly, Wesen, as Hegel points out, “in ordinary life frequently means only a collection or aggregate: Zeitungs-wesen (the press), Postwesen (the post office), Steuer-wesen (the revenue). All that these terms mean is that the things in question are not to be taken singly, in their immediacy, but as a complex, and then, perhaps, in addition, in their various bearings.” Hegel adds that: “This usage of the term is not very different in its implications from our own.” (See The Logic of Hegel, tr. Wallace, 2nd ed., p. 209, and p. 202 f.)

This last usage of the term is also not very different from Marx’s, when, for instance, he seeks to make positive use of the concept of das menschliche Wesen. “The essence of man,” he says, “is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual. In its reality it is the ensemble (aggregate) of social relations.”

(Theses on Feuerbach, VI, as translated by R. Pascal in the Appendix to The German Ideology, Parts I and III, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, London, Lawrence & Wishart. 1939.)

In the texts translated in the present volume, Marx frequently plays on the various meanings of Wesen, using it at times in two or even more of its senses in the one sentence. The English translator can only render the different senses by different English words, and explain their common equivalent in a note, as has been done in this volume.

PREFACE[1]

I have already given notice in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher[2] the critique of jurisprudence and political science in the form of a critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right. In the course of elaboration for publication, the intermingling of criticism directed only against speculation with criticism of the various subjects themselves proved utterly unsuitable, hampering the development of the argument and rendering comprehension difficult. Moreover the wealth and diversity of the subjects to be treated, could have been compressed into one work only in a purely aphoristic style; whilst an aphoristic presentation of this kind, for its part, would have given the impression of arbitrary systematising. I shall therefore issue the critique of law, ethics, politics, etc., in a series of distinct, independent pamphlets, and at the end try in a special work to present them again as a connected whole showing the interrelationship of the separate parts, and finally, shall make a critique of the speculative elaboration of that material. For this reason it will be found that the interconnection between political economy and the state, law, ethics, civil life, etc., is touched on in the present work only to the extent to which political economy itself ex professo[3] touches on these subjects.

It is hardly necessary to assure the reader conversant with political economy that my results have been won by means of a wholly empirical analysis based on a conscientious critical study of political economy.

{Whereas the uninformed reviewer who tries to hide his complete ignorance and intellectual poverty by hurling the “utopian phrase” at the positive critic’s head, or again such phrases as “pure, resolute, utterly critical criticism,” the “not merely legal but social—utterly social—society,” the “compact, massy mass,” the “oratorical orators of the massy mass,”[4] this reviewer has yet to furnish the first proof that besides his theological family-affairs he has anything to contribute to a discussion of worldly matters.} [5]

It goes without saying that besides the French and English Socialists I have made use of German socialist works as well. The only original German works of substance in this science, however—other than Weitling’s writings—are the essays by Hess published in Einund-zwanzig Bogen,[6] and Engels’s Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie[7] in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, where, likewise, I indicated in a very general way the basic elements of this work.

{Besides being indebted to these authors who have given critical attention to political economy, positive criticism as a whole—and therefore also German positive criticism of political economy—owes its true foundation to the discoveries of Feuerbacla, against whose Philosophie der Zukunft[8] and Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie[9] in the Anecdotis,[10] despite the tacit use that is made of them, the petty envy of some and the veritable wrath of others seem to have instigated a regular conspiracy of silence.}

It is only with Feuerbach that positive, humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins. The less noise they make, the more certain, profound, widespread and enduring is the effect of Feuerbach’s writings, the only writings since Hegel’s Phänomenologie and Logik to contain a real theoretical revolution.

In contrast to the critical theologians[11] of our day, I have deemed the concluding chapter of the present work—the settling of accounts with Hegelian dialectic and Hegelian philosophy as a whole—to be absolutely necessary, a task not yet performed. This lack of thoroughness is not accidental, since even the critical theologian remains a theologian. Hence, either he had to start from certain presuppositions of philosophy accepted as authoritative; or if in the process of criticism and as a result of other people’s discoveries doubts about these philosophical presuppositions have arisen in him, he abandons them without vindication and in a cowardly fashion, abstracts from them showing his servile dependence on these presuppositions and his resentment at this dependence merely in a negative, unconscious and sophistical manner.

{In this connection the critical theologian is either for ever repeating assurances about the purity of his own criticism, or tries to make it seem as though all that was left for criticism to deal with now was some other immature form of criticism outside itself—say eighteenth-century criticism—and the backwardness of the masses, in order to divert the observer’s attention as well as his own from the necessary task of settling accounts between criticism and its point of origin—Hegelian dialectic and German philosophy as a whole—from this necessary raising of modern criticism above its own limitation and crudity. Eventually, however, whenever discoveries (such as Feuerbach’s) are made about the nature of his own philosophic presuppositions, the critical theologian partly makes it appear as if he were the one who had accomplished this, producing that appearance by taking the results of these discoveries and, without being able to develop them, hurling them in the form of catch-phrases at writers still caught in the confines of philosophy; partly he even manages to acquire a sense of his own superiority to such discoveries by covertly asserting in a veiled, malicious and sceptical fashion elements of the Hegelian dialectic which he still finds lacking in the criticism of that dialectic (which have not yet been critically served up to him for his use) against such criticism—not having tried to bring such elements into their proper relation or having been capable of doing so, asserting, say, the category of mediating proof against the category of positive, self-originating truth, etc., in a way peculiar to Hegelian dialectic. For to the theological critic it seems quite natural that everything has to be done by philosophy, so that he can chatter away about purity, resoluteness, and utterly critical criticism; and he fancies himself the true conqueror of philosophy whenever he happens to feel some “moment” in Hegel[12] to be lacking in Feuerbach—for however much he practises the spiritual idolatry of “self.-consciousness ” and “mind” the theological critic does not get beyond feeling to consciousness.}[13]

On close inspection theological criticism—genuinely progressive though it was at the inception of the movement—is seen in the final analysis to be nothing but the culmination and consequence of the old philosophical, and especially the Hegelian, transcendentalism, twisted into a theological caricature. This interesting example of the justice in history, which now assigns to theology, ever philosophy’s spot of infection, the further role of portraying in itself the negative dissolution of philosophy—i.e., the process of its decay—this historical nemesis I shall demonstrate on another occasion.[14]

{How far, on the other hand, Feuerbach’s discoveries about the nature of philosophy required still, for their proof at least, a critical settling of accounts with philosophical dialectic will be seen from my exposition itself.}

WAGES OF LABOUR

Wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker. Victory goes necessarily to the capitalist. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than can the worker without the capitalist. Combination among the capitalists is customary and effective; workers’ combination is prohibited and painful in its consequences for them.[15] Besides, the landowner and the capitalist can augment their revenues with the fruits of industry; the worker has neither ground-rent nor interest on capital to supplement his industrial income. Hence the intensity of the competition among the workers. Thus only for the workers is the separation of capital, landed property and labour an inevitable, essential and detrimental separation. Capital and landed property need not remain fixed in this abstraction, as must the labour of the workers.

The separation of capital, ground-rent and labour is thus fatal for the worker.

The lowest and the only necessary wage-rate is that providing for the subsistence of the worker for the duration of his work and as much more as is necessary for him to support a family and for the race of labourers not to die out. The ordinary wage, according to Smith, is the lowest compatible with common humanity (that is a cattle-like existence).[16]

The demand for men necessarily governs the production of men, as of every other commodity. Should supply greatly exceed demand, a section of the workers sinks into beggary or starvation. The worker’s existence is thus brought under the same condition as the existence of every other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and it is a bit of luck for him if he can find a buyer. And the demand on which the life of the worker depends, depends on the whim of the rich and the capitalists. Should the quantity in supply exceed the demand, then one of the constituent parts of the price-profit, ground-rent or wages—is paid below its rate[17]; a part of these factors is therefore withdrawn from this application, and thus the market-price gravitates towards the natural price as the centre-point. But (i) where there is considerable division of labour it is most difficult for the worker to direct his labour into other channels; (ii) because of his subordinate relation to the capitalist, he is the first to suffer.

Thus in the gravitation of market-price to natural price it is the worker who loses most of all and necessarily. And it is just the capacity of the capitalist to direct his capital into another channel which renders destitute the worker who is restricted to some particular branch of labour, or forces him to submit to every demand of this capitalist.

The accidental and sudden fluctuations in market-price hit rent less than they do that part of the price which is resolved into profit and wages; but they hit profit less than they do wages. In most cases, for every wage that rises, one remains stationary and one falls.

The worker need not necessarily gain when the capitalist does, but he necessarily loses when the latter loses. Thus, the worker does not gain if the capitalist keeps the market-price above the natural price by virtue of some manufacturing or trading secret, or by virtue of monopoly or the favourable situation of his property.

Furthermore: the prices of labour are much more constant than the prices of provisions, often they stand in inverse proportion. In a dear year wages fall on account of the fall in demand, but rise on account of the rise in the prices of provisions—and thus balance. In any case, a number of workers are left without bread. In cheap years wages rise on account of the rise in demand, but fall on account of the fall in the prices of provisions—and thus balance.[18]

Another respect in which the worker is at a disadvantage : The labour-prices of the various kinds of workers show much wilder difference than the profits in the various branches in which capital is applied. In labour all the natural, spiritual and social variety of individual activity is manifested and is variously rewarded, whilst dead capital always shows the same face and is indifferent to the real individual activity.

In general it has to be observed that in those cases where worker and capitalist equally suffer, the worker suffers in his very existence, the capitalist in the profit on his dead mammon.

The worker has to struggle not only for his physical means of subsistence: he has to struggle to get work, i.e., the possibility, the means, to perform his activity. Take the three chief conditions in which society can find itself and consider the situation of the worker in them:[19]

(1) If the wealth of society declines the worker suffers most of all, for: although the working class cannot gain so much as can the class of property-owners in a prosperous state of society, no one suffers so cruelly from its decline as the working class.[20]

(2) Take now a society in which wealth is increasing. This condition is the only one favourable to the worker. Here competition between the capitalists sets in. The demand for workers exceeds their supply. But:

In the first place, the raising of wages gives rise to overwork among the workers. The more they wish to earn, the more must they sacrifice their time and carry out slave-labour, in the service of avarice completely losing all their freedom, thereby they shorten their lives. This shortening of their life-span is a favourable circumstance for the working class as a whole, for as a result of it an ever-fresh supply of labour becomes necessary. This class has always to sacrifice a part of itself in order not to be wholly destroyed.

Furthermore: when does a society find itself in a condition of advancing wealth? When the capitals and revenues of a country are growing. But this is only possible

(α) as the result of the accumulation of much labour, capital being accumulated labour; as the result, therefore, of the fact that his products are being taken in ever- increasing degree from the hands of the worker, that to an increasing extent his own labour confronts him as another’s property and that the means of his existence and his activity are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the capitalists.

(β) The accumulation of capital increases the division of labour, and the division of labour increases the numbers of the workers. Conversely, the workers’ numbers increase the division of labour, just as the division of labour increases the accumulation of capitals. With this division of labour on the one hand and the accumulation of capitals on the other, the worker becomes ever more exclusively dependent on labour, and on a particular, very one-sided, machine-like labour. Just as he is thus depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine and from being a man becomes an abstract activity and a stomach, so he also becomes ever more dependent on every fluctuation in market-price, on the application of capitals, and on the mood of the rich. Equally, the increase in the class of people wholly dependent on work intensifies competition among them, thus lowering their price. In the factory-system this situation of the worker reaches its climax.

(ϒ) In an increasingly prosperous society it is only the very richest people who can go on living on money-interest. Everyone else has to carry on a business with his capital, or venture it in trade. As a result, the competition between capitals becomes more intense. The concentration of capitals increases, the big capitalists ruin the small, and a section of the erstwhile capitalists sinks into the working class, which as a result of this supply again suffers to some extent a depression of wages and passes into a still greater dependence on the few big capitalists. The number of capitalists having been diminished, their competition with respect to workers scarcely exists any longer; and the number of workers having been augmented, their competition among themselves has become all the more intense, unnatural and violent. Consequently, a section of the working class falls into the ranks of beggary or starvation just as necessarily as a section of the middle capitalists falls into the working class.

Hence even in the condition of society most favourable to the worker, the inevitable result for the worker is overwork and premature death, decline to a mere machine, a bond servant of capital, which piles up dangerously over-against him, more competition, and for a section of the workers starvation or beggary.

The raising of wages excites in the worker the capitalist’s mania to get rich, which he, however, can only satisfy by the sacrifice of his mind and body. The raising of wages presupposes and entails the accumulation of capital, and thus sets the product of labour against the worker as something ever more alien to him. Similarly, the division of labour renders him ever more one-sided and dependent, bringing with it the competition not only of men but of machines. Since the worker has sunk to the level of a machine, he can be confronted by the machine as a competitor. Finally, as the amassing of capital increases the amount of industry and therefore the number of workers, it causes the same amount of industry to manufacture a greater amount of product, which leads to over-production and thus either ends by throwing a large section of workers out of work or by reducing their wages to the most miserable minimum. Such are the consequences of a condition of society most favourable to the worker—namely, of a condition of growing, advancing wealth.

Eventually, however, this state of growth must sooner or later reach its peak. What is the worker’s position now?

(3) “In a country which had attained the utmost degree of its wealth, both wages of labour and interest of stock would be very low. The competition among the workers to obtain employment would be so great that wages would be reduced to a point sufficient

for the maintenance of the given number of workers; and as the country would already be sufficiently populated, this number could not be increased.”[21]

The surplus would have to die.

Thus in a declining state of society—increasing misery of the worker; in an advancing state—misery with complications; and in a fully developed state of society—static misery.

Since, however, according to Smith, a society is not happy, of which the greater part suffers[22]—yet even the wealthiest state of society leads to this suffering of the majority—and since the economic system[23] (and in general a society based on private interest) leads to this wealthiest condition, it follows that the goal of the economic system is the unhappiness of society.

Concerning the relationship between worker and capitalist one should add that the capitalist is more than compensated for the raising of wages by the reduction in the amount of labour-time, and that the raising of wages and the raising of interest on capital operate on the price of commodities like simple and compound interest respectively.

Let us put ourselves now wholly at the standpoint of the political economist, and follow him in comparing the theoretical and practical claims of the workers.

He tells us that originally and in theory the whole produce of labour[24] belongs to the worker. But at the same time he tells us that in actual fact what the worker gets is the smallest and utterly indispensable part of the product—as much, only, as is necessary for his existence, not as a man but as a worker, and for the propagation, not of humanity but of the slave-class of workers.

The political economist tells us that everything is bought with labour and that capital is nothing but accumulated labour; but at the same time he tells us that the worker, far from being able to buy everything, must sell himself and his human identity.

Whilst the rent of the lazy landowner usually amounts to a third of the product of the soil, and the profit of the busy capitalist to as much as twice the interest on money, the “something more” which the worker himself earns at the best of times amounts to so little that of four children of his, two must starve and die. Whilst according to the political economists it is solely through labour that man enhances the value of the products of nature, whilst labour is man’s active property,[25] according to this same political economy the landowner and the capitalist, who qua landowner and capitalist are merely privileged and idle gods, are everywhere superior to the worker and lay down the law to him.

Whilst according to the political economists labour is the sole constant price of things, there is nothing more contingent than the price of labour, nothing exposed to greater fluctuations.

Whilst the division of labour raises the productive power of labour and increases the wealth and refinement of society, it impoverishes the worker and reduces him to a machine. Whilst labour brings about the accumulation of capitals and with this the increasing prosperity of society, it renders the worker ever more dependent on the capitalist, leads him into competition of a new intensity, and drives him into the headlong rush of over-production, with its subsequent corresponding slump.

Whilst the interest of the worker, according to the political economists, never stands opposed to the interest of society, society always and necessarily stands opposed to the interest of the worker.

According to the political economists, the interest of the worker is never opposed to that of society: 1) because the raising of wages is more than made up for by the reduction in the amount of labour-time, together with the other consequences set forth above; and 2) because in relation to society the whole gross product is the net product, and only in relation to the private individual has the “net product” any significance.

But that labour itself, not merely in present conditions but in general in so far as its purpose is the mere increase of wealth—that labour itself, I say, is harmful and pernicious—follows, without his being aware of it, from the political economist’s line of argument.

In theory, ground-rent and profit on capital are deductions suffered by wages. In actual fact, however, wages are a deduction which land and capital allow to go to the worker, a concession from the product of labour to the workers, to labour.

When society is in a state of decline, the worker suffers most severely. The specific severity of his burden he owes to his position as a worker, but the burden as such to the position of society.

But when society is in a state of progress, the ruin and impoverishment of the worker is the product of his labour and of the wealth produced by him. The misery results, therefore, from the essence of present-day labour itself.

Society in a state of maximum wealth, an ideal, but one which is more or less attained, and which at least is the aim of political economy as of civil society, means for the workers static miserly.

It goes without saying that the proletarian, i.e., the man who, being without capital and rent, lives purely by labour, and by a one-sided, abstract labour, is considered by political economy only as a worker. Political economy can therefore advance the proposition that the proletarian, the same as any horse, must get as much as will enable him to work. It does not consider him when he is not working, as a human being; but leaves such consideration to criminal law, to doctors, to religion, to the statistical tables, to politics and to the workhouse beadle.

Let us now rise above the level of political economy and try to answer two questions on the basis of the above exposition, which has been presented almost in the words of the political economists:

(1) What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?

(2) What are the mistakes committed by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and in this way to improve the situation of the working class, or regard equality of wages (as Proudhon does) the goal of social revolution?

In political economy labour occurs only in the form of wage-earning activity.

“It can be asserted that those occupations which presuppose specific talents or longer training have become on the whole more lucrative; whilst the proportionate reward for mechanically monotonous activity in which one person can be trained as easily and quickly as another has fallen with growing competition, and was inevitably bound to fall. And it is just this sort of work which in the present state of the organisation of labour is still by far the commonest. If therefore a worker in the first category now earns seven times as much as he did, say, fifty years ago, whilst the earnings of another in the second category have remained unchanged, then of course both are earning on the average four times as much. But if the first category comprises only a thousand workers, in a particular country, and the second a million, then 999,000 are no better off than fifty years ago—and they are worse off if at the same time the prices of the necessaries of life have risen. With such superficial calculations of averages people try to deceive themselves about the most numerous class of the population. Moreover, the size of the wage is only one factor in the estimation of the worker’s income, because it is essential for the measurement of the latter to take into account the assurance of its permanence—of which there is obviously no possibility in the anarchy of so-called free competition, with its ever-recurring fluctuations and periods of stagnation. Finally, the hours of work customary formerly and now have to be considered. And for the English cotton-workers these have been raised, as a result of the entrepreneurs’ mania for profit, to between twelve and sixteen hours a day during the past twenty-five years or so—that is to say, precisely during the period of the introduction of labour-saving machines; and this rise in one country and in one branch of industry inevitably asserted itself elsewhere to a greater or lesser degree for the right of the unlimited exploitation of the poor by the rich is still universally recognised.” (Wilhelm Schulz, Movement of Production, p. 65.)[26]

“But even if it were as true as it is false that the average income of every class of society has increased, the income-differences and relative income-distances may nevertheless have become greater and the contrasts between wealth and poverty accordingly stand out more sharply. For just because total production rises—and in the same measure as it rises—needs, desires and claims also multiply and thus relative poverty can increase whilst absolute poverty diminishes. The Samoyed living on fish-oil and rancid fish is not poor for in his secluded society all have the same needs. But in a state that is forging ahead, which in the course of a decade, say, increased by a third its total production in proportion to the population, the worker who is getting as much at the end of ten years as at the beginning has not remained as well off, but has become poorer by a third.” (Ibid., pp. 65-66.)

But political economy knows the worker only as a working-animal—as a beast reduced to the strictest bodily needs.

“To develop in greater spiritual freedom, a people must break their bondage to their bodily needs—they must cease to be the slaves of the body,. They must, therefore, above all, have time at their disposal for spiritual creative activity and spiritual enjoyment. The developments in the labour-organism gain this time. Indeed with new motive-forces and improved machinery, a single worker in the cotton factories now not infrequently performs the work formerly requiring a hundred, or even 250 to 350 workers. Similar results can be observed in all branches of production, because external natural forces are being compelled to participate to an ever-greater degree in human labour. If the satisfaction of a given amount of material needs formerly required a certain expenditure of time and human effort which has later been reduced by half, then without any loss of material comfort the scope for spiritual activity and enjoyment has been simultaneously extended by as much.... But again the way in which the booty, that we win from old Kronos[27] himself in his most private domain, is shared out is still decided by the dice-throw of blind, unjust Chance. In France it has been calculated that at the present stage in the development of production an average working-period of five hours a day by every person capable of work could suffice for the satisfaction of all the material interests of society.... Notwithstanding the time saved by the perfecting of machinery, the duration of the slave-labour performed by a large population in the factories has only increased.” (Ibid., pp. 67, 68.)

“The transition from compound manual labour rests on a breaking-down of the latter into its simple operations. At first, however,, only some of the uniformly-recurring operations will devolve on machines, while some devolve on men. From the nature of things, and from confirmatory experience, it is clear that unendingly monotonous activity of this kind is as harmful to the mind as to the body; thus this combination of machinery with mere division of labour among a greater number of hands must inevitably show all the disadvantages of the latter. These disadvantages appear, among other things, in the greater mortality of factory-workers.... Consideration has not been given ... to this big distinction as to how far men work through machines or as machines,.” (Ibid., p. 69.)

“In the future life of the peoples, however, the inanimate forces of nature working in machines will be our slaves and servants.” (Ibid., p. 74.)

“The English spinning-mills employ 196, 818 females and only 158,818 men. For every 100 male workers in the cotton-factories of Lancashire there are 103 female workers, and in Scotland as many as 209. In the English flax-mills of Leeds, for every 100 male workers there were found to be 147 female workers. In Druden and on the East Coast of Scotland as many as 280. In the English silk-mills ... many female workers; male workers predominate in the wool-mills where the work requires greater physical strength. In 1833, no fewer than 38,927 females were employed alongside 18,593 men in the North-American cotton-mills. As a result of the changes in the labour-organism, a wider sphere of gainful employment has thus fallen to the share of the female sex.... Women now occupying an economically more independent position.... The two sexes drawn closer together in their social conditions.“ (Ibid., pp. 71, 72.)

“Working in the English steam- and water-driven spinning-mills in 1835 were: 20,558 children between the ages of eight and twelve; 35,867 between the ages of twelve and thirteen; and, lastly, 108,208 children between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.... Admittedly, further advances in mechanisation, by more and more removing all monotonous work from human hands, are operating in the direction of a gradual elimination of this social evil. But standing in the way of these more rapid advances is the very circumstance that the capitalists can, in the easiest and cheapest fashion, appropriate the energies of the lower classes down to the children, to be employed and used up instead of mechanical aids.” (Ibid., pp. 70-71.)

“Lord Brougham’s call to the workers—‘Become capitalists’.... The evil that millions are only able to earn a bare pittance for themselves by strenuous labour which is shattering the body and crippling them morally and intellectually; that they are even obliged to consider the misfortune of finding such work a piece of good fortune.” (Ibid., p. 60.)

“In order to live, then, the non-owners are obliged to place themselves, directly or indirectly, at the service of the owners—to put themselves, that is to say, into a position of dependence upon them.” (Pecqueur, Théorie nouvelle d’économie soc., etc., p. 409.)[28]

“Servants—pay; workers—wages; employees—salary or emoluments.” (Ibid., pp. 409, 410.)

“To hire out one’s labour”; “To lend one’s labour at interest”; “To work in another’s place.”

“To hire out the materials of labour”; “To lend the materials of labour at interest”; “To make others work in one’s place.” (Ibid., p. 411.)

“Such an economic order condemns men to occupations so mean, to a degradation so devastating and bitter, that by comparison savagery seems like a kingly condition.” (Ibid., pp. 417, 418.) “Prostitution of the non-owing class in all its forms.” (Ibid., p. 421 f.) “Ragmen.”

Loudon, in the book Solution du problème de la population, etc., Paris, 1842,[29] declares the number of prostitutes in England to be between sixty and seventy thousand. The number of women of doubtful virtue is said to be equally large (p. 228).

“The average life of these unfortunate creatures on the streets, after they have embarked on their career of vice, is about six or seven years. To maintain the number of sixty to seventy thousand prostitutes, there must be in the three kingdoms at least eight to nine thousand women who commit themselves to this degrading profession each year, or about twenty-four new victims each day—an average of one per hour; and it follows that if the same proportion holds good over the whole surface of the globe, there must constantly be in existence one and a half million unfortunate women of this kind.” (Ibid., p. 229.)

“The population of the poverty-stricken grows with their poverty, and at the extreme limit of destitution human beings are crowded together in the greatest numbers contending with each other for the right to suffer.... In 1821 the population of Ireland was 6,801,827. In 1831 it had risen to 7,764,010,—an increase of 14 per cent in ten years. In Leinster, the wealthiest province, the population increased by only 8 per cent; whilst in Connaught, the most poverty-stricken province, the increase reached 21 per cent. (Extract from the Enquiries Published in England on Ireland, Vienna, 1840.)” (Buret, De la misère, etc., t. 1, pp. 36, 37.)[30]

Political economy considers labour in the abstract as a thing; “labour is a commodity.” If the price is high, then the commodity is in great demand; if the price is low, then the commodity is in great supply, “the price of labour as a commodity must fall lower and lower.” This is made inevitable partly by the competition between capitalist and worker, and partly by the competition amongst the workers. “The working population, the seller of labour, is necessarily reduced to accepting the meagrest part of the product.... Is the theory of labour as a commodity anything other than a theory of disguised bondage?” (Ibid., p. 43.) “Why then has nothing but an exchange-value been seen in labour?” (Ibid., p. 44.) The large workshops prefer to buy the labour of women and children, because this costs less than that of men. (Ibid.) “The worker is not at all in the position of a free seller vis-à-vis the one who employs him.... The capitalist is always free to use labour, and the worker is always forced to sell it. The value of labour is completely destroyed if it is not sold every instant. Labour can neither be accumulated nor even be saved, unlike true commodities. Labour is life, and if life is not each day exchanged for food, it suffers and soon perishes. To claim that human life is a commodity, one must, therefore, admit slavery.” (Ibid., pp. 49, 50.) If, then, labour is a commodity, it is a commodity with the most unfortunate attributes. But even by the principles of political economy it is no commodity, for it is not the free result of a free transaction. The present economic regime simultaneously lowers the price and the remuneration of labour; it perfects the worker and degrades the man. (Ibid., pp. 52-53.) “Industry has become a war, and commerce a gamble.” (Ibid., p. 62.)

The cotton-working machines (in England) alone represent 84,000,000 manual workers. (Ibid., p. 193.)

Up to the present, industry has been in a state of war—a war of conquest: “It has squandered the lives of the men who made up its army with the same indifference as the great conquerors. Its aim was the possession of wealth, not the happiness of men.” (Buret, l.c., p. 20.) “These interests (that is, economic interests), freely left to themselves ... must necessarily come into conflict; they have no other arbiter but war, and the decisions of war assign defeat and death to some, in order to give victory to the others.... It is in the conflict of opposed forces that science seeks order and equilibrium: perpetual war, according to it, is the sole means of obtaining peace; that war is called competition.” (Ibid., p. 23.)

“The industrial war, to be conducted with success, demands large armies which it can amass on one spot and profusely decimate. And it is neither from devotion nor from duty that the soldiers of this army bear the exertions imposed on them, but only to escape the hard necessity of hunger. They feel neither attachment nor gratitude towards their bosses, nor are these bound to their subordinates by any feeling of benevolence. They do not know them as men, but only as instruments of production which have to yield as much as possible with as little cost as possible. These populations of workers, ever more crowded together, have not even the assurance of always being employed. Industry, which has called them together, only lets them live while it needs them, and as soon as it can get rid of them it abandons them without the slightest scruple; and the workers are compelled to offer their persons and their powers for whatever price they can get. The longer, more painful and more disgusting the work they are given, the less they are paid. There are those who, with sixteen hours’ work a day and unremitting exertion, scarcely buy the right not to die.” (Ibid., pp. 68-69.)

“We are convinced ... as are the commissioners charged with the enquiry into the condition of the hand-loom weavers, that the large industrial towns would in a short time lose their population of workers if they were not all the time receiving from the neigh-bouring rural areas constant recruitments of healthy men, a constant flow of fresh blood.” (Ibid., p. 362.)

PROFIT OF CAPITAL

1. CAPITAL

1) What is the basis of capital, that is, of private property in the products of others’ labour?

“For if capital itself does not merely amount to theft or fraud, it requires still the co-operation of legislation to sanctify inheritance.” (Say, t. I, p. 136, footnote.)[31]

How does one become a proprietor of productive stock? How does one become owner of the products created by means of this stock?

By virtue of positive law. (Say, t. II, p. 4.)

What does one acquire with capital, with the inheritance of a large fortune, for instance?

“The person who either acquires, or succeeds to a great fortune, does not necessarily acquire or succeed to any political power.... The power which that possession immediately and directly conveys to him, is the power of purchasing; a certain command over all the labour, or over all the produce of labour, which is then in the market.” (The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, Vol. I, pp. 26-27.)

Capital is thus the governing power over labour and its products. The capitalist possesses this power, not on account of his personal or human qualities, but inasmuch as he is an owner of capital. His power is the purchasing power of his capital, which nothing can withstand.

Later we shall see first how the capitalist, by means of capital, exercises his governing power over labour, then, however, we shall see the governing power of capital over the capitalist himself.

What is capital?

“A certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed.” (Ibid., Vol. I, p. 295.)

Capital is stored-up labour.

2) Fonds, or stock, is any accumulation of products of the soil or of manufacture. Stock is called capital only when it yields to its owner a revenue or profit. (Ibid., Vol. I, p. 243.)

2. THE PROFIT OF CAPITAL

The profit or gain of capital is altogether different from the wages of labour. This difference is manifested in two ways: in the first place, the profits of capital are regulated altogether by the value of the capital employed, although the labour of inspection and direction associated with different capitals may be the same. Moreover in large works the whole of this labour is committed to some principal clerk, whose salary bears no regular proportion to the capital of which he oversees the management. And although the labour of the proprietor is here reduced almost to nothing, he still demands profits in proportion to his capital. (Ibid., Vol. I, p. 43.)

Why does the capitalist demand this proportion between profit and capital?

He would have no interest in employing the workers, unless he expected from the sale of their work something more than is necessary to replace the stock advanced by him as wages; and he would have no interest in employing a great stock rather than a small one unless his profit were to bear some proportion to the extent of the stock employed. (Ibid., p. 42.)

The capitalist thus makes a profit, first, on the wages, and secondly on the raw materials advanced by him.

What proportion, then, does profit bear to capital?

If it is already difficult to determine the usual average level of wages at a particular place and at a particular time, it is even more difficult to determine the profit on capitals. A change in the price of the commodities in which the capitalist deals, the good or bad fortune of his rivals and customers, a thousand other accidents to which commodities are exposed both in transit and in the warehouses —all produce a daily, almost hourly variation in profit. (Ibid., pp. 78-79.) But although it is impossible to determine with precision what are the profits on capitals, some notion may be formed of them from the interest of money. Wherever a great deal can be made by the use of money, a great deal will be given for the use of it; wherever little can be made by it, little will be given. (Ibid., p. 79.) The proportion which the usual market-rate of interest ought to bear to the rate of clear profit, necessarily varies as profit rises or falls. Double interest is in Great Britain reckoned what the merchants call un profit honnête, modéré, raisonnable,[32] terms which mean no more than a common and usual profit. (Ibid., p. 87.)

What is the lowest rate of profit? And what the highest?

The lowest rate of ordinary profit on capitals must always be something more than what is necessary to compensate the occasional losses to which every employment of capital is exposed. It is this surplus only which is the neat or clear profit. The same holds for the lowest rate of interest. (Ibid., p. 86.)

The highest rate to which ordinary profits can rise is that which in the price of the greater part of commodities eats up the whole of the rent of the land, and reduces the wages of labour contained in the commodity supplied to the lowest rate, the bare subsistence of the labourer during his work. The worker must always be fed in some way or other while he is required to work; ground-rent can disappear entirely. For example: the servants of the East India Company in Bengal. (Ibid., pp. 86-87.)

Besides all the advantages of limited competition which the capitalist may exploit in this case, he can keep the market-price above the natural-price by quite decorous means.

For one thing, by keeping secrets in trade if the market is at a great distance from those who supply it, that is, by concealing a price change, its rise above the natural level. This concealment has the effect that other capitalists do not follow him in investing their capital in this branch of industry or trade.

Then again by keeping secrets in manufacture, which enable the capitalist to reduce the costs of production and supply his commodity at the same or even at lower prices than his competitors while obtaining a higher profit. (Deceiving by keeping secrets is not immoral? Dealings on the stock exchange.) Furthermore, where production is restricted to a particular locality (as in the case of a rare wine), and where the effective demand can never be satisfied. Finally, through monopolies exercised by individuals or companies. Monopoly-price is the highest possible. (Ibid., pp. 53-54.)

Other fortuitous causes which can raise the profit on capital: the acquisition of new territories, or of new branches of trade, often increases the profit on capitals even in a wealthy country, because they withdraw some of the capitals from the old branches of trade, reduce competition, and cause the market to be supplied with fewer commodities, the prices of which then rise: those who deal in these commodities can then afford to borrow at a higher rate of interest. (Ibid., p. 83.)

The more a commodity is worked up—the more it becomes a manufactured object—the greater becomes that part of the price which resolves itself into wages and profit in proportion to that which resolves itself into rent. In the progress of the manufacture of a commodity, not only the number of profits increases, but every subsequent profit is greater than the foregoing; because the capital from which it is derived must always be greater. The capital which employs the weavers, for example, must always be greater than that which employs the spinners; because it not only replaces that capital with its profits, but pays, besides, the wages of weavers; and the profits must always bear some proportion to the capital. (Ibid., p. 45.)

Thus the advance made by human labour in converting the product of nature into the manufactured product of nature increases, not the wages of labour, but in part the number of profitable capitals, and in part the size of every subsequent capital in comparison with the foregoing.

With regard to the advantage which the capitalist derives from the division of labour, more later.

He profits doubly—first, by the division of labour; and secondly, in general, by the advance which human labour makes on the natural product. The greater the human share in a commodity, the greater the profit of dead capital.

In one and the same society the average rate of capital profits is much more nearly on the same level than the wages of the different sorts of labour. (Ibid., p. 100.) In the different employments of capital, the ordinary rate of profit varies with the certainty or uncertainty of the returns. “The ordinary profit of stock, though it rises with the risk, does not always seem to rise in proportion to it.” (Ibid., pp. 99-100.)

It goes without saying that profits also rise if the means of circulation become less expensive or easier available (e. g., paper money).

3. THE RULE OF CAPITAL OVER LABOUR AND THE MOTIVES OF THE CAPITALIST

The consideration of his own private profit is the sole motive which determines the owner of any capital to employ it either in agriculture, in manufactures, or in some particular branch of the wholesale or retail trade. The different quantities of productive labour which it may put into motion, and the different values which it may add to the annual produce of the land and labour of his country, according as it is employed in one or other of those different ways, never enter into his thoughts. (Ibid., p. 335.)

The most useful employment of capital for the capitalist is that which, risks being equal, yields him the greatest profit. This employment is not always the most useful for society: the most useful employment is that which draws benefit from the productive powers of nature. (Say, t. II, pp. 130-31.)

The plans and projects of the employers of capitals regulate and direct all the most important operations of labour, and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this class, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two.... The particular interest of the dealers in any particular branch of trade or manufactures is always in some respects different from, and frequently even in sharp opposition to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the sellers’ competition is always the interest of the dealer. This is a class of people whose interest is never exactly the same as that of society, a class of people who have generally an interest to deceive and to oppress the public. (Smith, Vol. I, pp. 231-32.)

4. THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITALS AND THE COMPETITION AMONGST THE CAPITALISTS

The increase of capitals, which raises wages, tends to lower the capitalists’ profit, because of the competition amongst the capitalists. (Ibid., p. 78.)

“If, for example, the capital which is necessary for the grocery trade of a particular town is divided between two different grocers, their competition will tend to make that each of them sells cheaper than if it were in the hands of one only; and if it were divided among twenty, their competition would be just so much the greater, and the chance’ of their combining together, in order to raise the price, just so much less.” (Ibid., p. 322.)

Since we already know that monopoly-prices are as high as possible, since the interest of the capitalists, even from the point of view commonly held by political economists, stands in hostile opposition to society, and since a rise of profit operates like compound interest on the price of the commodity (ibid., pp. 87-88), it follows that the sole defence against the capitalists is competition, which according to the evidence of political economy acts beneficently by both raising wages and lowering the prices of commodities to the advantage of the consuming public.

But competition is only possible if capitals multiply, and are held in many hands. The formation of many capitals is only possible as a result of multilateral accumulation, since capital comes into being only by accumulation; and multilateral accumulation necessarily turns into unilateral accumulation. Competition among capitals increases accumulation of capitals.

Accumulation, where private property prevails, is the concentration of capital in the hands of a few, it is in general an inevitable consequence if capitals are left to follow their natural course, and it is precisely through competition that the way is cleared for this natural destination of capital.

We have been told that the profit on capital is in proportion to the size of the capital. A large capital therefore accumulates more quickly than a small capital in proportion to its size, even if we disregard for the time being deliberate competition.

Accordingly, the accumulation of large capital proceeds much more rapidly than that of smaller capital, quite irrespective of competition. But let us follow this process further.

With the increase of capitals the profits on the capitals diminish, because of competition. The first to suffer, therefore, is the small capitalist.

The increase of capitals and a large number of capitals presupposes, further, a condition of advancing wealth in the country.

“In a country which had acquired its full complement of riches, ... as the ordinary rate of clear profit would be very small, so the usual market-rate of interest which could be afforded out of it would be so low as to render it impossible for any but the very wealthiest people to live upon the interest of their money. All people of small or middling fortunes would be obliged to superintend themselves the employment of their own stocks.” (Ibid., p. 86.)

This is the situation most dear to the heart of political economy.

“The proportion between capital and revenue, therefore, seems everywhere to regulate the proportion between industry and idleness; wherever capital predominates, industry prevails; wherever revenue, idleness.” (Ibid., p. 301.)

What about the employment of capital, then, in this condition of increased competition?

“As stock increases, the quantity of stock to be lent at interest grows gradually greater and greater. As the quantity of stock to be lent at interest increases, the interest ... diminishes....” (i) because “the market-price of things commonly diminishes as their quantity increases....” and (ii) because with the increase of capitals in any country, “it becomes gradually more and more difficult to find within the country a profitable method of employing any new capital. There arises in consequence a competition between different capitals, the owner of one endeavouring to get possession of that employment which is occupied by another. But upon most occasions he can hope to jostle that other out of this employment by no other means but by dealing upon more reasonable terms. He must not only sell what he deals in somewhat cheaper, but in order to get it to sell, he must sometimes, too, buy it dearer. The demand for productive labour, by the increase of the funds which are destined for maintaining it, grows every day greater and greater. Labourers easily find employment, but the owners of capitals find it difficult to get labourers to employ. Their competition raises the wages of labour and sinks the profits of stock.” (Ibid., p. 316.)

Thus the small capitalist has the choice: 1) either to consume his capital, since he can no longer live on the interest—and thus cease to be a capitalist; or: 2) to set up a business himself, sell his commodity cheaper, buy dearer than the wealthier capitalist, and pay increased wages—thus ruining himself, the market-price being already very low as a result of the intense competition presupposed. If, however, the big capitalist wants to squeeze out the smaller capitalist, he has all the advantages over him which the capitalist has as a capitalist over the worker. The larger size of his capital compensates him for the smaller profits, and he can even bear temporary losses until the smaller capitalist is ruined and he finds himself freed from this competition. In this way, he accumulates the small capitalist’s profits.

Furthermore: the big capitalist always buys cheaper than the small one, because he buys bigger quantities. He can therefore well afford to sell cheaper.

But if a fall in the rate of interest turns the middle capitalists from rentiers into business men, the increase in business capitals and the smaller profit consequent thereon produce conversely a fall in the rate of interest.

“When the profits which can be made by the use of a capital are ... diminished, ... the price which can be paid for the use of it, ... must necessarily be diminished with them.” (Ibid., p. 316.)

“As riches, improvement, and population have increased, interest has declined,” and consequently the profit of capitals, “after these are diminished, stock may not only continue to increase, but to increase much faster than before.... A great stock though with small profits, generally increases faster than a small stock with great profits. Money, says the proverb, makes money.” (Ibid., p. 83.)

If, however, this large capital is opposed by small capitals with small profits, as it is under the presupposed condition of intense competition, it crushes them completely. The necessary result of this competition is a general deterioration of commodities, adulteration, fake-production and universal poisoning, evident in large towns.

An important circumstance in the competition of large and small capitals is, furthermore, the relationship between fixed capital and circulating capital.[33]

“Circulating capital is a capital which is employed in raising provisions, in manufacture or trade. The capital employed in this manner yields no revenue or profit to its employer while it either remains in his possession or continues in the same shape. It is continually going from him in one particular shape in order to return to him in another, and it is only by means of such circulation, or such successive exchanges and transformations that it yields any profit. Fixed capital consists of capital invested in the improvement of land, the purchase of useful machines, instruments of trade, and such-like things.” (Ibid., pp. 243-44. In quoting it, Marx has abbreviated this passage.)

“Every saving in the expense of supporting the fixed capital is an improvement of the net revenue of the society. The whole capital of the undertaker of every work is necessarily divided between his fixed and his circulating capital. While his whole capital remains the same, the smaller the one part, the greater must necessarily be the other. It is the circulating capital which furnishes the materials and wages of labour, and puts industry into motion. Every saving, therefore, in the expense of maintaining the fixed capital, which does not diminish the productive powers of labour, must increase the fund which puts industry into motion.” (Ibid., p. 257.)

It is clear from the outset that the relationship of fixed capital and circulating capital is much more favourable to the big capitalist than to the smaller capitalist. The extra fixed capital required by a very big banker as against a very small one is insignificant. Their fixed capital amounts to nothing more than the office. The equipment of the bigger landowner does not increase in proportion to the size of his estate. Similarly, the credit which a big capitalist enjoys compared with a smaller one means for him all the greater saving in fixed capital—that is, in the amount of ready money he must always have at hand. Finally, it is obvious that where industrial labour has reached a high level, and where therefore almost all manual labour has become factory-labour, the entire capital of a small capitalist does not suffice to provide him even with the necessary fixed capital.[34]

The accumulation of large capitals is generally accompanied by a corresponding concentration and simplification of fixed capital relative to the smaller capitalists. The big capitalist introduces for himself some kind of organisation of the instruments of labour.

“Similarly, in the sphere of industry every manufactory and mill is already a more comprehensive combination of a larger material fortune with numerous and varied intellectual capacities and technical skills serving the common purpose of production... Where legislation preserves landed property in large units, the surplus of a growing population flocks into trades, and it is therefore as in Great Britain in the field of industry, principally, that proletarians aggregate in great numbers. Where, however, the law permits the continuous division of the land, the number of small, debt-encumbered proprietors increases, as in France; and the continuing process of fragmentation throws them into the class of the needy and the discontented. When eventually this fragmentation and indebtedness reaches a higher degree still, big landed property once more swallows up small property, just as large-scale industry destroys small industry. And as larger estates are formed again, large numbers of propertiless workers not required for the cultivation of the soil are again driven into industry.” (Schulz, Bewegung der Produktion, pp. 58, 59.)

“Commodities of a particular kind change in character as a result of changes in the method of production, and especially as a result of the use of machinery. Only by the exclusion of human power has it become possible to spin from a pound of cotton worth 3 shillings and 8 pence 350 hanks of a total length of 167 English miles (i.e., 36 German miles), and of a commercial value of 25 guineas.” (Ibid., p. 62.)

“On the average the prices of cotton cloths have decreased in England during the past 45 years by eleven-twelfths, and according to Marshall’s calculations the same amount of manufactured goods for which 16 shillings was still paid in 1814 is now supplied at 1 shilling and 10 pence. The greater cheapness of industrial products expands both consumption at home and the market abroad, and because of this the number of workers in cotton has not only not fallen in Great Britain after the introduction of machines but has risen from forty thousand to one and a half million. As to the earnings of industrial entrepreneurs and workers: the growing competition between the factory-owners has resulted in their profits necessarily falling relative to the amount of products supplied by them. In the years 1820-33 the Manchester manufacturer’s gross profit on a piece of calico fell from four shillings 1 pence to one shilling 9 pence. But to make up for this loss, the volume of manufacture has been correspondingly increased. The consequence of this is ... that separate branches of industry experience over-production to some extent; that frequent bankruptcies occur causing property to fluctuate and vacillate unstably within the class of capitalists and masters of labour, thus throwing into the proletariat some of those who have been ruined economically; and that, frequently and suddenly, close-downs or cuts in employment become necessary, the painful effects of which are always bitterly felt by the class of wage-labourers.” (Ibid., p. 63.)

“To hire out one’s labour is to begin one’s enslavement. To hire out the materials of labour is to establish one’s freedom.... Labour is man; but the materials of labour, on the other hand, contain nothing human.” (Pecqueur, Théorie sociale, etc., pp. 411-12.)

“The element of matter, which is quite incapable of creating wealth without the other element, labour, acquires the magical virtue of being fertile for them,[35] as if by their own action they had placed there this indispensable element.” (Ibid.)

“Supposing that the daily labour of a worker brings him on the average four hundred francs a year and that this sum suffices for every adult to live some sort of crude life, then any proprietor receiving 2,000 francs in interest or rent, from a farm, a house, etc., compels indirectly five men to work for him; an income of 100,000 francs represents the labour of two hundred and fifty men, and that of 1,000,000 francs the labour of two thousand five hundred individuals (and 300 million [Louis Philippe] therefore the labour of 750,000 workers).” (Ibid., pp. 412-13.)

“The human law has given owners the right to use and to abuse—that is to say the right to do what they will with the materials of labour. . . . They are in no way obliged by law to provide work for the propertiless when required and at all times, or to pay them always an adequate wage, etc.” (Ibid., p. 413.) “Complete freedom concerning the nature, the quantity, the quality and the opportunity of production; concerning the use and the disposal of wealth; and full command over the materials of all labour. Everyone is free to exchange what belongs to him as he thinks fit, without considering anything other than his own interest as an individual.” (Ibid., p. 413.)

“Competition is merely the expression of the freedom to exchange, which itself is the immediate and logical consequence of the individual’s right to use and abuse all the instruments of production. The right to use and abuse, freedom of exchange, and arbitrary competition—these three economic moments, which form one unit, entail the following consequences; each produces what he wishes, as he wishes, when he wishes, where he wishes, produces well or produces badly, produces too much or not enough, too soon or too late, at too high a price or too low a price; none knows whether he will sell, how he will sell, when he will sell, where he will sell, to whom he will sell. And it is the same with regard to purchases. The producer is ignorant of needs and resources, of demand and supply. He sells when he wishes, when he can, where he wishes, to whom he wishes, at the price he wishes. And he buys in the same way. In all this he is ever the plaything of chance, the slave of the law of the strongest, of the least harassed, of the richest. . . . Whilst at one place there is scarcity, at another there is glut and waste. Whilst one producer sells a lot or at a very high price, and at an enormous profit, the other sells nothing or sells at a loss. . . . The supply does not know the demand, and the demand does not know the supply. You produce, trusting to a taste, a fashion, which prevails amongst the consuming public. But by the time you are ready to deliver the commodity, the whim has already passed and has settled on some other kind of product. . . . The inevitable consequences: bankruptcies occurring permanently and universally; miscalculations, sudden ruin and unexpected fortunes, commercial crises, unemployment, periodic gluts or shortages; instability and depreciation of wages and profits, the loss or enormous waste of wealth, time and effort in the arena of fierce competition.” (Ibid., pp. 414-16.)

Ricardo in his book (Rent of Land): Nations are merely production-shops; man is a machine for consuming and producing; human life is a kind of capital; economic laws blindly rule the world. For Ricardo men are nothing, the product everything. In the 26th chapter of the French translation it says: “To an individual with a capital of £20,000 whose profits were £2,000 per annum, it would be a matter quite indifferent whether his capital would employ a hundred or a thousand men. . . . Is not the real interest of the nation similar? Provided its net real income, its rent and profits be the same, it is of no importance whether the nation consists of ten or of twelve millions of inhabitants.” “In fact, says M. Sismondi (t. II, p. 331), nothing remains to be desired but that the King, living quite alone on the island, should by continuously turning a crank cause automata to do all the work of England.”[36]

“The master who buys the worker’s labour at such a low price that it scarcely suffices for the worker’s most pressing needs is responsible neither for the inadequacy of the wage nor for the excessive duration of the labour: he himself has to submit to the law which he imposes. . . . Poverty is not so much caused by men as by the power of things.” (Buret, I.c., p. 82.)

“The inhabitants of many different parts of Great Britain have not capital sufficient to improve and cultivate all their lands. The wool of the southern counties of Scotland is, a great part of it, after a long land carriage through very bad roads, manufactured in Yorkshire, for want of capital to manufacture it at home. There are many little manufacturing towns in Great Britain, of which the inhabitants have not capital sufficient to transport the produce of their own industry to those distant markets where there is demand and consumption for it. If there are any merchants among them, they are properly only the agents of wealthier merchants who reside in some of the greater commercial cities.” (Smith, l.c., Vol. 1, pp. 326-27.)

“The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed.... In either case an additional capital is almost always required.” (Ibid., pp. 306-07.)

“As the accumulation of stock must, in the nature of things, be previous to the division of labour, so labour can be more and more subdivided in proportion only as stock is previously more and more accumulated. The quantity of materials which the same number of people can work up, increases in a great proportion as labour comes to be more and more subdivided; and as the operations of each workman are gradually reduced to a greater degree of simplicity, a variety of new machines come to be invented for facilitating and abridging those operations. As the division of labour advances, therefore, in order to give constant employment to an equal number of workmen, an equal stock of provisions, and a greater stock of materials and tools than what would have been necessary in a ruder state of things, must be accumulated beforehand. But the number of workmen in every branch of business generally increases with the division of labour in that branch, or rather it is the increase of their number which enables them to class and subdivide themselves in this manner.” (Ibid., pp. 241-42.)

“As the accumulation of stock is previously necessary for carrying on this great improvement in the productive powers of labour, so that accumulation naturally leads to this improvement. The person who employs his stock in maintaining labour, necessarily wishes to employ it in such a manner as to produce as great a quantity of work as possible. He endeavours, therefore, both to make among his workmen the most proper distribution of employment, and to furnish them with the best machines which he can either invent or afford to purchase. His abilities in both these respects are generally in proportion to the extent of his stock, or to the number of people whom it can employ. The quantity of industry, therefore, not only increases in every country with the increase of the stock which employs it, but, in consequence of that increase, the same quantity of industry produces a much greater quantity of work.” (Ibid., p. 242.) Hence overproduction.

“More comprehensive combinations of productive forces ... in industry and trade by uniting more numerous and more diverse, human and natural powers in larger-scale enterprises. Already here and there, closer association of the chief branches of production. Thus, big manufacturers will try to acquire also large estates in order to become independent of others for at least a part of the raw materials required for their industry; or they will go into trade in conjunction with their industrial enterprises, not only to sell their own manufactures, but also to purchase other kinds of products and to sell these to their workers. In England, where a single factory-owner sometimes employs ten to twelve thousand workers ... it is already not uncommon to find such combinations of various branches of production controlled by one brain, such smaller states or provinces within the state. Thus, the mine-owners in the Birmingham area have recently taken over the whole process of iron production, which was previously distributed among various entrepreneurs and owners. See ‘Der Bergmännische Distrikt bei Birmingham,’ Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, No. 3, 1838. Finally in the larger joint-stock enterprises which have become so numerous, we see far-reaching combinations of the financial resources of many participants with the scientific and technical knowledge and skills of others to whom the carrying-out of the work is handed over. The capitalists are thereby enabled to apply their savings in more diverse ways and perhaps even to employ them simultaneously in agriculture, industry and commerce; as a consequence their interest becomes more comprehensive, and the contradictions between agricultural, industrial and commercial interests are reduced and disappear. But this increased possibility of applying capital profitably in the most diverse ways cannot but intensify the antagonism between the propertied and the non-propertied classes.” (Schulz, I.c., pp. 40-41.)

The enormous profit which the landlords of houses make out of poverty. House-rent stands in inverse proportion to industrial poverty. [The lower the standard of living, the higher the house-rent.]

So does the interest obtained from the vices of the ruined proletarians. (Prostitution, drunkenness; the pawnbroker.) The accumulation of capitals increases and the competition between them decreases, when capital and landed property are united in the same hand, also when capital is enabled by its size to combine different branches of production.

Indifference towards men. Smith’s twenty lottery-tickets. [37]

Say’s net and gross revenue.

RENT OF LAND

Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery. (Say, t. I, p. 136, footnote.) The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth. (Smith, l.c., p. 44.)

“The rent of land, it may be thought, is frequently no more than a reasonable profit or interest for the stock laid out by the landlord upon its improvement. This, no doubt, may be partly the case upon some occasions; ... The landlord demands 1) a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. 2) Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own. He sometimes demands rent for what is altogether incapable of human improvement.” (Ibid., p. 131.)

Smith cites as an instance of the last case kelp, a species of seaweed which, when burnt, yields an alkaline salt, useful for making glass, soap, etc. It grows in several parts of Great Britain, particularly in Scotland, upon such rocks only as lie within the high water mark, which are twice every day covered with the sea, and of which the produce, therefore, was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind, demands a rent for it as much as for his corn fields. The sea in the neighbourhood of the Islands of Shetland is more than commonly abundant in fish, which makes a great part of the subsistence of their inhabitants. But in order to profit by the produce of the water they must have a habitation upon the neighbouring land. The rent of the landlord is in proportion, not to what the farmer can make by the land, but to what he can make both by the land and by the water. (Ibid., p. 131.)

“This rent may be considered as the produce of those powers of nature, the use of which the landlord lends to the farmer. It is greater or smaller according to the supposed extent of those powers, or in other words, according to the supposed natural or improved fertility of the land. It is the work of nature which remains after deducting or compensating everything which can be regarded as the work of man.” (Ibid., pp. 324-25.)

“The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give.” (Ibid., p. 131.)

Of the three original classes, that of the landlords is the one “whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own.” (Ibid., p. 230.)

We have already learnt that the size of the rent depends on the degree of fertility of the land.

Another factor in its determination is situation.

“The rent of land not only varies with its fertility, whatever be its produce, but with its situation, whatever be its fertility.” (Ibid., p. 133.)

“The produce of land, mines and fisheries, when their natural fertility is equal, is in proportion to the extent and proper application of the capitals employed about them. When the capitals are equal and equally well applied, it is in proportion to their natural fertility.” (Ibid., p. 249.)

These propositions of Smith are important, because, given equal costs of production and capital of equal size, they reduce the rent of land, to the greater or lesser fertility of the soil. Thereby showing clearly the perversion of concepts in political economy, which turns the fertility of the land into an attribute of the landlord.

Now, however, let us consider the rent of land as it is formed in real life.

The rent of land is established as a result of the struggle between tenant and landlord. We find that the hostile antagonism of interests, the struggle, the war is recognised throughout political economy as the basis of social organisation.

Let us see now what the relations are between landlord and tenant.

“In adjusting the terms of the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock from which he furnishes the seed, pays the labour, and purchases and maintains the cattle and other instruments of husbandry, together with the ordinary profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood. This is evidently the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more. Whatever part of the produce, or, what is the same thing, whatever part of its price is over and above this share, he naturally endeavours to reserve to himself as the rent of his land, which is evidently the highest the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land.... This portion, however, may still be considered as the natural rent of land, or the rent for which it is naturally meant that land should for the most part be let.” (Ibid., pp. 130-31.)

“The landlords,” says Say, “operate a certain kind of monopoly against the tenants. The demand for their commodity, site and soil, can go on expanding indefinitely; but there is only a given, limited amount of their commodity.... The bargain struck between landlord and tenant is always advantageous to the former in the greatest possible degree.... Besides the advantage he derives from the nature of the case, he derives a further advantage from his position, his -larger fortune and greater credit and standing. But the first by itself suffices to enable him and him alone to profit from the favourable circumstances of the land. The opening of a canal, or a road; the increase of population and of the prosperity of a district, always raise the rent.... Indeed, the tenant himself may improve the ground at his own expense; but he only derives the profit from this capital for the duration of his lease, with the expiry of which it remains with the proprietor of the land; henceforth it is the latter who -reaps the interest thereon, without having made the outlay, for there is now a proportionate increase in the rent.” (Say, t. II, pp. 142-43.)

“Rent considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land.” (Smith, I.c., p. 130.)

“The rent of an estate above ground commonly amounts to what is supposed to be a third of the gross produce; and it is generally a rent certain and independent of the occasional variations in the crop.” (Ibid., p. 153.) This rent “is seldom less than a fourth ... of the whole produce.” (Ibid., p. 325.)

Ground-rent cannot be paid on all commodities. For instance, in many districts no rent is paid for stones.

“Such parts only of the produce of land can commonly be brought to market of which the ordinary price is sufficient to replace the stock which must be employed in bringing them thither, together with its ordinary profits. If the ordinary price is more than this, the surplus part of it will naturally go to the rent of the land. If it is not more, though the commodity may be brought to market, it can afford no rent to the landlord. Whether the price is or is not more depends upon the demand.” (lbid., p. 132.)

“Rent, it is to be observed, therefore, enters into the composition of the price of commodities in a different way from wages and profit. High or low wages and profit are the causes of high or low prices; high or low rent is the effect of it.” (Ibid., p. 132.)

Food belongs to the products which always yield a ground-rent.

“As men, like all other animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the means of their subsistence, food is always, more or less, in demand. It can always purchase or command a greater or smaller quantity of labour, and somebody can always be found who is willing to do something in order to obtain it. The quantity of labour, indeed, which it can purchase is not always equal to what it could maintain, if managed in the most economical manner, on account of the high wages which are sometimes given to labour. But it can always purchase such a quantity of labour as it can maintain, according to the rate at which the sort of labour is commonly maintained in the neighbourhood. But land, in almost any possible situation, produces a greater quantity of food than what is sufficient to maintain all the labour necessary for bringing it to market in the most liberal way in which that labour is ever maintained. The surplus, too, is always more than sufficient to replace the stock Which employed that labour, together with its profits. Something, therefore, always remains for a rent to the landlord.” (Ibid., pp. 132-33.)

“Food is in this manner not only the original source of rent, but every other part of the produce of land which afterwards affords rent derives that part of its value from the improvement of the powers of labour in producing food by means of the improvement and cultivation of land.” (Ibid., p. 150.)

“Human food seems to be the only produce of land which always and necessarily affords some rent to the landlord.” (Ibid., p. 147.)

“Countries are populous not in proportion to the number of people whom their produce can clothe and lodge, but in proportion to that of those whom it can feed.” (Ibid., .p. 149.)

“After food, clothing and lodging are the two great wants of mankind.” (Ibid., p. 147.) They usually yield a rent, but not inevitably.

Let us now see how the landlord exploits everything from which society benefits.

(1) The rent of land increases with population. (Ibid., p. 146.)

(2) We have already learnt from Say how the rent of land increases with railways, etc., with the improvement, safety, and multiplication of the means of communication.

(3) “Every improvement in the circumstances of the society tends either directly or indirectly to raise the real rent of land, to increase the real wealth of the landlord, his power of purchasing the labour, or the produce of the labour of other people.... The extension of improvement and cultivation tends to raise it directly. The landlord’s share of the produce necessarily increases with the increase of the produce. The rise in the real price of those parts of the rude produce of land, ... the rise in the price of cattle, for example, tends too to raise the rent of land directly, and in a still greater proportion. The real value of the landlord’s share, his real command of the labour of other people, not only rises with the real value of the produce, but the proportion of his share to the whole produce rises with it. That produce, after the rise in its real price, requires no more labour to collect it than before. A smaller proportion of it will, therefore, be sufficient to replace, with the ordinary profit, the stock which employs that labour. A greater proportion of it must, consequently, belong to the landlord.” (Ibid., pp. 228-29.)

The greater demand for raw produce, and therefore the rise in value, may in part result from the increase of population and from the increase of their needs. But every new invention, every new application in manufacture of a previously unused or little-used raw material, augments the rent of the land. Thus, for example, there was a tremendous rise in the rent of coal-mines with the advent of the railways, steamships, etc.

Besides this advantage which the landlord derives from manufacture, discoveries, and labour, there is yet another, as we shall presently see.

(4) “All those improvements in the productive powers of labour, which tend directly to reduce the real price of manufactures, tend indirectly to raise the real rent of land. The landlord exchanges that part of his rude produce, which is over and above his own consumption, or what comes to the same thing, the price of that part of it, for manufactured produce. Whatever reduces the real price of the latter, raises that of the former. An equal quantity of the former becomes thereby equivalent to a greater quantity of the latter; and the landlord is enabled to purchase a greater quantity of the conveniences, ornaments, or luxuries, which he has occasion for.” (Ibid., p. 229.)

But it is absurd to conclude, as Smith does, that since the landlord exploits every benefit which comes to society, the interest of the landlord is always identical with that of society. (Ibid., p. 230.) In the economic system, under the rule of private property, the interest which an individual has in society is in precisely inverse proportion to the interest society has in him—just as the interest of the money-lender in the spendthrift is by no means identical with the interest of the spendthrift.

We shall mention only in passing the landlord’s obsession with monopoly directed against the landed property of foreign countries, from which the corn-laws, for instance, originate. Likewise, we shall here pass over medieval serfdom, the slavery in the colonies, and the miserable condition of the country folk, the day-labourers, in Great Britain. Let us confine ourselves to the propositions of political economy itself.

(1) The landlord being interested in the welfare of society means, according to the principles of political economy, that he is interested in the growth of its population, production, in the expansion of its needs—in short, in the increase of wealth; and the increase of wealth is, as we have already seen, identical with the increase of poverty and slavery. The relation between increasing house-rent and increasing poverty is an example of the landlord’s interest in society, for the ground-rent, the interest obtained from the land on which the house stands, goes up with the rent of the house.

(2) According to the political economists themselves, the landlord’s interest is the antagonistic opposite of the interest of the tenant farmer—and thus already of a significant section of society.

(3) As the landlord can demand all the more rent from the tenant farmer the less wages the farmer pays, and as the farmer forces down wages all the lower the more rent the landlord demands, it follows that the interest of the landlord is just as hostile to that of the farm workers as is that of the manufacturers to their workers. It forces down wages to the minimum in just the same way.

(4) Since a real reduction in the price of manufactured products raises the rent of land, the landowner has a direct interest in lowering the wages of industrial workers, in competition amongst the capitalists, in over-production, in all the misery associated with industrial production.

(5) While, thus, the landlord’s interest, far from being identical with the interest of society, stands in antagonistic opposition to the interest of tenant farmers, farm labourers, factory-workers and capitalists, on the other hand, the interest of one landlord is not even identical with that of another, on account of competition, which we will now consider.

In general the relationship of large and small landed property is like that of big and small capital. But in addition, there are special circumstances which lead inevitably to the accumulation of large landed property and to the absorption of small property by it.

(1) Nowhere does the relative number of workers and implements decrease more with increases in the size of the stock than in landed property. Likewise, the possibility of all-round exploitation, of economising production costs, and of effective division of labour, increases nowhere more with the size of the stock than in landed property. However small a field may be, it requires for its working a certain irreducible minimum of implements (plough, saw, etc.), whilst the size of a piece of landed property can be reduced far below this minimum.

(2) The big landed property accumulates to itself the interest on the capital which the tenant farmer has employed to improve the land. The small landed property has to employ its own capital, and therefore does not get this profit at all.

(3) While every social improvement benefits the big estate, it harms small property, because it increases its need for ready cash.

(4) Two important laws relating to this competition remain to be considered:

( α) The rent of the cultivated land, of which the produce is human food, regulates the rent of the greater part of other cultivated land. (Ibid., p. 144.)

Ultimately, only the big estate can produce such food as cattle, etc. Therefore it regulates the rent of other land and can force it down to a minimum.

The small landed proprietor working on his own account stands then to the big landowner in the same relation as an artisan possessing his own tool to the factory-owner. Small property in land has become a mere instrument of labour. Rent of land entirely disappears for the small proprietor; there remains to him at the most the interest on his capital, and his wages. For ground-rent can be driven down by competition till it is nothing more than the interest on capital not invested by the proprietor.

(β) In addition, we have already learnt that with equal fertility and equally efficient exploitation of lands, mines and fisheries, the produce is proportionate to the size of the capital. Hence the victory of the big landowner. Similarly, where equal capitals are employed the product is proportionate to the fertility. Hence, where capitals are equal victory goes to the proprietor of the more fertile soil.

(γ) “A mine of any kind may be said to be either fertile or barren, according as the quantity of mineral which can be brought from it by a certain quantity of labour is greater or less than what can be brought by an equal quantity from the greater part of other mines of the same kind.” (Ibid., p. 151.)

“The most fertile coal-mine, too, regulates the price of coals at all other mines in its neighbourhood. Both the proprietor and the undertaker of the work find, the one that he can get a greater rent, the other that he can get a greater profit, by somewhat underselling all their neighbours. Their neighbours are soon obliged to sell at the same price, though they cannot so well afford it, and though it always diminishes, and sometimes takes away altogether both their rent and their profit. Some works are abandoned altogether; others can afford no rent, and can be wrought only by the proprietor.” (Ibid., pp. 152-53.) “After the discovery of the mines of Peru, the silver mines of Europe were, the greater part of them, abandoned.... This was the case, too, with the mines of Cuba and St. Domingo, and even with the ancient mines of Peru, after the discovery of those of Potosi.” (Ibid., p. 154.)

What Smith here says of mines applies more or less to landed property generally.

(δ) “The ordinary market-price of land, it is to be observed, depends everywhere upon the ordinary market rate of interest.... If the rent of land should fall short of the interest of money by a greater difference, nobody would buy land, which would soon reduce its ordinary price. On the contrary if the advantages should much more than compensate the difference, everybody would buy land, which again would soon raise its ordinary price.” (Ibid., p. 320.)

From this relation of ground-rent to interest on money it follows that rent must fall more and more, so that eventually only the wealthiest people can live on rent. Hence the ever greater competition between landowners who do not lease their land to tenants. Ruin of some of these—further accumulation of large landed property.

This competition has the further consequence that a large part of landed property falls into the hands of the capitalists and that capitalists thus become simultaneously landowners, just as the smaller landowners, are on the whole already nothing more than capitalists. Similarly, a section of large landowners become simultaneously industrialists.

The final consequence is thus the abolishment of the distinction between capitalist and landowner, so that there remain altogether only two classes of the population—the working class and the class of capitalists. This huckstering with landed property, the transformation of landed property into a commodity, constitutes the final overthrow of the old and the final consummation of the money aristocracy.

(1) We will not join in the sentimental tears wept over this by romanticism. Romanticism always confuses the shamefulness of huckstering the land with the perfectly rational consequence, inevitable and desirable within the realm of private property, of the huckstering of private property in land. In the first place, feudal landed property is already by its very nature huckstered land—the earth which is estranged from man and hence, confronts him in the shape of a few great lords. The domination of the land as an alien power over men is already inherent in feudal landed property. The serf is the adjunct of the land. Likewise, the lord of an entailed estate, the first-born son, belongs to the land. It inherits him. Indeed, the dominion of private property begins with property in land—that is its basis. But in feudal landed property the lord at least appears as the king of the estate. Similarly, there still exists the semblance of a more intimate connection between the proprietor and the land than that of mere material wealth. The estate is individualised with its lord: it has his rank, is baronial or ducal with him, has his privileges, his jurisdiction, his political position, etc. It appears as the inorganic body of its lord. Hence the proverb nulle terre sans maître,[38] which expresses the fusion of nobility and landed property. Similarly, the rule of landed property does not appear directly as the rule of mere capital. For those belonging to it, the estate is more like their fatherland. It is a constricted sort of nationality.

In the same way, feudal landed property gives its name to its lord, as does a kingdom to its king. His family history, the history of his house, etc.—all this individualises the estate for him and makes it literally his house, personifies it. Similarly those working on the estate have not the position of day-labourers; but they are in part themselves his property, as are serfs; and in part they are bound to him by ties of respect, allegiance and duty. His relation to them is therefore directly political, and has likewise a human, intimate side. Customs, character, etc., vary from one estate to another and seem to be one with the land to which they belong; later, on the other hand, a man is bound to his land, not by his character or his individuality, but only by his purse strings. Finally, the feudal lord does not try to extract the utmost advantage from his land. Rather, he consumes what is there and calmly leaves the worry of producing to the serfs and the tenants. Such is nobility’s relationship to landed property, which casts a romantic glory on its lords.

It is necessary that this appearance be abolished—that landed property, the root of private property, be dragged completely into the movement of private property and that it become a commodity; that the rule of the proprietor appear as the undisguised rule of private property, of capital, freed of all political tincture; that the relationship between proprietor and worker be reduced to the economic relationship of exploiter and exploited; that all personal relationship between the proprietor and his property cease, property becoming merely objective, material wealth; that the marriage of convenience should take the place of the marriage of honour with the land; and that the land should likewise sink to the status of a commercial value, like man. It is essential that that which is the root of landed property —filthy self-interest—make its appearance, too, in its cynical form. It is essential that the immovable monopoly turn into the mobile and restless monopoly, into competition; and that the idle enjoyment of the products of the other peoples’ blood and toil turn into a bustling commerce in the same commodity. Lastly, it is essential that in this competition landed property, in the form of capital, manifest its dominion over both the working class and the proprietors themselves who are either being ruined or raised by the laws governing the movement of capital. The medieval proverb nulle terre sans seigneur[39] is thereby replaced by that other proverb, l’argent n’a pas de maître[40] wherein is expressed the complete domination of dead matter over men.

(2) Concerning the argument of division or non-division of landed property, the following is to be observed.

The division of landed property negates the large-scale monopoly of property in land—abolishes it; but only by generalising this monopoly. It does not abolish the source of monopoly, private property. It attacks the existing form, but not the essence, of monopoly. The consequence is that it falls victim to the laws of private property. For the division of landed property corresponds to the movement of competition in the sphere of industry. In addition to the economic disadvantages of such a dividing-up of the instruments of labour, and of separated labour (to be clearly distinguished from the division of labour: in separated labour the work is not shared out amongst many, but each carries on the same work by himself, it is a multiplication of the same work) this division of land, like competition in industry, necessarily turns again into accumulation.

Therefore, where the division of landed property takes place, there remains nothing for it but to return to monopoly in a still more malignant form, or to negate, to abolish the division of landed property itself. To do that, however, is not to return to feudal ownership, but to abolish private property in the soil altogether. The first abolition of monopoly is always its generalisation, the broadening of its existence. The abolition of monopoly once it has come to exist in its utmost breadth and inclusiveness is its total annihilation. Association, applied to land, shares the economic advantage of large-scale landed property, and first brings to realisation the original tendency inherent in land-division, namely, equality. In the same way association re-establishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of property, the intimate ties of man with the earth, for the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering and through free labour and free enjoyment becomes once more a true personal property of man. A great advantage of the division of landed property is that its masses, who can no longer resign themselves to servitude, perish through property in a different way than in industry.

As for large landed property, its defenders have always sophistically identified the economic advantages offered by large-scale agriculture with large-scale landed property, as if it were not precisely as a result of the abolition of property, that this advantage, for one thing, received its greatest possible extension, and, for another, only then would be of social benefit. In the same way, they have attacked the huckstering spirit of small landed property, as if large landed property did not contain huckstering latent within it, even in its feudal form—not to speak of the modern English form, which combines the landlord’s feudalism with the tenant farmer’s huckstering and industry.

Just as large landed property can throw back the reproach of monopoly levelled against it by partitioned land, for partitioned land is also based on the monopoly of private property, partitioned landed property can likewise throw back to large landed property the reproach of partition, since partition also prevails there, though in a rigid and crystallised form. Indeed, private property rests altogether on partitioning. Moreover, just as division of the land leads back to large landed property as a form of capital wealth, feudal landed property must necessarily lead to partitioning or at least fall into the hands of the capitalists, turn and twist as it may.

For large landed property, as in England, drives the overwhelming majority of the population into the arms of industry and reduces its own workers to utter wretchedness. Thus, it engenders and enlarges the power of its enemy, capital, industry, by throwing poor people and an entire activity of the country on to the other side. It makes the majority of the people of the country industrial, and thus opponents of large landed property. Where industry has attained to great power, as in England at the present time, it progressively forces large landed property to discord its monopolies against foreign countries and throws them into competition with landed property abroad. For under the sway of industry landed property could keep its feudal grandeur secure only by means of monopolies against foreign countries, thereby protecting itself against the general laws of trade, which are incompatible with its feudal character. Once thrown into competition, landed property obeys the laws of competition, like every other commodity subjected to competition. It begins thus to fluctuate, to decrease and to increase, to fly from one hand to another; and no law can keep it any longer in a few pre-destined hands. The immediate consequence is the splitting up of the land amongst many hands, and in any case subjection to the power of industrial capitals.

Finally, large landed property which has been forcibly preserved in this way and which has begotten by its side a tremendous industry leads even more quickly to crisis than the partitioning of land, by whose side the power of industry remains constantly of second rank.

Large landed property, as we see in England, has already cast off its feudal character and adopted an industrial character in so far as it is aiming to make as much money as possible. To the owner it yields the utmost possible rent, to the tenant farmer the utmost possible profit on his capital. The workers on the land, in consequence, have already been reduced to the minimum, and the class of tenant farmers already represent within landed property the power of industry and capital. As a result of foreign competition, rent of land can in most cases form no longer an independent income. A large number of landowners have to displace farmers, some of whom in this way sink into the proletariat. On the other hand, many farmers will take over landed property; for the big proprietors who with their comfortable incomes have mostly given themselves over to extravagance are, for the most part, not competent to conduct large-scale agriculture, and in some cases possess neither the capital nor the ability for the exploitation of the land. Hence a section of this class, too, is completely ruined. Eventually wages, which have already been reduced to a minimum, must be reduced yet further, to meet the new competition. This then necessarily leads to revolution.

Landed property had to develop in each of these two ways so as to experience in both its necessary eclipse, just as industry both in the form of monopoly and in that of competition had to ruin itself so as to learn to believe in man.

[ESTRANGED LABOUR][41]

We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labour, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land—likewise division of labour, competition, the concept of exchange-value, etc. On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; that finally the distinction between capitalist and land-rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory-worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes—the property-owners and the propertiless workers.

Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property, but it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulae the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulae it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws—i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy does not dis-close the source of the division between labour and capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause; i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to evolve. Similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently fortuitous circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how, to it, exchange itself appears to be a fortuitous fact. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are avarice and the war amongst the avaricious—competition.

Precisely because political economy does not grasp the connections within the movement, it was possible to counterpose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft-liberty to the doctrine of the corporation, the doctrine of the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate—for competition, craft-liberty and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only as fortuitous, premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, the corporation, and feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and natural consequences.

Now, therefore, we have to grasp the essential connection between private property, avarice, and the separation of labour, capital and landed property; between exchange and competition, value and the devaluation of men, monopoly and competition, etc.; the connection between this whole estrangement and the money-system.

Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing. He merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. He assumes in the form of fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce—namely, the necessary relationship between two things—between, for example, division of labour and exchange. Theology in the same way explains the origin of evil by the fall of man: that is, it assumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained.

We proceed from an actual economic fact.

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity—and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces—labour’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realisation is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realisation of labour appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.[42]

So much does labour’s realisation appear as loss of reality that the worker loses reality to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labour itself becomes an object which he can get hold of only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the dominion of his product, capital.

All these consequences are contained in the definition that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world-becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the greater is the worker’s lack of objects. Whatever the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

Let us now look more closely at the objectification, at the production of the worker; and therein at the estrangement, the loss of the object, his product.

The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labour is manifested, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.

But just as nature provides labour with the means of life in the sense that labour cannot live without objects on which to operate, on the other hand, it also provides the means of life in the more restricted sense—i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the worker himself.

Thus the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life in the double respect: first, that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labour—to be his labour’s means of life; and secondly, that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker.

Thus in this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labour; i.e., in that he receives work; and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. Therefore, it enables him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second, as a physical subject. The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.

(The laws of political economy express the estrangement of the worker in his object thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilised his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the mightier labour becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labour becomes, the duller becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature’s bondsman.)

Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production. It is true that labour produces for the rich wonderful things—- but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty—but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labour by machines —but some of the workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into machines. It produces intelligence—but for the worker idiocy, cretinism.

The direct relationship of labour to its produce is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the man of means to the objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence of this first relationship—and confirms it. We shall consider this other aspect later.

When we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labour we are asking about the relationship of the worker to production.

Till now we have been considering the estrangement, the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects, i.e., the worker’s relationship to the products of his labour. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production—within the producing activity itself. How would the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity, of production. If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarised the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself.

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour?

First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates independently of the individual—that is, operates on him as an alien, divine or diabolical activity—in the same way the worker’s activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions —eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But in the abstraction which separates them from the sphere of all other human activity and turns them into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal.

We have considered the act of estranging practical human activity, labour, in two of its aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object exercising power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature as an alien world antagonistically opposed to him. (2) The relation of labour to the act of production within the labour process. This relation is the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life or what is life other than activity—as an activity which is turned against him, neither depends on nor belongs to him. Here we have self-estrangement, as we had previously the estrangement of the thing.

We have yet a third aspect of estranged labour to deduce from the two already considered.

Man is a species being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object (his own as well as those of other things), but—and this is only another way of expressing it—but also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.

The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on inorganic nature; and the more universal man is compared with an animal, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, the air, light, etc., constitute a part of human consciousness in the realm of theory, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art—his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make it palatable and digestible—so too in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, or whatever it may be. The universality of man is in practice manifested precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body—both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life-activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life-activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It turns for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.

For in the first place labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need—the need to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species—its species character—is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.

The animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being. Or it is only because he is a species being that he is a Conscious Being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life-activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.

In creating an objective world by his practical activity, in working-up inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty.

It is just in the working-up of the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself to be a species being. This production is his active species life. Through and because of this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.

Similarly, in degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes man’s species life a means to his physical existence.

The consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by estrangement in such a way that the species life becomes for him a means.

Estranged labour turns thus:

(3) Man’s species being, both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means to his individual existence. It estranges man’s own body from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human being.

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the ,product of his labour, from his life-activity, from his species being is the estrangement of man from man. If a man is confronted by himself, he is confronted by the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product or his labour and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labour and object of labour.

In fact, the proposition that man’s species nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.[43]

The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man stands to himself, is first realised and expressed in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.

Hence within the relationship of estranged labour each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the position in which he finds himself as a worker.

We took our departure from a fact of political economy —-the estrangement of the worker and his production. We have formulated the concept of this fact—estranged, alienated labour. We have analysed this concept—hence analysing merely a fact of political economy.

Let us now see, further, how in real life the concept of estranged, alienated labour must express and present itself.

If the product of labour is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong?

If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien, a coerced activity, to whom, then, does it belong?

To a being other than me.

Who is this being?

The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labour. No more was nature. And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labour and the more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the produce in favour of these powers.

The alien being, to whom labour and the produce of labour belongs, in whose service labour is done and for whose benefit the produce of labour is provided, can only be man himself.

If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must be delight and his life’s joy. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.

We must bear in mind the above-stated proposition that man’s relation to himself only becomes objective and real for him through his relation to the other man. Thus, if the product of his labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If his own activity is to him an unfree activity, then he is treating it as activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion and the yoke of another man.

Every self-estrangement of man from himself and from nature appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from himself. For this reason religious self-estrangement necessarily appears in the relationship of the layman to the priest, or again to a mediator, etc., since we are here dealing with the intellectual world. In the real practical world self-estrangement can only become manifest through the real practical relationship to other men. The medium through which estrangement takes place is itself practical. Thus through estranged labour man not only engenders his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers that are alien and hostile to him; he also engenders the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as he begets his own production as the loss of his reality, as his punishment; just as he begets his own product as a loss, as a product not belonging to him; so he begets the dominion of the one who does not produce over production and over the product. Just as he estranges from himself his own activity, so he confers to the stranger activity which is not his own.

Till now we have only considered this relationship from the standpoint of the worker and later we shall be considering it also from the standpoint of the non-worker.

Through estranged, alienated labour, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labour of a man alien to labour and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labour engenders the relation to it of the capitalist, or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour. Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour., of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.

Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labour—i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged life, of estranged man.

True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) from political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labour, it is really its consequence, just as the gods in the beginning are not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.

Only at the very culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, re-emerge, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and that secondly it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realisation of this alienation.

This exposition immediately sheds light on various hitherto unsolved conflicts.

(1) Political economy starts from labour as the real soul of production; yet to labour it gives nothing, and to private property everything. From this contradiction Proudhon has concluded in favour of labour and against private property. We understand, however, that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of estranged labour with itself, and that political economy has merely formulated the laws of estranged labour.

We also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are identical: where the product, the object of labour pays for labour itself, the wage is but a necessary consequence of labour’s estrangement, for after all in the wage of labour, labour does not appear as an end in itself but as the servant of the wage. We shall develop this point later, and meanwhile will only deduce some conclusions.

A forcing-up of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that the higher wages, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not conquer either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity.

Indeed, even the equality of wages demanded by Proudhon only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour into the relationship of all men to labour. Society is then conceived as an abstract capitalist.

Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one aspect must therefore mean the downfall of the other.

(2) From the relationship of estranged labour to private property it further follows that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone was at stake but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation—and it contains this, because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and every relation of servitude is but a modification and consequence of this relation.

Just as we have found the concept of private property from the concept of estranged, alienated labour by analysis, in the same way every category of political economy can be evolved with the help of these two factors; and we shall find again in each category, e.g., trade, competition, capital, money, only a definite and developed expression of the first foundations.

Before considering this configuration, however, let us try to solve two problems.

(1) To define the general nature of private property, as it has arisen as a result of estranged labour, in its relation to truly human, social property.

(2) We have accepted the estrangement of labour, its alienation, as a fact, and we have analysed this fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development? We have already gone a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the question as to the origin of private property into the question as to the relation of alienated labour to the course of humanity’s development. For when one speaks of private property, one thinks of being concerned with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly concerned with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution.

As to (1): The general nature of private property and its relation to truly human property.

Alienated labour has resolved itself for us into two elements which mutually condition one another, or which are but different expressions of one and the same relationship. Appropriation appears as estrangement, as alienation; and alienation appears as appropriation, estrangement as true enfranchisement.

We have considered the one side—alienated labour—in relation to the worker himself, i.e., the relation of alienated labour to itself. The property-relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labour we have found as the product, the necessary outcome of this relation of alienated labour. Private property, as the material, summary expression of alienated labour, embraces both relations—the relation of the worker to work, to the product of his labour and to the non-worker, and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product of his labour.

Having seen that in relation to the worker who appropriates nature by means of his labour, this appropriation appears as estrangement, his own spontaneous activity as activity for another and as activity of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, production of the object as loss of the object to an alien power, to an alien person—we shall now consider the relation to the worker, to labour and its object of this person who is alien to labour and the worker.

First it has to be noticed, that everything which appears in the worker as an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears in the non-worker as a state of alienation, of estrangement.

Secondly, that the worker’s read, practical attitude in production and to the product (as a state of mind) appears in the non-worker confronting him as a theoretical attitude.

Thirdly, the non-worker does everything against the worker which the worker does against himself; but he does not do against himself what he does against the worker.

Let us look more closely at these three relations.[44]

[ANTITHESIS OF CAPITAL AND LABOUR. LANDED PROPERTY AND CAPITAL]

... forms the interest on his capital.[45] The worker is the subjective manifestation of the fact that capital is man wholly lost to himself, just as capital is the objective manifestation of the fact that labour is man lost to himself. But the worker has the misfortune to be a living capital, and therefore a capital with needs—one which loses its interest, and hence its livelihood, every moment it is not working. The value of the worker as capital rises according to demand and supply, and even physically his existence, his life, was and is looked upon as a supply of a commodity like any other. The worker produces capital, capital produces him—hence he produces himself, and man as worker, as a commodity, is the product of this entire cycle. To the man who is nothing more than a worker—and to him as a worker—his human qualities only exist in so far as they exist for capital alien to him. Because man and capital are foreign to each other, however, and thus stand in an indifferent, external and fortuitous relationship to each other, it is inevitable that this foreignness should also appear as something real. As soon, therefore, as it occurs to capital (whether from necessity or caprice) no longer to be for the worker, he himself is no longer for himself: he has no work, hence no wages, and as he has no existence as a human being but only as a worker, he can go and bury himself, starve to death, etc. The worker exists as a worker only when he exists for himself as capital; and he exists as capital only when some capital exists for him. The existence of capital is his existence, his life; as it determines the tenor of his life in a manner indifferent to him.

Political economy, therefore, does not recognise the unoccupied worker, the workman, in so far as he happens to be outside this labour-relationship. The cheat-thief, swindler, beggar, and unemployed man; the starving, wretched and criminal working-man—these are figures who do not exist for political economy but only for other eyes, those of the doctor, the judge, the grave-digger and bum-bailiff, etc.; such figures are spectres outside the domain of political economy. For it, therefore, the worker’s needs are but the one need—to maintain him whilst he is working in so far as may be necessary to prevent the race o labourers from dying out. The wages of labour have thus exactly the same significance as the maintenance and servicing of any other productive instrument, or as the consumption of a capital, required for its reproduction with interest; or as the oil which is applied to wheels to keep them turning. Wages, therefore, belong to capital’s and the capitalist’s necessary costs, and must not exceed the bounds of this necessity. It was therefore quite logical for the English factory-owners to deduct from the wages of the worker the public charity which he was receiving out of the Poor Rate before the Amendment Bill of 1834, and to consider this to be an integral part of the wage.

Production does not simply produce man as a commodity , the commodity-man, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping with this role as a spiritually and physically dehumanised being.—Immorality, deformity, and hebetation of the workers and the capitalists.—Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity.... The commodity-man.... Great advance of Ricardo, Mill, etc., on Smith and Say, to declare the existence of the human being—the greater or lesser human productivity of the commodity—to be a matter of indifference and even harmful. Not how many workers are maintained by a given capital_, but rather how much interest it brings in, the sum-total of the annual saving, is said to be the true purpose of production.

It was likewise a great and logical advance of modern English political economy, that, whilst elevating labour to the position of its sole principle, it should at the same time expound with complete clarity the inverse relation between wages and interest on capital, and the fact that the capitalist could normally only gain by pressing down wages, and vice versa. Not the doing-down of the consumer, but the capitalist and the worker doing-down each other, is shown to be the normal relationship.

The relations of private property contain latent within them the relations of private property as labour, the same relations as capital, and the mutual relation of these two to one another. There is the production of human activity as labour—that is, as an activity quite alien to itself, to man and to nature, and therefore to consciousness and the flow of life—the abstract existence of man as a mere workman who may therefore daily fall from his filled void into the absolute void—into his social, and therefore actual, non-existence. On the other hand there is the production of the object of human activity as capital—in which all the natural and social determinateness of the object is extinguished; in which private property has lost its natural and social quality (and therefore every political and social illusion, and is unmixed with any seemingly human relationships); in which the selfsame capital remains the same in the most diverse social and natural manifestations, totally indifferent to its real content. This contradiction, driven to the limit, is of necessity the limit, the culmination, and the downfall of the whole private-property relationship.

It is therefore another great achievement of modern English political economy to have declared rent to be the difference in the interest yielded by the worst and the best land under cultivation; to have exposed the landowner’s romantic illusions-his alleged social importance and identity of his interest with the interest of society, still maintained by Adam Smith after the physiocrats; and to have anticipated and prepared the movement of the real world which will transform the landowner into an ordinary, prosaic capitalist, and thus simplify and sharpen the antithesis between labour and capital and hasten its resolution. Land as land, and rent as rent, have lost their distinction of rank and become dumb capital and interest—or rather, become capital and interest that only talk money.

The distinction between capital and land, between profit and rent, and between both and wages, and industry, and agriculture, and immovable and movable private property —this distinction is not an inherently essential one, but a historical distinction, a fixed moment in the formation and development of the antithesis between capital and labour. Industry, etc., as opposed to immovable landed property, is only the expression of the way industry came into being and of the contradiction to agriculture in which industry developed. This distinction of industry only continues to exist as a special sort of work—as an essential, important and life-embracing distinction—so long as industry (town life) develops over-against landed property (aristocratic feudal life) and itself continues to bear the feudal character of its opposite in the form of monopoly, craft, guild, corporation, etc., within which labour still has a seemi ngly social significance, still the significance of real community-life, and has not yet reached the stage of indifference to its content, of complete being-for-self, i.e., of abstraction from all other being, and hence has not yet become liberated capital.

But liberated industry, industry constituted for itself as such, and liberated capital, are a necessary development of labour. The power of industry over its opposite is at once revealed in the emergence of agriculture as a real industry, most of the work having previously been left to the soil and to the slave of the soil, through whom the land cultivated itself. With the transformation of the slave into a free worker—i.e., into a hireling—the landlord himself is transformed into a captain of industry, into a capitalist—a transformation which takes place at first through the intermediacy of the tenant farmer. The farmer, however, is the landowner’s representative—the landowner’s revealed secret: it is only through him that the landowner has his economic existence—his existence as a private proprietor—for the rent of his land only exists due to the competition between the farmers. Thus, in the person of the tenant farmer the landlord has already become in essence a common capitalist. And thus must work itself out, too, in actual fact: the capitalist engaged in agriculture—the farmer—must become a landlord, or vice versa. The farmer’s industrial trade is the landowner’s industrial trade, for the being of the former postulates the being of the latter.

But mindful of their contrasting origin—of their line of descent—the landowner knows the capitalist as his insolent, liberated slave of yesterday now become rich, and sees himself as a capitalist who is threatened by him. The capitalist knows the landowner as the idle, cruel and egotistical master of yesterday; he knows that he injures him as a capitalist, and yet that it is to industry that he, the landowner, owes all his present social significance, his possessions and his pleasures; he sees in him an antithesis to free industry and to free capital—to capital independent of every natural determination. This contradiction between landowner and capitalist is extremely bitter, and each side gives the truth about the other. One need only read the attacks of immovable on movable property and vice versa to obtain a clear picture of their respective worthlessness. The landowner lays stress on the noble lineage of his property, on feudal mementoes, reminiscences, the poetry of recollections, on his romantic disposition, on his political importance, etc.; and when he talks economics, it is only agriculture that he holds to be productive. At the same time he depicts his adversary as a sly, haggling, deceitful, greedy, mercenary, rebellious, heart- and soul-less cheapjack—extorting, pimping, servile, smooth, flattering, fleecing, dried-up twister without honour, principles, poetry, substance, or anything else—a person estranged from the community who freely trades it away and who breeds, nourishes and cherishes competition, and with it pauperism, crime, and the dissolution of all social bonds. (Amongst others see the physiocrat Bergasse, whom Camille Desmoulins flays in his journal, Révolutions de France et de Brabant[46]; see von Vincke, Lancizolle, Haller, Leo, Kosegarten[47] and also Sismondi.)

Movable property for its part points to the miracles of industry and progress. It is the child of the modern time and its legitimate, native-born son. It pities its adversary as a simpleton, unenlightened about his own nature (and in this it is completely right), who wants to replace moral capital and free labour by brute, immoral force and serfdom. It depicts him as a Don Quixote who under the guise of bluntness, decency, the general interest, and stability, conceals incapacity for progress, greedy self-indulgence, selfishness, sectional interest and evil intent. It declares him for an artful monopolist; it pours cold water on his reminiscences, his poetry, and his romanticism by a historical and sarcastic enumeration of the baseness, cruelty, degradation, prostitution, infamy, anarchy and rebellion, of which romantic castles were the workshops.

It claims to have obtained political freedom for the people; to have loosed the chains binding civil society; to have linked together different worlds; to have created trade promoting friendship between the peoples; to have created pure morality and an agreeable degree of culture; to have given the people civilised in place of their crude needs, and the means of satisfying them. Meanwhile, it claims, the landowner—this idle, troublesome, parasitic grain-jobber—puts up the price of the people’s basic necessities and so forces the capitalist to raise wages without being able to increase productivity, thus impeding and eventually cancelling the nation’s annual income, the accumulation of capital, and therefore the possibility of providing work for the people and wealth for the country, and producing in consequence a general decline—whilst he parasitically exploits every advantage of modern civilisation without doing the least thing for it, and without even abating in the slightest his feudal prejudices. Finally, let him—for whom the cultivation of the land and the land itself exist only as a source of money, which comes to him as a present—let him just take a look at his tenant farmer and say whether he himself is not a “decent,” deluded sly scoundrel who in his heart and in actual fact has for a long time belonged to free industry and to beloved trade, however much he may protest and prattle about historical memories and ethical or political goals. Everything which he can really advance to justify himself is true only of the cultivator of the land (the capitalist and the labourers), of whom the landowner is rather the enemy. Thus he gives evidence against himself. Without capital landed property is dead, worthless matter. Movable property’s civilised victory has precisely been to discover and make human labour the source of wealth in place of the dead thing. (See Paul Louis Courier, Saint-Simon, Ganilh, Ricardo, Mill, MacCulloch and Destutt de Tracy and Michel Chevalier.)

The real course of development (to be inserted at this point) results in the necessary victory of the capitalist over the landowner—that is to say, of developed over undeveloped immature private property—just as generally movement must triumph over immobility—open, self-conscious baseness over hidden, unconscious baseness; avarice over self-indulgence; the avowedly restless, adroit self-interest of enlightenment over the parochial, world-wise, naive, idle and deluded self-interest of superstition; and money over the other forms of private property.

Those states which divine something of the danger attaching to fully-developed free industry, to fully-developed pure morality and to the full development of trade promoting friendship between the peoples, try, but in vain, to hold in check the capitalisation of landed property.

Landed property in its distinction from capital is private property—capital—still afflicted with local and political prejudices; it is capital which has not yet regained itself from its entanglement with the world—capital not yet fully-developed. It must in the course of its world-wide development achieve its abstract, that is, its pure, expression.

The relations of private property are labour, capital, and the relations between these two.

The movement through which these constituents have to pass is:

[First] Unmediated or mediated unity of the two.

Capital and labour at first still united. Then, though separated and estranged, they reciprocally develop and foster each other as positive conditions.

[Second] The two in opposition, mutually excluding each other. The worker knows the capitalist as his non-existence, and vice versa: each tries to rob the other of his existence.

[Third] Opposition of each to itself. Capital—stored-up labour—labour. Capital as such—splitting into capital itself and into its interest, and this latter again into interest and profit. The capitalist completely sacrificed. He falls into the working class, whilst the worker (but only exceptionally) becomes a capitalist. Labour as a moment of capital—its costs. Thus the wages of labour—a sacrifice of capital.

Splitting of labour into labour itself and the wages of labour. The worker himself a capital, a commodity.

Inimical mutual opposition.[48]

[PRIVATE PROPERTY AND LABOUR. VIEWS OF THE MERCANTILE SYSTEM AND PHYSIOCRACY, ADAM SMITH, RICARDO AND HIS SCHOOL]

Re. p. XXXVI. The subjective essence of private property—private property as activity for itself,[49] as subject, as person—is labour. It is therefore self-evident that only the political economy which acknowledged labour as its principle (Adam Smith), and which therefore no longer looked upon private property as a mere condition external to man—that it is this political economy which has to be regarded on the one hand as a product of the real energy and the real movement of private property[50]—as a product of modern industry—and, on the other hand, as a force which has quickened and glorified the energy and development of modern industry and made it a power in the realm of consciousness. To this enlightened political economy, which has discovered within private property the subjective essence of wealth, the adherents of the money and mercantile system, who look upon private property only as an objective substance[51] confronting men, seem therefore to be idolators, fetishists, Catholics. Engels was therefore right to call Adam Smith the Luther of Political Economy.[52] Just as Luther recognised religion—faith—as the substance of the external world and in consequence stood opposed to Catholic paganism—just as he superseded [53] external religiosity by making religiosity the inner substance of man—just as he negated the priests outside the layman because he transplanted the priest into laymen’s hearts, just so with wealth: wealth as something outside man and independent of him, and therefore as something to be maintained and asserted only in an external fashion, is done away with; that is, this external, mindless objectivity of wealth is done away with, with private property being incorporated in man himself and with man himself being recognised as its essence. But as a result man is brought within the orbit of private property, just as in Luther he is brought within the orbit of religion. Under the semblance of recognising man, the political economy whose principle is labour is really no more than consistent implementation of the denial of man, since man himself no longer stands in an external relation of tension to the external substance of private property, but has himself become this tensed essence of private property. What was previously being external to oneself—man’s externalisation in the thing—has merely become the act of externalising—the process of alienating.[54] If then this political economy begins by seeming to acknowledge man (his independence, spontaneity, etc.); and if, locating private property in man’s own being, it can no longer be conditioned by the local, national or other characteristics of private property as of something existing outside itself; and if this political economy consequently displays a cosmopolitan, universal energy which overthrows every restriction and bond so as to establish itself instead as the sole politics, the sole universality, the sole limit and sole bond, then it must throw aside this hypocrisy in the course of its further development and come out in its complete cynicism. And this it does—untroubled by all the apparent contradictions in which it becomes involved—by developing the idea of labour much more one-sidedly, and therefore more sharply and more consistently, as the sole essence of wealth; by proving the implications of this theory to be anti-human in character, in contrast to the other, original approach; and finally, by dealing the deathblow to rent—that last, individual, natural mode of private property and source of wealth existing independently of the movement of labour, that expression of feudal property, an expression which has already become wholly economic in character and therefore incapable of resisting political economy. (The Ricardo school.) There is not merely a relative growth in the cynicism of political economy from Smith through Say to Ricardo, Mill, etc., inasmuch as the implications of industry appear more developed and more contradictory in the eyes of the last-named; these later economists also constantly and consciously advance further than their predecessors in a positive sense in their estrangement from man. They do so, however, only because their science develops more consistently and genuinely. Because they make private property in its active form the subject, thus simultaneously making man—and man as something unessential—the essence, the contradiction of actuality corresponds completely to the contradictory essence which they accept as their principle. Far from refuting it, the ruptured world of industry confirms their internally-ruptured principle. Their principle is, after all, the principle of this rupture.

The physiocratic doctrine of Dr. Quesnay forms the transition from the mercantile system to Adam Smith. Physiocracy is directly the dissolution of feudal property in political economy, but it is therefore just as directly its metamorphosis and restoration in political economy, save that now its language is no longer feudal but economic. All wealth is resolved into land and cultivation (agriculture). Land is not yet capital: it is still a special mode of its existence, the validity of which is supposed to lie in, and to derive from, its natural peculiarity. Yet land is a general natural element, whilst the mercantile system admits the existence of wealth only in the form of precious metal. Thus the object of wealth—its matter—has straightway obtained the highest degree of generality within the bounds of nature, in so far as it is immediately objective wealth even as nature. And land only exists for man through labour, through agriculture. Thus the subjective essence of wealth has already been transferred to labour. But at the same time agriculture is the only productive labour. Hence, labour is not yet grasped in its generality and abstraction: it is still bound to a particular natural element as its matter, and it is therefore only recognised in a particular mode of existence determined by nature. It is therefore still only a specific, particular alienation of man, just as its product is conceived only as a specific form of wealth, due more to nature than to labour itself. The land is here still recognised as a phenomenon of nature independent of man—not yet as capital, i.e., as an aspect of labour itself. Labour appears, rather, as an aspect of the land. But since the fetishism of the old external wealth, of wealth existing only as an object, has been reduced to a very simple natural element, and since—even if only partially and in a particular form—its essence has been recognised within its subjective existence, there is the necessary step forward in that the general nature of wealth has been revealed and that labour has therefore in its total absoluteness (i.e., its abstraction) been raised and established as the principle. It is argued against physiocracy that agriculture, from the economic point of view—that is to say, from the only valid point of view—does not differ from any other industry; and that the essence of wealth, therefore, is not a specific form of labour bound to a particular element—a particular expression of labour —but labour in general.

Physiocracy denies particular, external, merely objective wealth by declaring labour to be the essence of wealth. But for physiocracy labour is from the outset only the subjective essence of landed property. (It takes its departure from the type of property which historically appears as the dominant acknowledged type.) It only turns landed property into alienated man. It annuls its feudal character by declaring industry (agriculture) to be its essence. But its attitude to the world of industry is one of denial; it acknowledges the feudal system by declaring agriculture to be the only industry.

It is clear that if the subjective essence of industry is now grasped (of industry in opposition to landed property, i.e., of industry constituting itself as industry), this essence encompasses this its opposite. For just as industry incorporates annulled landed property, the subjective essence of industry at the same time incorporates the subjective essence of landed property.

Just as landed property is the first form of private property, with industry at first confronting it historically merely as a special kind of property—or, rather, as landed property’s liberated slave—so this process repeats itself at the level of the scientific comprehension of the subjective essence of private property, labour. Labour appears at first only as agricultural labour; but then asserts itself as labour in general.

All wealth has become industrial wealth, the wealth of labour; and industry is accomplished labour, just as the factory-system is the essence of industry—of labour—brought to its maturity, and just as industrial capital is the accomplished objective form of private property.

We can now see how it is only at this point that private property can consummate its dominion over man and become in its most general form a world-historical power.

[PRIVATE PROPERTY AND COMMUNISM. VARIOUS STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNIST VIEWS. CRUDE, EQUALITARIAN COMMUNISM AND COMMUNISM AS SOCIALISM COINCIDING WITH HUMANENESS]

Re. p. XXXIX. The antithesis of propertilessness and property, so long as it is not comprehended as the antithesis of labour and capital, still remains an antithesis of indifference, not grasped in its active connection, its internal relation—an antithesis not yet grasped as a contradiction . It can find expression in this first form even without the advanced development of private property (as in ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.). It does not yet appear as having been established by private property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction—hence a dynamic relationship moving inexorably to its resolution.

Re. the same page. The transcendence[55] of self-estrangement follows the same course as self-estrangement. Private property is first considered only in its objective aspect—but nevertheless with labour as its essence. Its form of existence is therefore capital, which is to be annulled “as such” (Proudhon). Or a particular forrn of labour—labour levelled down, parcelled, and therefore unfree—is conceived as the source of private property’s perniciousness and of its existence in estrangement from men; for instance, Fourier, who, like the physiocrats, also conceived agricultural labour to be at least the exemplary type, whilst Saint-Simon declares in contrast that industrial labour as such is the essence, and now also aspires to the exclusive rule of the industrialists and the improvement of the workers’ condition. Finally, communism is the positive expression of annulled private property—at first as universal private property. By embracing this relation as a whole, communism is:

(1) In its first form only a generalisation and consummation of this relationship. It shows itself as such in a twofold form: on the one hand, the dominion of material property bulks so large that it wants to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by all as private property. It wants to abstract by force from talent, etc. For it the sole purpose of life and existence is direct, physical possession. The category of labourer is not done away with, but extended to all men. The relationship of private property persists as the relationship of the community to the world of things. Finally, this movement of counterposing universal private property to private property finds expression in the bestial form of counterposing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the community of women, in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property. It may be said that this idea of the community of women gives away the secret of this as yet completely crude and thoughtless communism. Just as the woman passes from marriage to general prostitution,[56] so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man’s objective substance) passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community. In negating the personality of man in every sphere, this type of communism is really nothing but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which avarice re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way. The thoughts of every piece of private property—inherent in each piece as such —are at least turned against all wealthier private property in the form of envy and the urge to reduce to a common level, so that this envy and urge even constitute the essence of competition. The crude communism is only the consummation of this envy and of this levelling-down proceeding from the preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited standard. How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and undemanding man who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even attained to it.

The community is only a community of labour, and an equality of wages paid out by the communal capital—the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality—labour as a state in which every person is put, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.

In the approach to woman as the spoil and handmaid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural procreative relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural relationship of the sexes man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature—his own natural function. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature has to him become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. It follows from the character of this relationship how much man as a species being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence—the extent to which his human nature has come to be nature to him. In this relationship is revealed, too, the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need—the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being. The first positive annulment of private property—crude communism—is thus merely one form in which the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community, comes to the surface.

(2) Communism (α) of a political nature still—democratic or despotic; (β) with the annulment of the state, yet still incomplete, and being still affected by private property (i.e., by the estrangement of man). In both forms communism already knows itself to be re-integration or return of man to himself, the transcendence of human self-estrangement ; but since it has not yet grasped the positive essence of private property, and just as little the human nature of need, it remains captive to it and infected by it. It has, indeed, grasped its concept, but not its essence.

(3) Communism as the positive transcendence of private property, as human self -estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return become conscious, and accomplished within the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully-developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully-developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

The entire movement of history is, therefore, both its actual act of genesis (the birth act of its empirical existence) and also for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its coming-to-be. That other, still immature communism, meanwhile, seeks an historical proof for itself—a proof in the realm of the existent—amongst disconnected historical phenomena opposed to private property, tearing single phases from the historical process and focusing attention on them as proofs of its historical pedigree (a horse ridden hard especially by Cabet, Villegardelle, etc.). By so doing it simply makes clear that by far the greater part of this process contradicts its claims, and that, if it has once been, precisely its being in the past refutes its pretension to being essential.

That the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property—in that of the economy, to be precise—is easy to see.

This material, immediately sensuous private property is the material sensuous expression of estranged human life. Its movement—production and consumption—is the sensuous revelation of the movement of all production hitherto—i.e., the realisation or the reality of man. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human life is, therefore, the positive transcendence of all estrangement—that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social mode of existence. Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces both aspects. It is evident that the initial stage of the movement amongst the various peoples depends on whether the true and for them authentic life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world—is more ideal or real. Communism begins from the outset (Owen) with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, it is still mostly an abstraction.

The philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only philosophical, abstract, philanthropy, and that of communism is at once real and directly bent on action.

We have seen how on the premise of positively annulled private property man produces man—himself and the other man; how the object, being the direct embodiment of his individuality, is simultaneously his own existence for the other man, the existence of the other man, and that existence for him. Likewise, however, both the material of labour and man as the subject, are the point of departure as well as the result of the movement (and precisely in this fact, that they must constitute the point of departure, lies the historical necessity of private property). Thus the social character is the general character of the whole movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him. Activity and consumption, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social: social activity and social consumption; the human essence of nature first exists only for social man; for only here does nature exist for him as a bond with man—as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him —as the life-element of the human world; only here does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence. Only here has what is to him his natural existence become his human existence, and nature become man for him. Thus society is the consummated oneness in substance of man and nature—the true resurrection of nature—the naturalism of man and the humanism of nature both brought to fulfilment.

Social activity and social consumption exist by no means only in the form of some directly communal activity and directly communal consumption, although communal activity and communal consumption—i.e., activity and consumption which are manifested and directly confirmed in real association with other men—will occur wherever such a direct expression of sociality stems from the true character of the activity’s content and is adequate to the nature of consumption.

But again when I am active scientifically, etc.,—when I am engaged in activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others—then I am social, because I am active as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.

My general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of that of which the living shape is the real community, the social fabric, although at the present day general consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such antagonistically confronts it. Consequently, too, the activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is my theoretical existence as a social being.

What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of “Society” as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being. His life, even if it may not appear in the direct form of a communal life carried out together with others—is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and species life are not different, however much—and this is inevitable—the mode of existence of the individual is a more particular, or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life.

In his consciousness of species man confirms his real social life and simply repeats his real existence in thought, just as conversely the being of the species confirms itself in species-consciousness and is for itself in its generality as a thinking being.

Man, much as he may therefore be a particular individual (and it is precisely his particularity which makes him an individual, and a real individual social being), is just as much the totality—the ideal totality—the subjective existence of thought and experienced society present for itself; just as he exists also in the real world as the awareness and the real enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of human life-activity.

Thinking and being are thus no doubt distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each other.

Death seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the definite individual and to contradict their unity. But the determinate individual is only a determinate species being, and as such mortal.

(4) Just as private property is only the sensuous expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the assertion of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realisation is his loss of reality, is an alien reality: conversely, the positive transcendence of private property—i.e., the sensuous appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements—is not to be conceived merely in the sense of direct, one-sided gratification—merely in the sense of possessing, of having. Man appropriates his total essence in a total manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world-seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, being aware, sensing, wanting, acting, loving—in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, are in their objective orientation or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of that object, the appropriation of the human world; their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human world[57]; it is human efficaciousness and human suffering, for suffering, apprehended humanly, is an enjoyment of self in man.

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it—when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc.,—in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property—labour and conversion into capital.

In place of all these physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses—the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world. (On the category of “having,” see Hess in the Twenty-One Sheets.[58])

The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object—an object emanating from man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians, They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man,[59] and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost their egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use.

In the same way, the senses and enjoyments of other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social organs develop in the form of society; thus, for instance, activity in direct association with others, etc., has become an organ for expressing my own life, and a mode of appropriating human life.

It is obvious that the human eye gratifies itself in a way different from the crude, non-human eye; the human ear different from the crude ear, etc.

To recapitulate; man is not lost in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is possible only when the object becomes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for him in this object.

On the one hand, therefore, it is only when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man’s essential powers[60]—human reality, and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers—that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects which confirm and realise his individuality, become his objects: that is, man himself becomes the object. The manner in which they become his depends on the nature of the objects and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to it; for it is precisely the determinateness of this relationship which shapes the particular, real mode of affirmation. To the eye an object comes to be other than it is to the ear, and the object of the eye is another object than the object of the ear. The peculiarity of each essential power is precisely its peculiar essence, and therefore also the peculiar mode of its objectification, of its objectively actual living being. Thus man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses.

On the other hand, looking at this in its subjective aspect : just as music alone awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear—is no object for it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers and can therefore only be so for me as my essential power is present for itself as a subjective capacity, because the sense of an object for me goes only so far as my senses go (has only sense for a sense corresponding to that object) —for this reason the senses of the social man are other senses than those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form—in short, senses capable of human gratifications, senses confirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses—the practical senses (will, love, etc.)—in a word, human sense—the humanness of the senses—comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.

The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its absract being as food; it could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding-activity differs from that of animals. The care-burdened man in need has no sense for the finest play; the dealer in minerals sees only the mercantile value but not the beauty and the unique nature of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the human essence both in its theoretical and practical aspects is required to make man’s sense human, as well as to create the human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance.

Just as resulting from the movement of private property, of its wealth as well as its poverty—or of its material and spiritual wealth and poverty—the budding society finds to hand all the material for this development: so established society produces man in this entire richness of his being—produces the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses—as its enduring reality.

It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence, as such antitheses in the social condition; it will be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of men. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.

It will be seen how the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man’s essential powers, the exposure to the senses of human psychology. Hitherto this was not conceived in its inseparable connection with man’s essential being, but only in an external relation of utility, because, moving in the realm of estrangement, people could only think man’s general mode of being—religion or history in its abstract-general character as politics, art, literature, etc.,—to be the reality of man’s essential powers and man’s species-activity. We have before us the objectified essential powers of man in the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects, in the form of estrangement, displayed in ordinary material industry (which can be conceived as a part of that general movement, just as that movement can be conceived as a particular part of industry, since all human activity hitherto has been labour—that is, industry—activity estranged from itself).

A psychology for which this, the part of history most contemporary and accessible to sense, remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine, comprehensive and real science. What indeed are we to think of a science which airily abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel its own incompleteness, while such a wealth of human endeavour unfolded before it means nothing more to it than, perhaps, what can be expressed in one word—“need,” “vulgar need”?

The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and have accumulated a constantly growing mass of material. Philosophy, however, has remained just as alien to them as they remain to philosophy. Their momentary unity was only a chimerical illusion. The will was there, but the means were lacking. Even historiography pays regard to natural science only occasionally, as a factor of enlightenment and utility arising from individual great discoveries. But natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, however directly and much it had to consummate dehumanisation. Industry is the actual, historical relation of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man’s essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man. In consequence, natural science will lose its abstractly material—or rather, its idealistic—tendency, and will become the basis of human science, as it has already become the basis of actual human life, albeit in an estranged form. One basis for life and another basis for science is a priori a lie. The nature which comes to be in human history—the genesis of human society—is man’s real nature; hence nature as it comes to be through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature.

Sense-perception (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when it proceeds from sense-perception in the twofold form both of sensuous consciousness and of sensuous need—that is, only when science proceeds from nature—is it true science. All history is the preparation for “man” to become the object of sensuous consciousness, and for the needs of “man as man” to become [natural, sensuous] needs. History itself is a real part of natural history—of nature’s coming to be man. Natural science will in time subsume under itself the science of man, just as the science of man will subsume under itself natural science: there will be one science.

Man is the immediate object of natural science: for immediate, sensuous nature for man is, immediately, human sensuousness (the expressions are identical)—presented immediately in the form of the other man sensuously present for him. For his own sensuousness first exists as human sensuousness for himself through the other man. But nature is the immediate object of the science of man: the first object of man—man—is nature, sensuousness; and the particular human sensuous essential powers can only find their self-knowledge in the science of the natural world in general, since they can find their objective realisation in natural objects only. The element of thought itself—the element of thought’s living expression—language—is of a sensuous nature. The social reality of nature, and human natural science, or the natural science about man, are identical terms.

It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy come the rich human being and rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human life-activities—the man in whom his own realisation exists as an inner necessity, as need. Not only wealth, but likewise the poverty of man—given socialism—receives in equal measure a human and therefore social significance. Poverty is the passive bond which causes the human being to experience the need of the greatest wealth—the other human being. The dominion of the objective being in me, the sensuous outburst of my essential activity, is emotion, which thus becomes here the activity of my being.

(5) A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the sustenance of my life, but if he has, moreover, created my life—if he is the source of my life; and if it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside it. The Creation is therefore an idea very difficult to dislodge from popular consciousness. The self-mediated being of nature and of man is incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts everything palpable in practical life.

The creation of the earth has received a mighty blow from geogeny—i.e., from the science which presents the formation of the earth, the coming-to-be of the earth, as a process, as self-generation. Generatio aequivoca[61] is the only practical refutation of the theory of creation.

Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said. You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings-a species-act of human beings —has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically, man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect—the infinite progression which leads you further to enquire: “Who begot my father? Who his grandfather?”, etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progression, by which man repeats himself in procreation, thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progression which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is a perverse one. Ask yourself whether that progression as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egoist that you postulate everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to be?

You can reply: I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature. I ask you about its genesis, just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, etc.

But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through human labour, nothing but the coming-to-be of nature for man, he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his process of coming-to-be. Since the real existence of man and nature has become practical, sensuous and perceptible—since man has become for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man—the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man—a question which implies the admission of the inessentiality of nature and of man—has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this inessentiality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the practically and theoretically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the annulment of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the annulment of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and recovery. Communism is the necessary pattern and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such[62] is not the goal of human development—the structure of human society.

[THE MEANING OF HUMAN REQUIREMENTS WHERE THERE IS PRIVATE PROPERTY AND UNDER SOCIALISM. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EXTRAVAGANT WEALTH AND INDUSTRIAL WEALTH. DIVISION OF LABOUR IN BOURGEOIS SOCIETY]

(7) We have seen what significance, given socialism, the wealth of human needs has, and what significance, therefore, both a new mode of production and a new object of production have: a new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature.[63] Under private property their significance is reversed: every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to a fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence and to seduce him into a new mode of gratification and therefore economic ruin. Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potency of mutual swindling and mutual plundering. Man becomes ever poorer as man; his need for money becomes ever greater if he wants to overpower hostile being; and the power of his money declines exactly in inverse proportion to the increase in the volume of production: that is, his neediness grows as the power of money increases.

The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the modern economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces. The quantity of money becomes to an ever greater degree its sole effective attribute: just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to something merely quantitative. Excess and intemperance come to be its true norm. Subjectively, this is even partly manifested in that the extension of products and needs falls into contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites. Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and whim; and no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch—the producer—in order to sneak for himself a few pennies—in order to charm the golden birds out of the pockets of his Christianly beloved neighbours. He puts himself at the service of the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses—all so that he can then demand the cash for this service of love. (Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other’s very being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the gluepot. General exploitation of communal human nature, just as every imperfection in man, is a bond with heaven—an avenue giving the priest access to his heart; every need is an opportunity to approach one’s neighbour under the guise of the utmost amiability and to say to him: Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the condi-tio sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.)

And partly, this estrangement manifests itself in that it produces refinement of needs and of their means on the one hand, and a bestial barbarisation, a complete, unrefined, abstract simplicity of need, on the other; or rather in that it merely resurrects itself in its opposite. Even the need for fresh air ceases for the worker. Man returns to living in a cave, which is now, however, contaminated with the mephitic breath of plague given off by civilisation, and which he continues to occupy only precariously, it being for him an alien habitation which can be withdrawn from him any day—a place from which, if he does not pay, he can be thrown out any day. For this mortuary he has to pay. A dwelling in the light, which Prometheus in Aeschylus designated as one of the greatest boons, by means of which he made the savage into a human being, ceases to exist for the worker. Light, air, etc.—the simplest animal cleanliness—ceases to be a need for man. Dirt—this stagnation and putrefaction of man—the sewage of civilisation (speaking quite literally)—comes to be the element of life for him. Utter, unnatural neglect, putrefied nature, comes to be his life-element. None of his senses exist any longer, and not only in his human fashion, but in an inhuman fashion, and therefore not even in an animal fashion. The crudest modes (and instruments) of human labour are coming back: the tread-mill of the Roman slaves, for instance, is the means of production, the means of existence, of many English workers. It is not only that man has no human needs—even his animal needs are ceasing to exist. The Irishman no longer knows any need now but the need to eat, and indeed only the need to eat potatoes—and scabby potatoes at that, the worst kind of potatoes. But in each of their industrial towns England and France have already a little Ireland. The savage and the animal have at least the need to hunt, to roam, etc.—the need of companionship. Machine labour is simplified in order to make a worker out of the human being still in the making, the completely immature human being, the child—whilst the worker has become a neglected child. The machine accommodates itself to the weakness of the human being in order to make the weak human being into a machine.

How the multiplication of needs and of the means of their satisfaction breeds the absence of needs and of means is demonstrated by the political economist (and the capitalist: it should be noted that it is always empirical business men we are talking about when we refer to political economists—their scientific confession and mode of being). This he shows:

(1) By reducing the worker’s need to the barest and most miserable level of physical subsistence, and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement. Hence, he says: Man has no other need either of activity or of enjoyment. For he calls even this life human life and existence.

(2) By counting the lowest possible level of life (existence) as the standard, indeed as the general standard—general because it is applicable to the mass of men. He changes the worker into an insensible being lacking all needs, just as he changes his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. To him, therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need—be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity—seems to him a luxury. Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of denial, of want, of thrift, of saving—and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made an abject art in which to clothe this its pet idea: they have presented it, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy—despite its worldly and wanton appearance—is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-denial, the denial of life and of all human needs, is its cardinal doctrine. The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life—the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power —all this it can appropriate for you—it can buy all this for you: it is the true endowment. Yet being all this, it is inclined to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant. And when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have [enough].

Of course a controversy now arises in the field of political economy. The one side (Lauderdale, Malthus, etc.) recommends luxury and execrates thrift. The other (Say, Ricardo, etc.) recommends thrift and execrates luxury. But the former admits that it wants luxury in order to produce labour (i.e., absolute thrift); and the latter admits that it recommends thrift in order to produce wealth (i.e., luxury). The Lauderdale-Malthus school has the romantic notion that avarice alone ought not to determine the consumption of the rich, and it contradicts its own laws in advancing extravagance as a direct means of enrichment. Against it, therefore, the other side very earnestly and circumstantially proves that I do not increase but reduce my possessions by being extravagant. The Say-Ricardo school, however, is hypocritical in not admitting that it is precisely whim and caprice which determine production. It forgets the “refined needs”; it forgets that there would be no production without consumption; it forgets that as a result of competition production can only become more extensive and luxurious. It forgets that it is use that determines a thing’s value, and that fashion determines use. It wishes to see only “useful things” produced, but it forgets that production of too many useful things produces too large a useless population. Both sides forget that extravagance and thrift, luxury and privation, wealth and poverty are equal.

And you must not only stint the immediate gratification of your senses, as by stinting yourself of food, etc.: you must also spare yourself all sharing of general interest, all sympathy, all trust, etc.; if you want to be economical, if you do not want to be ruined by illusions.

You must make everything that is yours saleable, i.e., useful. If I ask the political economist: Do I obey economic laws if I extract money by offering my body for sale, by surrendering it to another’s lust? (The factory workers in France call the prostitution of their wives and daughters the xth working hour, which is literally correct.)—Or am I not acting in keeping with political economy if I sell my friend to the Moroccans? (And the direct sale of men in the form of a trade in conscripts, etc., takes place in all civilised countries.)—Then the political economist replies to me: You do not transgress my laws; but see what Cousin Ethics and Cousin Religion have to say about it. My political economic ethics and religion have nothing to reproach you with, but—But whom am I now to believe, political economy or ethics? The ethics of political economy is acquisition, work, thrift, sobriety—but political economy promises to satisfy my needs. The political economy, of ethics is the opulence of a good conscience, of virtue, etc.; but how can I live virtuously if I do not live? And how can I have a good conscience if I am not conscious of anything? It stems from the very nature of estrangement that each sphere applies to me a different and opposite yardstick—ethics one and political economy another; for each is a specific estrangement of man and focuses attention on a particular round of estranged essential activity, and each stands in an estranged relation to the other. Thus M. Michel Chevalier reproaches Ricardo with having abstracted from ethics. But Ricardo is allowing political economy to speak its own language, and if it does not speak ethically, this is not Ricardo’s fault. M. Chevalier abstracts from political economy in so far as he moralises, but he really and necessarily abstracts from ethics in so far as he practises political economy. The reference of political economy to ethics, if it is other than an arbitrary, contingent and therefore unfounded and unscientific reference, if it is not being put up as a sham but is meant to be essential, can only be the reference of the laws of political economy to ethics. If there is no such connection, or if the contrary is rather the case, can Ricardo help it? Besides, the opposition between political economy and ethics is only a sham opposition and just as much no opposition as it is an opposition. All that happens is that political economy expresses moral laws in its own way.

Needlessness as the principle of political economy is most brilliantly shown in its theory of population. There are too many people. Even the existence of men is a pure luxury; and if the worker is “ethical,” he will be sparing in procreation. (Mill suggests public acclaim for those who prove themselves continent in their sexual relations, and public rebuke for those who sin against such barrenness of marriage.... Is not this the ethics, the teaching of asceticism?) The production of people appears in the form of public misery.

The meaning which production has in relation to the rich is seen revealed in the meaning which it has for the poor. At the top the manifestation is always refined, veiled, ambiguous—a sham; lower, it is rough, straightforward, frank—the real thing. The worker’s crude need is a far greater source of gain than the refined need of the rich. The cellar-dwellings in London bring more to those who let them than do the palaces; that is to say, with reference to the landlord they constitute greater wealth, and thus (to speak the language of political economy) greater social wealth.

Industry speculates on the refinement of needs, but it speculates just as much on their crudeness, but on their artificially produced crudeness, whose true enjoyment, therefore, is self-stupefaction—this seeming satisfaction of need—this civilisation contained within the crude barbarism of need; the English gin-shops are therefore the symbolical embodiments of private property. Their luxury reveals the true relation of industrial luxury and wealth to man. They are therefore rightly the only Sunday pleasures of the people, dealt with at least mildly by the English police.

We have already seen how the political economist establishes the unity of labour and capital in a variety of ways:—(1) Capital is accumulated labour. (2) The purpose of capital within production—partly, reproduction of capital with profit, partly, capital as raw material (material of labour), and partly, as itself a working instrument (the machine is capital directly equated with labour)—is productive labour. (3) The worker is a capital. (4) Wages belong to costs of capital. (5) In relation to the worker, labour is the reproduction of his life-capital. (6) In relation to the capitalist, labour is an aspect of his capital’s activity.

Finally, (7) the political economist postulates the original unity of capital and labour in the form of the unity of the capitalist and the worker; this is the original state of paradise. The way in which these two aspects in the form of two persons leap at each other’s throats is for the political economist a contingent event, and hence only to be explained by reference to external factors. (See Mill.)[64]

The nations which are still dazzled by the sensuous splendour of precious metals, and are therefore still fetish-worshippers of metal money, are not yet fully developed money-nations.—Contrast of France and England. The extent to which the solution of theoretical riddles is the task of practice and effected through practice, just as true practice is the condition of a real and positive theory, is shown, for example, in fetishism. The sensuous consciousness of the fetish-worshipper is different from that of the Greek, because his sensuous existence is still different. The abstract enmity between sense and spirit is necessary so long as the human feeling for nature, the human sense of nature, and therefore also the natural sense of man, are not yet produced by man’s own labour.

Equality is nothing but a translation of the German “Ich=Ich” into the French, i.e., political form. Equality as the groundwork of communism is its political justification, and it is the same as when the German justifies it by conceiving man as universal self-consciousness. Naturally, the transcendence of the estrangement always proceeds from that form of the estrangement which is the dominant power: in Germany, self-consciousness; in France, equality, because politics; in England, real, material, practical need taking only itself as its standard. It is from this standpoint that Proudhon is to be criticised and appreciated.

If we characterise communism itself because of its character as negation of the negation, as the appropriation of the human essence which mediates itself with itself through the negation of private property—as being not yet the true, self-originating position but rather a position originating from private property, [....][65]

Since in that case[66] the real estrangement of the life of man remains, and remains all the more, the more one is conscious of it as such, it may be accomplished solely by putting communism into operation.

In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will come to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very severe and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have gained beforehand a consciousness of the limited character as well as of the goal of this historical movement—and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it.

When communist workmen associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means becomes an end. You can observe this practical process in its most splendid results whenever you see French socialist workers together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring together. Company, association, and conversation, which again has society as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.

When political economy claims that demand and supply always balance each other, it immediately forgets that according to its own claim (theory of population) the supply of people always exceeds the demand, and that, therefore, in the essential result of the whole production process—the existence of man—the disparity between demand and supply gets its most striking expression.

The extent to which money, which appears as a means, constitutes true power and the sole end—the extent to which in general that means which gives me substance, which gives me possession of the objective substance of others, is an end in itself—can be clearly seen from the facts that landed property wherever land is the source of life, and horse and sword wherever these are the true means of life, are also acknowledged as the true political powers in life. In the Middle Ages a social class is emancipated as soon as it is allowed to carry the sword. Amongst nomadic peoples it is the horse which makes me a free man and a participant in the life of the community.

We have said above that man is regressing to the cave dwelling, etc.—but that he is regressing to it in an estranged, malignant form. The savage in his cave—a natural element which freely offers itself for his use and protection—feels himself no more a stranger, or rather feels himself to be just as much at home as a fish in water. But the cellar-dwelling of the poor man is a hostile dwelling, “an alien, restraining power which only gives itself up to him in so far as he gives up to it his blood and sweat”—a dwelling which he cannot look upon as his own home where he might at last exclaim, “Here I am at home,” but where instead he finds himself in someone else’s house, in the house of a stranger who daily lies in wait for him and throws him out if he does not pay his rent. Similarly, he is also aware of the contrast in quality between his dwelling and a human dwelling—a residence in that other world, the heaven of wealth.

Estrangement is manifested not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that my desire is the inaccessible possession of another, but also in the fact that everything is in itself something different from itself—that my activity is something else and that, finally (and this applies also to the capitalist), all is under the sway of inhuman power. There is a form of inactive, extravagant wealth given over wholly to pleasure, the enjoyer of which on the one hand behaves as a mere ephemeral individual frantically spending himself to no purpose, knows the slave-labour of others (human sweat and blood) as the prey of his cupidity, and therefore knows man himself, and hence also his own self, as a sacrificed and empty being. With such wealth the contempt of man makes its appearance, partly as arrogance and as the throwing-away of what can give sustenance to a hundred human lives, and partly as the infamous illusion that his own unbridled extravagance and ceaseless, unproductive consumption is the condition of the other’s labour and therefore of his subsistence. He knows the realisation of the essential powers of man only as the realisation of his own excesses, his whims and capricious, bizarre notions. This wealth which, on the other hand, again knows wealth as a mere means, as something that is good for nothing but to be annihilated and which is therefore at once slave and master, at once generous and mean, capricious, presumptuous, conceited, refined, cultured and witty—this wealth has not yet experienced wealth as an utterly alien power over itself: it sees in it, rather, only its own power, and not wealth but gratification [is its][67] final aim and end.

This bright illusion about the nature of wealth, blinded by sensuous appearances, is confronted by the working, sober, economical, prosaic industrialist who is quite enlightened about the nature of wealth, and who, while providing a wider sphere for the other’s self-indulgence and saying fulsome flatteries to him in his product (for his products are just so many base compliments to the appetites of the spendthrift), knows how to appropriate for himself in the only useful way the other’s waning power. If, therefore, industrial wealth appears at first to be the result of extravagant fantastic wealth, its motion, the motion inherent in it, ousts the latter also in an active way. For the fall in the interest on money is a necessary consequence and result of industrial development. The extravagant rentier’s means therefore dwindle day by day in inverse proportion to the increasing possibilities and pitfalls of pleasure. Consequently, he must either consume his capital himself, thus ruining himself, or must become an industrial capitalist. On the other hand, there is of course a direct, constant rise in the rent of land as a result of the course of industrial development; nevertheless, as we have already seen,[68] there must come a time when landed property, like every other kind of property, is bound to fall within the category of profitably self-reproducing capital —and this in fact results from the same industrial development. Thus the extravagant landowner, too, must either consume his capital, and thus be ruined, or himself become the farmer of his own estate—an agricultural industrialist.

The diminution in the interest on money, which Proudhon regards as the annulling of capital and as the tendency to socialise capital, is really and immediately, therefore, only a symptom of the total victory of working capital over extravagant wealth—i.e., the transformation of all private property into industrial capital. It is a total victory of private property over all those of its qualities which are still in appearance human, and the complete subjection of the owner of private property to the essence of private property—labour. To be sure, the industrial capitalist also takes his pleasures. He does not by any means return to the unnatural simplicity of need; but his pleasure is only a side-issue—recuperation—something subordinated to production: at the same time it is a calculated and, therefore, itself an economical pleasure. For he debits it to his capital’s expense-account, and what is squandered on his pleasure must therefore amount to no more than will be replaced with profit through the reproduction of capital. Pleasure is therefore subsumed under capital, and the pleasure-taking individual under the capital-accumulating individual, whilst formerly the contrary was the case. The decrease in the interest-rate is therefore a symptom of the annulment of capital only inasmuch as it is a symptom of the rule of capital in the process of perfecting itself—of the estrangement in the process of becoming fully-developed and therefore of hastening to its annulment. This is indeed the only way in which that which exists affirms its opposite.

The quarrel between the political economists about luxury and thrift is, therefore, only the quarrel between that political economy which has achieved clarity about the nature of wealth, and that political economy which is still afflicted with romantic, anti-industrial memories. Neither side, however, knows how to reduce the subject of the controversy to its simple terms, and neither therefore can make short work of the other.

Moreover, rent of land qua rent of land has been overthrown, since, contrary to the argument of the physiocrats which maintains that the landowner is the only true producer, modern political economy has proved that the landowner as such is in fact the only completely unproductive rentier. According to it, agriculture is the business of the capitalist, who applies his capital in it provided he can expect from it the usual profit. The claim of the physiocrats that landed property, as the sole productive property, should alone pay state taxes and therefore should alone sanction them and participate in the affairs of state, is transformed into the opposite position that the tax on the rent of land is the only tax on unproductive income, and is therefore the only tax not detrimental to national production. It goes without saying that from this point of view the political prerogative of landowners no longer follows from their position as principal tax-payers.

Everything which Proudhon conceives as a movement of labour against capital is only the movement of labour in the form of capital, of industrial capital, against capital not consumed as capital—i.e., not consumed industrially. And this movement is proceeding along its triumphant road—the road to the victory of industrial capital. It is clear, therefore, that only when labour is grasped as the essence of private property, can the economic process as such be penetrated in its actual concreteness.

Society, as it appears to the political economist, is civil society, in which every individual is a totality of needs and only exists for the other person, as the other exists for him, in so far as each becomes a means for the other. The political economist reduces everything (just as does politics in its Rights of Man) to man, i.e., to the individual whom he strips of all determinateness so as to class him as capitalist or worker.

The division of labour is the expression in political economy of the social character of labour within the estrangement. Or, since labour is only an expression of human activity within alienation, of the living of life as the alienating of life, the division of labour, too, is therefore nothing else but the estranged, alienated positing of human activity as a real activity of the species or as activity of man as a species being.

As for the essence of the division of labour—and of course the division of labour had to be conceived as a major driving force in the production of wealth as soon as labour was recognised as the essence of private property —i.e., about the estranged and alienated form of human activity as an activity of the species—the political economists are very unclear and self-contradictory about it.

Adam Smith:[69] “The division of labour is not originally the effect of any human wisdom. It is the necessary, slow and gradual consequence of the propensity to exchange and barter one product for another. This propensity to trade is probably a necessary consequence of the use of reason and of speech. It is common to all men, and to be found in no animal. The animal, when it is grown up, is entirely independent. Man has constant occasion for the help of others, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can appeal to their personal interest and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. We address ourselves not to other men’s humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

“As it is by treaty, by barter, and by purchase that we obtain from one another the greater part of those mutual good offices which we stand in need of, so it is this same trucking disposition which originally gives occasion to the division of labour. In a tribe of hunters or shepherds a particular person makes bows and arrows, for example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other. He frequently exchanges them for cattle or for venison with his companions; and he finds at last that he can in this manner get more cattle and venison than if he himself went to the field to catch them. From a regard to his own interest, therefore, the making of bows, etc., grows to be his chief business.

The difference of natural talents in different individuals is not so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour.... Without the disposition to truck and exchange, every man must have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of life. All must have had the same work to do, and there could have been no such difference of employment as could alone give occasion to any great difference of talents.

“As it is this disposition which forms that difference of talents among men, so it is this same disposition which renders that difference useful. Many tribes of animals of the same species derive from nature a much more remarkable distinction of genius than what, antecedent to custom and education, could be observed among men. By nature a philosopher is not in talent and in intelligence half so different from a street-porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a greyhound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd’s dog. Those different tribes of animals, however, though all of the same species, are of scarce any use to one another. The mastiff cannot add to the advantages of his strength by making use of the swiftness of the greyhound, etc. The effects of these different talents or grades of intelligence, for want of the power or disposition to barter and exchange, cannot be brought into a common stock, and do not in the least contribute to the better accommodation and conveniency of the species. Each animal is still obliged to support and defend itself, separately and independently, and derives no sort of advantage from that variety of talents with which nature has distinguished its fellows. Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another; the different produces of their respective talents, by the general disposition to truck, barter and exchange, being brought, as it were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever part of the produce of other men’s industry he has occasion for.

“As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by the extent of that power, or in other words, by the extent of the market. When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment, for want of the power to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men’s labour as he has occasion for....”

In an advanced state of society “Every man lives by exchanging and becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.”[70] (See Destutt de Tracy:[71] “Society is a series of reciprocal exchanges; commerce contains the whole essence of society.”) The accumulation of capitals mounts with the division of labour, and vice versa.—So much for Adam Smith.

“If every family produced all that it consumed, society could keep going although no exchange of any sort took place; without being fundamental, exchange is indispensable in our advanced state of society. The division of labour is a skilful deployment of man’s powers; it increases society’s production—its power and its pleasures—but it plunders and reduces the ability of every person taken individually. Production cannot take place without exchange.”—Thus J. B. Say.[72]

“The powers inherent in man are his intelligence and his physical capacity for work. Those which arise from the condition of society consist of the capacity to divide up labour and to distribute different jobs amongst different people required to obtain means of subsistence, and the power to exchange mutual services and the products which constitute these means. The motive which impels a man to give his services to another is self-interest—he requires a reward for the services rendered. The right of exclusive private property is indispensable to the establishment of exchange amongst men.” “Exchange and division of labour reciprocally condition each other.” Thus Skarbek.[73]

Mill presents developed exchange—trade—as a consequence of the division of labour.

“The agency of man can be traced to very simple elements. He can, in fact, do nothing more than produce motion. He can move things towards one another, and he can separate them from one another: the properties of matter perform all the rest.” “In the employment of labour and machinery, it is often found that the effects can be increased by skilful distribution, by separating all those operations which have any tendency to impede one another, and by bringing together all those operations which can be made in any way to aid one another. As men in general cannot perform many different operations with the same quickness and dexterity with which they can by practice learn to perform a few, it is always an advantage to limit as much as possible the number of operations imposed upon each. For dividing labour, and distributing the powers of men and machinery, to the greatest advantage, it is in most cases necessary to operate upon a large scale; in other words, to produce the commodities in greater masses. It is this advantage which gives existence to the great manufactories; a few of which, placed in the most convenient situations, frequently supply not one country, but many countries, with as much as they desire of the commodity produced.”

Thus Mill.[74]

The whole of modern political economy agrees, however, that division of labour and wealth of production, division of labour and accumulation of capital, are mutually interrelated; just as it agrees that liberated private property alone—private property left to itself—can produce the most useful and comprehensive division of labour.

Adam Smith’s argument can be summed up as follows: Division of labour bestows on labour infinite production capacity. It stems from the propensity to exchange and barter, a specifically human propensity which is probably not fortuitous but is conditioned by the use of reason and speech. The motive of those who engage in exchange is not humanity but egoism. The diversity of human talents is more the effect than the cause of the division of labour —i.e., of exchange. Besides, it is only the latter which makes such diversity useful. The differences between the particular attributes to which nature gives rise within a species of animal are much more marked than the degrees of difference in human aptitude and activity. But because animals are unable to engage in exchange, no individual animal benefits from the difference in the attributes of animals of the same species but of different breeds. Animals are unable to combine the different attributes of their species, and are unable to contribute anything to the common advantage and comfort of the species. It is otherwise with men, amongst whom the most dissimilar talents and forms of activity are of use to one another, because they can bring their different products together into a common stock, from which each can purchase. As the division of labour springs from the propensity to exchange it grows and is limited by the extent of exchange—by the extent of the market. In advanced conditions, every man is a merchant, and society is a commercial society. Say regards exchange as accidental and not fundamental. Society could exist without it. It becomes indispensable in the advanced state of society. Yet production cannot take place without it. Division of labour is a convenient, useful means—a skilful deployment of human powers for social wealth; but it reduces the ability of each person taken individually. The last remark is a step forward for Say.

Skarbek distinguishes the individual powers inherent in man—intelligence and the physical capacity for work—from the powers derived from society—exchange and division of labour, which mutually condition one another. But the necessary premise of exchange is private property. Skarbek here expresses in an objective form what Smith, Say, Ricardo, etc., say when they designate egoism and self-interest as the basis of exchange, and buying and selling as the essential and adequate form of exchange.

Mill presents trade as the consequence of the division of labour. With him human activity is reduced to mechanical motion. Division of labour and use of machinery promote wealth of production. Each person must be entrusted with as small a sphere of operations as possible. Division of labour and use of machinery for their part require the production of wealth, and therefore of the product, in large quantities. This is the reason for large manufactories.

The examination of division of labour and exchange is of extreme interest, because these are perceptibly alienated expressions of human activity and of essential human power as a species activity and power.

To assert that division of labour and exchange rest on private property is nothing short of asserting that labour is the essence of private property—an assertion which the political economist cannot prove and which we wish to prove for him. Precisely in the fact that division of labour and exchange are embodiments of private property lies the twofold proof, on the one hand that human life required private property for its realisation, and on the other hand that it now requires the supersession of private property.

Division of labour and exchange are the two phenomena in connection with which the political economist boasts of the social character of his science and in the same breath gives expression to the contradiction in his science —the establishment of society through unsocial, particular interests.

The factors we have to consider are: the propensity to exchange—the basis of which is found in egoism—regarded as the cause or reciprocal effect of the division of labour. Say regards exchange as not fundamental to the nature of society. Wealth—production—is explained by division of labour and exchange. The impoverishment of individual activity, and its loss of character as a result of the division of labour, are admitted. Exchange and division of labour are acknowledged as the sources of the great diversity of human talents—a diversity which in its turn becomes useful as a result of exchange. Skarbek divides man’s essential powers of production—or productive powers—into two parts: (1) those which are individual and inherent in him—his intelligence and his special disposition, or capacity, for work; and (2) those derived from society and not the actual individual—division of labour and exchange. Furthermore, the division of labour is limited by the market. Human labour is simple mechanical motion: the main work is done by the material properties of the object. The fewest possible operations must be apportioned to any one individual. Splitting up of labour and concentration of capital; the nothingness of individual production and the production of wealth in large quantities. Meaning of free private property within the division of labour.[75]

[THE POWER OF MONEY IN BOURGEOIS SOCIETY]

If man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological phenomena in the [narrower][76] sense, but truly ontological affirmations of essential being (of nature), and if they are only really affirmed because their object exists for them as an object of sense, then it is clear:

(1) That they have by no means merely one mode of affirmation, but rather that the distinctive character of their existence, of their life, is constituted by the distinctive mode of their affirmation. In what manner the object exists for them, is the characteristic mode of their gratification .

(2) Wherever the sensuous affirmation is the direct annulment of the object in its independent form (as in eating, drinking, working up of the object, etc.), this is the affirmation of the object.

(3) In so far as man, and hence also his feeling, etc., are human, the affirmation of the object by another is likewise his own enjoyment.

(4) Only through developed industry—i.e., through the medium of private property—does the ontological essence of human passion come to be both in its totality and in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a product of man’s establishment of himself by practical activity.

(5) The meaning of private property--liberated from its estrangement—is the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of enjoyment and as objects of activity.

By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It therefore functions as the almighty being. Money is the pimp between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.

“What, man! confound it, hands and feet

And head and backside, all are yours!

And what we take while life is sweet,

Is that to be declared not ours?

Six stallions, say, I can afford,

Is not their strength my property?

I tear along, a sporting lord,

As if their legs belonged to me.”

(Goethe: Faust—Mephistopheles.[77])

Shakespeare in Timon of Athens:

“Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, Gods,

I am no idle votarist! ... Thus much of this will

make black white, foul fair,

Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.

... Why, this

Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,

Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads:

This yellow slave

Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;

Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves

And give them title, knee and approbation

With senators on the bench: This is it

That makes the wappen’d widow wed again;

She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores

Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices

To the April day again.... Damned earth,

Thou common whore of mankind, that putt’st odds

Among the rout of nations.“[78]

And also later:

“O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce

Twixst natural son and sire! thou bright defiler

of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars!

Thou ever young fresh, loved and delicate wooer,

Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow

That lies on Dian’s lap! Thou visible God!

That solder‘st close impossibilities,

And maest them kiss! That speak’st with every tongue,

To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!

Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue

Set them into confounding odds, that beasts

May have the world in empire!”[79]

Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money. To understand him, let us begin, first of all, by expounding the passage from Goethe.

That which is for me through the medium of money—that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy)—that am I, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my properties and essential powers—the properties and powers of its possessor. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money. I, in my character as an individual, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and therefore so is its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am stupid, but money is the real mind of all things and how then should its possessor be stupid? Besides, he can buy talented people for himself, and is he who has power over the talented not more talented than the talented? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money therefore transform all my incapacities into their contrary?

If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of divorce? It is the true agent of divorce as well as the true binding agent—the [universal][80] galvano-chemical power of Society.

Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:

(1) It is the visible divinity—the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and overturning of things: it makes brothers of impossibilities. (2) It is the common whore, the common pimp of people and nations.

The overturning and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities—the divine power of money—lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.

That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not—turns it, that is, into its contrary.

If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or willed existence into their sensuous, actual existence —from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, money is the truly creative power.

No doubt demand also exists for him who has no money, but his demand is a mere thing of the imagination without effect or existence for me, for a third party, for the others, and which therefore remains for me unreal and objectless. The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between the imagined which exists merely within me and the imagined as it is for me outside me as a real object.

If I have no money for travel, I have no need—that is, no real and self-realising need—to travel. If I have the vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study—that is, no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for study but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it. Being the external, common medium and faculty for turning an image into reality. and reality into a mere image (a faculty not springing from man as man or from human society as society), money transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract conceits and therefore imperfections—into tormenting chimeras—just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras—essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual—into real powers and faculties.

In the light of this characteristic alone, money is thus the general overturning of individualities which turns them into their contrary and adds contradictory attributes to their attributes.

Money, then, appears as this overturning power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be essences in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence and intelligence into idiocy.

Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanges all things, it is the general confounding and compounding of all things—the world upside-down—the confounding and compounding of all natural and human qualities.

He who can buy bravery is brave, though a coward. As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically-cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return—that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent—a misfortune.

[CRITIQUE OF THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC AND PHILOSOPHY AS A WHOLE]

(6) This is perhaps the place[81] at which, by way of explaining and justifying the ideas here presented, we might offer some considerations in regard to the Hegelian dialectic generally and especially its exposition in the Phenomenology and Logic,[82] and also, lastly, the relation to it of the modern critical movement.

So powerful was modern German criticism’s preoccupation with the past—so completely was it possessed in its development by its subject-matter—that there prevailed a completely uncritical attitude to the method of criticising, together with a complete lack of awareness about the seemingly formal, but really vital question: how do we now stand as regards the Hegelian dialectic? This lack of awareness about the relationship of modern criticism to the Hegelian philosophy as a whole and especially to the Hegelian dialectic has been so great that critics like Strauss and Bruno Bauer still remain wholly within the confines of the Hegelian Logic; the former completely so and the latter at least implicitly so in his Synoptics[83] (where, in opposition to Strauss, he replaces the substance of “abstract nature” by the “self-consciousness” of abstract man), and even in Christianity Discovered.[84] Thus in Christianity Discovered, for example, you get:

“As though in positing the world, self-consciousness posits that which is different from itself, and in what it posits it posits itself, because it in turn annuls the difference between what it has posited and itself, inasmuch as it itself has being only in the positing and the movement.—How then can it not have its purpose in this movement?” etc.; or again: “They” (the French materialists) “have not yet been able to see that it is only as the movement of self -consciousness that the movement of the universe has actually come to be for itself, and achieved unity with itself.”

Such expressions do not even show any verbal divergence from the Hegelian approach, but on the contrary repeat it word for word.

How little consciousness there was in relation to the Hegelian dialectic during the act of criticism (Bauer, The Synoptics), and how little this consciousness came into being even after the act of material criticism is proved by Bauer, when, in his The Good of Freedom,[85] he dismisses the brash question put by Herr Gruppe—“What about logic now?”—by referring him to future critics.

But even now—now that Feuerbach both in his Theses in the Anecdotis and, in detail, in The Philosophy of the Future, has in principle overthrown the old dialectic and philosophy; now that that school of criticism, on the other hand, which was incapable of accomplishing this has all the same seen it accomplished and has proclaimed itself pure, resolute, absolute criticism—criticism that has come into the clear with itself; now that this criticism, in its spiritual pride, has reduced the whole process of history to the relation between the rest of the world and itself (the rest of the world, in contrast to itself, falling under the category of “the masses”) and dissolved all dogmatic antithesis into the single dogmatic antithesis of its own cleverness and the stupidity of the world—the antithesis of the critical Christ and Mankind, the rabble; now that daily and hourly it has demonstrated its own excellence against the dullness of the masses; now, finally, that it has proclaimed the critical Last Judgement in the shape of an announcement that the day is approaching when the whole of expiring humanity will assemble before it and be sorted by it into groups, each particular mob receiving its testi-monium paupertatis;[86] now that it has made known in print[87] its superiority to human feelings as well as its superiority to the world, over which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, only letting fall from time to time from its sarcastic lips the ringing laughter of the Olympian Gods—even now, after all these delightful antics of moribund idealism in the guise of criticism (i.e., of Young-Hegelianism) —even now it has not expressed the suspicion that the time was ripe for a critical settling of accounts with the mother of Young-Hegelianism—the Hegelian dialectic—and even had [nothing] to say about its critical attitude towards the Feuerbachian dialectic. Criticism with a completely uncritical attitude to itself!

Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity with which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the reverse.

Feuerbach’s great achievement is:

(1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thoughts and thinkingly expounded, and that it has therefore likewise to be condemned as another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man;

(2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, since Feuerbach also makes the social relationship “of man to man” the basic principle of the theory;

(3) His opposing to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively grounded on itself.

Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies starting out from the positive, from sense-certainty) as follows:

Hegel sets out from the estrangement of Substance (in Logic, from the Infinite, the abstractly universal)—from the absolute and fixed abstraction; which means, put popularly, that he sets out from religion and theology.

Secondly, he annuls the infinite, and establishes the actual, sensuous, real, finite, particular (philosophy—annulment of religion and theology).

Thirdly, he again annuls the positive and restores the abstraction, the infinite—Restoration of religion and theology.

Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself—as the philosophy which affirms theology (the transcendent, etc.) after having denied it, and which it therefore affirms in opposition to itself.

The position or self-affirmation and self-confirmation contained in the negation of the negation is taken to be a position which is not yet sure of itself which is therefore burdened with its opposite, which is doubtful of itself and therefore in need of proof, and which, therefore, is not a position establishing itself by its existence—not a position that justifies itself; hence it is directly and immediately confronted by the self-grounded position of sense-certainty. [88]

But because Hegel has conceived the negation of the negation from the point of view of the positive relation inherent in it as the true and only positive, and from the point of view of the negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and self-realising act of all being, he has only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history; and this historical process is not yet the real history of man—of man as a given subject, but only man’s act of genesis—the story of man’s origin. We shall explain both the abstract form of this process and the difference between this process as it is in Hegel in contrast to modern criticism, that is, in contrast to the same process in Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christentums (Essence of Christianity), or rather the critical form of this in Hegel still uncritical process.

Let us take a look at the Hegelian system. One must begin with Hegel’s Phenomenology, the true point of origin and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy.

PHENOMENOLOGY[89]

A. Self-consciousness

I. Consciousness. (α) Certainty at the level of sense-experience ; or the “This” and Meaning. (β) Perception, or the Thing with Its Properties, and Deception. ( γ ) Force and Understanding, Appearance and the Supersensible World.

II. Self-consciousness. The Truth of Certainty of Self. (a) Independence and Dependence of Self-consciousness; Lordship and Bondage. (b) Freedom of Self-consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, the Unhappy Consciousness.

III. Reason. Reason’s Certainty and Reason’s Truth. (a) Observation as a Process of Reason. Observation of Nature and of Self-consciousness. (b) Realisation of Rational Self-consciousness through its own Activity. Pleasure and Necessity. The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-conceit. Virtue and the Course of the World. (c) The Individuality Which is Real In and For Itself. The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and the Deception, or the Real Fact. Reason as Lawgiver. Reason Which Tests Laws.

B. Mind

- I. True Mind; the Ethical Order.

- II. Mind in Self-Estrangement—Culture.

- III. Mind Certain of Itself, Morality.

C. Religion

Natural Religion; Religion in the Form of Art; Revealed Religion.

D. Absolute Knowledge

Hegel’s Encyclopaedia,[90] beginning as it does with Logic, with pure speculative thought, and ending with Absolute Knowledge—with the self-consciousness, self-comprehending, philosophic or absolute (i.e., superhuman) abstract mind—is in its entirety nothing but the display, the self-objectification, of the essence of the philosophic mind, and the philosophic mind is nothing but the estranged mind of the world thinking within its self-estrangement—i.e., comprehending itself abstractly. Logic (mind’s coin of the realm, the speculative or thought-value of man and nature—their essence grown totally indifferent to all real determinateness, and hence their unreal essence) is alienated thinking, and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and from real man: abstract thinking. Then: The externality of this abstract thinking ... nature, as it is for this abstract thinking. Nature is external to it—its self-loss; and it apprehends nature also in an external fashion, as abstract thinking—but as alienated abstract thinking. Finally, Mind, this thinking returning home to its own point of origin—the thinking which, as the anthropological, phenomenological, psychological, ethical, artistic and religious mind is not valid for itself, until ultimately it finds itself, and relates itself to itself, as absolute knowledge in the hence absolute, i. e., abstract mind, and so receives its conscious embodiment in a mode of being corresponding to it. For its real mode of being is abstraction.

There is a double error in Hegel.

The first emerges most clearly in the Phenomenology, the Hegelian philosophy’s place of origin. When, for instance, wealth, state-power, etc., are understood by Hegel as entities estranged from the human being, this only happens in their form as thoughts. . . . They are thoughtentities , and therefore merely an estrangement of pure, i.e., abstract, philosophical thinking. The whole process therefore ends with Absolute Knowledge. It is precisely abstract thought from which these objects are estranged and which they confront with their arrogation of reality. The philosopher sets up himself (that is, one who is himself an abstract form of estranged man) as the measuring-rod of the estranged world. The whole history of the alienation-process and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e., absolute) thought—of logical, speculative thought. The estrangement, which therefore forms the real interest of this alienation and of the transcendence of this alienation, is the opposition of in itself and for itself,[91] of consciousness and self-consciousness, of object and subject—that is to say, it is the opposition, within thought itself, between abstract thinking and sensuous reality or real sensuousness. All other oppositions and movements of these oppositions are but the semblance, the cloak , the exoteric shape of these oppositions which alone matter, and which constitute the meaning of these other, profane oppositions. It is not the fact that the human being objectifies himself inhumanly, in opposition to himself, but the fact that he objectifies himself in distinction from and in opposition to abstract thinking, that is the posited essence of the estrangement and the thing to be superseded.

The appropriation of man’s essential powers, which have become objects—indeed, alien objects—is thus in the first place only an appropriation occurring in consciousness, in pure thought—i.e., in abstraction : it is the appropriation of these objects as thoughts and as movements of thought. Consequently, despite its thoroughly negative and critical appearance and despite the criticism really contained in it, which often anticipates far later development, there is already latent in the Phenomenology as a germ, a potentiality, a secret, the uncritical positivism and the equally uncritical idealism of Hegel’s later works—that philosophic dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world. In the second place: the vindication of the objective world for man—for example, the realisation that sensuous consciousness is not an abstractly sensuous consciousness but a humanly sensuous consciousness—that religion, wealth, etc., are but the estranged world of human objectification, of man’s essential powers given over to work and that they are therefore but the path to the true human world—this appropriation or the insight into this process consequently appears in Hegel in this form, that sense, religion, state-power, etc., are spiritual entities; for only mind is the true essence of man, and the true form of mind is thinking mind, the logical, speculative mind. The humanness of nature and of the nature begotten by history—the humanness of man’s products—appears in the form that they are products of abstract mind and as such, therefore, phases of mind—thought entities. The Phenomenology is, therefore, an occult critique—still to itself obscure and mystifying criticism ; but inasmuch as it keeps steadily in view man’s estrangement, even though man appears only in the shape of mind, there lie concealed in it all the elements of criticism, already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint. The “Unhappy Consciousness,” the “Honest Consciousness,” the struggle of the “Noble and Base Consciousness,”[92] etc., etc.,—these separate sections contain, but still in an estranged form, the critical elements of whole spheres such as religion, the state, civil life, etc. Just as entities, objects, appear as thought-entities, so the subject is always consciousness or self-consciousness; or rather the object appears only as abstract consciousness, man only as self-consciousness: the distinct forms of estrangement which make their appearance are, therefore, only various forms of consciousness and self-consciousness. Just as in itself abstract consciousness (the form in which the object is conceived) is merely a moment of distinction of self-consciousness, what appears as the result of the movement is the identity of self-consciousness with consciousness—absolute knowledge—the movement of abstract thought no longer directed outwards but going on now only within its own self: that is to say, the dialectic of pure thought is the result.

The outstanding thing in Hegel’s Phenomenology and its final outcome—that is, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle—is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-genesis of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man—true, because real man—as the outcome of man’s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species being, or his manifestation as a real species being (i.e., as a human being), is only possible by his really bringing out of himself all the powers that are his as the species man—something which in turn is only possible through the totality of man’s actions, as the result of history—is only possible by man’s treating these generic powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement.

We shall now demonstrate in detail Hegel’s one-sidedness and limitations as they are displayed in the final chapter of the Phenomenology, “Absolute Knowledge”—a chapter which contains the concentrated spirit of the Phenomenology, the relationship of the Phenomenology to speculative dialectic, and also Hegel’s consciousness concerning both and their relationship to one another.

Let us provisionally say just this much in advance: Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy. He grasps labour as the essence of man—as man’s essence in the act of proving itself: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man. The only labour which Hegel knows and recognises is abstractly mental labour. Therefore, that which constitutes the essence of philosophy—the alienation of man in his knowing of himself, or alienated science thinking itself—Hegel grasps as its essence; and he is therefore able vis-à-vis preceding philosophy to gather together its separate elements and phases, and to present his philosophy as the philosophy. What the other philosophers did—that they grasped separate phases of nature and of human life as phases of self-consciousness, and indeed of abstract self-consciousness—is known to Hegel as the doings of philosophy. Hence his science is absolute.

Let us now turn to our subject.

Absolute Knowledge. The last chapter of the “Phenomenology.”

The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self -consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness—self-consciousness as object.

(Positing of man=self-consciousness.)

The issue, therefore, is to surmount the object of consciousness. Objectivity as such is regarded as an estranged human relationship which does not correspond to the essence of man, to self-consciousness. The re-appropriation of the objective essence of man, begotten in the form of estrangement as something alien, has the meaning therefore not only to annul estrangement, but objectivity as well. Man, that is to say, is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being.

The movement of surmounting the object of consciousness is now described by Hegel in the following way:

The object reveals itself not merely as returning into the self—for Hegel that is the one-sided way of apprehending this movement, the grasping of only one side. Man is posited as equivalent to self. The self, however, is only the abstractly conceived man—man begotten by abstraction. Man is egotistic. His eye, his ear, etc., are egotistic. In him every one of his essential powers has the quality of selfhood. But it is quite false to say on that account, “Self-consciousness has eyes, ears, essential powers.” Self-consciousness is rather a quality of human nature, of the human eye, etc.; it is not human nature that is a quality of self-consciousness.

The self-abstracted and fixed for itself is man as abstract egoist—egoism raised in its pure abstraction to the level of thought. (We shall return to this point later.)

For Hegel the essence of man—man—equals selj-consciousness. All estrangement of the human essence is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness. The estrangement of self-consciousness is not regarded as an expression of the real estrangement of the human being —its expression reflected in the realm of knowledge and thought. Instead, the real estrangement—that which appears real—is from its innermost, hidden nature (a nature only brought to light by philosophy) nothing but the manifestation of the estrangement of the real essence of man, of self-consciousness. The science which comprehends this is therefore called Phenomenology. All re-appropriation of the estranged objective essence appears, therefore, as a process of incorporation into self-consciousness: The man who takes hold of his essential being is merely the self-consciousness which takes hold of objective essences. Return of the object into the self is therefore the re-appropriation of the object.

The surmounting of the object of consciousness, comprehensively, expressed, means:[93]

(1) That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something vanishing. (2) That it is the alienation of self-consciousness which establishes thinghood. (3) That this externalisation[94] of self-consciousness has not merely a negative but a positive significance. (4) That it has this meaning not merely for us or intrinsically, but for self-consciousness itself. (5) For self-consciousness, the negative of the object, its annulling of itself, has positive significance—self-consciousness knows this nullity of the object—because self-consciousness itself alienates itself; for in this alienation it establishes itself as object, or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for-self, establishes the object as itself. (6) On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process, that self-consciousness has also just as much annulled and superseded this alienation and objectivity and resumed them into itself, being thus at home with itself in its other-being as such. (7) This is the movement of consciousness and in this movement consciousness is the totality of its moments. (8) Consciousness must similarly have taken up a relation to the object in all its aspects and phases, and have comprehended it from the point of view of each of them. This totality of its determinate characteristics makes the object intrinsically a spiritual being; and it becomes so in truth for consciousness through the apprehending of each single one of them as self or through what was called above the spiritual attitude to them.

As to (1): That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something vanishing—this is the above-mentioned return of the object into the self.

As to (2): The alienation of self-consciousness establishes thinghood. Because man equals self-consciousness, his alienated, objective essence, or thinghood, equals alienated self-consciousness, and thinghood is thus established through this alienation (thinghood being that which is an object for man and an object for him is really only that which is to him an essential object, therefore his objective essence. And since it is not real Man, nor therefore Nature—Man being human Nature—who as such is made the subject, but only the abstraction of man—self-consciousness—thinghood cannot be anything but alienated self-consciousness.). It is only to be expected that a living, natural being equipped and endowed with objective (i.e., material) essential powers should have real natural objects of his essence; as is the fact that his self-alienation should lead to the establishing of a real, objective world—but a world in the form of externality—a world, therefore, not belonging to his own essential being, and an overpowering world. There is nothing incomprehensible or mysterious in this. It would be mysterious, rather, if it were otherwise. But it is equally clear that a self-consciouness—can only establish thinghood through its alienation—i.e., establish something which itself is only an abstract thing, a thing of abstraction and not a real thing. It is clear, further, that thinghood is therefore utterly without any independence, any essentiality vis-à-vis self-consciousness; that on the contrary it is a mere creature—something posited by self-consciousness. And what is posited, instead of confirming itself, is but a confirmation of the act of positing in which is concentrated for a moment the energy of the act as its product, seeming to give the de-posit—but only for a moment—the character of an independent, real substance. [95]

Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, establishes his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective. A being who is objective acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He creates or establishes only objects, because he is established by objects—because at bottom he is nature. In the act of establishing, therefore, this objective being does not fall from his state of “pure activity” into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, establishing his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being.

Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism distinguishes itself both from idealism and materialism, constituting at the same time the unifying truth of both. We see also how only naturalism is capable of comprehending the act of world history.

Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand furnished with natural powers of life—he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities—as impulses. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his impulses exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects of his need—essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous, objects as the objects of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing. Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant—an indispensable object to it, confirming its life—just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power.

A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for some third being has no being for its object; i.e., it is not objectively related. Its be-ing is not objective.[96]

An unobjective being is a nullity—an un-being.

Suppose a being which is neither an object itself, nor has an object. Such a being, in the first place, would be the unique being: there would exist no being outside it—it would exist solitary and alone. For as soon as there are objects outside me, as soon as I am not alone, I am another—another reality than the object outside me. For this third object I am thus an other reality than it; that is, I am its object. Thus, to suppose a being which is not the object of another being is to presuppose that no objective being exists. As soon as I have an object, this object has me for an object. But a non-objective being is an unreal, nonsensical thing—something merely thought of (merely imagined, that is)—a creature of abstraction. To be sensuous, that is, to be an object of sense, to be a sensuous object, and thus to have sensuous objects outside oneself—objects of one’s sensuousness. To be sensuous is to suffer.[97]

Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being—and because he feels what he suffers, a passionate being. Passion is the essential force of man energetically bent on its object.

But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species being, and has to confirm and manifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing. Therefore, human objects are not natural objects as they immediately present themselves, and neither is human sense as it immediately is—as it is objectively—human sensibility, human objectivity. Neither nature objectively nor nature subjectively is directly given in a form adequate to the human being. And as everything natural has to have its beginning, man too has his act of coming-to-be—history—which, however, is for him a known history, and hence as an act of coming-to-be it is a conscious self-transcending act of coming-to-be. History is the true natural history of man (on which more later).

Thirdly, because this establishing of thinghood is itself only a sham, an act contradicting the nature of pure activity, it has to be cancelled again and thinghood denied.

Re. 3, 4, 5 and 6. (3) This externalisation of consciousness has not merely a negative but a positive significance, and (4) it has this meaning not merely for us or intrinsically, but for consciousness itself.[98] (5) For consciousness the negative of the object, its annulling of itself, has positive significance—consciousness knows this nullity of the object because it alienates itself; for in this alienation it knows itself as object, or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for-itself, the object as itself. (6) On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process, that consciousness has also just as much annulled and superseded this alienation and objectivity and resumed them into itself, being thus at home with itsed in its other-being as such.

As we have already seen: the appropriation of what is estranged and objective, or the annulling of objectivity in the form of estrangement (which has to advance from indifferent foreignness to real, antagonistic estrangement) means equally or even primarily for Hegel that it is objectivity which is to be annulled, because it is not the determinate character of the object, but rather its objective character that is offensive and constitutes estrangement for self-consciousness. The object is therefore something negative, self-annulling—a nullity. This nullity of the object has not only a negative but a positive meaning for consciousness, for such a nullity of the object is precisely the self-confirmation of the non-objectivity, of the abstraction of itself. For consciousness itself this nullity of the object has a positive meaning because it knows this nullity, the objective being, as its self-alienation; because it knows that it exists only as a result of its own self-alienation. ...

The way in which consciousness is, and in which something is for it, is knowing. Knowing is its sole act. Something therefore comes to be for consciousness in so far as the latter knows this something. Knowing is its sole objective relation. Consciousness, then, knows the nullity of the object (i.e., knows the non-existence of the distinction between the object and itself, the non-existence of the object for it) because it knows the object as its self-alienation; that is, it knows itself—knows knowing as the object—because the object is only the semblance of an object, a piece of mystification, which in its essence, however, is nothing else but knowing itself, which has confronted itself with itself and in so doing has confronted itself with a nullity—a something which has no objectivity outside the knowing. Or: knowing knows that in relating itself to an object it is only outside itself—that it only externalises itself; that it itself appears to itself only as an object—or that that which appears to it as an object is only it itself.

On the other hand, says Hegel, there is at the same time this other moment in this process, that consciousness has just as much annulled and superseded this externalisation and objectivity and resumed them into itself, being thus at home in its other-being as such.

In this discussion are brought together all the illusions of speculation.

First of all: consciousness—self-consciousness—is at home with itself in its other-being as such. It is therefore —or if we here abstract from the Hegelian abstraction and put the self-consciousness of man instead of Self-consciousness—it is at home with itself in its other-being as such. This implies, for one thing that consciousness (knowing as knowing, thinking as thinking) pretends to be directly the other of itself—to be the world of sense, the real world, life—thought over-reaching itself in thought (Feuerbach).[99] This aspect is contained herein, inasmuch as consciousness as mere consciousness takes offence not at estranged objectivity, but at objectivity as such.

Secondly, this implies that self-conscious man, in so far as he has recognised and annulled and superseded the spiritual world (or his world’s spiritual, general mode of being) as self-alienation, nevertheless again confirms this in its alienated shape and passes it off as his true mode of being—re-establishes it, and pretends to be at home in his other-being as such. Thus, for instance, after annulling and superseding religion, after recognising religion to be a product of self-alienation, he yet finds confirmation of himself in religion as religion. Here is the root of Hegel’s false positivism, or of his merely apparent criticism: this is what Feuerbach designated as the positing, negating and re-establishing of religion or theology—but it has to be grasped in more general terms. Thus reason is at home in unreason as unreason. The man who has recognised that he is leading an alienated life in politics, law, etc., is leading his true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation, in contradiction with itself—in contradiction both with the knowledge of and with the essential being of the object—is thus true knowledge and life.

There can therefore no longer be any question about an act of accommodation of Hegel’s part vis-à-vis religion, the state, etc., since this lie is the lie of his principle.

If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness, but my alienated self-consciousness confirmed in it. I therefore know my own self, the self-consciousness that belongs to its very nature, confirmed not in religion but rather in annihilated and superseded religion.

In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of the true essence, effected precisely through negation of the pseudo-essence. With him the negation of the negation is the confirmation of the pseudo-essence, or of the self-estranged essence in its denial; or it is the denial of this pseudo-essence as an objective being dwelling outside man and independent of him, and its transformation into the subject.

A peculiar role, therefore, is played by the act of superseding in which denial and preservation—denial and affirmation—are bound together.

Thus, for example, in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Private Right superseded equals Morality, Morality superseded equals the Family, the Family superseded equals Civil Society, Civil Society superseded equals the State, the State superseded equals World History. In the actual world private right, morality, the family, civil society, the state, etc., remain in existence, only they have become moments of man—state of his existence and being—which have no validity in isolation, but dissolve and engender one another, etc. They have become moments of motion.

In their actual existence this mobile nature of theirs is hidden. It first appears and is made manifest in thought, in philosophy. Hence my true religious existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion; my true political existence is my existence within the philosophy of right; my true natural existence, existence in the philosophy of nature; my true artistic existence, existence in the philosophy of art; my true human existence, my existence in philosophy. Likewise the true existence of religion, the state, nature, art, is the philosophy of religion, of nature, of the state and of art. If, however, the philosophy of religion, etc., is for me the sole true existence of religion, then, too, it is only as a philosopher of religion that I am truly religious, and so I deny real religious sentiment and the really religious man. But at the same time I assert them, in part within my own existence or within the alien existence which I oppose to them—for this is only their philosophic expression—and in part I assert them in their own original shape, for they have validity for me as merely the apparent other-being, as allegories, forms of their own true existence (i.e., of my philosophical existence) hidden under sensuous disguises.

In just the same way, Quality superseded equals Quantity, Quantity superseded equals Measure, Measure superseded equals Essence, Essence superseded equals Appearance, Appearance superseded equals Actuality, Actuality superseded equals the Concept, the Concept superseded equals Objectivity, Objectivity superseded equals the Absolute Idea, the Absolute Idea superseded equals Nature, Nature superseded equals Subjective Mind, Subjective Mind superseded equals Ethical Objective Mind, Ethical Mind superseded equals Art, Art superseded equals Religion, Religion superseded equals Absolute Knowledge.[100]

On the one hand, this act of superseding is a transcending of the thought entity; thus, Private Property as a thought is transcended in the thought of morality. And because thought imagines itself to be directly the other of itself, to be sensuous reality—and therefore takes its own action for sensuous, real action—this superseding in thought, which leaves its object standing in the real world, believes that it has really overcome it. On the other hand, because the object has now become for it a moment of thought, thought takes it in its reality too to be self-confirmation of itself—of self-consciousness, of abstraction.

From the one point of view the existent which Hegel supersedes in philosophy is therefore not real religion, the real state, or real nature, but religion itself already become an object of knowledge, i.e., Dogmatics; the same with Jurisprudence, Political Science and Natural Science. From the one point of view, therefore, he stands in opposition both to the real thing and to immediate, unphilosophic science or the unphilosophic conceptions of this thing. He therefore contradicts their conventional conceptions. [101]

On the other hand, the religious man, etc., can find in Hegel his final confirmation.

It is now time to lay hold of the positive aspects of the Hegelian dialectic within the realm of estrangement.

(a) Annulling as an objective movement of retracting the alienation into self. This is the insight, expressed within the estrangement, concerning the appropriation of the objective essence through the annulment of its estrangement; it is the estranged insight into the real objectification of man, into the real appropriation of his objective essence through the annihilation of the estranged character of the objective world, through the annulment of the objective world in its estranged mode of being—just as atheism, being the annulment of God, is the advent of theoretic humanism, and communism, as the annulment of private property, is the justification of real human life as man’s possession and thus the advent of practical humanism (or just as atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the annulment of religion, whilst communism is humanism mediated with itself through the annulment of private property). Only through the annulment of this mediation—which is itself, however, a necessary premise—does positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being.

But atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction; they are not a losing of the objective world begotten by man—of man’s essential powers given over to the realm of objectivity; they are not a returning in poverty to unnatural, primitive simplicity. On the contrary, they are but the first real coming-to-be, the realisation become real for man, of man’s essence of the essence of man as something real.

Thus, by grasping the positive meaning of self-referred negation (if even again in estranged fashion) Hegel grasps man’s self-estrangement, the alienation of man’s essence, man’s loss of objectivity and his loss of realness as finding of self, change of his nature, his objectification and realisation. In short, within the sphere of abstraction, Hegel conceives labour as man’s act of self-genesis—conceives man’s relation to himself as an alien being and the manifesting of himself as an alien being to be the coming-to-be of species-consciousness and species-life.

(b) However, apart from, or rather in consequence of, the perverseness already described, this act appears in Hegel:

First of all as a merely formal, because abstract, act, because the human essence itself is taken to be only an abstract, thinking essence, conceived merely as self-consciousness. And,

secondly, because the conception is formal and abstract, the annulment of the alienation becomes a confirmation of the alienation; or again, for Hegel this movement of self-genesis and self-objectification in the form of self-alienation and self-estrangement is the absolute, and hence final, expression of human life—of life with itself as its aim, of life at rest in itself, of life that has attained oneness with its essence.

This movement, in its abstract form as dialectic, is therefore regarded as truly human life, and because it is nevertheless an abstraction—an estrangement of human life—it is regarded as a divine process, but as the divine process of man, a process traversed by man’s abstract, pure, absolute essence that is distinct from him.

Thirdly, this process must have a bearer, a subject. But the subject first emerges as a result. This result—the subject knowing itself as absolute self-consciousness—is therefore God—absolute Spirit—the self-knowing and self-manifesting Idea. Real man and real nature become mere predicates—symbols of this esoteric, unreal man and of this unreal nature. Subject and predicate are therefore related to each other in absolute inversion—a mystical subject-object or a subjectivity reaching beyond the object—the absolute subject as a process, as subject alienating itself and returning from alienation into itself, but at the same time retracting this alienation into itself, and the subject as this process; a pure, restless revolving within itself.

First, the formal and abstract conception of man’s act of self-genesis or self-objectification.

Hegel having posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness, the estranged object—the estranged essential reality of man—is nothing but consciousness, the thought of estrangement merely—estrangement’s abstract and therefore empty and unreal expression, negation. The annulment of the alienation is therefore likewise nothing but an abstract, empty annulment of that empty abstraction—the negation of the negation. The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativity—an abstraction which is again fixed as such and thought of as an independent activity—as sheer activity. Because this so-called negativity is nothing but the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content can in consequence be merely a formal content begotten by abstraction from all content. As a result there are general, abstract forms of abstraction pertaining to every content and on that account indifferent to, and, consequently, valid for, all content—the thought-forms or logical categories torn from real mind and from real nature. (We shall unfold the logical content of absolute negativity further on.)

Hegel’s positive achievement here, in his speculative logic, is that the determinate concepts, the universal fixed thought-forms in their independence vis-à-vis nature and mind are a necessary result of the general estrangement of the human essence and therefore also of human thought, and that Hegel has therefore brought these together and presented them as moments of the abstraction-process. For example, superseded Being is Essence, superseded Essence is Concept, the Concept superseded is ... the Absolute Idea. But what, then, is the Absolute Idea? It supersedes its own self again, if it does not want to traverse once more from the beginning the whole act of abstraction, and to acquiesce in being a totality of abstractions or in being the self-comprehending abstraction. But abstraction comprehending itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing: it must abandon itself—abandon abstraction—and so it arrives at an entity which is its exact contrary—at nature. Thus, the entire Logic is the demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that the Absolute Idea is nothing in itself; that only Nature is something.

The absolute idea, the abstract idea, which “considered with regard to its unity with itself is intuiting”[102] (Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, 3rd edition, p. 222), and which “in its own absolute truth resolves to let the moment of its particularity or of initial characterisation and other-being—the immediate idea, as its reflection, go forth freely from itself as nature” (l.c.)—this whole idea which behaves in such a strange and singular way, and which has given the He-gelians such terrible headaches, is from beginning to end nothing else but abstraction (i.e., the abstract thinker)—abstraction which, made wise by experience and enlightened concerning its truth, resolves under various (false and themselves still abstract) conditions to abandon itself and to replace its self-absorption, nothingness, generality and indeterminateness by its other-being, the particular, and the determinate; resolves to let nature, which it held hidden in itself only as an abstraction, as a thought-entity, go forth freely from itself: that is to say, abstraction resolves to forsake abstraction and to have a look at nature free of abstraction. The abstract idea, which without mediation becomes intuiting, is nothing else through-and-through but abstract thinking that gives itself up and resolves on intuition. This entire transition from Logic to Natural Philosophy is nothing else but the transition—so difficult to effect for the abstract thinker and therefore so queer in his description of it—from abstracting to intuiting. The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher forward from abstract thinking to intuiting is boredom—the longing for a content.

(The man estranged from himself is also the thinker estranged from his essence—that is, from the natural and human essence. His thoughts are therefore fixed mental shapes or ghosts dwelling outside nature and man. Hegel has locked up all these fixed mental forms together in his Logic, laying hold of each of them first as negation—that is, as an alienation of human thought—and then as negation of the negation—that is, as a superseding of this alienation, as a real expression of human thought. But as even this still takes place within the confines of the estrangement, this negation of the negation is in part the restoring of these fixed forms in their estrangement; in part a stopping-short at the last act—the act of self-reference in alienation—as the true mode of being of these fixed mental forms;[103] and in part, to the extent that this abstraction apprehends itself and experiences an infinite weariness with itself, there makes its appearance in Hegel, in the form of the resolution to recognise nature as the essential being and to go over to intuition, the abandonment of abstract thought—the abandonment of thought revolving solely within the orbit of thought, of thought devoid of eyes, of teeth, of ears, of everything.)

But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself—nature fixed in isolation from man—is nothing for man. It goes without saying that the abstract thinker who has committed himself to intuiting, intuits nature abstractly. Just as nature lay enclosed in the thinker in the form of the absolute idea, in the form of a thought-entity—in a shape which is his and yet is esoteric and mysterious even to him—so what he has let go forth from himself in truth is only this abstract nature, only nature as a thought-entity—but with the significance now of being the other-being of thought, of being real, intuited nature—of being nature distinguished from abstract thought. Or, to talk a human language, the abstract thinker learns in his intuition of nature that the entities which he thought to create from nothing, from pure abstraction—the entities he believed he was producing in the divine dialectic as pure products of the labour of thought forever weaving in itself and never looking outward-are nothing else but abstractions from characteristics of nature. To him, therefore, the whole of nature merely repeats the logical abstractions in a sensuous, external form. He analyses it and these abstractions over again. Thus, his intuition of nature is only the act of confirming his abstraction from the intuition of nature—is only the conscious repetition by him of the process of begetting his abstraction. Thus, for example, Time equals Negativity referred to itself (1.c., p. 238): to the superseded Becoming as Being there corresponds, in natural form, superseded Movement as Matter. Light is Reflection-in-Itself, in natural form. Body as Moon and Comet is the natural form of the antithesis which according to the Logic is on the one side the Positive resting on itself and on the other side the Negative resting on itself. The Earth is the natural form of the logical Ground, as the negative unity of the antithesis, etc.[104]

Nature as nature—that is to say, in so far as it is still sensuously distinguished from that secret sense hidden within it—nature isolated, distinguished from these abstractions, is nothing—a nothing proving itself to be nothing —is devoid of sense, or has only the sense of being an externality which has to be annulled.

“In the finite-teleological position is to be found the correct premise that nature does not contain within itself the absolute purpose” (p. 225).

Its purpose is the confirmation of abstraction.

“Nature has shown itself to be the Idea in the form of other-being. Since the Idea is in this form the negative of itself or external to itself, nature is not just relatively external vis-à-vis this idea, but externality constitutes the form in which it exists as nature” (p. 227).

Externality here is not to be understood as the self-externalising world of sense open to the light, open to the man endowed with senses. It is to be taken here in the sense of alienation—a mistake, a defect, which ought not to be. For what is true is still the Idea. Nature is only the form of the Idea’s other-being. And since abstract thought is the essence, that which is external to it is by its essence something merely external. The abstract thinker recognises at the same time that sensuousness—externality in contrast to thought weaving within itself—is the essence of nature. But he expresses this contrast in such a way as to make this externality of nature, its contrast to thought, its defect, so that inasmuch as it is distinguished from abstraction, nature is something defective. Something which is defective not merely for me or in my eyes but in itself— intrinsically—has something outside itself which it lacks. That is, its being is something other than it itself. Nature has therefore to supersede itself for the abstract thinker, for it is already posited by him as a potentially superseded being.

“For us, Mind has nature for its premise, being nature’s truth and for that reason its absolute prius. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has resulted as the Idea arrived at being-for-itself, the object of which, as well as the subject, is the concept. This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has become identical with itself. But it is this identity, therefore, only in being a return out of nature” (p. 392).

“As the abstract idea, revelation is unmediated transition to, the coming-to-be of, nature; as the revelation of the mind, which is free, it is the establishing of nature as the mind’s world—an establishing which at the same time, being reflection, is a presupposing of the world as independently-existing nature. Revelation in conception is the creation of nature as the mind’s being, in which the mind procures the affirmation and the truth of its freedom.”[105] “The absolute is mind. This is the highest definition of the absolute.”

Written by Karl Marx

in April-August 1844

First published in part by the

Institute of Marxism-Leninism

in Russian in 1927 and complete

in German in 1932.

Translated from

the German

APPENDIX

OUTLINES OF A CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY[106]

BY FREDERICK ENGELS

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific swindling was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud—a complete get-rich economy.

This political economy or science of enrichment born of the merchants’ mutual envy and greed, bears on its brow the mark of the most loathsome selfishness. People still lived in the naive belief that gold and silver were wealth, and considered nothing more urgent than the prohibition everywhere of the export of the “precious” metals. The nations faced each other like misers, each clasping to himself with both arms his precious money-bag, eyeing his neighbours with envy and distrust. Every conceivable means was employed to lure from the nations with whom one had commerce as much ready cash as possible, and to retain snugly within the customs-boundary all which had happily been gathered in.

A rigorously consistent pursuit of this principle would have killed trade. People therefore began to go beyond this first stage. They came to appreciate that capital locked up in a chest was dead capital, while capital in circulation multiplied itself continuously. They then became more philanthropic, sent off their ducats as call-birds to bring others back with them, and recognised that there is no harm in paying A too much for his commodity so long as it can be disposed of to B at a higher price.

On this basis the mercantile system was built. The avaricious character of trade was to some extent already beginning to be hidden. The nations drew slightly nearer to one another, concluded trade and friendship agreements, did business with one another and, for the sake of larger profits, treated one another with all possible love and kindness. But basically there was still the old rage for money and selfishness which from time to time erupted in wars, which in that day were all based on trade jealousy. In these wars it also became evident that trade, like robbery, is based on the law of the strong hand. No scruples whatever were felt about exacting by cunning or violence such treaties as were held to be the most advantageous.

The cardinal point in the whole mercantile system is the theory of the balance of trade. For as they still subscribed to the dictum that gold and silver were wealth, only such transactions as would finally bring ready cash into the country were considered profitable. To ascertain this, exports were compared with imports. When more had been exported than imported, it was believed that the difference had come into the country in ready cash, and that the country was richer by that difference. The art of the economists, therefore, consisted in ensuring that at the end of each year exports should show a favourable balance over imports; and for the sake of this ridiculous illusion thousands of men have been slaughtered! Trade, too, has had its crusades and inquisitions.

The eighteenth century, the century of revolution, also revolutionised economics. But just as all the revolutions of this century were one-sided and bogged down in antitheses—just as abstract materialism was set in opposition to abstract spiritualism, the republic to monarchy, the social contract to divine right—likewise the economic revolution did not get beyond antithesis. The premises remained everywhere in force: materialism did not contend with the Christian contempt for and humiliation of Man, and merely posited Nature instead of the Christian God as the Absolute facing Man. In politics no one dreamt of examining the premises of the State as such. It did not occur to economics to question the validity of private property. Therefore, the new economics was only half an advance. It was obliged to betray and to disavow its own premises, to have recourse to sophistry and hypocrisy so as to cover up the contradictions in which it became entangled, so as to reach the conclusions to which it was driven not by its premises but by the humane spirit of the century. Thus economics took on a philanthropic character. It withdrew its favour from the producers and bestowed it on the consumers. It affected a solemn abhorrence of the bloody terror of the mercantile system, and proclaimed trade to be a bond of friendship and union among nations as among individuals. All was pure splendour and magnificence—yet the premises reasserted themselves soon enough, and in contrast to this sham philanthropy produced the Malthusian population theory—the crudest, most barbarous theory that ever existed, a system of despair which struck down all those beautiful phrases about love of neighbour and world citizenship. The premises begot and reared the factory-system and modern slavery, which yields nothing in inhumanity and cruelty to ancient slavery. Modern economics—the system of free trade based on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations—reveals itself to be that same hypocrisy, inconsistency and immorality which now confront free humanity in every sphere.

But was Smith’s system, then, not an advance? Of course it was, and a necessary advance at that. It was necessary to overthrow the mercantile system with its monopolies and hindrances to trade, so that the true consequences of private property could come to light. It was necessary for all these petty, local and national considerations to recede into the background, so that the struggle of our time could become a universal human struggle. It was necessary for the theory of private property to leave the purely empirical path of merely objective enquiry and to acquire a more scientific character which would also make it responsible for the consequences, and thus transfer the matter to a universally human sphere. It was necessary to carry the immorality contained in the old economics to its highest pitch, by attempting to deny it and by veiling it in hypocrisy (a necessary result of that attempt). All this lay in the nature of the matter.

We gladly concede that it is only thanks to the establishment and development of free trade that we were placed in a position from which we can go beyond the economics of private property; but we must at the same time have the right to demonstrate the utter theoretical and practical nullity of this free trade.

The nearer to our time the economists whom we have to judge, the more severe must our judgement become. For while Smith and Malthus only had scattered fragments to go by, the modern economists had the whole system complete before them: the consequences had all been drawn; the contradictions came clearly enough to light; yet they did not come to examining the premises—and still undertook the responsibility for the whole system. The nearer the economists come to the present time, the further they depart from honesty. With every advance of time, sophistry necessarily increases, so as to prevent economics from lagging behind the times. This is why Ricardo, for instance, is more guilty than Adam Smith, and MacCulloch and Mill more guilty than Ricardo.

Modern economics cannot even judge the mercantile system correctly, since it is itself one-sided and as yet fenced in by that very system’s premises. Only that view which rises above the opposition of the two systems, which criticises the premises common to both and proceeds from a purely human, universal basis, can assign to both their proper position.

It will become evident that the protagonists of free trade are more inveterate monopolists than the old mercantilists themselves. It will become evident that the sham humanity of the modern economists hides a barbarism of which their predecessors knew nothing; that the predecessors’ conceptual confusion is simple and consistent compared with the double-tongued logic of their attackers, and that neither of the two can reproach the other with anything which would not recoil upon himself.

This is why modern liberal economics cannot comprehend the restoration of the mercantile system by List,[107] whilst for us the matter is quite simple. The inconsistency and two-sidedness of liberal economics must of necessity dissolve again into its basic components. Just as theology must either regress to blind faith or progress towards free philosophy, free trade must produce the restoration of monopolies on the one hand and the abolition of private property on the other.

The only positive advance which liberal economics has made is the unfolding of the laws of private property. These are contained in it, at any rate, although not yet fully unfolded and clearly expressed. It follows that on all points where it is a question of deciding which is the shortest road to wealth—i.e., in all strictly economic controversies—the protagonists of free trade have right on their side. That is, needless to say, in controversies with the monopolists—not with the opponents of private property, for the English Socialists have long since proved both practically and theoretically that the latter are in a position to settle economic questions more correctly even from an economic point of view.

In the critique of political economy, therefore, we shall examine the basic categories, uncover the contradiction introduced by the free-trade system, and bring out the consequences of both sides of the contradiction.

The term “national wealth” has only arisen as a result of the liberal economists’ passion for generalisation. As long as private property exists, this term has no meaning. The “national wealth” of the English is very great and yet they are the poorest people under the sun. One either dismisses this term completely, or one accepts such premises as give it meaning. Similarly with the terms “national economy” and “political or public economy.” In the present circumstances that science ought to be called private economy, for its public connections exist only for the sake of private property.

The immediate consequence of private property is trade—exchange of reciprocal demand—buying and selling. This trade, like every activity, must under the dominion of private property become a direct source of gain for the trader; i.e., each must seek to sell as dear as possible and buy as cheap as possible. In every purchase and sale, therefore, two men with diametrically opposed interests confront each other. The confrontation is decidedly antagonistic, for each knows the intentions of the other—knows that they are opposed to his own. Therefore, the first consequence is mutual mistrust, on the one hand, and the justification of this mistrust—the application of immoral means to attain an immoral end—on the other. Thus, the first maxim in trade is “discretion”—the concealment of everything which might reduce the value of the article in question. The result is that in trade it is permitted to take the utmost advantage of the ignorance, the trust, of the opposing party, and likewise to bestow qualities on one’s commodity which it does not possess. In a word, trade is legalised fraud. Any merchant who wants to give truth its due can bear me witness that actual practice conforms with this theory.

The mercantile system still had a certain artless Catholic candour and did not in the least conceal the immoral nature of trade. We have seen how it openly paraded its mean avarice. The mutually hostile attitude of the nations in the eighteenth century, loathsome envy and trade jealousy, were the logical consequences of trade as such. Public opinion had not yet become humanised. Why, therefore, conceal things which resulted from the inhuman, hostile nature of trade itself?

But when the economic Luther, Adam Smith, criticised past economics things had changed considerably. The century had been humanised; reason had asserted itself; morality began to claim its eternal right. The extorted trade treaties, the commercial wars, the surly isolation of the nations, offended too greatly against advanced consciousness. Protestant hypocrisy took the place of Catholic candour. Smith proved that humanity, too, was rooted in the nature of trade; that trade, instead of being “the most fertile source of discord and animosity” must become a “bond of union and friendship among nations as among individuals” (cf. Wealth of Nations, Bk. 4, ch. 3, §2); that after all it lay in the nature of things for trade, taken overall, to be profitable to all parties concerned.

Smith was right to eulogise trade as humane. There is nothing absolutely immoral in the world. Trade, too, has an aspect wherein it pays homage to morality and humanity. But what homage! The law of the strong hand, the open highway robbery of the Middle Ages, became humanised when it passed over into trade; and trade became humanised when, in its first stage characterised by the prohibition to export money, it passed over into the mercantile system. Now the mercantile system itself was humanised. Naturally, it is in the interest of the trader to be on good terms with the one from whom he buys cheap as well as with the other to whom he sells dear. A nation therefore acts very imprudently if it fosters feelings of animosity in its suppliers and customers. The more friendly, the more profitable. Such is the humanity of trade. And this hypocritical way of misusing morality for immoral purposes is the pride of the free-trade system.

“Have we not overthrown the barbarism of the monopolies?” exclaim the hypocrites. “Have we not carried civilisation to distant parts of the world? Have we not brought about the fraternisation of the peoples, and reduced the number of wars?” Yes, all this you have done—but how! You have destroyed the small monopolies so that the one great basic monopoly, property, may function the more freely and unrestrictedly. You have civilised the ends of the earth to win new terrain for the deployment of your vile avarice. You have brought about the fraternisation of the peoples—but the fraternity is the fraternity of thieves. You have reduced the number of wars—to earn all the bigger profits in peace, to intensify to the utmost the enmity between individuals, the ignominious war of competition! When have you done anything out of pure humanity, from consciousness of the nullity of the opposition between the general and individual interest? When have you been moral without being interested, without harbouring at the back of your mind immoral, egoistical motives?

After liberal economics had done its best to universalise enmity by dissolving nationalities so as to transform mankind into a horde of ravenous beasts (for what else are competitors?) who devour one another just because each has identical interests with all the others—after this preparatory work there remained but one step to take before the goal was reached—the dissolution of the family.

To accomplish this, economy’s own beautiful invention, the factory-system, came to its aid. The last vestige of common interests, the community of possessions constituted by the family, is being undermined by the factory-system and—at least here in England—is already in the process of dissolution. It is a common practice for children, as soon as they are capable of work (i.e., as soon as they reach the age of nine), to spend their wages themselves, to look upon their parental home as a mere boarding-house, and to make their parents an allowance of a certain sum for food and lodging. How can it be otherwise? What else can result from the separation of interests, such as forms the basis of the free-trade system? Once a principle is set in motion, it works by its own impetus through all its consequences, whether the economists like it or not.

But the economist does not know himself what cause he serves. He does not know that with all his egoistical reasoning he nevertheless forms but a link in the chain of mankind’s universal progress. He does not know that by his dissolution of all sectional interests he merely paves the way for the great transformation to which the century is moving—the reconciliation of mankind with nature and with itself.

The next category established by trade is value. There is no quarrel between the modern economists and their predecessors over this category, just as there is none over all the others, since the monopolists in their obsessive mania for getting rich had no time left to concern themselves with categories. All controversies over such points stem from the modern economists.

The economist who lives by antitheses has also of course a double value—abstract or real, and exchange-value. There was a protracted quarrel over the nature of real value between the English, who defined the costs of production as the expression of real value, and the Frenchman, Say, who claimed to measure this value by the utility of an object. The quarrel hung in doubt from the beginning of the century, then became dormant without a decision having been reached. The economists cannot decide anything.

The English—MacCulloch and Ricardo in particular—thus claim that the abstract value of a thing is determined by the costs of production. The abstract value, of course, not the exchange-value, the “exchangeable value,”[108] value in trade—that, they say, is something quite different. Why are the costs of production the measure of value? Because—listen to this!—because no one in ordinary conditions and leaving aside the circumstance of competition would sell an object for less than the cost to him of its production. Would sell—? What have we to do with “selling” here, where it is not a question of trade value? So we find trade again, which we are specifically supposed to leave aside—and what trade! A trade in which the cardinal factor, the circumstance of competition, is not to be taken into account! First, an abstract value; now also an abstract trade—a trade without competition, i.e., a man without a body, a thought without a brain to produce thoughts. And does the economist never stop to think that as soon as competition is left out of account there is no guarantee at all that the producer will sell his commodity just at the cost of production? What confusion!

Furthermore: Let us concede for a moment that everything is as the economist says. Supposing someone were to make something utterly useless with tremendous exertion and at enormous cost—were to make something which no one desires: is that also worth its production costs? Certainly not, says the economist: Who will want to buy it? So we suddenly have not only Say’s despised utility but alongside it—with “buying”—the circumstance of competition. It can’t be done—the economist cannot for one moment hold on to his abstraction. Not only what he painfully seeks to remove—competition—but also what he attacks—utility—crops up at every moment. Abstract value and its determination by the costs of production are, after all, only abstractions, nonentities.

But let us suppose once more for a moment that the economist is correct—how then will he determine the costs of production without taking account of competition? When examining the costs of production we shall see that this category too is based on competition, and here once more it becomes evident how little the economist is able to substantiate his claims.

If we turn to Say, we find the same abstraction. The utility of an object is something purely subjective, something which cannot be decided absolutely, and certainly something not to be decided, anyway, so long as one still roams about in antitheses. According to this theory, the necessities of life ought to possess more value than luxury articles. The only possible way to arrive at a more or less objective, apparently general decision on the greater or lesser utility of an object is, under the dominion of private property, by the circumstance of competition; and yet it is precisely that circumstance which is to be left aside. But if the circumstance of competition is admitted, production costs enter it as well; for no one will sell for less than what he has himself invested in production. Thus, here, too, the one side of the opposition passes over involuntarily into the other.

Let us try to introduce clarity into this confusion. The value of an object includes both factors, which the contending parties so rudely separate—and, as we have seen, without success. Value is the relation of production costs to utility. The first application of value is the decision as to whether a thing ought to be produced at all; i.e., as to whether utility counterbalances production costs. Only then can one talk of the application of value to exchange. The production costs of two objects being equal, the deciding factor determining their comparative value will be utility.

This basis is the only just basis of exchange. But if one proceeds from this basis, who is to decide the utility of the object? The mere opinion of the parties concerned? Then in any event one will be cheated. Or is this decision a determination grounded in the inherent utility of the object independent of the parties concerned, and not apparent to them? If so, the exchange can only be effected by coercion, and each party considers itself cheated. The opposition between the real inherent utility of the thing and the determination of that utility, between the determination of utility and the freedom of those who exchange, cannot be superseded without superseding private property; and once this is superseded, there can no longer be any question of exchange as it exists at present. The practical application of the concept of value will then be increasingly confined to the decision about production, and that is its proper sphere.

But how do matters stand at present? We have seen how the concept of value is violently torn asunder, and how the detached sides are each substituted for the whole. Production costs, distorted from the outset by competition, are supposed to be value itself. So is mere subjective utility—since no other kind of utility can exist at this stage. To help these lame definitions on to their feet, we must in both cases have recourse to competition; and the best of it is that with the English competition represents utility, in contrast to the costs of production, whilst inversely with Say it introduces the costs of production in contrast to utility. But what kind of utility, what kind of production costs, does it introduce? Its utility depends on chance, on fashion, on the whim of the rich; its production costs fluctuate with the fortuitous relationship of demand and supply.

The difference between real value and exchange-value is based on the fact—namely, that the value of a thing differs from the so-called equivalent given for it in trade; i.e., that this equivalent is not an equivalent. This so-called equivalent is the price of the thing, and if the economist were honest, he would employ this term for trade value. But he has still to keep up some sort of pretence that price is somehow bound up with value, lest the immorality of trade become too obvious. It is, however, quite correct, and a fundamental law of private property, that price is determined by the reciprocal action of production costs and competition. This purely empirical law was the first to be discovered by the economist; and from this law he then abstracted his “real value,” i.e, the price at the time when competition is in a state of equilibrium, when demand and supply cover each other. Then, of course, what remains over are the costs of production and it is these which the economist proceeds to call “real value,” whilst they are merely the determinateness of price. Thus everything in economics stands on its head. Value, the origin or source of price, is made dependent on that which is its own product. As is well known, this inversion is the essence of abstraction; on which see Feuerbach.

According to the economists, the production costs of a commodity consist of three elements: the rent for the piece of land required to produce the raw material; the capital with its profit; and the wages for the labour required for production and manufacture. But it becomes immediately evident that capital and labour are identical, since the economists themselves confess that capital is “stored-up labour.” We are therefore left with only two sides—the natural objective side, land; and the human, subjective side, labour, which includes capital and, besides capital, a third factor which the economist does not think about—I mean the spiritual element of invention, of thought, alongside the physical element of sheer labour. What has the economist to do with the spirit of invention? Have not all inventions come flying to him without any effort on his part? Has one of them cost him anything? Why then should he bother about them in the calculation of production costs? Land, capital and labour are for him the conditions of wealth, and he requires no more. Science is no concern of his. What does it matter to him that he has received its gifts through Berthollet, Davy, Liebig, Watt, Cartwright, etc.—gifts which have benefited him and his production immeasurably? He does not know how to calculate such things; the advances of science go beyond his figures. But in a rational order which has gone beyond the division of interests as it is found with the economist, the spiritual element certainly belongs among the elements of production and will find its place, too, in economics among the costs of production. And here it is certainly gratifying to know that the promotion of science also brings its material reward; to know that a single achievement of science like James Watt’s steam-engine has brought in more for the world in the first fifty years of its existence than the world has spent on the promotion of science since the beginning of time.

We have, then, two elements of production in operation —nature and man, with man again active physically and spiritually, and can go back to the economist and his production costs.

What cannot be monopolised has no value, says the economist—a proposition which we shall examine more closely later on. If we say “has no price,” then the proposition is valid for the order which rests on private property. If land could be had as easily as air, no one would pay rent. Since this is not the case, but since, rather, the extent of a piece of land to be acquired is limited in any particular case, one pays rent for the acquired, i.e., the monopolised land, or one pays down a purchase price for it. After this enlightenment about the origin of ground-rent it is, however, very strange to have to hear from the economist that the rent of land is the difference between the yield from the rented land and from the worst land worth cultivating at all. As is well known, this is the definition of rent fully developed for the first time by Ricardo. This definition is no doubt correct in practice if one presupposes that a fall in demand reacts instantaneously on rent, and at once puts a corresponding amount of the worst cultivated land out of cultivation. This, however, is not the case, and the definition is therefore inadequate. Moreover, it does not cover the causation of rent, and must therefore be dismissed for that reason alone. In opposition to this definition, Col. T. P. Thompson, the champion of the Anti-Corn Law League, revived Adam Smith’s definition, and consolidated it. According to him, rent is the relation between the competition of those striving for the use of the land and the limited quantity of available land. Here at least is a return to the origin of rent; but this explanation does not take into account the varying fertility of the soil, just as the previous explanation leaves out competition.

Once more, therefore, we have two one-sided and hence only imperfect definitions of a single object. As in the case of the concept of value, we shall again have to bring together these two definitions so as to find the correct definition which will follow from the development of the thing itself and thus embrace all practice. Rent is the relation between the productivity of the land—-between the natural side (which in turn consists of natural fertility and human cultivation—labour applied to effect improvement), and the human side, competition. The economists may shake their heads over this “definition”; they will discover to their horror that it embraces everything relevant to this matter.

The landowner has nothing with which to reproach the merchant.

He practises robbery in monopolising the land. He practises robbery in exploiting for his own benefit the increase in population which increases competition and thus the value of his estate; in turning into a source of personal advantage that which has not been his own doing—that which is his by sheer accident. He practises robbery in leasing his land, when he eventually seizes for himself the improvements effected by his tenant. This is the secret of the ever-increasing wealth of the great landowners.

The axioms which qualify as robbery the landowner’s method of deriving an income—namely, that each has a right to the product of his labour, or that no one shall reap where he has not sown—are not something we have set forth. The first excludes the duty of feeding children; the second deprives each generation of the right to live, since each generation starts with what it inherits from the preceding generation. These axioms are, rather, implications of private property. Either one implements its implications or one abandons private property as a premise.

Indeed, the original act of appropriation itself is justified by the assertion of the still earlier common property-right. Thus, wherever we turn, private property leads us into contradictions.

To make earth an object of huckstering—the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence—was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering. It was and is to this very day an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And the original appropriation—the monopolisation of the earth by a few, the exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life—yields nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth.

If here again we abandon private property, rent is reduced to its truth, to the rational notion which essentially lies at its root. The value of the land divorced from it as rent then reverts to the land itself. This value, to be measured by the productivity of equal areas of land subjected to equal applications of labour, should, however, be taken into account as part of the production costs when determining the value of products; and like rent, it is the relation of productivity to competition—but to true competition, such as will be developed when its time comes.

We have seen how capital and labour are initially identical; we see further from the explanations of the economist himself, how, in the process of production, capital, the result of labour, is immediately transformed again into the substratum, into the material of labour; and how therefore the momentarily established separation of capital from labour immediately gives way to the unity of both. And yet the economist separates capital from labour, and yet insists on the division without giving any other recognition to their unity than by his defining capital as “stored-up labour.” The split between capital and labour resulting from private property is nothing but the inner dichotomy of labour corresponding to this divided condition and arising out of it. And after this separation is accomplished, capital divides itself once more into the original capital and profit—the increment of capital, which it receives in the process of production; although in practice profit is immediately lumped together with capital and set into motion with it. Indeed, even profit is in its turn split into interest and profit proper. In the case of interest, the absurdity of these splits is carried to the extreme. The immorality of interest-loans, of receiving without working, for merely lending, though already inherent in private property, is only too obvious, and has long ago been recognised for what it is by unsophisticated popular consciousness, which in such matters is usually right. All these minute splits and divisions stem from the original separation of capital from labour and from the culmination of this separation—the division of mankind into capitalists and workers—a division which daily becomes ever more acute, and which, as we shall see, is bound to deepen. This separation, however, like the separation already considered of land from capital and labour, is in the final analysis an impossible separation. What share land, capital and labour each have in any particular product cannot be determined. The three magnitudes are incommensurable. The soil creates the raw material, but not without capital and labour. Capital presupposes land and labour. And labour presupposes at least land, and usually also capital. The functions of these three elements are completely different, and are not to be measured by a fourth common standard. Therefore, when it comes to dividing the proceeds among the three elements under existing conditions, there is no inherent standard; it is an entirely alien and to them fortuitous standard that decides—competition, the slick right of the stronger. Rent implies competition; profit on capital is solely determined by competition; and the position with regard to wages we shall see presently.

If we abandon private property, then all these unnatural divisions disappear. The difference between interest and profit disappears; capital is nothing without labour, without movement. The significance of profit is reduced to the weight which capital carries in the determination of the costs of production; and profit thus remains inherent in capital, in the same way as capital itself reverts to its original unity with labour.

Labour—the main factor in production, the “source of wealth,” free human activity—comes off badly with the economist. Just as capital was previously separated from labour, likewise labour is now in turn split for a second time: the product of labour confronts labour as wages, is separated from it, and is as usual once more determined by competition—there being, as we have seen, no firm standard determining labour’s share in production. If we do away with private property, this unnatural separation also disappears. Labour becomes its own reward, and the true significance of the wages of labour, hitherto alienated, comes to light—namely, the significance of labour for the determination of the production costs of a thing.

We have seen that in the end everything comes down to competition, so long as private property exists. It is the economist’s principal category—his most beloved daughter, whom he ceaselessly caresses—and look out for the medusa’s head which she will show you!

The immediate consequence of private property was the split of production into two opposing sides—the natural and the human sides, the soil which without fertilisation by man is dead and sterile, and human activity, whose first condition is that very soil. Furthermore we have seen how human activity in its turn was dissolved into labour and capital, and how these two sides antagonistically confronted each other. Thus already we had the struggle of the three elements against one another, instead of their mutual support; and to make matters worse, private property brings in its wake the splintering of each of these elements. One estate stands confronted by another, one piece of capital by another, one unit of labour-power by another. In other words, because private property isolates everyone in his own crude solitariness, and because, nevertheless, everyone has the same interest as his neighbour, one landowner stands antagonistically confronted by another, one capitalist by another, one worker by another. In this discord of identical interests resulting precisely from this identity is consummated the immorality of mankind’s condition hitherto; and this consummation is competition.

The opposite of competition is monopoly. Monopoly was the war-cry of the mercantilists; competition the battle-cry of the liberal economists. It is easy to see that this antithesis is again a quite hollow antithesis. Every competitor cannot but desire to have the monopoly, be he worker, capitalist or landowner. Each smaller group of competitors cannot but desire to have the monopoly for itself against all others. Competition is based on self-interest, and self-interest in turn breeds monopoly. In short, competition passes over into monopoly. On the other hand, monopoly cannot stem the tide of competition—indeed, it itself breeds competition; just as high tariffs, for instance, or a prohibition of imports positively breed the competition of smuggling. The contradiction of competition is exactly the same as that of private property. It is in the interest of each to possess everything, but in the interest of the whole that each possess an equal amount. Thus, the general and the individual interest are diametrically opposed to each other. The contradiction of competition is that each cannot but desire the monopoly, whilst the whole as such is bound to lose by monopoly and must therefore remove it. Moreover, competition already presupposes monopoly—namely, the monopoly of property (and here the hypocrisy of the liberals comes once more to light); and so long as the monopoly of property exists, for just so long the possession of monopoly is equally justified—for monopoly, once it exists, is also property. What a pitiful half-measure, therefore, to attack the small monopolies, and to leave untouched the basic monopoly! And if we here bring in the economist’s proposition mentioned above, that nothing has value which cannot be monopolised—that nothing, therefore, which does not permit of such monopolisation can enter this arena of competition—then our assertion that competition presupposes monopoly is completely justified.

The law of competition is that demand and supply always strive to complement each other, and therefore never do so. The two sides are torn apart again and transformed into flat opposition. Supply always follows close on demand without ever quite covering it. It is either too big or too small, never corresponding to demand; because in this unconscious condition of mankind no one knows how big supply or demand is. If demand is greater than supply the price rises and, as a result, supply is to a certain degree stimulated. As soon as it comes on to the market, prices fall; and if it becomes greater than demand, then the fall in prices is so significant that demand is once again stimulated. So it goes on unendingly—a permanently unhealthy state of affairs—a constant alternation of over-stimulation and collapse which precludes all advance—a state of perpetual fluctuation perpetually unresolved. This law with its constant balancing, in which whatever is lost here is gained there, seems to the economist marvellous. It is his chief glory—he cannot see enough of it, and considers it in all its possible and impossible applications. Yet it is obvious that this law is a purely natural law, and not a law of the mind. It is a law which produces revolution. The economist comes along with his lovely theory of demand and supply, proves to you that “one can never produce too much,” and practice replies with trade crises, which re-appear as regularly as the comets, and of which we have now on the average one every five to seven years. For the last eight years these trade crises have come just as regularly as the great plagues did in the past—and they have brought in their train more misery and more immorality than the latter. (Compare Wade: History of the Middle and Working Classes, London, 1835, p. 211.) Of course, these trade crises confirm the law, confirm it exhaustively —but in a manner different from that which the economist would have us believe to be the case. What are we to think of a law which can only assert itself through periodic crises? It is just a natural law based on the unconsciousness of the participants. If the producers as such knew how much the consumers required, if they were to organise production, if they were to share it out amongst themselves, then the fluctuations of competition and its tendency to crisis would be impossible. Produce with consciousness as human beings—not as dispersed atoms without consciousness of your species—and you are beyond all these artificial and untenable antitheses. But as long as you continue to produce in the present unconscious, thoughtless manner, at the mercy of chance—for just so long trade crises will remain; and each successive crisis is bound to become more universal and therefore worse than the preceding one; is bound to impoverish a larger body of small capitalists, and to augment in increasing proportion the numbers of that class who live by labour alone, thus visibly enlarging the mass of labour to be employed (the major problem of our economists) and finally causing a social revolution such as has never been dreamt of by the school-wisdom of the economists.

The perpetual fluctuation of prices such as is created by the condition of competition completely deprives trade of its last vestige of morality. Value is no longer even mentioned; the same system which appears to attach such importance to value, which confers on the abstraction of value in money form the honour of having an existence of its own—this very system destroys by means of competition the inherent value of all things, and daily and hourly changes the value-relationship of all things to one another. Where does there remain any possibility of an exchange based on a moral foundation in this whirlpool? In this continuous up-and-down, every one must seek to hit upon the most favourable moment for purchase and sale; every one must become a speculator—that is to say, must reap where he has not sown; must enrich himself at the expense of others, must calculate on the misfortune of others, or let chance win for him. The speculator always counts on disasters, particularly on bad harvests. He utilises everything—for instance, the New York fire in its time—and immorality’s culminating point is the speculation on the Stock Exchange, where history, and with it mankind, is demoted to a means of gratifying the avarice of the calculating and gambling speculator. And let not the honest “respectable” merchant rise above the gambling on the Stock Exchange with a Pharisaic “I thank thee, O Lord...” etc. He is as bad as the speculators in stocks and shares. He speculates just as much as they do. He has to: competition compels him to. And his trading activity therefore implies the same immorality as theirs. The truth of the relationship of competition is the relationship of the power of consumption to the power of production. In a world worthy of mankind there will be no other competition than this. The community will have to calculate what it can produce with the means at its disposal; and in the light of the relationship of this productive power to the mass of consumers it will determine how far it has to raise or lower production, how far it has to give way to, or curtail, luxury. But so that they may be able to pass a correct judgement on this relationship and on the increase in productive power to be expected from a rational state of affairs within the community, I invite my readers to consult the writings of the English Socialists, and partly also those of Fourier.

Subjective competition—the contest of capital against capital, of labour against labour, etc.—will under these conditions be reduced to the spirit of emulation grounded in human nature (a concept tolerably developed so far only by Fourier), which after the transcendence of opposing interests will be confined to its proper and rational sphere.

The struggle of capital against capital, of labour against labour, of land against land, drives production to a fever-pitch at which production turns all natural and rational relations upside-down. No capital can stand the competition of another if it is not brought to the highest pitch of activity. No estate can be profitably cultivated if it does not continuously increase its productive power. No worker can hold his own against his competitors if he does not devote all his powers to labour. No one at all who becomes involved in the struggle of competition can stand the strain without the utmost exertion of his powers, without renouncing every truly human purpose. The consequence of this over-exertion on the one side is, inevitably, collapse on the other. When the fluctuation of competition is small, when demand and supply, consumption and production, are almost equal, a stage must be reached in the development of production where there is so much superfluous productive power that the great mass of the nation has nothing to live on, that the people starve from sheer abundance. For some considerable time England has found herself in this crazy position, in this living absurdity. When, as a necessary consequence of such a situation, production is subject to greater fluctuations, then the alternation of boom and crisis, over-production and slump, sets in. The economist has never been able to explain to himself this mad situation. In order to explain it, he invented the Population Theory, which is just as senseless—indeed even more senseless—than the contradiction of co-existing wealth and poverty. The economist could not afford to see the truth; he could not afford to admit that this contradiction is a simple consequence of competition; for otherwise his entire system would have fallen to bits.

For us the matter is easy to explain. The productive power at mankind’s disposal is immeasurable. The productivity of the soil can be increased ad infinitum by the application of capital, labour and science. According to the most able economists and statisticians (cf. Alison’s Principles of Population, Vol. 1, chs. 1 and 2),[109] “over-populated” Great Britain can be brought within ten years to produce a corn yield sufficient for a population of six times its present size. Capital increases daily; the power of labour grows with population; and day by day science increasingly makes the power of nature subject to man. This immeasurable productive capacity, handled with consciousness and in the interest of all, would soon reduce to a minimum the labour falling to the share of mankind. Left to competition, it does the same, but within a context of antitheses. One part of the land is cultivated in the best possible manner, whilst another part—in Great Britain and Ireland thirty million acres of good land—lies barren. One part of capital circulates with amazing speed; another lies dead in the chest. One part of the workers works fourteen to sixteen hours a day, whilst another part stands idle and inactive, and starves. Or the division leaves this realm of simultaneousness: today trade is good; demand is very considerable; everyone works; capital is turned over with miraculous speed; farming flourishes; the workers work themselves sick. Tomorrow, a slump sets in. The cultivation of the land is not worth the effort; entire stretches of land remain untilled; the flow of capital freezes; the workers have no employment, and the whole country labours under surplus wealth and surplus population.

The economist cannot afford to accept this exposition of the subject as correct; otherwise, as has been said, he would have to give up his whole system of competition. He would have to recognise the hollowness of his antithesis of production and consumption, of surplus population and surplus wealth. To bring fact and theory into conformity with each other—since this fact just could not be denied—the Population Theory was invented.

Malthus, the originator of this doctrine, maintains that population is always pressing on the means of subsistence; that as soon as production increases, population increases in the same proportion; and that the inherent tendency of the population to multiply in excess of the available means of subsistence is the root of all misery and all vice. For, when there are too many people, they have to be disposed of in one way or another: either they must be killed by violence or they must starve. But when this has happened, there is once more a gap which other multipliers of the population immediately start to fill up once more: and so the old misery begins all over again. What is more, this is the case in all circumstances—not only in civilised, but also in primitive, conditions. In New Holland,[110] with a population density of one per square mile, the savages suffer just as much from over-population as England. In short, if we want to be consistent, we must admit that the earth was already over-populated when only one man existed . The implications of this line of thought are that since it is just the poor who are the surplus, nothing should be done for them except to make their starvation as easy as possible, to convince them that it cannot be helped and that there is no other salvation for their whole class than keeping propagation down to the absolute minimum. Or if this does not work, then it is always better to establish a state institution for the painless killing of the children of the poor, such as “Marcus”[111] has suggested, whereby each working-class family would be allowed to have two and a half children, any excess being painlessly killed. Charity would be a crime, since it supports the augmentation of the surplus population. Indeed, it will be very advantageous to declare poverty a crime and to turn poor-houses into prisons, as has already happened in England as a result of the new “liberal” Poor Law. Admittedly it is true that this theory ill conforms with the Bible’s doctrine of the perfection of God and of His creation; but “it is a poor refutation to enlist the Bible against facts.”

Am I to go on any longer elaborating this vile, infamous theory, this revolting blasphemy against nature and mankind? Am I to pursue its consequences any further? Here at last we have the immorality of the economist brought to its highest pitch. What are all the wars and horrors of the monopoly system compared with this theory! And it is just this theory which is the keystone of the liberal system of free trade, whose fall entails the downfall of the entire edifice. For if here competition is proved to be the root cause of misery, poverty and crime, who then will still dare to speak up for it?

In his above-mentioned work, Alison has shaken the Malthusian theory by invoking the productive power of the earth, and by opposing to the Malthusian principle the fact that each adult can produce more than he himself needs—a fact without which mankind could not multiply, indeed could not even exist; for what else could those still growing up live on? But Alison does not go to the root of the matter, and therefore in the end reaches the same conclusion as Malthus. True enough, he proves that Malthus’s principle is incorrect, but cannot gainsay the facts which have impelled Malthus to his principle.

If Malthus had not considered the matter so one-sidedly, he could not have failed to see that surplus population or labour-power is invariably tied up with surplus wealth, surplus capital and surplus landed property. The population is only too large where the productive power as a whole is too large. The condition of every over-populated country, particularly England, since the time when Malthus wrote, makes this abundantly clear. These were the facts which Malthus ought to have considered in their totality, and whose consideration was bound to have led to the correct conclusion. Instead, he selected one fact, gave no consideration to the others, and therefore arrived at his crazy conclusion. The second error he committed was to confuse means of subsistence with means of employment. That population is always pressing on the means of employment—that the number of people produced varies with the number of people who can be employed—in short, that the production of labour-power has been regulated so far by the law of competition and is therefore also exposed to periodic crises and fluctuations—this is a fact whose establishment constitutes Malthus’s merit. But the means of employment are not the means of subsistence. Only in their end-result are the means of employment increased by the increase in machine-power and capital. The means of subsistence increase as soon as productive power increases even slightly. Here a new contradiction in economics comes to light. The economist’s “demand” is not the real demand; his “consumption” is an artificial consumption. For the economist, only that person really demands, only that person is a real consumer, who has an equivalent to offer for what he receives. But if it is a fact that every adult produces more than he himself can consume, that children are like trees which give superabundant returns on the outlays invested in them—and these certainly are facts, are they not?—then one ought to believe that each worker should be able to produce far more than he needs and that the community, therefore, should be very glad to provide him with everything he needs; one ought to believe that a large family should be looked upon by the community as a very welcome gift. But the economist, with his crude outlook, knows no other equivalent than that which is paid to him in tangible ready cash. He is so firmly set in his antitheses that the most striking facts are of as little concern to him as the most scientific principles.

We destroy the contradiction simply by transcending it. With the fusion of the interests now opposed to each other there disappears the opposition between excess population here and excess wealth there; there disappears the miraculous fact (more miraculous than all the miracles of all the religions put together) that a nation has to starve from sheer wealth and plenty; and there disappears the crazy assertion that the earth lacks the power to feed men. This assertion is the pinnacle of Christian economics—and that our economics is essentially Christian I could have proved from every proposition, from every category, and shall in fact do so when the time comes. The Malthusian theory is but the economic expression of the religious dogma concerning the contradiction of spirit and nature and the resulting corruption of both. So far as religion is concerned, this contradiction has been resolved long ago. I hope that in the sphere of economics I have equally demonstrated the utter emptiness of this contradiction. Moreover, I shall not accept as competent any defence of the Malthusian theory which does not from the outset explain to me on the basis of its own principles how a people can starve from sheer plenty and bring this into harmony with reason and fact.

At the same time, the Malthusian theory has been an absolutely necessary point of transition which has taken us infinitely further. Thanks to this theory, as to economics as a whole, our attention has been drawn to the productive power of the earth and of mankind; and after overcoming this economic despair we have been made for ever secure against the fear of over-population. We derive from it the most powerful economic arguments for a social transformation. For even if Malthus were completely right, this transformation would have to be undertaken on the spot; for only this transformation, and the education of the masses which it alone provides, makes possible that moral restraint of the propagative instinct which Malthus himself presents as the most effective and easiest remedy for over-population. Through this theory we have come to know the deepest degradation of man, his dependence on the realm of competition. It has shown us how in the last instance private property has turned man into a commodity whose production and destruction also depend solely on demand; how the system of competition has thus slaughtered, and daily continues to slaughter, millions of men. All this we have seen, and all this drives us to the abolition of this degradation of mankind through the abolition of private property, competition and the opposing interests.

Yet, so as to deprive the universal fear of over-population of any possible basis, let us once more return to the relationship of productive power to population. Malthus establishes a formula on which he bases his entire system: population is said to increase in a geometrical progression—1 =2=4=8=16=32, etc.; the productive power of the land in an arithmetical progression—1=2=3=4=5=6. The difference is obvious, is terrifying; but is it correct? Where has it been proved that the productivity of the land increases in an arithmetical progression? The extent of land is limited. All right! The labour-power to be employed on this land-surface increases with population. Let us even assume that the increase in yield due to increase in labour does not always rise in proportion to the labour: there still remains a third element which, of course, never means anything to the economist—science—whose progress is as unceasing and at least as rapid as that of population. What progress does the agriculture of this century owe to chemistry alone—indeed, to two men alone, Sir Humphrey Davy and Justus Liebig! But science increases at least as much as population. The latter increases in proportion to the size of the previous generation, science advances in proportion to the knowledge bequeathed to it by the previous generation, and thus under the most ordinary conditions also in geometrical progression. And what is impossible to science? But it is absurd to talk of over-population so long as “there is enough waste land in the valley of the Mississippi for the whole population of Europe to be transplanted there”[112]; so long as no more than one-third of the earth can be considered cultivated, and so long as the production of this third itself can be raised sixfold and more by the application of improvements already known.

Thus, competition sets capital against capital, labour against labour, landed property against landed property; and likewise each of these elements against the other two. In the struggle the stronger wins; and in order to predict the outcome of the struggle, we shall have to investigate the strength of the contestants. At first, land and capital are stronger than labour, for the worker must work to live, whilst the landowner can live on his rents, and the capitalist on his interest, or if the need arises, on his capital or on capitalised property in land. The result is that only the very barest necessities, the mere means of subsistence, fall to the lot of labour; whilst the largest part of the products is shared between capital and landed property. Moreover, the stronger worker drives the weaker out of the market, just as larger capital drives out smaller capital, and larger landed property drives out smaller landed property. Practice confirms this conclusion. The advantages which the larger manufacturer and merchant enjoy over the smaller, and the big landowner over the owner of a single acre, are well known. The result is that already under ordinary conditions, in accordance with the law of the stronger, large capital and large landed property swallow small capital and small landed property—— i.e., centralisation of property. In crises of trade and agriculture, this centralisation proceeds much more rapidly. Large property as such increases much more rapidly than small property, since a much smaller portion is deducted from its proceeds as property-expenses. This law of the centralisation of private property is as immanent in private property as all the others. The middle classes must increasingly disappear until the world is divided into millionaires and paupers, into large landowners and poor farm labourers. All the laws, all the dividing of landed property, all the possible splitting-up of capital, are of no avail: this result must and will come, unless it is anticipated by a total transformation of social conditions, a fusion of opposed interests, a transcendence of private property.

Free competition, the key-word of our present-day economists, is an impossibility. Monopoly at least intended to protect the consumer against counterfeit, even if it could not in fact do so. The abolition of monopoly, however, opens the door wide to counterfeit. You say that competition carries with it the remedy for counterfeit, since no one will buy bad articles. But that means that everyone has to be an expert in every article, which is impossible. Hence the necessity for monopoly, which many articles in fact reveal. Apothecaries, etc., must have a monopoly. And the most important article—money—requires a monopoly most of all. Whenever the circulating medium has ceased to be a state monopoly it has invariably produced a trade crisis; and the English economists, Dr. Wade among them, do concede in this case the necessity for monopoly. But even monopoly is no protection against counterfeit money. One can take one’s stand on either side of the question: the one is as difficult as the other. Monopoly produces free competition, and the latter, in turn, produces monopoly. Therefore, both must fall, and these difficulties must be resolved through the transcendence of the principle which gives rise to them.

Competition has penetrated all the relationships of our life and completed the reciprocal bondage in which men now hold themselves. Competition is the great mainspring which again and again jerks into activity our ageing and withering social order, or rather disorder; but with each new exertion it also saps a part of this order’s waning strength. Competition governs the numerical advance of mankind; it likewise governs its moral advance. Anyone who has any knowledge of the statistics of crime must have been struck by the peculiar regularity with which crime advances year by year, and with which certain causes produce certain crimes. The extension of the factory-system is followed everywhere by an increase in crime. The number of arrests, of criminal cases—indeed, the number of murders, robberies, petty thefts, etc., for a large town or for a district—can be predicted year by year with unfailing precision, as has been done often enough in England. This regularity proves that crime, too, is governed by competition; that society creates a demand for crime which is met by a corresponding supply; that the gap created by the arrest, transportation or execution of a certain number is at once filled by others, just as every gap in population is at once filled by new arrivals; in other words, this regularity proves that crime presses on the means of punishment just as the people press on the means of employment. How just it is to punish criminals under these circumstances, quite apart from any other considerations, I leave to the judgement of my readers. Here I am merely concerned in demonstrating the extension of competition into the moral sphere, and to show to what deep degradation private property has brought man.

In the struggle of capital and land against labour, the first two elements enjoy yet another special advantage over labour—the assistance of science; for in present conditions science, too, is directed against labour. Almost all mechanical inventions, for instance, have been occasioned by the lack of labour-power; especially so, Hargreaves’s, Crompton’s and Arkwright’s cotton-spinning machines. There has never been an intense demand for labour which did not result in an invention that increased labour productivity considerably, thus diverting demand away from human labour. The history of England from 1770 until now is one long proof of this. The last great invention in cotton-spinning, the self-acting mule, was occasioned simply and solely by the demand for labour, and rising wages. It doubled machine-labour, and thereby cut down hand-labour by half; it threw half the workers out of employment, and thereby depressed the wages of the other half; it crushed a joint scheme of the workers against the factory-owners, and destroyed the last vestige of strength with which labour had still held out in the unequal struggle against capital. (Cf. Dr. Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures, Vol. 2.) The economist now says, however, that in its final result machinery is favourable to the workers, since it makes production cheaper and thus creates a new and larger market for its products, and since in so doing it ultimately re-employs the workers put out of work. Quite right. But is the economist forgetting, then, that the production of labour-power is regulated by competition; that labour-power is always pressing on the means of employment, and that, therefore, when these advantages are due to become operative, a surplus of competitors for work is already waiting for them, and will thus render these advantages illusory; whilst the disadvantages—the sudden withdrawal of the means of subsistence from one half of the workers and the fall in wages for the other half—are not illusory? Is the economist forgetting that the progress of invention never stands still, and that these disadvantages, therefore, perpetuate themselves? Is he forgetting that with the division of labour, developed to such a degree by our civilisation, a worker can only live if he can be used at this particular machine for this particular detailed operation; that the change-over from one type of employment to another newer type is almost invariably an absolute impossibility for the adult worker?

In turning my attention to the effects of machinery, I am brought to another subject less directly relevant,—the factory-system; and I have neither the inclination nor the time to treat this here. Besides, I hope to have an early opportunity to expound in detail the despicable immorality of this system, and to expose mercilessly the economist’s hypocrisy which here appears in all its glitter.[113]

Written by F. Engels in late

1843-January 1844.

Published in the journal

Deutsch-Französische

Jahrbücher, 1844

Translated from the German

1   Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx has come down to us in the form of three manuscripts, each of which has its own pagination (in Roman figures). Just the last four pages have survived of the second manuscript (pp. XL-XLIII). Each of the 27 pages of the first manuscript is broken up into three columns with two vertical lines, and each of the columns on each page is supplied with a heading written in beforehand: Wages of Labour, Profit of Capital, Rent of Land. After p. XVII, inclusive, it is only the column headed Rent of Land which is filled in, and after p. XXII to the end of the first manuscript Marx wrote across the three columns, disregarding the headings. The text of these six pages (pp. XXII-XXVII) is given in the present book under the editor’s title, Estranged Labour. The third manuscript contains 43 large pages divided into two columns and paginated by Marx himself. At the end of the third manuscript (pp. XXXIX-XL) is the “Introduction,” which is given in the present volume at the beginning preceding the text of the first manuscript.

The title of Marx’s work and the headings of the various parts of the manuscripts, put in square brackets, were given by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. The parts of the manuscripts are published in the sequence in which Marx put them down, save the “Introduction,” which is given in the beginning, and the Critique of Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole which was put in the end in accordance with the reference made by Marx in the “Introduction.”—Ed.

2   Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Year-Books) was edited by K. Marx and A. Ruge and published in German. The only issue was a double number which appeared in Paris in February 1844. In it were printed Marx’s Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question) and Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechts Philosophie. Einlei-tung (Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction) and Engels’s Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie (Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy) and Die Lage Englands (The Position of England). “Past and Present” by Thomas Carlyle. These works mark the final transition of Marx and Engels to materialism and communism. Differences of principle between Marx and the bourgeois radical Ruge were chiefly responsible for the discontinuation of the journal.—Ed.

3   Particularly.—Ed.

4   Marx refers here to Bruno Bauer who had published in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung two long reviews dealing with books, articles and pamphlets on the Jewish question. Most of the quoted phrases are taken from these reviews in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung , Heft I, Dezember 1843; Heft 4, März 1844. The expressions “utopian phrase” and “compact mass” can be found in B. Bauer’s article “Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?” published in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft 8, Juli 1844.

Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (General Literary Gazette), a German monthly, was published by the Young Hegelian B. Bauer in Charlottenburg from December 1843 to October 1844.

K. Marx and F. Engels gave a detailed critical appraisal of this monthly in their book Die heilige Familie, oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik. Cf. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique, Moscow, 1956.—Ed.

5   Passages enclosed in braces were crossed out by Marx in his manuscript.—Ed.

6   The full title of this collection of articles is Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Twenty-One Sheets from Switzerland), Erster Teil, Zurich und Winterthur, 1843.—Ed.

7   Engels’s Outlines : See Appendix to present volume.—Ed.

8   Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future), Zürich und Winterthur, 1843.—Ed.

9   Ludwig Feuerbach, Vorläufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie (Preliminary Theses on the Reformation of Philosophy) published in Anekdota, Bd. II.—Ed.

10   This is how Marx abbreviates Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik (Unpublished Materials Related to Modern German Philosophy and Writing), a two-volume collection published by A. Ruge in Switzerland. It included Marx’s Notes on the Latest Prussian Instruction to Censors and Luther—the Arbiter Between Strauss and Feuerbach, and articles by Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Köppen, Arnold Ruge, etc.—Ed.

11   Marx has in mind B. Bauer and his followers, who were associated with the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung.—Ed.

12   “Moment” is a technical term in Hegelian philosophy meaning a vital element of thought. The term is used to stress that thought is a process, and thus that elements in a system of thought are also phases in a movement.—Ed.

13   In Hegel, “feeling” (Empfindung) denotes a relatively low form of mental life in which the subjective and the objective are still confused together. “Consciousness” (Bewusstsein)—the name given by Hegel to the first major section of his Phenomenology of Mind—denotes those forms of mental activity where a subject first seeks to comprehend an object. “Self-consciousness” and “mind” denote subsequent, higher phases in the evolution of “absolute knowledge” or “the absolute.”.—Ed.

14   Within a short time, Marx fulfilled this promise in Die heilige Familie, oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik, written in collaboration with Engels. See K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Critique, Moscow, 1956.—Ed.

15   Compare what Marx says here about the determination of wages, combination amongst workers, etc., with the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (Everyman Library edition, Vol. I, pp. 58-60). In the first three sections of this manuscript, Marx, as he himself points out later, is constantly drawing upon the words of the classical political economists, and particularly of Smith. This is often the case, as here, even where Marx does not explicitly indicate that he is quoting or paraphrasing. The text of the Health of Nations used by Marx was Garnier’s French translation of 1802 (Recherche sur la Nature et les Causes de la richesse des Nations; par Adam Smith. Traduction nouvelle, avec les notes et observations; par Germain Garnier, tomes I-V, Paris, 1802).—Ed.

16   A. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Everyman Library edition, Vol. I, pp. 60-61—Ed.

17   Ibid., pp. 71-72, and pp. 50-51.—Ed.

18   A. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, p. 77.—Ed.

19   Cf. Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, p. 230; also pp. 61-65, where Smith illustrates these three possible conditions of society by referring to contemporary conditions in Bengal, China, and North America. (The Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776.)—Ed.

20   Cf. Smith, I.e., p. 230; in Marx’s manuscript the last clause of this sentence is in French, being taken direct from Garnier’s translation, Tome II, p. 162.—Ed.

21   Cf. A. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, p. 84 (Garnier, T. I, p. 193). Despite Marx’s quotation marks, this is not in fact an exact quotation from Smith but a condensed version of some sentences of his.—Ed.

22   Cf. A. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, p. 70.—Ed.

23   In this sentence the phrase “economic system” has been used to render the German term Nationalökonomie—the term used by Marx in these manuscripts for “Political Economy.” Here, and occasionally elsewhere, Marx seems to use Nationalökonomie to stand not simply for Political Economy as a body of theory, but for the economic system, the developing industrial capitalist system, portrayed and championed by the classical political economists.—Ed.

24   Cf. A. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, p. 57.—Ed.

25   Property, that is, in the sense of “a possession,” not “an attribute.” The German term is Eigentum, not Eigenschaft.—Ed.

26   Die Bewegung der Produktion, eine geschichtlich-statistische Abhandlung, von Wilhelm Schulz, Zürich und Winterthur, 1843.—Ed.

27   The god of Greek mythology identified with Time.—Ed.

28   Théorie nouvelle d’économie sociale et politique, ou Etude sur l’organisation des Sociétés, par C. Pecqueur, Paris, 1842. This and all succeeding quotations from Pecqueur, Buret and Loudon in this section are in French in Marx’s manuscript.—Ed.

29   Solution du problème de la population et de la subsistance, soumise à un médicin dans une série de lettres, par Charles Loudon: Paris, 1842, p. 229. This work was a translation into French, slightly abridged, of an English manuscript which seems never to have been published. In 1836, however, Loudon did issue at Leamington a short pamphlet in English—The Equilibrium of Population and Sustenance Demonstrated; but the French work referred to is a substantial book of 336 pages.—Ed.

30   De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France, par Eugène Buret, t. I-II, Paris, 1840.—Ed.

31   Traité d’économie politique, par Jean-Baptiste Say (Treatise on Political Economy, by Jean-Baptiste Say), 3ème edition, t. I-II, Paris, 1817.—Ed.

32   Smith has “good, moderate, reasonable profit.”—Ed.

33   Marx uses the French terms capital fixe and capital circulant. —Ed.

34   Marx has made here the following note in French: “As is well known, large-scale cultivation usually provides employment only for a small number of hands.”—Ed.

35   For those who own this matter, this object of labour.—Ed.

36   The whole paragraph (including the quotation from Ricardo’s book Principles of Political Economy and Taxation and from Sismondi’s Nouveaux principes d’économie politique) is an excerpt from E. Buret’s book De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France, T. 1, Paris, 1840, pp. 6-7.—Ed.

37   Marx alludes to the following passage: “In a perfectly fair lottery, those who draw the prizes ought to gain all that is lost by those who draw the blanks. In a profession where twenty fail for one that succeeds, that one ought to gain all that should have been gained by the unsuccessful twenty.” (Smith, l.c., Vol. I, Bk. I, p. 94.)—Ed.

38   There is no land without its master.—Ed.

39   There is no land without its lord.—Ed.

40   Money knows no master.—Ed.

41   Estranged Labour—Die Entfremdete Arbeit: re-“estranged,” see Entfremdung in “Translator’s Note on Terminology.”—Ed.

42   Alienation—Entäusserung: See Entäusserung in “Translator’s Note on Terminology.”—Ed.

43   Species nature (and earlier species being)—Gattungswesen: man’s essential nature—menschlichen Wesen: see Wesen in “Translator’s Note on Terminology.”

The following short passages from Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity may help readers to understand the ideological background to this part of Marx’s thought, and, incidentally, to see how Marx accepted but infused with new content concepts made current by Feuerbach as well as by Hegel and the political economists:

“What is this essential difference between man and the brute?... Consciousness—but consciousness in the strict sense; for the consciousness implied in the feeling of self as an individual, in discrimination by the senses, in the perception and even judgement of outward things according to definite sensible signs, cannot be denied to the brutes. Consciousness in the strictest sense is present only in a being to whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought. The brute is indeed conscious of himself as an individual—and he has accordingly the feeling of self as the common centre of successive sensations—but not as a species.... In practical life we have to do with individuals; in science, with species.... But only a being to whom his own species, his own nature, is an object of thought, can make the essential nature of other things or beings an object of thought.... The brute has only a simple, man a twofold life; in the brute, the inner life is one with the outer. Man has both an inner and an outer life. The inner life of man is the life which has relation to his species—to his general, as distinguished from his individual nature.... The brute can exercise no function which has relation to its species without another individual external to itself; but man can perform the functions of thought and speech, which strictly imply such a relation, apart from another individual.... Man is in fact at once I and Thou; he can put himself in the place of another, for this reason, that to him his species, his essential nature, and not merely his individuality, is an object of thought.... An

object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject’s own, but objective nature....

“The relation of the sun to the earth is, therefore, at the same time a relation of the earth to itself, or to its own nature, for the measure of the size and of the intensity of light which the sun possesses as the object of the earth, is the measure of the distance, which determines the peculiar nature of the earth.... In the object which he contemplates, therefore, man becomes acquainted with himself.... The power of the object over him is therefore the power of his own nature.”

(The Essence of Christianity, by Ludwig Feuerbach, translated from the second German edition by Marian Evans, London, 1854, pp. 1-5.)—Ed.

44   At this point the first manuscript breaks off unfinished.—Ed.

45   The Xf, page of Marx’s second manuscript opens with these words. The beginning of the sentence is unknown, because the first 39 pages of the manuscript are missing.—Ed.

46   Revolutions de France et de Brabant, par Camille Desmoulins. Second Trimestre, contenant Mars, Avril et Mai. Paris, l‘an I’ier. No. 16, p. 139 f.; No. 23, p. 425 f.; No. 26, p. 580 f.—Ed.

47   See the garrulous, old-Hegelian theologian Funke who tells after Herr Leo with tears in his eyes how a slave had refused, when serfdom was abolished, to cease being the property of the gentry. See also the Patriotic Visions of Justus Möser, which distinguish themselves by never for a moment abandoning the ingenuous, petty-bourgeois “home-baked,” ordinary, narrow, horizon of the philistine, and which nevertheless remain pure fancy. This contradiction has made them so plausible in the German disposition.

48   Here ends the second manuscript.—Ed.

49   “For itself”—fuer sich: a Hegelian term used in antithesis with “in itself”—an sich. “In itself” means roughly “implicit” or even “unconscious”; “For itself,” similarly, can be read as “present to itself,” or “conscious(ly).”—Ed.

50   It is a movement of private property become independent for itself in consciousness—the modern industry as Self.

51   Substance—Wesen. Elsewhere on this page Wesen is rendered as “essence.” See “Translator’s Note on Terminology.”—Ed.

52   See F. Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, p. 9.—Ed.

53   Superseded—aufhob (rendered below “done away with”). See under Aufheben in “Translator’s Note on Terminology.”—Ed.

54   Man’s externalisation in the thing—reale Entäusserung des Menschen: the process of alienating—Veräusserung: See under Entäusserung in “Translator’s Note on Terminology.”—Ed.

55   Transcended ... annulled ... done away with:—see Aufheben in “Translator’s Note on Terminology.”—Ed.

56   Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes, fall—and the latter’s abomination is still greater—the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head.

57   For this reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and activities.

58   Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, Erste Teil. Zürich und Winterthur, 1843, p. 329.—Ed.

59   In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself to the human being humanly.

60   Essential powers—Wesenskräfte: i.e., powers belonging to me as part of my essential nature, my very being. See Wesen in “Translator’s Note on Terminology.”—Ed.

61   The spontaneous generation.—Ed.

62   Under “communism as such” Marx here means crude, equalitarian communism, such as propounded by Babeuf and his followers. —Ed.

63   Forces of human nature—menschlichen Wesenskraft:... human nature—menschlichen Wesens.—Ed.

64   James Mill, Elements of Political Economy.—Ed.

65   In the manuscript the lower left corner of the page is torn off. Just the right-hand endings of the last six lines remain, making restoration of the text impossible. It is possible to surmise, however, that Marx here criticises Hegel’s idealistic “transcending” of estrangement (the words that have survived are cited in the next footnote). —Ed.

66   In “transcending” estrangement “in the old German manner—the manner of the Hegelian phenomenology,” i.e., in transcending it exclusively in the “consciousness” of the subject.—Ed.

67   The bottom of the page is torn. Three or four lines are missing. —Ed.

68   See “Rent of Land” above.—Ed.

69   Wealth of Nations, Book 1, chs. II and III (but quoted with omissions, transpositions, etc.).—Ed.

70   Adam Smith, Vol 1, p. 20.—Ed.

71   Destutt de Tracy: Elements d’Idéologie. Traité de la Volonté et de ses Effets (Elements of Ideology. Treatise on the Will and Its Effects), Paris, 1826, pp. 68, 78.—Ed.

72   Say, op. cit., p. 300 and p. 76 f.—Ed.

73   F. Skarbek, Théorie des Richesses sociales, suivi d‘une Biogra-phie de l’Economie Politique (Theory of Social Wealth, Followed by an Account of the Development of Political Economy), t. I-II, Paris, 1829, t. I, p. 25 f.—Ed.

74   Elements of Political Economy, by James Mill (London, 1821), pp. 5-9.—Ed.

75   That part of the third manuscript which serves as a supplement to p. XXXIX of the second manuscript breaks off at this point on the left side of p. XXXVIII. The right-hand side of p. XXXVIII is empty. Then follows the “Introduction” (pp. XXXIX-XL) and a passage on money (pp. XLI-XLIII).—Ed.

76   This word is illegible.—Ed.

77   Goethe, Faust, Part 1—Faust’s Study, III, cf. Goethe’s Faust, Part 1, translated by Philip Wayne (Penguin, 1949, p. 91).—Ed.

78   Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act 4, Sc. 3. (Marx quotes the Schlegel-Tieck translation.)—Ed.

79   Ibid.

80   An end of the page is torn out in the manuscript.—Ed.

81   Reference is made to the concluding portion of the part which directly precedes these words and which ’(because the chapter about Hegel, which Marx qualified in the “Introduction” as the “final chapter,” has been put at the end of the volume) is given above under the editor’s heading “Private Property and Communism. Various Stages of Development of Communist Views. Crude, Equalitarian Communism and Communism as Socialism Coinciding with Humaneness.”—Ed.

82   System der Wissenschaft, von G. W. F. Hegel. Erste Teil: Phänomenologie des Geistes. Bamberg und Nuernberg, 1807. Wissenschaft der Logik, 2 Bande, 1812-16. English translations: The Phenomenology of Mind, by G. W. F. Hegel, Translated with an Introduction and Notes by J. B. Baillie, 2nd Edition, 1931, reprinted 1949 (London): The Science of Logic, by G. W. F. Hegel, Translated by Johnston and Struthers, in 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1929).—Ed.

83   Bruno Bauer, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (Critique of the Synoptic Gospels) Band 1-2, Leipzig, 1841; Band 3, Braunschweig, 1842. In religious literature the authors of the first three Gospels are known as the Synoptics.—Ed.

84   Das Entdeckte Christentum. Eine Erinnerung des Achtzehnten Jahrhundert und ein Beitrag zur Krisis des Neunzehnten (Christianity Discovered: A Memorial of the Eighteenth Century and a Contribution to the Crisis of the Nineteenth), von Bruno Bauer, Zürich und Winterthur, 1843.

85   Die Gute Sache der Freiheit und meine Eigene Angelegenheit (The Good of Freedom and My Own Affair), von Bruno Bauer, Zürich und Winterthur, 1842.—Ed.

86   Certificate of poverty.—Ed.

87   Reference is made to the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung.—Ed.

88   Feuerbach views negation of negation, the definite concept as thinking surpassing itself in thinking and as thinking wanting to be directly awareness, nature, reality. (Reference is here made by Marx to Feuerbach’s critical observations about Hegel in §§29-30 of his Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft.)—Ed.

89   What follows here are the main chapter and section-headings of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. Here and in later quotations from the Phenomenology, the translator has followed Baillie’s translation very closely, departing from it only on the few occasions where this was necessary to keep the terminology in line with that used throughout the present volume.—Ed.

90   Enzyklopädie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften, von G. W. F. Hegel (Heidelberg, 1st edition, 1817, 3rd edition, 1830). Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences is a single volume falling into three main parts: the subject of the first is Logic (cf. The Logic of Hegel, translated by William Wallace (2nd edition, Oxford, 1892); the subject of the second part is the Philosophy of Nature (of which no English translation has been published), and that of the third the Philosophy of Mind. (Cf. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, translated by William Wallace, Oxford, 1894.)—Ed.

91   See footnote on page 93.—Ed.

92   “The unhappy consciousness,” etc.—Forms of mind, and phases and factors in human history, distinguished and analysed in particular sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology.—Ed.

93   The paragraph which follows is a transcript of the second and third paragraphs of the last chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Baillie’s translation, 2nd edition, p. 789).—Ed.

94   Externalisation—Entäusserung. See “Translator’s Note on Terminology.” —Ed.

95   Substance—Wesen.—Ed.

96   Being—Wesen; nature—Natur; system—Wesen; being—Sein. See Wesen in “Translator’s Note on Terminology”—Ed.

97    To be sensuous is to suffer—Sinnlich sein ist leidend sein. Here “to suffer” should probably be understood in the sense of “to undergo“—to be the object of another’s action. Note the transition in the next sentence from Leiden (suffering) to leidenschaftlich (passionate).—Ed.

98   Here Marx has taken the impersonal pronoun es (it) to represent Bewusstsein (consciousness); but it seems that Baillie is more correct in reading this as standing for Selbstbewusstsein (self-consciousness). In the first quotation of this passage (cf. p. 154) Marx simply uses es without specifying what it represents, and the translation has followed Baillie in interpreting it as “self-consciousness.” In the present repetition of the passage, Marx’s specification of the “it” as “consciousness,” has been followed in the translation.—Ed.

99   Marx refers to §30 of Feuerbach’s Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, which says: “Hegel is a thinker who transcends himself in thinking.”—Ed.

100   This sequence gives the major “categories” or “thought-forms” of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia in the order in which they occur and are superseded. Similarly, the sequence on p. 162 from “private right” to “world history,” gives the major categories of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in the order in which they there appear.—Ed.

101   The conventional conception of theology, jurisprudence, political science, natural science, etc.—Ed.

102   The Logic of Hegel, tr. by Wallace, para. 244. “Intuiting” is here used to render Anschauen. In popular usage Anschauen means “to contemplate,” but Hegel is here using the word, like Kant, as a technical term in philosophy meaning, roughly, “to be aware through the senses.” “Intuiting,” likewise, should be understood here not in its popular sense but as the philosophical term which is the recognised English equivalent of Anschauen.—Ed.

103   This means that what Hegel does is to put in place of these fixed abstractions the act of abstraction which revolves in its own circle. In so doing, he has the merit, in the first place, of having indicated the source of all these inappropriate concepts which, as originally presented, belonged to disparate philosophies; of having brought them together; and of having created the entire compass of abstraction exhaustively set out as the object of criticism, instead of some specific abstraction. (Why Hegel separates thought from the subject we shall see later: at this stage it is already clear, however, that when man is not, his characteristic expression also cannot be human, and so neither could thought be grasped as an expression of man as a human and natural subject endowed with eyes, ears, etc., and living in society, in the world, and in nature.)

104   Time, Motion, Matter, Light, etc., are forms distinguished within Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Becoming, etc., are of course categories of the Logic.—Ed.

105   Cf. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, tr. by Wallace, para. 381. But in rendering these passages from the Encyclopaedia, the present translator has not followed Wallace closely.—Ed.

106   Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy is the first economic work of Frederick Engels in which he examines the bourgeois economic system and the basic categories of bourgeois political economy from the standpoint of socialism. Marx rated this work of Engels’s highly even later, calling it “a brilliant outline of a critique of economic categories” [See “Introduction” to Zur Kritik der Politischen Ekonomie (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), 1859]. Evidencing Engels’s final departure from idealism to materialism and from revolutionary democracy to communism, the work is not, however, free from the influence of ethical “philosophical” communism. In a number of passages Engels still criticises bourgeois society from the standpoint of abstract principles of universal morals and humaneness.—Ed.

107   Friedrich List (1789-1846), a well-known German economist, advocated the abolition of customs barriers within Germany but at the same time the protection by tariffs, etc., of German industry from foreign competition.—Ed.

108   “Exchangeable value”—English term quoted by Engels.—Ed.

109   A. Alison, The Principles of Population, and Their Connection with Human Happiness, Vols. I, II. London, 1840.—Ed.

110   The old name for Australia.—Ed.

111   Three pamphlets appeared under the pseudonym of “Marcus,” namely: On the Possibility of Limiting Populousness, by Marcus, Printed by John Hill, Black Horse Court, Fleet Street, 1838, 46 p.; The Book of Murder! A Vade Mecum for the Commissioners and Guardians of the New Poor Law... Being an Exact Reprint of the Infamous Essay on the Possibility of Limiting Populousness, by Marcus, one of the three ... now Reprinted for the Instruction of the Labourer, by William Dugdale, 37, Holywell Street, Strand.; The Theory of Painless Extinction, by Marcus. Cf. N.M.W.: Advertisements 29.VIII.1840.

An anonymous pamphlet, An Essay on Populousness, printed for private circulation; printed for the author. 1838. 27 pp.—contains the basic ideas of the “Marcus” pamphlets. Cf. also Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, London, 1840, p. 110 sqq.—Ed.

112   A. Alison, 1.c., p. 548—Ed.

113   Engels refers to a work on England’s social history which he intended to write and for which he was collecting material during his stay in that country (November 1842-August 1844). In this work Engels meant to devote a special chapter to the condition of the English workers. Later he changed his mind and decided to write a special book about the English proletariat. He did so on returning to Germany. The book, Condition of the Working Class in England, was published in Leipzig in 1845.—Ed.