Atnti Duhring- theory of value

Anti Duhring THEORY OF VALUE

It is now about a hundred years since the publication in Leipzig of a book which had run through over thirty editions by the beginning of the nineteenth century; it was circulated and distributed in town and country by the authorities, by preachers and philanthropists of all kinds, and was generally prescribed as a reader in the elementary schools. This book was Rochow's Children's Friend. Its purpose was to teach the youthful offspring of the peasants and artisans their vocation in life and their duties to their social and political superiors, and likewise to inspire in them a beneficent contentment with their lot on earth, with black bread and pota-

toes, corvée labour, low wages, paternal thrashings and other such delights, and all by means of the system of enlightenment which was then in vogue. To this end the youth of the towns and of the countryside was admonished how wisely nature had ordained that man must win his livelihood and his pleasures by labour, and how happy therefore the peasant or artisan should feel that it was granted to him to season his meal with bitter labour, instead of suffering the pangs of indigestion or constipation and having to gulp down the choicest tidbits with repugnance, like the rich glutton. These same commonplaces, which old Rochow thought good enough for the peasant youth of the Electorate of Saxony of his time, are served up to us by Herr Dühring on page 14 and the following pages of his Course as the "absolutely fundamental" teaching of the most up-to-date political economy.

"Human wants as such have their natural laws, and their expansion is confined within limits which can be transgressed only temporarily by unnatural acts, until these acts result in nausea, boredom with life, decrepitude, social mutilation and finally salutary annihilation. . . . A game consisting purely of pleasures without any further serious aim soon makes one blasé, or, what amounts to the same thing, exhausts all capacity to feel. Real labour, in some form or other, is therefore the natural social law of healthy beings. . . . If instincts and wants were not provided with counterbalances, they would hardly bring us even an infantile existence, let alone a historically enhanced development of life. If they were satisfied fully and painlessly, they would soon exhaust themselves, leaving an empty existence behind them in the form of irksome intervals lasting until their recurrence. . . . In every respect, therefore, the fact that the functioning of the instincts and passions depends on victory over an economic obstacle is a salutary basic law of both the external arrangement of nature and the inner constitution of man" -- and so on, and so forth.

It can be seen that the most inane inanities of the worthy Rochow are celebrating their centenary in Herr Dühring, and,

moreover, as "the deeper foundation" of the one and only really critical and scientific "socialitarian system".

With the ground thus laid, Herr Dühring can proceed to build. Applying the mathematical method, he first gives us a series of definitions in accordance with old Euclid's procedure. This is all the more convenient because it immediately enables him to contrive his definitions in such a way that what is to be proved with their help is already partially contained in them. Thus we learn at the outset that

the governing concept in all prior political economy has been wealth and that wealth, as it has really been understood in world history hitherto and as it has developed its sway, is "economic power over men and things".

This is doubly wrong. In the first place the wealth of the tribal and village communities of antiquity was in no sense a domination over men. Secondly, even in societies moving in class antagonisms, wealth, in so far as it includes domination over men, is preponderantly and almost exclusively a domination over men exercised by virtue of, and through the agency of, the domination over things. From the very early period when the capture of slaves and their exploitation became separate branches of business, the exploiters of slave labour had to buy the slaves, acquiring domination over men only through their prior domination over things, over the slave's purchase price, means of subsistence and instruments of labour. Throughout the Middle Ages large landed property was the precondition through which the feudal nobility obtained peasants paying dues and performing corvée. Nowadays even a six-year-old child can see that wealth dominates men exclusively by means of the things over which it disposes.

But why must Herr Dühring concoct this false definition of wealth, and why must he sever the actual connection which

has existed in all class societies up to now? In order to drag wealth from the sphere of economics into that of morals. Domination over things is quite all right, but domination over men is an evil; and as Herr Dühring has forbidden himself to explain domination over men by domination over things, he can once again do an audacious trick and explain domination over men offhand by his beloved force. Wealth, as domination over men, is "robbery" -- so we return to a corrupted version of Proudhon's ancient formula, "Property is theft."

Thus we have now fortunately brought wealth under the two essential aspects of production and distribution: wealth as domination over things -- production wealth, the good side; wealth as domination over men -- distribution wealth up to the present day, the bad side, away with it! Applied to present-day conditions, this means: the capitalist mode of production is quite all right and may remain, but the capitalist mode of distribution is no good and must be abolished. Such is the nonsense which comes of writing on economics without so much as having grasped the connection between production and distribution.

After wealth, value is defined as follows:

"Value is the worth which economic things and services have in commerce." This worth corresponds to "the price or any other equivalent name, for example, wages".

In other words, value is price. Or rather, in order not to do Herr Dühring an injustice and give the absurdity of his definition as far as possible in his own words: value are prices. For he says on page 19: "value, and the prices expressing it in money", thus himself stating that the same value has very different prices and consequently also just as many different

values. If Hegel had not died long ago, he would hang himself; with all his theologizing he could not have thought up this value which has as many different values as it has prices. Once again, it needs someone with Herr Dühring's brashness to inaugurate a new and deeper foundation for economics with the declaration that there is no difference between price and value, except that one is expressed in money and the other is not.

But we still don't know what value is, and still less by what it is determined. Herr Dühring must therefore come across with further explanations.

"Speaking quite generally, the basic law of comparison and valuation, on which value and the prices expressing it in money depend, belongs in the first place to the sphere of pure production, apart from distribution, which introduces only a second element into the concept of value. The greater or lesser obstacles which the variety of natural conditions places in the way of efforts directed towards the procurement of things, necessitating a greater or lesser expenditure of economic energy, also determine . . . the greater or lesser value," and this is appraised according to "the resistance offered by nature and circumstances to the procuring of things. . . . The extent to which we invested our own energy in them" (things) "is the immediate determining cause of the existence of value in general and of a particular magnitude of it".

So far as this has any meaning, it is: The value of a product of labour is determined by the labour-time necessary for its production; and we knew that long ago, even without Herr Dühring. Instead of stating the fact simply, he has to twist it into an oracular saying. It is simply wrong to say that the extent to which anyone invests his energies in anything (to adhere to the bombastic style) is the immediate determining cause of value and of the magnitude of value. In the first place, it depends on what thing the energy is put into, and secondly, on how the energy is put into it. If some-

one makes a thing which has no use-value for other people, all his energy produces not an atom of value; and if he is stiff-necked enough to produce by hand an object which a machine produces twenty times more cheaply, nineteen-twentieths of the energy he put into it produces neither value in general nor any particular magnitude of value.

Moreover, it is a complete distortion to transform productive labour, which creates positive products, into a merely negative overcoming of resistance. In order to get a shirt we should then have to set about it somewhat as follows. Firstly we overcome the resistance of the cotton-seed to being sown and to growing, then the resistance of the ripe cotton to being picked and packed and transported, then its resistance to being unpacked and carded and spun, next the resistance of the yarn to being woven, then the resistance of the cloth to being bleached and sewn, and finally the resistance of the completed shirt to being put on.

Why all this childish perversion and perversity? In order to pass by means of "resistance" from the "production value", the true but hitherto only ideal value, to the "distribution value", the value, falsified by force, which alone was acknowledged in past history:

"In addition to the resistance offered by nature . . . there is yet another, a purely social obstacle. . . . An obstructive power steps in between man and nature, and this power is once again man. Man, conceived as alone and isolated, is free in the face of nature. . . . The situation is different as soon as we think of a second man who, sword in hand, holds the approaches to nature and its resources and demands a price, in whatever form, for allowing access. This second man . . . , so to speak, taxes the other and is thus the reason why the value of the object striven for turns out to be greater than it would be but for this political and social obstacle to supply or production. . . . The particular forms of this artificially enhanced worth of things are extremely manifold, and it naturally has its concomitant counterpart in a corresponding forcing down of the

worth of labour. . . . It is therefore an illusion to attempt to regard value in advance as an equivalent in the proper sense of this term, that is, as something which is of equal worth, or as a relation of exchange arising from the principle that service and counter-service are equal. . . . On the contrary, the criterion of a correct theory of value will be that the most general cause of valuation conceived in the theory does not coincide with the special form of worth which rests on compulsory distribution. This form varies with the social system, while economic value proper can only be a production value measured in relation to nature and consequently will only change with changes in obstacles to production of a purely natural and technical kind."

According to Herr Dühring, the value which a thing has in practice therefore consists of two parts, first, the labour contained in it, and, secondly, the tax surcharge imposed "sword in hand". In other words, the value in force today is a monopoly price. Now if all commodities have such a monopoly price in accordance with this theory of value, only two alternatives are possible. Either each individual loses again as a buyer what he has gained as a seller; the prices have changed nominally, but in reality -- in their reciprocal relationship -- have remained the same; everything remains as before, and the far-famed distribution value is a sheer illusion.

Or, on the other hand, the alleged tax surcharges represent a real sum of values, namely, that produced by the labouring, value-producing class but appropriated by the monopolist class, and then this sum of values consists merely of unpaid labour; in this event, in spite of the man with the sword in his hand, in spite of the alleged tax surcharges and the asserted distribution value, we arrive once again -- at the Marxian theory of surplus-value.

But let us look at some examples of this famous "distribution value". On page 135 and the following pages we find:

"Price formation as a result of individual competition must also be regarded as a form of economic distribution and of the mutual imposition of tribute. . . . If the supply of any necessary commodity is suddenly and significantly reduced, this gives the seller a disproportionate power to exploit; . . . how colossal the increase in prices may be is shown particularly by those abnormal situations in which the supply of necessities is cut off for any length of time", and so on. Moreover, even in the normal course of things virtual monopolies exist which permit arbitrary price increases, as for example the railways, the companies supplying towns with water and gas, etc.

It has long been known that such opportunities for monopolistic exploitation occur. But that the monopoly prices they produce are not to rank as exceptions and special cases, but precisely as classical examples of the determination of values in operation today -- this is new. How are the prices of necessities determined? Herr Dühring replies: Go into a beleaguered city from which supplies have been cut off, and ask for yourself! How does competition affect the determination of market prices? Ask the monopoly, it will tell you all about it!

Besides, even in the case of these monopolies, the man with the sword in his hand who is supposed to stand behind them is not to be found. On the contrary. If the man with the sword, the commandant, does his duty in cities under siege, as a rule he very soon puts an end to the monopoly and requisitions the monopolized stocks in order to distribute them equally. Anyhow, when the men with the sword have tried to fabricate a "distribution value", they have reaped nothing but bad business and financial loss. The Dutch brought both their monopoly and their trade to ruin with their monopolization of the East Indian trade. The two strongest governments which ever existed, the North American revolutionary government and the French National Convention, ventured to fix maximum prices, and they failed

miserably. For years now, the Russian government has been trying to raise the exchange rate for Russian paper money -- which it is lowering in Russia by the constant emission of irredeemable banknotes -- by the equally constant buying up in London of bills of exchange on Russia. In the last few years it has had to pay almost sixty million rubles for this pleasure, and the ruble now stands at under two marks instead of over three. If the sword has the magic economic power ascribed to it by Herr Dühring, why is it that no government has succeeded in permanently compelling bad money to have the "distribution value" of good money, or assignats to have the "distribution value" of gold? And where is the sword which is in command of the world market?

There is said to be yet another principal form in which distribution value facilitates the appropriation of other people's services without counter-services, namely, rent of possession, that is to say, ground-rent and the earnings of capital. For the moment we merely record this, to enable us to state that this is all that we learn of this famous "distribution value". -- All? No, not quite. Listen to this:

"In spite of the twofold standpoint which is manifested in the recognition of a production value and a distribution value, there is something in common always underlying these, the thing of which all values consist and by which they are therefore measured. The immediate, natural measure is the expenditure of energy, and the simplest unit is human energy in the crudest sense of the term. This latter can be reduced to the existence-time whose self-maintenance in turn represents the overcoming of a certain sum of difficulties in nutrition and life. Distribution, or appropriation, value is purely and exclusively present only where the power to dispose of unproduced things, or, to use a commoner expression, these things themselves, are exchanged for services or things of real production value. The homogeneous element, which is indicated and represented in every expression of value and therefore also in the component parts of value appropriated

through distribution without counter-service, consists in the expenditure of human energy, which . . . finds embodiment . . . in each commodity."

Now what should we say to this? If all commodity values are measured by the expenditure of human energy embodied in the commodities, what becomes of the distribution value, the price surcharge, the tax? True, Herr Dühring tells us that even unproduced things -- things which consequently cannot have a real value -- can be given a distribution value and exchanged against things which have been produced and possess value. But he tells us at the same time that all values -- consequently also pure and exclusive distribution values -- consist in the expenditure of energy embodied in them. Unfortunately we are not told how an expenditure of energy can be embodied in an unproduced thing. In any case what finally seems clear from all this medley of values is that once again distribution value, the price surcharge on commodities extorted as a result of social position, the tax levied by virtue of the sword, makes no sense. Aren't the values of commodities determined solely by the expenditure of human energy, vulgo labour, which finds embodiment in them? Therefore, if we leave out ground-rent and a few monopoly prices, doesn't Herr Dühring say the same thing, only in a more slipshod and confused way, as the much-decried Ricardian-Marxian theory of value said far more clearly and precisely long ago?

He says so, and in the same breath he says the opposite. Taking Ricardo's investigations as his starting-point, Marx says: The value of commodities is determined by the socially necessary general human labour embodied in them, and this in turn is measured by its duration. Labour is the measure of all values, but has no value itself. After also putting

forward labour as the measure of value but in his own sloppy way, Herr Dühring continues:

This "can be reduced to the existence-time whose self-maintenance in turn represents the overcoming of a certain sum of difficulties in nutrition and life".

Let us ignore the confusion, arising purely from his craving for originality, of labour-time, which is the only thing that matters here, with existence-time, which has never yet created or measured values. Let us also ignore the false "socialitarian" pretence which the "self-maintenance" of this existence-time is intended to introduce; so long as the world has existed and so long as it continues to exist, every individual must maintain himself in the sense that he himself consumes his means of subsistence. Let us assume that Herr Dühring expressed himself in precise economic terms; then the sentence quoted either means nothing at all or means the following: the value of a commodity is determined by the labour-time embodied in it, and the value of this labour-time by the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the worker for this time. For present-day society, this means the value of a commodity is determined by the wages contained in it.

This finally brings us to what Herr Dühring is really trying to say. The value of a commodity is determined, in the phraseology of vulgar economics, by the cost of production,

as against which Carey "brought out the truth that it is not the cost of production, but the cost of reproduction that determines value" (Critical History, p. 401).

We shall see later what there is to this cost of production or reproduction; at the moment we only note that, as is well known, it consists of wages and profit on capital. Wages

represent the "expenditure of energy" embodied in commodities, the production value. Profit represents the tax or price surcharge extorted by the capitalist by virtue of his monopoly, by the sword in his hand -- the distribution value. The whole contradictory confusion of the Dühringian theory of value is thus ultimately resolved in the most beautiful and harmonious clarity.

The determination of the value of commodities by wages, which in Adam Smith still appeared frequently side by side with its determination by labour-time, has been banned from scientific political economy since Ricardo and nowadays survives only in vulgar economics. It is precisely the shallowest sycophants of the existing capitalist order of society who preach the determination of value by wages, and who concomitantly describe the profit of the capitalist as also a higher sort of wages, as the wages of abstinence (the reward to the capitalist for not playing ducks and drakes with his capital), as the premium on risk, as the wages of management, etc. Herr Dühring differs from them only in declaring that profit is robbery. In other words, Herr Dühring bases his socialism directly on the doctrines of the worst kind of vulgar economics. And his socialism is worth just as much as this vulgar economics. The two stand and fall together.

After all, it is clear that what a worker produces and what he costs are just as much different things as what a machine produces and what it costs. The value created by a worker in a twelve-hour working-day has absolutely nothing in common with the value of the means of subsistence he consumes in this working-day and the accompanying period of rest. In these means of subsistence there may be embodied three, four or seven hours of labour-time, according to the stage of development reached by the productivity of labour. If we assume that seven hours of labour were necessary for their production, then the theory of value of vulgar economics accepted by Herr Dühring says that the product of twelve hours of labour has the value of the product of seven hours of labour, that twelve hours of labour are equal to seven hours of labour, or that 12 = 7. To put it even more plainly: an agricultural labourer, under whatever social relations, annually produces a certain quantity of grain, say sixty bushels of wheat. During this time he consumes a sum of values amounting to forty-five bushels of wheat. Then the sixty bushels of wheat have the same value as the forty-five bushels, and that in the same market and with other conditions remaining absolutely identical; in other words, sixty = forty-five. And this styles itself political economy!

The whole development of human society beyond the stage of brute savagery begins from the day when the labour of the family created more products than were necessary for its subsistence, from the day when a portion of labour could be devoted to the production no longer of the mere means of subsistence, but of means of production. A surplus of the product of labour over and above the costs of subsistence of the labour, and the formation and expansion of a social production and reserve fund out of this surplus, these were and these are the basis of all social, political and intellectual progress. Historically up to now, this fund has been the possession of a privileged class, on which, along with this possession, political supremacy and intellectual leadership also devolved. The impending social revolution will for the first time make this social production and reserve fund -- that is, the total mass of raw materials, instruments of production and means of subsistence -- a real social fund by taking its

disposal away from that privileged class and transferring it to the whole of society as its common property.

It is one of two alternatives. Either the value of commodities is determined by the costs of subsistence of the labour necessary for their production, that is, in present-day society, by wages. In this case each worker receives in his wages the value of the product of his labour, in this case the exploitation of the wage-earning class by the capitalist class is an impossibility. Let us assume that a worker's costs of subsistence in a given society can be expressed by the sum of three shillings. Then, according to the above-cited theory of the vulgar economists, the product of a day's labour has a value of three shillings. Let us now assume that the capitalist who employs this worker adds a profit to this product, a tribute of one shilling, and sells it for four shillings. The other capitalists do the same. But from that moment the worker can no longer cover his daily needs with three shillings, but likewise requires four shillings for them. As all other conditions are assumed to have remained unchanged, the wages expressed in means of subsistence must remain the same, while the wages expressed in money must rise, namely, from three shillings to four shillings a day. What the capitalists take from the working class in the form of profit they must give back to it in the form of wages. We are just where we were at the beginning: if wages determine value, no exploitation of the worker by the capitalist is possible. But the formation of a surplus of products is also impossible, for according to our assumption the workers consume just as much value as they produce. Moreover, as the capitalists produce no value, it is impossible to see how they are even to live. Yet if such a surplus of production over consumption, such a production and reserve fund, nevertheless exists,

and in the hands of the capitalists at that, no other explanation remains possible but that the workers consume for their own subsistence merely the value of the commodities, and have relinquished the commodities themselves to the capitalist for further use.

Or, on the other hand, if this production and reserve fund does in fact exist in the hands of the capitalist class, if it has in fact arisen through the accumulation of profit (for the moment we leave ground-rent out of account), then it necessarily consists of the accumulated surplus of the product of labour handed over to the capitalist class by the working class, over and above the sum of wages paid to the working class by the capitalist class. In this case, however, value is determined not by wages, but by the quantity of labour; in this case the working class hands over to the capitalist class in the product of labour a greater quantity of value than it receives from it in the payment of wages, and in this case the profit on capital, like all other forms of appropriation of the unpaid labour product of others, is explained as a simple component part of this surplus-value discovered by Marx.

Incidentally, in the whole Course of Political Economy there is no mention of that great and epoch-making discovery with which Ricardo opens his most important work: <"p250">

"The value of a commodity . . . depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not on the greater or lesser compensation which is paid for that labour."[67]

In the Critical History it is dismissed with the oracular phrase:

"It is not considered" (by Ricardo) "that the greater or lesser proportion in which wages can be an allotment of necessities (!) must also involve . . . a heterogeneous configuration of the value relationships!"

A phrase into which the reader can read what he pleases, and is on the safest ground if he reads into it nothing at all.

Now let the reader select for himself, from the five sorts of value served up to us by Herr Dühring, the one he likes best: the production value, which comes from nature; or the distribution value, which man's wickedness has created and which is distinguished by the fact that it is measured by the expenditure of energy which is not contained in it; or thirdly, the value which is measured by labour-time; or fourthly, the value which is measured by the cost of reproduction; or lastly, the value which is measured by wages. The selection is wide, the confusion complete, and the only thing left for us to do is to exclaim with Herr Dühring:

"The theory of value is the touchstone of the soundness of economic systems!"

SIMPLE AND COMPOUND LABOUR

Herr Dühring has discovered a very gross schoolboy howler in political economy in Marx which at the same time contains a socialist heresy dangerous to society.

Marx's theory of value is "nothing but the ordinary . . . theory that labour is the cause of all values and labour-time is their measure. But the question of how the differential value of so-called skilled labour is to be conceived is left in complete confusion. . . . It is true that in our theory, too, only the labour-time expended can be the measure of the natural cost of production and therefore of the absolute value of economic things; but here the labour-time of each individual must be considered absolutely equal to start with, and it is only necessary to be on guard where the separate labour-time of the individual in more skilled production receives a contribution from the labour-time of other persons . . . for example, in the

tool used. Therefore the position is not, as in Herr Marx's nebulous conception, that the labour-time of one person is in itself more valuable than that of another, because more average labour-time is condensed as it were within it, but that all labour-time is in principle and without exception perfectly equivalent, and there is therefore no need to take an average first; and in regard to the work done by a person, as also in regard to every finished product, we only have to be on guard about how much of the labour-time of other persons may be concealed in what appears to be only his own labour-time. Whether it is a hand tool for production, or the hand or even the head, which could not have acquired its special characteristics and capacity for work without the labour-time of others, is not of the slightest importance in the strict application of the theory. In his lucubrations on value, however, Herr Marx never rids himself of the ghost of skilled labour time lurking in the background. He was unable to effect a thoroughgoing change here because he was hampered by the traditional mode of thought of the educated classes, to whom it necessarily appears monstrous to recognize the labour-time of a porter and that of an architect as perfectly equivalent from the economic standpoint."

The passage in Marx which calls forth this "mighty wrath" on Herr Dühring's part is very brief. Marx is examining what it is that determines the value of commodities and gives the answer, the human labour embodied in them. This, he continues, "is the expenditure of simple labour-power which on an average exists, apart from any special development, in the physical organism of every ordinary individual. . . . More complex labour counts only as simple labour raised to a higher power, or rather as multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of more complex is equal to a greater quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the product of the most complex labour, but its value equates it to the product of simple labour and consequently only represents a definite quantity of simple labour. The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measurement are established by a social process that

goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to them to be fixed by custom."[*]

First of all, Marx is here dealing only with the determination of the value of commodities, i.e., of objects which, within a society composed of private producers, are produced and exchanged against each other by these private producers for their private account. In this passage, therefore, there is no question whatever of "absolute value" -- whatever regions it may haunt -- but of the value which is current in a definite form of society. This value, in this definite historical setting, is shown as created and measured by the human labour embodied in the individual commodities, and this human labour is shown further as the expenditure of simple labour-power. But not all labour is a mere expenditure of simple human labour-power; very many sorts of labour involve the use of capabilities or knowledge acquired with the expenditure of greater or lesser effort, time and money. Do these kinds of compound labour produce, in the same interval of time, the same commodity values as simple labour, the expenditure of pure and simple labour-power? Obviously not. The product of one hour of compound labour is a commodity of a higher value -- double or treble -- in comparison with the product of one hour of simple labour. The value of the products of compound labour is expressed in definite quantities of simple labour through this comparison; but this reduction of compound labour is established by a social process which goes on behind the backs of the producers, by a process which can only be stated at this point in the development of the theory of value, but not as yet explained. <"fnp253">

* Capital, Vol. I, p. 44, translation drastically revised. --Ed.

It is this simple fact, taking place daily before our eyes in present-day capitalist society, which is here stated by Marx. This fact is so indisputable that even Herr Dühring does not venture to dispute it either in his Course or in his history of economics; and the Marxian presentation is so simple and lucid that no one but Herr Dühring "is left in complete confusion" by it. Because of his complete confusion he mistakes the value of commodities, with the study of which Marx was alone occupied in the first instance, for "the natural cost of production", which makes the confusion still worse confounded, and even for "absolute value", which to our knowledge has nowhere had currency in political economy up to now. But whatever Herr Dühring may understand by the natural cost of production and whichever of his five kinds of value may have the honour to represent absolute value, this much at least is sure: Marx is discussing none of these things, but only the value of commodities, and in the whole section of Capital dealing with value there is not the slightest indication of whether or to what extent Marx considers this theory of the value of commodities also applicable to other forms of society.

"Therefore the position is not," Herr Dühring proceeds, "as in Herr Marx's nebulous conception, that the labour-time of one person is in itself more valuable than that of another, because more average labour-time is condensed as it were within it, but that all labour-time is in principle and without exception perfectly equivalent, and there is therefore no need to take an average first."

It is lucky for Herr Dühring that fate did not make him a manufacturer, thus saving him from fixing the value of his commodities on the basis of this new rule and so running infallibly into the arms of bankruptcy. But say, are we still in the society of manufacturers here? No, far from it. With

his natural cost of production and absolute value Herr Dühring has made us take a leap, a veritable salto mortale, out of the present evil world of exploiters into his own economic commune of the future, into the pure heavenly air of equality and justice, and so we must now take a glance, even if prematurely, at this new world.

It is true that according to Herr Dühring's theory only the labour-time expended can measure the value of economic things even in the economic commune; but here the labour-time of each individual must be considered absolutely equal to start with, all labour-time is in principle and without exception absolutely equivalent, without any need to take an aver age first. Now put this radical equalitarian socialism against Marx's nebulous conception that one person's labour-time is in itself more valuable than another's because more average labour-time is condensed within it, a conception which held Marx captive by reason of the traditional mode of thought of the educated classes, to whom it necessarily appears monstrous that the labour-time of a porter and that of an architect should be recognized as perfectly equivalent from the economic standpoint!

Unfortunately Marx put a short footnote to the passage in Capital cited above: "The reader must note that we are not speaking here of the wages or value that the labourer gets for a given labour-time, but of the value of the commodity in which that labour-time is materialized. "* Marx, who seems here to have had a presentiment about his Dühring, therefore safeguards himself against an application of his above statement to the wages which are paid in existing society for compound labour. If Herr Dühring, not content with doing

* Ibid., p. 44, second footnote, Engels' italics. --Ed.

this all the same, presents these statements as the principles on which Marx would like to see the distribution of necessities regulated in a socialistically organized society, he is guilty of a shameless imposture, the like of which is only to be found in the gutter press.

But let us look a little more closely at the doctrine of equivalence. All labour-time, the porter's and the architect's, is perfectly equivalent. So labour-time, and therefore labour itself, has a value. But labour is the creator of all values. It alone gives the products found in nature value in the economic sense. Value itself is nothing other than the expression of the socially necessary human labour materialized in an object. Labour can therefore have no value. One might as well speak of the value of value, or try to determine the weight, not of a heavy body, but of heaviness itself, as speak of the value of labour and try to determine it. Herr Dühring dismisses people like Owen, Saint-Simon and Fourier by calling them social alchemists. By his logic-chopping over the value of labour-time, that is, of labour, he shows that he ranks far beneath the genuine alchemists. Now let the reader fathom Herr Dühring's brazenness in imputing to Marx the assertion that the labour-time of one person is in itself more valuable than that of another, that labour-time, and therefore labour, has a value -- to Marx, who first demonstrated that labour can have no value, and why it cannot!

The realization that labour has no value and can have none is of great importance for socialism, which wants to emancipate human labour-power from its status as a commodity. With this realization all attempts -- inherited by Herr Dühring from primitive working-class socialism -- to regulate the future distribution of necessities as a kind of higher wage fall to the ground. From it there follows the further realization that

in so far as it is governed by purely economic considerations, distribution will be regulated by the interests of production, and that production is most encouraged by a mode of distribution which allows all members of society to develop, maintain and exercise their capacities as all-sidedly as possible. It is true that it must seem monstrous to the mode of thought of the educated classes Herr Dühring has inherited that in time to come there will no longer be any professional porters or architects, and that the man who gives instructions as an architect for half an hour will also act as a porter for a period, until his activity as an architect is once again required. A fine sort of socialism that would be -- perpetuating professional porters!

If the equivalence of labour-time means that each worker produces equal values in equal periods of time without there being any need to take an average first, then this is obviously wrong. If we take two workers, even in the same branch of industry, the value they produce in one hour of labour-time will always vary with the intensity of their labour and their skill; not even an economic commune, at any rate on our planet, can remedy this evil, which in any case is only an evil for people like Dühring. What then remains of the perfect equivalence of any and all labour? Nothing but the purely braggart phrase, which has no other economic foundation than Herr Dühring's incapacity to distinguish between the determination of value by labour and the determination of value by wages -- nothing but the ukase, the basic law of the new economic commune, equal wages for equal labour-time! Indeed, the old French communist workers and Weitling had much better reasons for their equality of wages.

How then are we to solve the whole important question of the higher wages paid for compound labour? In a society

of private producers, private individuals or their families defray the costs of teaching the trained worker; hence the higher price paid for trained labour-power accrues first of all to private individuals; the clever slave is sold for a higher price, and the clever wage-earner is paid higher wages. In a socialistically organized society, these costs are defrayed by society, and the fruits, the greater values produced by compound labour, therefore belong to it. The worker himself<"p258"> has no extra claim. Which incidentally also yields the moral that the popular demand of the workers for "the full proceeds of labour" often has its snags.[68]

<"p2s7">

VII

CAPITAL AND SURPLUS-VALUE

"To begin with, Herr Marx does not hold the accepted economic view of capital, according to which it is a produced means of production, but tries to advance a more special, dialectical-historical idea toying with metamorphoses of concepts and history. According to him, capital is born of money; it forms a historical phase opening with the sixteenth century, that is, with the assumed beginnings of a world market in that period. It is obvious that the acuteness of economic analysis is lost in such a conceptual interpretation. In such barren conceptions, which are represented as half historical and half logical, but which in fact are only bastards of historical and logical fantasy, the faculty of discernment perishes together with all honesty in the use of concepts." --

and so he blusters along for a whole page. . . .

Marx's definition of the concept of capital can only cause confusion in rigorous economic theory . . . frivolities which are palmed off as profound logical truths . . . the fragility of the foundations" -- and so forth.

So according to Marx, we are told, capital was born of money at the beginning of the sixteenth century. This is like

saying that fully three thousand years ago metallic money was born of cattle, because once upon a time cattle, among other things, functioned as money. Only Herr Dühring is capable of such a crude and inept way of expressing himself. It is as the final form that money appears in Marx's analysis of the economic forms within which the process of the circulation of commodities develops. "This final product of the circulation of commodities is the first form in which capital appears. As a matter of history, capital, as opposed to landed property, invariably takes the form at first of money; it appears as moneyed wealth, as merchant's capital and usurer's capital. . . . We can see it daily under our very eyes. All new capital, to commence with, comes on the stage, that is, on the market, whether of commodities, labour, or money, even in our days, in the shape of money that by a definite process has to be transformed into capital."[*]

Here once again Marx is stating a fact. Unable to dispute it, Herr Dühring distorts it: Capital is born of money!

Marx then investigates the processes by which money is transformed into capital, and first finds that the form in which money circulates as capital is the inversion of the form in which it circulates as the universal equivalent of commodities. The simple owner of commodities sells in order to buy; he sells what he does not need, and buys what he does need with the money acquired. The incipient capitalist starts by buying what he does not need himself; he buys in order to sell, and to sell at a higher price, in order to get back the value of the money originally thrown into the purchase, augmented by an increment in money, and this increment Marx calls surplus-value. <"fnp259">

* Capital, Vol. I, p. 146, translation revised, Engels' italics. --Ed.

Where does this surplus-value come from? It can come neither from the buyer buying the commodities under their value, nor from the seller selling them above their value. For in both cases the gains and the losses of each individual cancel each other out, as each individual is in turn buyer and seller. Nor can it arise from cheating, since cheating can doubtless enrich one person at the expense of another but cannot increase the total sum possessed by both and therefore cannot increase the sum of the values in circulation. "The capitalist class, as a whole, in any country, cannot over-reach themselves."[*]

Yet we find that in each country the capitalist class as a whole is constantly enriching itself before our eyes by selling dearer than it had bought, by appropriating to itself surplus-value. We are therefore just where we were at the start: where does this surplus-value come from? This problem must be solved, and solved in a purely economic way, excluding all cheating and the intervention of any force -- the problem being, how is it possible constantly to sell dearer than one has bought, yet on the assumption that equal values are constantly exchanged for equal values?

The solution of this problem was the most epoch-making contribution in Marx's works. It spread the clear light of day over economic domains in which socialists no less than bourgeois economists previously groped in utter darkness. Scientific socialism dates from it, centres around it.

This solution is as follows. The increase in value of the money that is to be converted into capital cannot take place in this money or originate in the purchase, as here this money does no more than realize the price of the commodity and <"fnp260">

* Ibid., p. 163. --Ed.

this price is not different from its value, since we assumed that equal values are exchanged. But for the same reason, the increase in value cannot originate in the sale of the commodity. The change must, therefore, take place in the commodity which is bought, not however in its value, as it is bought and sold at its value, but in its use-value as such, that is, the change of value must originate in the consumption of the commodity. "In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend, Moneybags, must be so lucky as to find . . . in the market a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption, therefore, is itself an embodiment of labour, and, consequently, a creation of value. The possessor of money does find on the market such a specific commodity in capacity for labour or labour-power. "* Though, as we saw, labour as such can have no value, this is by no means the case with labour-power. This acquires a value from the moment that it becomes a commodity, which it actually is today, and this value is determined "as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article";** that is to say, by the labour-time necessary for the production of the means of subsistence which the worker requires for maintaining himself in a fit state to work and for perpetuating his race. Let us assume that these means of subsistence represent six hours of labour-time a day. Our incipient capitalist, who buys labour-power to carry on his business, i.e., hires a worker, consequently pays this worker the full value of his day's labour-power if he pays <"fnp">

* Ibid., p. 167, Engels' italics. --Ed.
** Ibid., pp. 170-71. --Ed.

him a sum of money which likewise represents six hours of labour. Now as soon as the worker has worked six hours in the employment of the incipient capitalist, he has fully reimbursed the latter for his outlay, for the value of the day's labour-power paid for. But with this the money would not have been converted into capital, it would not have produced any surplus-value. For this reason the buyer of labour-power has quite a different view of the nature of the transaction he has carried out. The fact that only six hours' labour is necessary to keep the worker alive for twenty-four hours in no way prevents him from working twelve hours out of the twenty-four. The value of the labour-power and the value which that labour-power creates in the labour process are two different magnitudes. Moneybags has paid the value of a day's labour-power; therefore its use for the day, the whole day's labour, belongs to him. If the value which its use during one day creates is double its own value for the day, this is a stroke of particular good fortune for the buyer, but, according to the laws of the exchange of commodities, no injustice at all to the seller. On our assumption, therefore, the worker each day costs Moneybags the value of the product of six hours' labour, but he hands over to him each day the value of the product of twelve hours' labour. Difference in Moneybags' favour -- six hours of unpaid surplus-labour, a surplus-product which is not paid for and in which six hours' labour is embodied. The trick has been performed. Surplus-value has been produced, money has been converted into capital.

In thus showing how surplus-value arises and how alone surplus-value can arise under the domination of the laws regulating the exchange of commodities, Marx laid bare the mechanism of the existing capitalist mode of production and of the mode of appropriation based on it, and revealed the

core around which the whole existing social order has crystallized.

However, this creation of capital has one essential prerequisite: "For the conversion of money into capital the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he disposes of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, has no ties and is free of everything necessary for the realization of his labour-power."[*] But this relation between the owners of money or of commodities, on the one hand, and those who possess nothing beyond their own labour-power, on the other, is not a relation arising from natural history, nor is it one common to all historical periods: "It is itself clearly the result of a past historical development, the product . . . of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production."** In fact, we first encounter this free worker on a mass scale in history at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, as a result of the dissolution of the feudal mode of production. With this, however, and with the creation of world trade and the world market dating from the same epoch, the basis was laid on which the mass of the existing movable wealth was of necessity increasingly converted into capital, and the capitalist mode of production, which is directed towards the production of surplus-value, of necessity increasingly became the exclusively prevailing one.

Up to this point, we have been following the "barren conceptions" of Marx, these "bastards of historical and logical <"fnp263">

* Ibid., p. 169, translation revised, Engels' italics. --Ed.
** Ibid., --Ed.

fantasy" in which "the faculty of discernment perishes together with all honesty in the use of concepts". Let us contrast these "frivolities" with the "profound logical truths" and the "definitive and most rigorously scientific treatment in the sense of the exact disciplines", such as Herr Dühring offers us.

So Marx "does not hold the accepted economic view of capital, according to which it is a produced means of production"; on the contrary, he says that a sum of values is converted into capital only when it creates value by forming surplus-value. And what does Herr Dühring say?

"Capital is a basis of means of economic power for the continuation of production and for the formation of shares in the fruits of the general labour-power. "

However oracularly and awkwardly this too is expressed, this much at least is certain: the basis of means of economic power may continue production to eternity, but in Herr Dühring's own words it will not become capital so long as it does not form "shares in the fruits of the general labour-power", that is to say, form surplus-value or at least surplus-product. Therefore not only does Herr Dühring himself commit the sin of not holding the accepted economic view of capital, a sin with which he charges Marx, but he also commits a clumsy plagiarism of Marx, "badly concealed" by high-sounding phrases.

This is further developed on 62:

"Capital in the social sense" (and Herr Dühring still has to discover any capital in a sense which is not social) "is in fact specifically different from the mere means of production; for while the latter have only a technical character and are necessary under all conditions, the former is distinguished by its social power of appropriation and the formation of shares. It is true that social capital is to a great extent nothing but the technical means of production in their social function ; but it is precisely this function which . . . must disappear."

When we reflect that it was precisely Marx who first stressed the "social function" by virtue of which alone a sum of values becomes capital, it will certainly "be immediately clear to every attentive investigator of the subject that Marx's definition of the concept of capital can only cause confusion" -- not, however, as Herr Dühring thinks, in rigorous economic theory but, as is evident, solely and simply in the head of this very Herr Dühring, who in the Critical History has already forgotten how much nourishment he drew from the said concept of capital in his Course.

However, Herr Dühring is not content with borrowing from Marx the latter's definition of capital, though in a "purified" form. He is also obliged to follow Marx in the "toying with metamorphoses of concepts and history", and this in spite of his own better knowledge that nothing could come of it but "barren conceptions", "frivolities", "fragility of the foundations", and so forth. Where does this "social function" of capital come from which enables it to appropriate the fruits of others' labour, and which alone distinguishes it from mere means of production? Herr Dühring says that

it does not depend "on the nature of the means of production and their technical indispensability".

It therefore arose historically, and on 62 Herr Dühring only tells us again what we have heard ten times before when he explains its origin by means of the old familiar adventures of the two men, one of whom at the dawn of history converted his means of production into capital by the use of violence against the other. But not content with ascribing a historical beginning to the social function through which alone a sum of values becomes capital, Herr Dühring prophesies that it will also have a historical end. It is

"precisely this that must disappear". In ordinary parlance it is customary to call a phenomenon which arose historically and again disappears historically "a historical phase". Capital, therefore, is a historical phase not only in Marx but also in Herr Dühring, and we are consequently forced to the conclusion that we are among Jesuits here. When two people do the same thing, then it is not the same thing. When Marx says that capital is a historical phase, that is a barren conception, a bastard of historical and logical fantasy, in which the faculty of discernment perishes, together with all honesty in the use of concepts. When Herr Dühring likewise presents capital as a historical phase, that is proof of the acuteness of his economic analysis and of his definitive and most vigorously scientific treatment in the sense of the exact disciplines.

What is it then that distinguishes the Dühringian conception of capital from the Marxian?

"Capital," says Marx, "has not invented surplus-labour Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production."* Surplus-labour, labour over and above the time required for the worker's own maintenance, and appropriation by others of the product of this surplus-labour, the exploitation of labour, is therefore common to all forms of society up to now, in so far as they have moved in class antagonisms. But it is only when the product of this surplus-labour assumes the form of surplus-value, when the owner of the means of production finds himself facing the free worker -- free from social fetters and free from posses-

* Ibid., p. 235. --Ed.

sions of his own -- as an object of exploitation and exploits him for the purpose of the production of commodities, it is only then, according to Marx, that the means of production take on the specific character of capital. This first took place on a large scale at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century.

On the contrary, Herr Dühring declares that every sum of means of production which "forms shares in the fruits of the general labour-power", that is, yields surplus-labour in any form, is capital. In other words, Herr Dühring annexes the surplus-labour discovered by Marx in order to kill for him the momentarily inconvenient surplus-value, likewise discovered by Marx. According to Herr Dühring, therefore, not only the movable and immovable wealth of the Corinthian and Athenian citizens, who ran their economy with slaves, but also that of the large Roman landowners of the time of the empire and equally the wealth of the feudal barons of the Middle Ages, in so far as it in any way served production -- all this without distinction is capital.

So Herr Dühring himself does not hold "the accepted view of capital, according to which it is a produced means of production", but rather a diametrically opposite one, a view which includes in capital even unproduced means of production, namely, the earth and its natural resources. But the idea that capital is simply "produced means of production" is once again the accepted view only in vulgar economics. Outside of this vulgar economics so dear to Herr Dühring, the "produced means of production" or any sum of values whatever becomes capital only by yielding profit or interest, i.e., by appropriating the surplus-product of unpaid labour in the form of surplus-value, and that, moreover, in these two definite subforms of surplus-value. It is of no importance

whatever that the whole of bourgeois economics is still chained to the idea that the characteristic of yielding profit or interest is inherent in every sum of values which is employed under normal conditions in production or exchange. In classical political economy, capital and profit, or capital and interest, are just as inseparable, stand in the same reciprocal relationship, as cause and effect, father and son, yesterday and today. But the word "capital" in its modern economic meaning is first met with at the time when the thing itself makes its appearance, when movable wealth increasingly acquires the function of capital by exploiting the surplus-labour of free workers for the production of commodities; and in fact it was introduced by the first nation of capitalists in history, the Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If Marx was the first to make a fundamental analysis of the mode of appropriation characteristic of modern capital; if he brought the concept of capital into harmony with the historical facts from which, in the last analysis, it had been abstracted, and to which it owed its existence; if Marx thus cleared this economic concept of those obscure and fluctuating ideas which still clung to it even in classical bourgeois political economy and among socialists up to now -- then it was Marx who applied that "definitive and most rigorously scientific treatment" which Herr Dühring is so constantly talking about and which we so painfully miss in his works.

In actual fact, Herr Dühring's treatment is quite different. He is not content with first inveighing against the presentation of capital as a historical phase by calling it a "bastard of historical and logical fantasy" and then himself presenting it as a historical phase. He also roundly declares that all means of economic power, all means of production which appropriate "shares in the fruits of the general labour-power"

-- and therefore also landed property in all class societies -- are capital; which, however, does not in the least prevent him in his further progress from separating landed property and ground-rent from capital and profit quite in the traditional manner, and designating as capital only those means of production which yield profit or interest, as he does at considerable length on page 156 ff. of his Course. Herr Dühring might just as well first include horses, oxen, asses and dogs under the term "locomotive" on the ground that these, too, can be used as means of transport, and reproach modern engineers with limiting the term locomotive to the modern steam-engine and thus setting it up as a historical phase, using barren conceptions, bastards of historical and logical fantasy and so forth; and then finally declare that horses, asses, oxen and dogs are nevertheless excluded from the designation locomotive, and that it is applicable only to the steam-engine.

So once more we are compelled to say that it is precisely the Dühringian conception of capital in which all acuteness of economic analysis is lost and the faculty of discernment perishes, together with all honesty in the use of concepts; and that the barren conceptions, the confusion, the frivolities palmed off as profound logical truths and the fragility of the foundations are to be found aplenty in Herr Dühring's own work.

But all that is of no consequence. For Herr Dühring's is the glory of having discovered the axis on which all economics, all politics and jurisprudence, in a word, all past history, has revolved. Here it is:

"Force and labour are the two principal factors which come into play in the formation of social ties."

This one sentence contains the complete constitution of the economic world up to the present day. It is extremely short, and runs:

Article One: Labour produces.

Article Two: Force distributes.

"In plain human language", this sums up the whole of Herr Dühring's economic wisdom.