FREDERICK ENGELS

ANTI-DÜHRING

(Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science)

-- Section 2 --
Part II: Political Economy

FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS
PEKING 1976

First Edition 1976

Prepared © for the Internet by David J. Romagnolo, djr@marx2mao.org (July 1998)

PART II

POLITICAL ECONOMY

SUBJECT MATTER AND METHOD

Political economy, in the widest sense, is the science of the laws governing the production and exchange of the material means of subsistence in human society. Production and exchange are two different functions. Production may occur without exchange, but exchange -- by the very fact that it is only an exchange of products -- cannot occur without production. Each of these two social functions is subject to the influence of what are for a large part special external factors, and consequently each has what are also for a large part its own special laws. But on the other hand, they constantly determine and influence each other to such an extent that they might be termed the abscissa and the ordinate of the economic curve.

The conditions under which men produce and exchange vary from country to country, and within each country again

page 187

from generation to generation. Political economy, therefore, cannot be the same for all countries and for all historical epochs. A tremendous distance separates the bow and arrow, the stone knife and the exceptional occurrence of exchange transactions among savages from the steam-engine of a thousand horse power, the mechanical loom, the railways and the Bank of England. The inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego have not attained mass production and world trade, any more than they have bill-jobbing or a Stock Exchange crash. Anyone who attempted to bring the political economy of Tierra del Fuego under the same laws as are operative in present-day England would obviously produce nothing but the most banal commonplaces. Political economy is therefore essentially a historical science. It deals with material which is historical, that is, constantly changing; it first investigates the special laws of each individual stage in the development of production and exchange, and only when it has completed this investigation will it be able to establish the few quite general laws which hold good for production and exchange in all cases. At the same time it goes without saying that the laws which are valid for definite modes of production and forms of exchange also hold good for all historical periods to which these modes of production and forms of exchange are common. Thus, for example, the introduction of metallic money brought into operation a series of laws which remain valid for all countries and historical epochs in which metallic money is a medium of exchange.

The nature and mode of distribution of the products of a specific historical society are simultaneously given with the nature and mode of production and exchange in that society and with its historical preconditions. In the tribal or village community with common ownership of land, with which, or

page 188

with the easily recognizable survivals of which, all civilized peoples enter history, a fairly equal distribution of products is altogether a matter of course; where a more marked inequality of distribution among the members of the community sets in, this is an indication that the community is already beginning to break up.

Both large- and small-scale agriculture admit of very diverse forms of distribution, according to the historical preconditions from which they developed. But it is clear that large-scale farming always entails a distribution which is quite different from that in small-scale farming; that the former presupposes or creates a class antagonism -- slave-owners and slaves, feudal lords and serfs, capitalists and wage-workers -- while the latter by no means entails class differences between the individuals engaged in agricultural production, and that on the contrary the mere existence of such differences indicates the incipient decline of small-holding economy.

The introduction and extensive use of metallic money in a country in which natural economy was hitherto universal or predominant is always associated with either a slower or a faster revolutionization of the previous mode of distribution, and this in such a way that the inequality of distribution among individuals and therefore the contrast between rich and poor becomes more and more pronounced.

The local, guild handicraft production of the Middle Ages precluded the existence of big capitalists and lifelong wage workers, just as these two categories are inevitably created by modern large-scale industry, the present-day credit system, and the form of exchange corresponding to the development of both the latter -- free competition.

But with the differences in distribution, class differences emerge. Society divides into classes, the privileged and the

page 189

dispossessed, the exploiters and the exploited, the rulers and the ruled; and henceforward the state, which the primitive groups of communities of the same tribe had at first arrived at only in order to safeguard their common interests (e.g., irrigation in the East) and for protection against the outside world, has the equal purpose of maintaining by force the conditions of existence and domination of the ruling class against the subject class.

Distribution, however, is not a merely passive result of production and exchange; it reacts just as much on both. Each new mode of production or form of exchange is at first obstructed not only by the old forms and their corresponding political institutions, but also by the old mode of distribution. It must first secure the distribution which corresponds to it in the course of a long struggle. But the more mobile a given mode of production and exchange, the more capable it is of expansion and development, the more rapidly does distribution reach the stage at which it outgrows its progenitor, and in which it comes into conflict with the hitherto prevailing mode of production and exchange. The old primitive communities which have already been mentioned could remain in existence for thousands of years -- as in India and among the Slavs up to the present day -- before intercourse with the external world gave rise to the internal inequalities of property as a result of which they began to break up. On the other hand, modern capitalist production, which is hardly three hundred years old and has become predominant only since the introduction of large-scale industry, that is, only in the last hundred years, has in this short time brought about antagonisms in distribution -- concentration of capital in a few hands on the one side and concentration of the propertyless

page 190

masses in the big towns on the other -- which must of necessity bring about its downfall.

The connection between distribution and the material conditions of existence of society in any period lies so much in the nature of things that it is regularly reflected in popular instinct. So long as a mode of production is still in its rising phase of development, it is enthusiastically welcomed even by those who come off badly from its corresponding mode of distribution. This was the case with the English workers during the emergence of large-scale industry. So long as this mode of production remains the social norm, on the whole there is contentment with distribution, and if objections begin to be raised, they come from within the ruling class itself (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) and find no response at all among the exploited masses. Only when the mode of production in question is already well into its declining phase, when it has half outlived its day, when the conditions of its existence have to a large extent disappeared and its successor is already knocking at the door -- only then does the constantly increasing inequality of distribution appear unjust, only then is appeal made from the facts which have had their day to so-called eternal justice. From a scientific standpoint, this appeal to morals and law does not help us an inch further; economic science can regard moral indignation, however justifiable, not as an argument, but only as a symptom. Its task is rather to show that the social abuses coming to the fore are necessary consequences of the existing mode of production, but at the same time also indications of its impending dissolution; and to reveal, within the already dissolving form of economic motion, the elements of the future new organization of production and exchange which will put an end to those abuses. The wrath which makes the poet is totally in

page 191

place in describing these abuses as well as in attacking those apostles of harmony in the service of the ruling class who deny or prettify them; but how little it proves in any particular case is evident from the fact that there has been no lack of material for such wrath in every historical epoch up to now.

But political economy as the science of the conditions and forms under which the various human societies have produced and exchanged and have always correspondingly distributed their products -- political economy in this wider sense has still to be brought into being. Such economic science as we possess up to the present is almost exclusively limited to the genesis and development of the capitalist mode of production: it begins with the critique of the survivals of the feudal forms of production and exchange, shows the necessity of their replacement by capitalist forms, then develops the laws of the capitalist mode of production and its corresponding forms of exchange in their positive aspects, that is, the aspects in which they further the general aims of society, and ends with the socialist critique of the capitalist mode of production, that is, with the exposition of its laws in their negative aspects, with the demonstration that by virtue of its own development this mode of production is being driven towards the point at which it makes itself impossible. This critique proves that the capitalist forms of production and exchange increasingly become an intolerable fetter on production itself; that the mode of distribution necessarily determined by these forms has produced a class situation which is growing daily more intolerable, has produced the daily sharpening antagonism between ever fewer and ever richer capitalists and ever more numerous and -- by and large -- ever more badly situated propertyless wage-workers; and finally, that the colossal

page 192

productive forces, which are created within the capitalist mode of production and which the latter can no longer tame, are only waiting to be taken possession of by a society organized for co-operative work on a planned basis to ensure to all members of society in constantly increasing measure the means of existence and of the free development of their capacities.

In order to carry out this critique of bourgeois economics completely, it was not enough to be acquainted with the capitalist form of production, exchange and distribution. The forms preceding it or still existing alongside it in less developed countries had also to be examined and compared, at least in their main features. By and large, this kind of investigation and comparison has as yet been undertaken only by Marx, and so we owe almost exclusively to his researches all that has so far been established concerning pre-bourgeois theoretical economics.

Although it first took shape in the minds of a few men of genius towards the end of the seventeenth century, political economy in the narrower sense, in its positive formulation by the Physiocrats and Adam Smith, is nevertheless essentially a child of the eighteenth century, and ranks with the achievements of the great contemporary French philosophers of the Enlightenment, with all the merits and defects of that period. What we have said of the philosophers* is also true of the economists of that time. To them, the new science was not the expression of the conditions and needs of their epoch but the expression of eternal reason; the laws of production and exchange it discovered were not laws of a historically determined form of those activities, but eternal

* See pp. 18-20 above. --Ed.

page 193

laws of nature; they were deduced from the nature of man. But when examined more closely, this man proved to be the middle burgher of the time in the process of becoming a bourgeois, and his nature consisted in manufacturing and trading in accordance with the historically determined conditions of that period.

Now that we have acquired sufficient knowledge of our "builder of critical foundations", Herr Dühring, and his method in the philosophical field, we can easily foretell how he will handle political economy. In philosophy, in so far as his writings were not just drivel (as in his philosophy of nature), his outlook was a distortion of that of the eighteenth century. It was not a question of historical laws of development, but of laws of nature, eternal truths. Social relations such as morality and law were determined, not by the actual historical conditions of the age, but by the famous twosome, one of whom either oppresses or does not oppress the other, the latter, sad to say, never having yet come to pass. We are therefore hardly likely to go astray if we conclude that Herr Dühring will also trace political economy back to final and ultimate truths, eternal laws of nature, and the most empty and dreary tautological axioms; that nevertheless he will again smuggle in by the backdoor the whole positive content of political economy, so far as this is known to him; and that he will not evolve distribution, as a social phenomenon, out of production and exchange, but will hand it over to his glorious twosome for final solution.<"p193"> Since these are all old familiar tricks to us, we can be that much briefer here. In fact, Herr Dühring tells us already on [58] that

his economics links up with what has been "established " in his "philosophy", and "in certain essential points depends on truths of a higher order which have already been put out in a higher field of investigation".

page 194

Everywhere the same importunate self-praise. Everywhere Herr Dühring is gloating over what Herr Dühring has established and put out. Put out, yes, we have seen it to surfeit -- but put out in the way that people put out a sputtering candle.[*]

Immediately afterwards we find "the most general laws of nature governing every economy" -- so our forecast was right.

But these natural laws permit of a correct understanding of past history only if they are "investigated in that more precise determination which their results have experienced through the political forms of subjection and grouping. Institutions such as slavery and wage bondage, with which their twin-brother, property based on force, is associated, must be regarded as socio-economic constitutional forms of a purely political nature, and have hitherto constituted the frame within which the consequences of the economic laws of nature could alone manifest themselves."

This sentence is the fanfare which, like a leitmotif in Wagner's operas, announces the approach of the famous two some. But it is still more, it is the basic theme of Herr Dühring's whole book. In the sphere of law, Herr Dühring could offer us nothing save a bad translation of Rousseau's theory of equality into the language of socialism,** such as one has long been able to hear on a far higher level in any workers' tavern in Paris. Now he gives us an equally bad socialist translation of the economists' laments over the distortion of the eternal economic laws of nature and of their effects through the intervention of the state, of force. In this Herr Dühring deservedly stands quite alone among socialists. Every socialist worker of whatever nationality knows quite well that force only protects exploitation, but does not cause <"fnp194">

* An untranslatable play on words: ausmachen means to settle and also to put out. --Ed.
** See pp. 121-29 above. --Ed.

page 195

it; that the relation between capital and wage-labour is the basis of his exploitation, and that this arose from purely economic causes and not at all by means of force.

Then we are further told that

in all economic questions "two processes, that of production and that of distribution, can be distinguished". Also that the notoriously superficial J. B. Say added yet a third process, that of use, of consumption, but that he was unable to say anything sensible about it, any more than his successors; but that exchange or circulation is only a department of production, which comprises all the operations required for the products to reach the final and actual consumers.

By confounding the two processes of production and circulation, which though conditioning each other are essentially different, and unblushingly asserting that the avoidance of this confusion can only "give rise to confusion", Herr Dühring merely shows that he either does not know or does not under stand the colossal development which this very process of circulation has undergone during the last fifty years, as indeed is further borne out by the rest of his book. But this is not all. After lumping production and exchange together into production as such, he puts distribution alongside production, as a second, wholly external process which has nothing what ever to do with the first. Now we have seen that in its decisive features distribution is always the necessary result of the relations of production and exchange in a particular society, as well as of the historical preconditions of this society; so much so that when we know these relations and preconditions, we can definitely infer the prevailing mode of distribution in this society. But we see too that if Herr Dühring does not want to be unfaithful to the basic principles "established" by him in his interpretation of morals, law and history, he must deny this elementary economic fact,

page 126

especially if he is to smuggle his indispensable twosome into economics. This great event can come to pass once distribution has been happily released from all connection with production and exchange.

But let us first recall how things went in morals and law. Herr Dühring started originally with one man, saying:

"One man conceived as being alone, or, which comes to the same thing, out of all connection with other men, can have no obligations ; for him there is no duty but only will."

But what is this man without obligations and conceived as being alone but the fateful "original Jew Adam" in paradise, where he is without sin precisely because he can't commit any?

But original sin is impending even for this philosophy-of reality Adam. By the side of this Adam there suddenly appears -- not, it is true, an Eve with rippling tresses, but still a second Adam. And Adam instantly acquires obligations and -- breaks them. Instead of clasping his brother to his bosom as his equal in rights, he subjects him to his domination, he enslaves him -- and it is the consequence of this first sin, the original sin of enslavement, from which the whole of world history has suffered down to the present day, which is also why according to Herr Dühring it is not worth threepence.

Incidentally, Herr Dühring believed that he had brought the "negation of the negation" sufficiently into contempt by characterizing it as a feeble imitation of the old fable of original sin and redemption. But what are we to say of his latest version of the same story? (For, in due course, we shall, to use an expression of the government-bought press, "get down to brass tacks" on redemption as well.) In any case,

page 197

we prefer the old Semitic tribal legend, according to which it was worth while for the good little man and woman to abandon the state of innocence, and we leave to Herr Dühring the uncontested glory of having constructed his original sin with two men.

Let us now see how he translates this original sin into economic terms:

"If need be, we can get an appropriate conceptual schema for the idea of production from the conception of a Robinson Crusoe who is facing nature alone with his own resources and has nobody else to share anything with, . . . The conceptual schema of two persons, who combine their economic forces and must evidently come to some form of mutual understanding as to their respective shares, is equally appropriate for the illustration of what is most essential for the idea of distribution. In fact nothing more than this simple dualism is required to enable us to portray some of the most important relations of distribution in all their rigour and to study their laws embryonically in their logical necessity. . . . Co-operative work on an equal footing is here just as conceivable as the combination of forces through the complete subjection of one party, who is then compelled to render economic service as a slave or as a mere tool and is also only maintained as a tool. . . . Between the state of equality and that of nullity on the one hand and of omnipotence and sole active participation on the other, there is a range of stages which the events of world history have filled in rich variety. A universal survey of the various historical institutions of justice and injustice is here an essential presupposition". . . .

and in conclusion the whole question of distribution is transformed into an "economic right of distribution".

Now at last Herr Dühring has firm ground under his feet again. Arm in arm with his two men, he can issue his challenge to his age. But behind this trinity stands yet another, an unnamed man.

"Capital 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

page 198

order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, whether this proprietor be the Athenian kalos kagathos,[*] Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus (Roman citizen), Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist" (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 2nd edition, p. 227).[**]

When Herr Dühring had thus learned what the basic form of exploitation common to all forms of production up to the present is -- so far as they move in class antagonisms -- all he had to do was to apply his two men to it, and the deep-rooted foundation of the economics of reality was completed. He did not hesitate for a moment to carry out this "system-creating idea". Labour without compensation, beyond the labour-time necessary for the maintenance of the worker himself -- that is the point. The Adam, who is here called Robinson Crusoe, makes his second Adam, Man Friday, drudge for all he is worth. But why does Friday drudge more than is necessary for his own subsistence? To this question, too, Marx provides a partial answer. But it is far too long-winded for the two men. The matter is settled in a trice: Crusoe "oppresses" Friday, compels him "to render economic service as a slave or a tool" and maintains him, but "only as a tool". With this latest "creative turn" of his, Herr Dühring kills two birds with one stone. Firstly, he saves himself the trouble of explaining the various forms of distribution up to now, their differences and their causes; the whole lot are simply worthless, they rest on oppression, on force. We shall have to deal with this before long. Secondly, he in this way trans- <"fnp198">

* Aristocrat. --Ed.
** Capital, English ed., Vol. I, p. 235. --Ed.

page 199

fers the whole theory of distribution from the sphere of economics to that of morals and law, that is, from the sphere of established material facts to that of more or less fluctuating opinions and sentiments. Therefore he no longer needs to investigate or to prove things, but can just go on merrily declaiming and demand that the distribution of the products of labour should be regulated, not in accordance with its real causes, but in accordance with what seems ethical and just to him, Herr Dühring. But what seems just to Herr Dühring is not at all immutable, and hence very far from being a genuine truth. For genuine truths, according to Herr Dühring himself, are "absolutely immutable". In 1868 Herr Dühring asserted in Die Schicksale meiner sozialen Denkschrift, etc.[*] that it is

"a tendency of all higher civilization to put more and more emphasis on property, and that the essence and the future of modern development lie in this, not in the confusion of rights and spheres of sovereignty".

Furthermore, he was quite unable to see

"how a transformation of wage-labour into another manner of gaining a livelihood is ever to be reconciled with the laws of human nature and the naturally necessary structure of the body social". <"p199">

Thus in 1868, private property and wage-labour are naturally necessary and therefore just; in 1876, both are the emanation of force and "robbery" and therefore unjust.[59] As we cannot possibly tell what may well seem ethical and just to such a mighty and impetuous genius in a few years' time, we should in any case do better to stick to genuine, objective, economic laws in considering the distribution of wealth and not to <"fnp199">

* The Fate of My Memorandum on the Social Problem for the Prussian Ministry of State. -- Ed.

depend on Herr Dühring's momentary, changeable, subjective conceptions of what is just or unjust.

We should be in a pretty bad way and might have a long time to wait for the impending overthrow of the present mode of distribution of the products of labour with its crying contrasts of misery and luxury and of famine and feasting, if we had no better guarantee than the consciousness that this mode of distribution is unjust and that justice must eventually triumph. The mediaeval mystics who dreamed of the coming millennium were already conscious of the injustice of class antagonisms. On the threshold of modern history, three hundred and fifty years ago, Thomas Münzer loudly proclaimed it to the world. In the English and the French bourgeois revolutions the same call resounded -- and died away. If today the same call for the abolition of class antagonisms and class distinctions, which had left the working and suffering classes cold up to 1830, if today this call is re-echoed a million-fold, if it takes hold of one country after another in the same order and in the same degree of intensity that large-scale industry develops in each country, if in one generation it has gained a strength that enables it to defy all the forces combined against it and to be sure of victory in the near future -- what is the reason for this? The reason is that modern large-scale industry has on the one hand created a proletariat, a class which for the first time in history can demand the abolition, not of this or that particular class organization or of this or that particular class privilege but of classes themselves, and which is so situated that it must carry through this demand on pain of sinking to the level of the Chinese coolie. And that this same large-scale industry has on the other hand created in the bourgeoisie a class which has the monopoly of all the instruments of production and

means of subsistence, but which in each speculative boom period and in each ensuing crash proves that it has become incapable of any longer governing the productive forces which have grown beyond its power; a class under whose leadership society is racing to ruin like a locomotive whose jammed safety-valve the driver is too weak to open. In other words, the reason is that both the productive forces engendered by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established by it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself, so much so that if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions. It is on this palpable material fact which is more or less clearly impressing itself with irresistible necessity on the minds of the exploited proletarians -- it is on this fact, and not on any armchair philosopher's conceptions of justice and injustice, that the sure confidence of modern socialism in victory is founded.

<"p2s2">

THE FORCE THEORY

"In my system, the relation between general politics and the forms of economic rights is determined in so decisive and at the same time so original a way that it would not be superfluous to make special reference to this point in order to facilitate study. The formation of political relationships is the historically fundamental factor, and instances of economic dependence are only effects or special cases and are consequently always facts of a second order. Some of the newer socialist systems take as their guiding principle the striking semblance of a completely reverse relationship by making the political infrastructures as it were grow out of economic conditions. It is true that these second order effects do exist as such and are

most elearly perceptible at the present time; but the primary factor must be sought in direct political force and not in any indirect economic power."

This is also asserted in another passage, in which Herr Dühring

"starts from the principle that political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation and that the reverse relationship represents only a second order reaction . . . so long as anyone takes the political grouping not as the starting point for its own sake, but merely as a means of getting grub, he must be harbouring a hidden dose of reaction in his mind, however radical a socialist and revolutionary he may seem to be".

That is Herr Dühring's theory. In this and in many other passages it is simply set up, decreed, so to speak. Nowhere in the three fat tomes is there the slightest attempt to prove it or to disprove the opposite point of view. Even if the arguments for it were as cheap as blackberries, Herr Dühring wouldn't give us any. For the whole affair has already been proved through the famous original sin when Robinson Crusoe made Friday his slave. That was an act of force, hence a political act. Since this enslavement was the starting-point and the basic fact for all past history and inoculated it with the original sin of injustice, so much so that in later periods it was only softened down and "transformed into the more indirect forms of economic dependence", and since all "property founded on force" which has maintained its legality right up to the present day is likewise based on this original act of enslavement, it is clear that all economic phenomena must be explained by political causes, that is, by force. Anyone who is not satisfied with that is a reactionary in disguise.

We must first point out that only someone as self-infatuated as Herr Dühring could regard this view as so very "original", which it is not in the least. The idea that the political ac-

tions of leaders and states are decisive in history is as old as written history itself, and is the main reason why so little has been preserved for us concerning the development of the peoples, which occurs quietly, in the background, behind these noisy scenes on the stage, and which really pushes things forward. This idea dominated the whole conception of history<"p203"> in the past and only received its first blow from the French bourgeois historians of the Restoration period;[60] the only "original" thing about it is that Herr Dühring once again knows nothing of all this.

Furthermore, even if we assume for the moment that Herr Dühring is right in saying that all past history can be traced back to the enslavement of man by man, we are still very far from having got to the bottom of the matter. For the question immediately arises, how did Crusoe come to enslave Friday? Just for the fun of it? No such thing. On the contrary, we see that Friday "is compelled to render economic service as a slave or as a mere tool and is maintained only as a tool". Crusoe enslaved Friday only in order that Friday should work for Crusoe's benefit. And how can he derive any benefit for himself from Friday's labour? Only through Friday's producing by his labour more of the necessaries of life than Crusoe has to give him to keep him fit to work. Therefore, in violation of Herr Dühring's express orders, Crusoe "takes the political grouping" arising out of Friday's enslavement "not as the starting-point for its own sake, but exclusively as a means of getting grub "; and now let him see to it that he gets along with his lord and master, Dühring.

Thus the childish example expressly selected by Herr Dühring in order to prove that force is "the historically fundamental factor" proves that force is only the means, and that the end is economic advantage. In proportion as the

end is "more fundamental" than the means, so the economic side of the relationship is more fundamental in history than the political. The example therefore proves precisely the opposite of what it was supposed to prove. And as in the case of Crusoe and Friday, so in all cases of domination and enslavement up to the present. Subjugation has always been -- to use Herr Dühring's elegant expression -- a "means of getting grub" (taking getting grub in its widest sense), but never and nowhere a political grouping established "for its own sake". It takes a Herr Dühring to be able to imagine that state taxes are only "second order effects", or that the present-day political grouping of the dominant bourgeoisie and the dominated proletariat has come into existence "for its own sake", and not as a "means of getting grub" for the dominant capitalists, that is to say, for the sake of making profits and accumulating capital.

However, let us get back to our twosome. Crusoe, "sword in hand", makes Friday his slave. But in order to pull this off, Crusoe needs something else besides his sword. Not every one is served by a slave. To be able to make use of a slave, one must possess two things: first, the instruments and material for the slave's labour, and second, the means of bare subsistence for him. Therefore, a certain level of production must have already been reached and a certain inequality of distribution must have already occurred before slavery becomes possible. For slave-labour to become the dominant mode of production in a whole society, a far higher increase in production, trade and accumulation of wealth is needed. In the ancient primitive communities with common ownership of the land, slavery either does not exist at all or plays only a very subordinate role. It was the same in the originally peasant city of Rome; but when Rome became a

"world city" and Italic landownership increasingly fell into the hands of a numerically small class of enormously rich proprietors, the peasant population was squeezed out by a population of slaves. If the number of slaves in Corinth rose to 460,000 and in Aegina to 470,000 at the time of the Persian wars and there were ten slaves to every freeman, something else besides "force" was required, namely, a highly developed arts and handicraft industry and an extensive commerce. Slavery in the United States of America was based far less on force than on the English cotton industry; in those areas where no cotton was grown or which, unlike the border states, did not breed slaves for the cotton-growing states, it died out of itself without any force being used, simply because it did not pay.

Hence, Herr Dühring is standing the whole relationship on its head when he calls property as it exists today property founded on force and characterizes it as

"that form of domination at the root of which there lies not merely the exclusion of fellow-men from the use of the natural means of subsistence. but also, and what is far more important, the subjugation of man to menial service".

The subjugation of a man to menial service in all its forms presupposes that the subjugator has at his disposal the means of labour through which alone he can employ the person placed in bondage, and in the case of slavery, in addition, the means of subsistence which enable him to keep the slave alive. In all cases, therefore, it already presupposes the possession of a certain amount of property in excess of the average. How did this property come into existence? In any case it is clear that it may have been robbed and therefore may be based on force, but that this is by no means necessary. It may have been obtained by labour, by theft, by trade

or by fraud. Nevertheless, it must have been obtained by labour before there was any possibility of its being robbed.

Private property by no means makes its appearance in history as the result of robbery or force. On the contrary. It already existed, though limited to certain objects, in the ancient primitive communes of all civilized peoples. It developed into the form of commodities already within these communes, at first through barter with foreigners. The more the products of the commune assumed the commodity form, that is, the less they were produced for the producers' own use and the more for the purpose of exchange, and the more the original natural division of labour was supplanted by exchange within the commune as well, the more unequal became the property status of the individual commune members, the more deeply was the ancient common ownership of the land undermined, and the more rapidly did the commune move towards its dissolution and transformation into a village of small-holding peasants. For thousands of years Oriental despotism and the changing rule of conquering nomad peoples were unable to injure these old communities; the gradual destruction of their primitive home industry by the competition of the products of large-scale industry brought them nearer and nearer to dissolution. Force was as little involved in this process as in the dividing up of the land held in common by the village communities (Gehöferschaften ) on the Moselle and in the Hochwald, which is still taking place today; the peasants simply find it to their advantage that the private ownership of land should take the place of common ownership. Even the formation of a primitive aristocracy, as in the case of the Celts, the Germans and the Indian Punjab, took place on the basis of common ownership of the land, and was not at first based in any way on force,

but on voluntariness and custom. Wherever private property was instituted, it was the result of altered relations of production and exchange, in the interest of increased production and of the furtherance of trade -- hence as a result of economic causes. Force plays no part in this at all. Indeed, it is clear that the institution of private property must already be in existence before a robber can appropriate another person's property, and that therefore force may be able to change the possession of, but cannot create, private property as such.

Nor can we use either force or property founded on force to explain the "subjugation of man to menial service" in its most modern form, wage-labour. We have already mentioned the role played in the dissolution of the ancient communities, that is, in the direct or indirect general spread of private property, by the transformation of the products of labour into commodities, by their production not for one's own consumption but for exchange. Now in Capital, Marx proved to the hilt -- and Herr Dühring carefully avoids the slightest reference to this -- that at a certain stage of development, the production of commodities becomes transformed into capitalist production, and that at this stage "the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, which appeared as the original operation, has now become turned round in such a way that there is only an ostensible exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the portion of capital which is exchanged for labour-power is itself but a portion of the product of others' labour appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, the worker, but replaced together with an added

surplus. . . . At first property seemed to us to be based on a man's own labour. . . . Now (at the end of the Marxist analysis) property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others, and to be the impossibility, on the part of the worker, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labour becomes the necessary consequence of a law that ostensibly originated in their identity."[*] In other words, even if we exclude the possibility of any robbery, any act of violence and any fraud, if we assume that all private property was originally based on the owner's own labour, and that throughout the whole subsequent process there was only exchange of equal values for equal values, the progressive evolution of production and exchange nevertheless brings us of necessity to the present capitalist mode of production, to the monopolization of the means of production and the means of subsistence in the hands of the one, numerically small, class, to the degradation into propertyless proletarians of the immense majority forming the other class, to the periodic alternation of speculative production booms and commercial crises, and to the whole of the present anarchy of production. The entire process is explained by purely economic causes, without the necessity for recourse even in a single instance to robbery, force, the state, or political interference of any kind. Here also "property founded on force" proves to be nothing but the phrase of a braggart designed to cover up his lack of understanding of the real course of things.

Expressed historically, this course of events is the story of the development of the bourgeoisie. If "political condi- <"fnp208">

* Capital, Vol. I, pp. 583-84, translation revised. --Ed.

tions are the decisive cause of the economic situation", then the modern bourgeoisie cannot have developed in the struggle with feudalism, but must be the latter's voluntarily be gotten pet child. Everyone knows that it was the opposite which occurred. Originally an oppressed estate tributary to the ruling feudal nobility, recruited from all manner of serfs and villeins, the burghers conquered one position after another in their constant struggle with the nobility, and finally took power in its stead in the most highly developed countries: in France, by directly overthrowing the nobility, in England, by increasingly bourgeoisifying it and incorporating it as their own ornamental head. How did they accomplish this? Simply through a change in the "economic situation", which whether sooner or later, whether voluntarily or as the out come of combat, was followed by a change in the political conditions. The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal nobility is the struggle of town against country, industry against landed property, money economy against natural economy; and the decisive weapon of the burghers in this struggle was their resources of economic power, which were constantly expanding through the development of industry, at first handicraft and progressing at a later stage to manufacture, and through the spread of commerce. Throughout this struggle political force was on the side of the nobility, except for a period when the crown played the burghers against the nobility in order to keep one estate in check by means of the other; but from the moment when the as yet politically powerless bourgeoisie began to grow dangerous owing to its increasing economic power, the crown resumed its alliance with the nobility and by so doing called forth the bourgeois revolution, first in England and then in France. The "political conditions" in France had remained unaltered, while the

"economic situation" had outgrown them. In terms of political status, the nobleman was everything, the burgher nothing; but in terms of the social situation the burgher now formed the most important class in the state, while the nobleman had been shorn of all his social functions and was now only pocketing his revenues in payment for these vanished functions. Nor was that all. Throughout the whole range of their productive activity, the burghers were still hemmed in by the feudal political forms of the Middle Ages, which this production -- not only manufacture, but even handicraft industry -- had long outgrown, hemmed in by the thousand-fold guild privileges and local and provincial customs barriers which had become mere devices against and fetters on production.

The burghers' revolution put an end to this. Not, however, by adapting the economic situation to the political conditions, in accordance with Herr Dühring's principle -- this was precisely what the nobility and the crown had been vainly trying to do for years -- but, on the contrary, by casting aside the old mouldering political rubbish and creating political conditions in which the new "economic situation" could continue and develop. And it did develop brilliantly in this political and legal atmosphere suited to its needs, so brilliantly that the bourgeoisie has already approached the position held by the nobility in 1789: it is increasingly becoming not only socially superfluous, but a social hindrance; it is increasingly abandoning productive activity, and, like the nobility in the past, increasingly becoming a merely revenue-pocketing class; and it has accomplished this revolution in its own position and the creation of a new class, the proletariat, without any hocus-pocus of force whatever, in a purely economic way. Even more. In no wise did it will this result

of its own doings and actions -- on the contrary, this result established itself with irresistible force, against the will and contrary to the intentions of the bourgeoisie; its own productive forces have grown beyond its control, and, as if by a necessity of nature, are driving the whole of bourgeois society towards ruin or towards revolution. If the bourgeoisie now appeals to force in order to save the collapsing "economic situation" from collapse, it is only showing that it is labouring under the same delusion as Herr Dühring, the delusion that "political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation"; that, just like Herr Dühring, it imagines that it can regenerate those "second order facts", the economic situation and its inevitable development, by means of the "primary factor", of "direct political force", and that it can shoot and kill with Krupp guns and Mauser rifles the economic consequences of the steam-engine and the modern machinery driven by it, and of world trade and the present-day development of banking and credit.

<"p2s3">

III

THE FORCE THEORY

(Continued)

Let us look a little more closely at this almighty "force" of Herr Dühring's. Crusoe enslaved Man Friday "sword in hand". Where did he get the sword? Even on the imaginary islands of the Robinson Crusoe epic, swords have not up to now been known to grow on trees, and Herr Dühring provides no answer to this question. If Crusoe could procure a sword for himself, we are equally entitled to assume that one fine

morning Friday may appear with a loaded revolver in his hand, and then the whole "force" relationship is inverted. Friday is in command, and it is Crusoe who has to drudge. We apologize to the reader for returning with such insistence to the Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday story, which properly belongs to the nursery and not to the field of science, but how can we help it? We are obliged to apply Herr Dühring's axiomatic method conscientiously, and it is not our fault if in doing so we are continually moving within the sphere of pure puerility. So the revolver triumphs over the sword; and this will probably make even the most puerile lover of axioms comprehend that force is no mere act of the will, but requires the existence of very real preconditions for its functioning, especially, instruments, the more perfect of which vanquishes the less perfect; that further these instruments have to be produced, which at the same time implies that the producer of more perfect instruments of force, commonly called arms, vanquishes the producer of the less perfect instruments, and that, in a word, the triumph of force is based on the production of arms, and this in turn on production in general -- therefore, on "economic power", on the "economic situation", on the material means which force has at its disposal.

Force, nowadays, is the army and navy, and both, as we all know to our cost, are "devilishly expensive". But force cannot make any money; at most it can take away money that has already<"p212"> been made, and this does not help much either, as we have seen, also to our cost, in the case of the French milliards.[61] In the last analysis, therefore, money must be provided through the medium of economic production; and so once more force is conditioned by the economic situation, which furnishes the means for the equipment and mainte-

nance of its instruments. But that is not all. It is precisely the army and navy that are most dependent on economic preconditions. Armament, composition, organization, tactics and strategy depend above all on the stage reached in production at any particular time as well as on communications. It is not the "free creations of the mind" of generals of genius that have had a revolutionizing effect here, but the invention of better weapons and the change in the human material, the soldiers; in the best of cases, the part played by generals of genius is limited to adapting methods of fighting to the new weapons and combatants.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, gunpowder came from the Arabs to Western Europe, and, as every school child knows, completely revolutionized the methods of warfare. The introduction of gunpowder and fire-arms, however, was not at all an act of force, but an industrial, and therefore an economic, advance. Industry remains industry, whether it is oriented towards the production or the destruction of things. The introduction of fire-arms had a revolutionizing effect not only on the conduct of war itself, but also on the political relationships of domination and subjection. The procurement of powder and fire-arms required industry and money, both of which were in the hands of the burghers in the towns. From the outset, therefore, fire-arms were the weapons of the towns and of the rising monarchy, which was supported by the towns, against the feudal nobility. The stone walls of the noblemen's castles, which had hitherto been unapproachable, fell before the cannon of the burghers, the bullets of whose arquebuses pierced the armour of the knights. With the defeat of the armour-clad cavalry of the nobility, the latter's supremacy was broken; with the development of the burghers, infantry and artillery increasingly became the

decisive types of armed power; artillery compelled the military profession to provide itself with a new and entirely industrial subsection, the corps of engineers.

The development of fire-arms was a very slow process. Ordnance remained ponderous and, despite many inventions in detail, the musket was crude. Over three hundred years were needed for the construction of a weapon that was suitable for the equipment of the whole body of infantry. It was not until the start of the eighteenth century that the flint-lock musket with a bayonet finally displaced the pike in the equipment of the infantry. The foot soldiers were then the mercenaries of princes; they were rigorously drilled but quite unreliable and only held together by the rod; they were recruited from among the most demoralized elements in society and often from enemy prisoners of war who had been pressed into service. The only type of fighting in which these soldiers could apply the new weapon was the tactics of the line, which reached its highest perfection under Frederick II. All the infantry of an army was drawn up in triple ranks in the form of a very long, hollow square, and moved in battle order only as a whole; at the very most, either of the two wings might advance or hold back a little. This cumbrous mass could move in formation only on completely level ground, and even then only very slowly (seventy-five paces a minute); a change of formation in battle was impossible, and once the infantry was engaged, victory or defeat was decided rapidly and at one blow.

In the American War of Independence, these unwieldy lines were met by bands of rebels, who although undrilled were for that very reason better able to shoot from their rifled guns; they were fighting for their own interests and therefore did not desert like the mercenaries; they did not

do the English the favour of encountering them in line and across the open plain, but fought in scattered groups of rapidly moving sharpshooters, under cover of the woods. Here the line was powerless and succumbed to its invisible and inaccessible opponents. Skirmishing was re-invented -- a new method of warfare which was the result of a change in the human war material.

The French Revolution completed and in the military sphere too what the American Revolution had begun. It too could oppose to the well-trained mercenary armies of the Coalition only poorly trained masses but in large numbers, the levy of the entire nation. But these masses had to protect Paris, that is, to hold a definite area, and for this purpose victory in open mass battle was essential. Mere skirmishes were not enough; a form had to be found to make use of large masses and this form was discovered in the column. Column formation made it possible for even poorly trained troops to move in passable order and yet with greater speed (a hundred paces and more a minute); it made it possible to break through the rigid forms of the old line formation and therefore to fight on any ground, even on ground which was most unfavourable to the line formation; to group the troops in any appropriate way; and, in conjunction with skirmishes by scattered bands of sharpshooters, to contain the enemy's lines, keep them engaged and wear them out until the moment came for masses held in reserve to break through them at the decisive point in the position. This new method of warfare, based on the combined action of skirmishers and columns and on the partitioning of the army into independent divisions or army corps, composed of all arms of the service -- a method brought to full perfection by Napoleon in both its tactical and strategic aspects -- had become necessary pri-

marily because of the changed combat personnel of the French Revolution. But it also had two very important technical prerequisites: first, the lighter carriages for field guns constructed by Gribeauval, which alone made possible the more rapid movement now required of them; and second, the slanting of the rifle butt, which had hitherto been quite straight, continuing the line of the barrel. Introduced in France in 1777, it was borrowed from hunting guns and made it possible to shoot at a particular individual without the odds being on missing him. But for this improvement, it would have been impossible to skirmish with the old weapons.

The revolutionary system of arming the whole people was soon restricted to conscription (with substitution for the rich, who paid for their release) and in this form was adopted by most of the large states on the Continent. Only Prussia attempted,<"p216"> through its Landwehr system, to draw to a greater extent on the military strength of the nation.[62] Prussia was also the first state to equip its whole infantry -- after the rifled muzzle-loader, which had been improved between 1830 and 1860 and found fit for use in war, had played a brief role<"p216a"> -- with the most up-to-date weapon, the rifled breech loader. Its successes in 1866 were due to these two innovations.[63]

The Franco-German War was the first in which two armies faced each other, with each equipped with breech-loading rifles and with each fundamentally in the same tactical formations as in the time of the old smoothbore flint-locks. The only difference was that the Prussians had introduced the company column formation in an attempt to find a form of fighting better adapted to the new type of arms. But when the Prussian Guard tried to apply the company column formation seriously at St.-Privat on August 18, the five regi-

<"p217"> ments which were chiefly engaged lost more than a third of their strength (176 officers and 5,114 men) in less than two hours.[64] Henceforward, the company column, too, was condemned as a battle formation, no less than the battalion column and the line; all idea of further exposing troops in any kind of close formation to enemy gun-fire was abandoned, and all subsequent fighting on the German side was conducted only in those compact bodies of skirmishers into which the columns had so far regularly dissolved of themselves under a deadly hail of bullets, although this had been opposed by the higher commands as contrary to order; and in the same way the only form of movement when under fire from enemy rifles became the double. Once again the soldier had proved shrewder than the officer; it was he who instinctively found the only way of fighting which has so far proved of service under the fire of breech-loading rifles, and in spite of his officers' resistance he carried it through successfully.

The Franco-German War marked a turning-point quite different in significance from all previous ones. In the first place weapons are now so perfected that further progress which would have any revolutionizing influence is no longer possible. Once armies have guns capable of hitting a battalion at any range at which the eye can distinguish it and rifles which are equally effective against individual men and with which loading takes less time than aiming, all further improvements are more or less unimportant for field warfare. The era of development is therefore, in essentials, closed in this direction. But secondly, this war has compelled all continental powers to introduce the Prussian Landwehr system in a stricter form, and with it a military burden which must bring them to ruin within a few years. The army has become the main purpose of the state, an end in itself; the

peoples are there only to provide soldiers and feed them. Militarism dominates and is swallowing Europe. But this militarism also bears within itself the seed of its own destruction. Competition among the individual states forces them, on the one hand, to spend more money each year on the army and navy, artillery, etc., thus increasingly hastening their financial collapse, and, on the other, to resort to universal compulsory military service more and more seriously, thus in the long run making the whole people familiar with the use of arms, and therefore enabling them at a certain point to make their will prevail against the top military command in all its glory. This point will be reached as soon as the mass of the people -- town and country workers and peasants -- has a will. At this point the armies of the princes become transformed into armies of the people; the machine refuses to work, and militarism collapses by the dialectic of its own development. What the bourgeois democracy of 1848 could not accomplish, precisely because it was bourgeois and not proletarian, namely, to give the labouring masses a will whose content corresponds with their class position -- socialism will secure without fail. And this will mean the bursting asunder from within of militarism and with it of all standing armies.

That is the first moral of our history of modern infantry. The second moral, which brings us back again to Herr Dühring, is that the army's whole organization and method of warfare, and with them victory or defeat, prove to be dependent on material, that is, on economic conditions, on the human material and the war material, and therefore on the quality and quantity of the population and on technical development. Only a hunting people like the Americans could rediscover skirmishing tactics -- and they were hunters as a result of purely economic causes, just as now it is as a

result of purely economic causes that these same Yankees of the old States have transformed themselves into farmers, industrialists, seamen and merchants who no longer skirmish in the primeval forests, but instead skirmish all the more effectively in the field of speculation, where they have likewise made great advances in utilizing masses.

Only a revolution such as the French, which brought about the economic emancipation of the burghers and, especially, of the peasantry, could simultaneously discover the mass armies and the free forms of movement which shattered the old rigid lines -- the military counterparts of the absolutism which they were defending. We have seen in case after case how, as soon as advances in technique became militarily applicable -- and applied they were -- they immediately and almost forcibly produced changes and even revolutions in the methods of warfare, often, what is more, against the will of the army command. Nowadays any go-ahead NCO could explain to Herr Dühring how greatly the conduct of a war depends on the productivity and means of communication of the army's own hinterland as well as of the theatre of war. In short, always and everywhere it is the economic conditions and instruments of power which help "force" to victory and without which force ceases to be force, and anyone who tried to reform methods of warfare from the opposite standpoint, according to Dühringian principles, would certainly earn nothing but a beating.*

* This is already perfectly well known to the Prussian General Staff. Herr Max Jahns, a captain of the General Staff, says in a scientific lecture, "The basis of warfare is primarily the economic way of life of the peoples in general." (Kölnische Zeitung, April 20, 1876, p. 3.) [Note and italics by Engels.]

If we now pass from land to sea, the last twenty years alone show an even more sweeping revolution. The battleship of the Crimean War was the wooden two- and three-decker of 60 to 100 guns which was still mainly propelled by sail, with a low-powered auxiliary steam-engine only for emergencies. The guns on these warships were for the most part 32-pounders, weighing approximately 2 1/2 tons, with only a few 68-pounders weighing 4 3/4 tons. Towards the end of the war, ironclad floating batteries appeared on the scene, clumsy and almost immobile, but invulnerable monsters to the guns of that period. Soon, iron armour-plating was applied to battleships, too; at first the plates were still thin, a thickness of four inches being regarded as extremely heavy armour. But soon the progress made with artillery outstripped the armour-plating; each successive increase in the strength of the armour used was countered by a new and heavier gun which easily pierced the plates. So we have already reached armour-plating ten, twelve, fourteen and twenty-four inches thick (Italy proposes to have a ship built with plates three feet thick) on the one hand, and on the other, rifled guns weighing 25, 35, 80 and even 100 tons, which can hurl projectiles weighing 300, 400, 1,700 and up to 2,000 pounds to distances never dreamed of before. The battleship of the present day is a gigantic armoured screw-driven steamer of 8,000 to 9,000 tons displacement and 6,000 to 8,000 horse power, with revolving turrets and four or at most six heavy guns, the bow being extended under the water line into a ram for running down enemy vessels. It is a single colossal machine, in which steam not only drives the ship at a high speed, but also works the steering-gear, raises the anchor, swings the turrets, changes the elevation of the guns and loads

them, pumps out water, hoists and lowers the boats -- some of which are themselves steam-driven -- and so forth. And the rivalry between armour-plating and the fire power of guns is so far from being at an end that nowadays a ship is almost always not up to requirements, already out of date, before it is launched. The modern battleship is not only a product, but at the same time a specimen, of modern large-scale industry, a floating factory, mainly producing -- a lavish waste of money. The country in which large-scale industry is most highly developed has almost a monopoly in the construction of these ships. All Turkish, almost all Russian and most German armoured vessels have been built in England; armour-plates that are at all serviceable are made almost solely in Sheffield; of the three steel-works in Europe which alone are able to make the heaviest guns, two (Woolwich and Elswick) are in England, and the third (Krupp) in Germany. In this sphere it is most palpably evident that the "direct political force" which, according to Herr Dühring, is the "decisive cause of the economic situation", is on the contrary completely subordinate to the economic situation, that not only the construction but also the manipulation of the marine instrument of force, the battleship, has itself become a branch of modern large-scale industry. That this is so distresses no one more than force itself, that is, the state, which has now to pay for a single ship as much as a whole small fleet used to cost; which must resign itself to seeing these expensive vessels become obsolete, and therefore worthless, even before they slide into the water; and which must certainly be just as disgusted as Herr Dühring that the man of the "economic situation", the engineer, is now of far greater importance on

board than the man of "direct force", the captain. On the other hand, we have absolutely no cause for annoyance when we see that, in this competitive struggle between armour-plating and guns, the battleship is being developed to a pitch of perfection which is making it both outrageously costly and unusable in war,[*] and that this struggle makes manifest in the sphere of naval warfare too those immanent dialectical laws of motion according to which militarism, like every other historical phenomenon, is perishing in consequence of its own development.

Here too, therefore, we see absolutely clearly that it is in no wise true that "the primary factor must be sought in direct political force and not in any indirect economic power". On the contrary. For what precisely does "the primary factor" in force itself prove to be? Economic power, the disposal over the means of power of large-scale industry. Naval political force, which reposes on modern battleships, proves to be not "direct" at all, but on the contrary mediated by economic power, highly developed metallurgy, command of skilled technicians and productive coal-mines.

But it's all no good anyhow. If we put Herr Dühring in supreme command in the next naval war, without torpedoes or any other artifices he will destroy all fleets of armoured ships, slaves as they are of the economic situation, solely by virtue of his "direct force". <"fnp222">

* The perfecting of the latest product of large-scale industry for use in naval warfare, the self-propelled torpedo. seems likely to bring this to pass; it would mean that the smallest torpedo boat would be superior to the most powerful armoured battleship. (It should be borne in mind that the above was written in 1878.)[65] [Note by Engels.]

<"p2s4">

THE FORCE THEORY

(Concluded)

"It is a circumstance of great importance that in fact domination over nature, generally speaking(!), only proceeded" (a domination proceeded!) "through domination over man. The cultivation of landed property in tracts of considerable size never took place anywhere without the prior subjection of man in some form of slave-labour or corvée. The establishment of an economic domination over things has presupposed the political, social and economic domination of man over man. How could a large landed proprietor even be conceived without at the same time including in this idea his domination over slaves, serfs, or indirectly unfree men? What could the efforts of an individual, at most supplemented by those of his family, have signified or signify in large-scale agriculture? The exploitation of the land, or the extension of economic control over it on a scale exceeding the natural capacities of the individual, was only made possible in previous history by the establishment, either before or simultaneously with the introduction of domination over land, of the enslavement of man which this involves. In the later periods of development this servitude was mitigated, . . . its present form in the more highly civilized states is wage-labour, to a greater or lesser degree carried on under police rule. Thus wage-labour provides the practical possibility of that form of contemporary wealth which is represented by domination over wide areas of land and (!) large-scale landed property. It goes without saying that all other types of distributed wealth must be explained historically in a similar way, and the indirect dependence of man on man, which is now the essential feature of economically speaking the most fully developed situations, cannot he understood and explained by their own nature, but only as a somewhat transformed heritage of an earlier direct subjugation and expropriation."

Thus says Herr Dühring.

Thesis: The domination of nature (by man) presupposes the domination of man (by man).

Proof: The cultivation of landed property in tracts of considerable size never took place anywhere except by the use of serfs.

Proof of the proof: How can there be large landowners without serfs, since the large landowner, even with his family, could cultivate only a tiny part of his property in the absence of serfs?

Therefore, in order to prove that man first had to subjugate man before he could bring nature under his control, Herr Dühring transforms "nature" without further ado into "landed property in tracts of considerable size", and then this landed property -- ownership unspecified -- is immediately transformed again into the property of a large landed proprietor, who naturally cannot cultivate his land without serfs.

In the first place, "domination over nature" and the "cultivation of landed property" are by no means the same thing. In industry, domination over nature is exercised on quite another and more gigantic scale than in agriculture, which must still submit to the command of weather conditions instead of commanding them.

Secondly, if we confine ourselves to the cultivation of landed property in extensive tracts, what it boils down to is whose landed property it is. We find in the early history of all civilized peoples, not the "large landed proprietors" whom Herr Dühring interpolates here with the usual sleight of hand he calls "natural dialectics", but tribal and village communities with common ownership of the land. From India to Ireland the cultivation of landed property in extensive tracts was originally carried on by such tribal and village communities; sometimes the arable land was tilled jointly for account of the community, and sometimes in separate plots temporarily allotted to families by the community, while woodland and pasture-land continued to be used in common. It is once again characteristic of Herr Dühring's "most exhaustive specialized studies in the domain of politics and

<"p225"> law" that he knows nothing of all this; that all his works breathe total ignorance of Maurer's epoch-making writings on the primitive constitution of the German Mark,[66] the basis of all German law, and of the ever-increasing mass of literature, chiefly stimulated by Maurer, which is devoted to proving the primitive common ownership of the land among all the civilized peoples of Europe and Asia, and to showing the various forms of its existence and dissolution. Just as in the domain of French and English law Herr Dühring "acquired all his ignorance himself", great as it was, so it is with his even greater ignorance in the domain of German law. In this domain the man who flies into such a violent rage over the limited horizon of university professors is today, at the very most, still where the professors were twenty years ago.

It is purely a "free creation and imagination" on Herr Dühring's part when he asserts that landed proprietors and serfs were required for the cultivation of landed property in extensive tracts. In the whole of the Orient, where the village community or the state owns the land, the very term landed proprietor is not to be found in the various languages, a point on which Herr Dühring can consult the English jurists, whose efforts in India to solve the question, who is the owner of the land? -- were as vain as those of the late Prince Heinrich LXXII of Reuss-Greiz-Schleitz-Lobenstein-Eberswalde in his attempts to solve the question of who was the night-watchman. The Turks were the first to introduce a sort of feudal ownership of land in the countries conquered by them in the Orient. As far back as the heroic epoch, Greece made its entry into history with a system of social estates which was itself evidently the product of a long but unknown prehistory; even there, however, the land was mainly cultivated by independent peasants; the larger do

mains of the nobles and tribal chiefs were the exception, and they disappeared soon after. Italy was brought under cultivation chiefly by peasants; when, in the final period of the Roman Republic, the great complexes of estates, the latifundia, displaced the small peasants and replaced them by slaves, they also replaced tillage by stock-raising, and, as Pliny already realized, brought Italy to ruin (latifundia Italiam perdidere ). During the Middle Ages, peasant farming was predominant throughout Europe (especially in bringing virgin soil into cultivation); and in relation to the question we are now considering it is of no importance whether these peasants had to pay dues, and if so what dues, to any feudal lords. The colonists from Friesland, Lower Saxony, Flanders and the Lower Rhine, who brought under cultivation the land east of the Elbe which had been wrested from the Slavs, did this as free peasants under very favourable rentals, and not at all under "some form of corvée".

In North America, by far the largest portion of the land was opened for cultivation by the labour of free farmers, while the big landed proprietors of the South, with their slaves and their rapacious tilling of the land, exhausted the soil until it could only grow firs, so that the cultivation of cotton was forced further and further west. In Australia and New Zealand, all attempts of the British government artificially to establish a landed aristocracy came to nothing. In short, if we except the tropical and subtropical colonies, where the climate makes agricultural labour impossible for Europeans, the big landed proprietor who subjugates nature by means of his slaves or serfs and brings the land under cultivation proves to be a pure figment of the imagination. The very reverse is the case. Where he makes his appearance in antiquity, as in Italy, he does not bring wasteland into cul-

tivation, but transforms arable land brought under cultivation by peasants into stock pastures, depopulating and ruining whole countries. Only in a more recent period, when the in creasing density of population raised the value of land, and particularly after the development of agricultural science made even poorer land more cultivable -- it is only from this period that large landowners began to participate on an extensive scale in bringing wasteland and grassland under cultivation, and this mainly through the robbery of common land from the peasants, both in England and in Germany. But there was another side even to this. For every acre of common land which the large landowners brought into cultivation in England, they transformed at least three acres of arable land in Scotland into sheepruns and eventually into mere grounds for deer-hunting.

We are concerned here only with Herr Dühring's assertion that the bringing into cultivation of extensive tracts of land, and therefore of practically the whole area now cultivated, "never and nowhere" took place except through the agency of big landed proprietors and their serfs -- an assertion which, as we have seen, "presupposes" a really unprecedented ignorance of history. It is not necessary, therefore, for us to examine here to what extent areas which were already made entirely or mainly cultivable were cultivated at different periods by slaves (as in the heyday of Greece) or serfs (as in the manors of the Middle Ages), or what the social function of the large landowners was at various periods.

After Herr Dühring has shown us this masterpiece of the imagination, in which we do not know whether the conjuring trick of deduction or the falsification of history is more to be admired, he crows:

"It goes without saying that all other types of distributed wealth must be explained historically in a similar way !"

Which of course saves him the trouble of wasting a single word more on the origin of capital for example.

If, with his domination of man by man as a prior condition for the domination of nature by man, Herr Dühring only wanted to state in a general way that the whole of our present economic order, the level of development now attained by agriculture and industry, is the result of a social history which evolved in class antagonisms, in relationships of domination and subjection, he is saying something which has become a commonplace ever since The Communist Manifesto. But the question at issue is how we are to explain the origin of classes and relations based on domination, and if Herr Dühring's only answer is always the single word "force", we are left exactly where we were at the start. The mere fact that the ruled and exploited have at all times been far more numerous than the rulers and the exploiters, and that therefore the real force has reposed in the hands of the former, is enough to demonstrate the absurdity of the whole force theory. The relations of domination and subjection have therefore still to be explained.

They arose in two ways.

As men originally made their exit from the animal world -- in the narrower sense -- so they made their entry into history: still half animal, brutish, still impotent in face of the forces of nature, still ignorant of their own; and consequently as poor as the animals and hardly more productive than they. There prevailed a certain equality in the conditions of existence, and also a kind of equality of social position for the heads of families -- at least an absence of social classes -- which continued among the primitive agricultural com-

munities of the civilized peoples of a later period. In each such community there were from the beginning certain common interests the safeguarding of which had to be handed over to individuals, true, under the control of the community as a whole: adjudication of disputes; repression of encroachments by individuals beyond their rights; control of water supplies, especially in hot countries; and finally, when conditions were still very primitive, religious functions. Such offices are found in native communities in every period -- thus in the oldest German Marks and even today in India. It goes without saying that they are endowed with a certain measure of authority and constitute the beginnings of state power. The productive forces gradually increase; the greater density of the population creates common interests at one point and conflicting interests at another between the separate communities, whose grouping into larger units again brings about a new division of labour, the setting up of organs to defend common interests and guard against conflicting interests. These organs, which as representatives of the common interests of the whole group, already occupy a special position in relation to each individual community -- in certain circumstances even one of opposition -- soon make themselves still more independent, partly through heredity of functions, which comes about almost as a matter of course in a world where everything occurs spontaneously, and partly through their growing indispensability with the increase in conflicts with other groups. It is not necessary for us to examine here how this independence of social functions as against society increased with time until it developed into domination over society; how, where conditions were favourable, the original servant gradually changed into the master; how this master emerged as an Oriental despot or satrap, the dynast of a

Greek tribe, the chieftain of a Celtic clan, and so on, according to the conditions; how far he finally made use of force in the course of this transformation; and how the individual rulers ultimately united into a ruling class. Here we are only concerned with establishing the fact that the exercise of a social function was everywhere the basis of political domination; and further that political domination has existed for any length of time only when it discharged this, its social, function. However many the despotisms which rose and fell in Persia and India, each was fully aware that it was above all the general entrepreneur for the maintenance of irrigation throughout the river valleys, without which no agriculture was possible. It was reserved for the enlightened English to lose sight of this in India; they let the irrigation canals and sluices fall into decay, and are now at last discovering as a result of the regularly recurring famines that they have neglected the one activity which might have made their rule in India at least as legitimate as that of their predecessors.

But side by side with this formation of classes another was taking place. At a certain level of well-being, the natural division of labour within the family cultivating the soil made possible the introduction of one or more strangers as units of labour-power. This was especially the case in countries where the old common ownership of the land had already disintegrated or at least the former joint cultivation had given place to the separate cultivation of plots by the respective families. Production had developed so far that human labour-power could now produce more than was necessary for its maintenance; the means of maintaining additional units of labour-power were present; likewise the means of employing them; labour-power acquired a value. But the community itself and the association to which it belonged yielded no available,

superfluous labour-power. On the other hand, the latter was furnished by war, and war was as old as the coexistence of several groups of juxtaposed communities. Hitherto they had not known what to do with prisoners of war and had therefore simply killed them, at a still earlier period, eaten them. But at the stage of the "economic order" which had now been attained the prisoners acquired a value; they were therefore allowed to live and their labour was made use of. Thus, instead of dominating the economic situation, force was on the contrary pressed into the service of the economic situation. Slavery had been invented. It soon became the dominant form of production among all peoples who were developing beyond the old community, but in the end it also became one of the chief causes of their decline. It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour between agriculture and industry on a larger scale, and with it the glory of the ancient world, Hellenism. Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Hellenism and the Roman Empire, no modern Europe either. We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognized. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity, no modern socialism.

It is very easy to inveigh against slavery and the like in general terms and pour out the vials of one's lofty moral wrath on such infamies. Unfortunately all this conveys is merely what everyone knows, namely, that these institutions of antiquity are no longer in accord with our present conditions and our sentiments, which these conditions determine. But it does not tell us one word as to how these institutions arose, why they existed, and what role they have played in

history. When we examine these questions, we are compelled to say -- however contradictory and heretical it may sound -- that the introduction of slavery under the then prevailing conditions was a great step forward. For it is an established fact that man sprang from the beasts and consequently had to use barbaric and almost bestial means in his efforts to extricate himself from barbarism. Where the ancient communes have continued to exist, they have for thousands of years formed the basis of the crudest form of state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia. It was only where these communities dissolved that the peoples made further progress of themselves, and their next economic advance consisted in the increase and development of production by means of slave labour. It is clear that so long as human labour was still so little productive that it provided but a small surplus over and above the necessary means of subsistence, the increase in the productive forces, the extension of trade, the development of the state and of law, the founding of art and science were possible only by means of an increased division of labour, the necessary basis for which was the great division of labour between the masses providing simple manual labour and the few privileged persons directing labour, conducting trade and affairs of state, and, later on, occupying themselves with art and science. The simplest and most natural form of this division of labour was actually slavery. Given the historical antecedents of the ancient world, and particularly of Greece, the advance to a society based on class antagonisms could only be accomplished in the form of slavery. This was an advance even for the slaves; the prisoners of war, from whom the mass of the slaves was recruited, now at least saved their lives, instead of being killed as they had been before, or even roasted, as at a still earlier period.

We may add at this point that all historical antagonisms between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes to this very day find their explanation in this same relatively undeveloped productivity of human labour. So long as the effective working population were so much occupied with their necessary labour that they had no time left for looking after the common affairs of society -- the direction of labour, affairs of state, legal matters, art, science, etc. -- the concomitant existence of a special class freed from actual labour to manage these affairs was always necessary; by this means it never failed to saddle the working masses with a greater and greater burden of labour to its own advantage. Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained by large-scale industry has made it possible to distribute labour among all members of society without exception, and thus to limit the labour-time of each individual member to such an extent that all have enough free time left to take part in the general affairs of society, whether theoretical or practical. It is only now, therefore, that every ruling and exploiting class has become superfluous and indeed a hindrance to social development, and it is only now, too, that it will be inexorably abolished, however much it may be in possession of "direct force".

When, therefore, Herr Dühring turns up his nose at Hellenism because it was founded on slavery, he might with equal justice reproach the Greeks for having had no steam-engines or electric telegraphs. And when he asserts that our modern wage bondage can only be explained as a somewhat transformed and mitigated heritage of slavery and not by its own nature (that is, by the economic laws of modern society), either this means only that both wage-labour and slavery are forms of bondage and class domination, as every child knows,

or it is false. For we might as well say that wage-labour can only be explained as a mitigated form of cannibalism, which, it is now universally established, was the primitive form of using defeated enemies.

The role played in history by force as contrasted with economic development is therefore clear. Firstly, all political power is originally based on an economic and social function, and increases in proportion as the members of society become transformed into private producers through the dissolution of the primitive community, and thus become more and more alienated from the administrators of the common functions of society. Secondly, after the political force has made itself independent as against society and has transformed itself from its servant into its master, it can work in two different directions. Either it works in the sense and in the direction of normal economic development. In this case no conflict arises between them, and economic development is accelerated. Or it works against economic development, in which case, with but few exceptions, force succumbs to it. These few exceptions are isolated cases of conquest, in which the more barbarian conquerors exterminated or drove out the population of a country and laid waste or allowed to go to ruin productive forces they did not know how to use. This was what the Christians in Moorish Spain did with the major part of the irrigation works on which the Moors' highly developed agriculture and horticulture depended. Of course, every conquest by a more barbarian people disturbs economic development and extensively destroys productive forces. But in the immense majority of cases where the conquest is permanent, the more barbarian conqueror has to adapt himself to the higher "economic order" as it emerges from the conquest; he is assimilated by the vanquished and in most cases

he has even to adopt their language. But where -- apart from cases of conquest -- the internal state power of a country becomes antagonistic to its economic development, as occurred at a certain stage with almost every political power in the past, the contest always ended with the downfall of the political power. Inexorably and without exception economic development has forced its way through -- we have already mentioned the latest and most striking example of this, the great French Revolution. If, following Herr Dühring's theory, the economic situation and with it the economic structure of a given country were dependent simply on political force, it is absolutely impossible to understand why Frederick William IV after 1848 could not succeed, in spite of his "magnificent army", in grafting the mediaeval guilds and other romantic oddities on to the railways, the steam-engines and the large-scale industry which was just then developing in his country; or why the tsar of Russia, who is certainly still more powerful, is not only unable to pay his debts, but cannot even maintain his "force" without continually borrowing from the "economic order" of Western Europe.

For Herr Dühring force is the absolute evil; for him the first act of force is the original sin; his whole exposition is a jeremiad on the contamination of all subsequent history consummated by this original sin, a jeremiad on the shameful perversion of all natural and social laws by this diabolical power, force. That force, however, plays yet another role in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one,* that it is the instrument by means of which social movement

* Capital, Vol I, p. 751. --Ed.

forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms -- of this there is not a word in Herr Dühring. It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow of the economy based on exploitation -- alas! because all use of force, forsooth, demoralizes the person who uses it. And this in spite of the immense moral and spiritual advance which has been the result of every victorious revolution! And this too in Germany, where a violent collision -- which may after all be forced on the people -- would at least have the advantage of wiping out the servility which has penetrated the national consciousness as a result of the humiliation of the Thirty Years' War. It is this preachers' mentality, dull, insipid and impotent, that claims the right to impose itself on the most revolutionary party history has known!

<"p2s5">

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!"

<"p2s6">

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.

<"p2s8">

VIII

CAPITAL AND SURPLUS-VALUE

(Concluded)

"In Herr Marx's view, wages represent only the payment of that labour-time during which the worker is actually working to make his own existence possible. But only a small number of hours suffices for this; all the rest of the working-day, which is often prolonged, yields a surplus in which there is contained what our author calls 'surplus-value', or, expressed in everyday language, the earnings of capital. If we disregard the labour-time which is already contained in the instruments of labour and in the pertinent raw material at each stage of production, this surplus part of the working-day is the capitalist entrepreneur's share. The prolongation of the working-day is consequently a pure gain by extortion for the benefit of the capitalist."

According to Herr Dühring, therefore, Marx's surplus-value would be nothing more than what is known in everyday language, as the earnings of capital, or profit. Let us see and hear Marx himself. On page 195 of Capital, surplus-value is explained in the following words placed in brackets after it: "interest, profit, rent".* On 10, Marx gives an example in which a total surplus-value of �3.11.0. appears in the dif-

* Capital, English ed., Vol. I, p. 206, first footnote. --Ed.

ferent forms in which it is distributed: tithes, rates and taxes, 21s.; rent 28s.; farmer's profit and interest, 22s.; together making a total surplus-value of �3.11.0.[*] On page 542,** Marx points out as one of Ricardo's main shortcomings that "he has not . . . represented surplus-value in its pure form, i.e., independently of its particular forms, such as profit, ground-rent, etc.", and that he therefore lumps together the laws of the rate of surplus-value and the laws of the rate of profit; against this Marx announces: "I shall show in Book III that the same rate of surplus-value may be expressed in the most varied rates of profit, and that various rates of surplus-value may, under given conditions, express themselves in the same rate of profit." On page 587[***] we find: "The capitalist who produces surplus-value -- i.e., who extracts unpaid labour directly from the labourers, and fixes it in commodities, is, indeed, the first appropriator, but by no means the ultimate owner, of this surplus-value. He has subsequently to share it with capitalists, with landowners, etc., who fulfil other functions in the complex of social production. Surplus-value, therefore, splits up into various parts. Its fragments fall to various categories of persons, and take various forms, independent the one of the other, such as profit, interest, merchants' profit, ground-rent, etc. It is only in Book III that we can take in hand these changed forms of surplus-value." And there are many other similar passages.

It is impossible to express oneself more clearly. On each occasion Marx calls attention to the fact that his surplus-value must not be confounded with profit or the earnings of <"fnp271">

* Ibid., p. 220. --Ed.
** Ibid., p. 524; see p. 166 above, first footnote. --Ed. [Transcriber's Note: Here is the footnote: "The English translation of Capital, Vol. I, follows the text of the third German edition (1883), whereas Engels cites the second German edition (1872), which is slightly different in this passage and which is accordingly followed here. -Ed. " -- DJR]
*** Ibid., p. 564, translation revised. --Ed.

capital; that this latter is rather a subform and frequently even only a fraction of surplus-value. If nevertheless Herr Dühring asserts that Marxian surplus-value, "expressed in everyday language, is the earnings of capital", and if it is well established that the whole of Marx's book turns on surplus-value, there are only two possibilities. Either Herr Dühring does not know any better, in which case it is an unparalleled act of impudence to decry a book of whose main content he is ignorant. Or he knows better, in which case he has perpetrated a deliberate falsification.

To proceed:

"The venomous hatred which Herr Marx bestows on this conception of the business of extortion is only too understandable. But even mightier wrath and even fuller recognition of the exploitative character of the economic form based on wage-labour is possible without accepting the theoretical position expressed in Marx's doctrine of surplus-value."

The well-meant but erroneous theoretical position taken up by Marx provokes him to a venomous hatred of the business of extortion; in consequence of his false "theoretical position" the emotion, in itself ethical, receives an unethical expression, manifesting itself in ignoble hatred and low venomousness, while Herr Dühring's definitive and most rigorously scientific treatment expresses itself in ethical emotion of a correspondingly noble nature, in wrath which besides being ethically superior even in form is quantitatively superior in venomous hatred, is altogether a mightier wrath. While Herr Dühring is gleefully admiring himself in this way, let us see where this mightier wrath stems from.

We read on:

"Now the question arises how the competing entrepreneurs are able constantly to realize the full product of labour, including the surplus-product, at a price so far above the natural cost of production as is indicated

by the ratio, already mentioned, of the surplus labour-hours. No answer to this is to be found in Marx's doctrine, and for the simple reason that there could be no place in it for even raising the question. The luxury character of production based on hired labour is not seriously dealt with at all, and the social constitution with its bloodsucking opportunities is in no way recognized as the ultimate basis of white slavery. On the contrary, political and social matters are always to be explained by the economic."

Now we have seen from the above passages that Marx in no way asserts that the industrial capitalist, who first appropriates the surplus-product, sells it on the average at its full value in all circumstances, as is here assumed by Herr Dühring. Marx says explicitly that merchants' profit also forms a part of surplus-value, and on the assumptions made this is possible only when the manufacturer sells his product to the merchant below its value, and thus relinquishes a part of the booty to him. Clearly there could be no place in Marx for even raising the question in the way it is put here. Put in a rational way, the question is, how is surplus-value transformed into its subforms, profit, interest, merchants' profit, ground-rent, and so forth? And in fact Marx promises to solve this problem in the third book. But if Herr Dühring cannot wait<"p273"> until the second volume of Capital appears, he should in the meantime look the first volume over a little more closely.[69] In addition to the passages already quoted, he would see, for example on page 323,* that according to Marx the immanent laws of capitalist production assert themselves in the external movements of masses of capital as coercive laws of competition, and in this form are brought home to the consciousness of the individual capitalist as the driving motives

* Ibid., p. 316. --Ed.

of his operations; that therefore a scientific analysis of competition is only possible when the inner nature of capital is understood, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are not intelligible to any but him who is acquainted with their real motions, which are not directly perceptible by the senses; and then Marx gives an example to show how in a definite case, a definite law, the law of value, manifests itself and exercises its motive force in competition. Herr Dühring might see from this alone that competition plays a leading part in the distribution of surplus-value, and with some reflection the indications given in the first volume are in fact enough to make clear the transformation of surplus-value into its subforms, at least in its main features.

But competition is precisely the absolute obstacle to Herr Dühring's understanding of the process. He cannot comprehend how the competing entrepreneurs are able constantly to realize the full product of labour, including the surplus-product, at prices so far above the natural costs of production. Here again we find his usual "rigour" of expression, which in fact is simply slovenliness. In Marx, the surplus-product as such has absolutely no cost of production ; it is the part of the product which costs the capitalist nothing. If therefore the competing entrepreneurs desired to realize the surplus-product at its natural costs of production, they would have to give it away. But don't let us waste time on such "micrological details". Don't the competing entrepreneurs realize the product of labour above its natural costs of production every day? According to Herr Dühring, the natural costs of production consist

"in the expenditure of labour or energy, and this in turn, can in the last analysis be measured by the expenditure of food";

that is, in present-day society, these costs consist in the outlays actually expended on raw materials, instruments of labour, and wages, as distinguished from the "tax", the profit, the surcharge levied sword in hand. Now everyone knows that in the society in which we live the competing entrepreneurs do not realize their commodities at the natural costs of production, but that they add on -- and as a rule also receive -- the so-called surcharge, the profit. The question Herr Dühring thinks he has only to raise to blow down the whole Marxian structure, as Joshua blew down the walls of Jericho of yore, this same question also exists for Herr Dühring's economic theory. Let us see how he answers it.

"Capital ownership," he says, "has no practical meaning and cannot be realized, unless indirect force against human material is simultaneously included in it. The product of this force is the earnings of capital, and the magnitude of the latter will therefore depend on the range and intensity of this exercise of domination. . . . Earnings of capital are a political and social institution which operates more powerfully than competition. In this connection the capitalists act as a social estate, and each one maintains his position. A certain measure of earnings of capital is a necessity in this kind of economy, once it is dominant."

Unfortunately we still don't know how the competing entrepreneurs can constantly realize the product of labour above the natural costs of production. It cannot be that Herr Dühring thinks so little of his public as to fob it off with the phrase that earnings of capital are above competition, just as the King of Prussia used to be above the law. We know the manoeuvres by which the King of Prussia attained his position above the law; it is precisely the manoeuvres by which the earnings of capital succeed in being more powerful than competition that Herr Dühring should explain to us, but it is precisely that which he obstinately refuses to do. Moreover, it is of no avail if in this connection the entrepreneurs,

as he tells us, act as an estate, and each one of them maintains his position. We surely cannot be expected to take his word for it that a number of people need only act as an estate for each one of them to maintain his position. Everyone knows that the guildsmen of the Middle Ages and the French nobles in 1789 acted very definitely as estates and perished nevertheless. The Prussian army at Jena also acted as an estate, but instead of maintaining its position it had to take to its heels and afterwards even to capitulate in sections. Just as little can we be satisfied with the assurance that a certain measure of earnings of capital is a necessity in this kind of economy, once it is dominant; for the point to be proved is precisely why this is so. We do not get a step nearer the goal when Herr Dühring informs us:

"The domination of capital arose in conjunction with the domination of land. Part of the agricultural serfs were transformed into craftsmen in the towns, and ultimately into factory material. After ground-rent, earnings of capital developed as a second form of rent of possession."

Even if we ignore the historical perversity of this assertion, it still remains a mere assertion and is restricted to repeatedly affirming precisely what should be explained and proved. We can therefore come to no other conclusion than that Herr Dühring is incapable of answering his own question: how can the competing entrepreneurs constantly realize the product of labour above the natural costs of production? That is to say, he is incapable of explaining the genesis of profit. He can only bluntly decree: earnings of capital shall be the product of force, which, true enough, is wholly in accordance with Article Two of the Dühringian social constitution: force distributes. This is certainly expressed very nicely; but now "the question arises", force distributes -- what? Surely there must be something to distribute, or with the best will in the

world even the most omnipotent force can distribute nothing. The earnings pocketed by the competing entrepreneurs are something very tangible and solid. Force can take them, but cannot produce them. If Herr Dühring obstinately refuses to explain to us how force takes the earnings of entrepreneurs, he is as silent as the grave in answer to the question of where force takes them from. Where there is nothing, the king, like any other force, loses his rights. Out of nothing comes, and certainly not profit. If ownership of capital has no practical meaning and cannot be realized unless indirect force against human material is simultaneously included in it, then once again the question arises, first, how capital-wealth got this force, a question which is in no way settled by the couple of historical assertions cited above; second, how this force is transformed into the realization of capital, into profit; and third, where it takes this profit from.

However we approach Dühringian economics, we do not get one step further. For every obnoxious phenomenon, profit, ground-rent, starvation wages, the enslavement of the workers, it has only one word of explanation, force, and ever again force, and Herr Dühring's "mightier wrath" finally resolves itself into wrath against force. We have seen, first, that this appeal to force is a lame subterfuge, a relegation of the problem from the economic to the political sphere, which is unable to explain a single economic fact; and second, that it leaves unexplained the origin of force itself, and very prudently so, for otherwise it would have to come to the conclusion that all social power and all political force have their source in economic preconditions, in the mode of production and exchange historically given for each society.

But let us see whether we cannot wrest some further disclosures about profit from the remorseless builder of the

"deeper foundations" of economics. Perhaps we shall succeed by taking up his treatment of wages. On page 158 we find:

"Wages are the remuneration for the subsistence of labour-power, and first come into consideration only as a basis for ground-rent and earnings of capital. In order to become quite clear about the relationships obtaining in this field, one must conceive first ground-rent and later also earnings of capital, historically, without wages, that is to say, on the basis of slavery or serfdom. . . . Whether it is a slave or a serf, or a wage-worker who has to be maintained only gives rise to a difference in the mode of charging the costs of production. In every case the net product obtained by the utilization of labour-power constitutes the master's income. . . . It can therefore be seen that . . . in particular the chief antithesis, by virtue of which there exists some kind of rent of possession on the one hand and propertyless hired labour on the other, is not to be found exclusively in one of its members, but always in both at the same time."

But as we learn on page 188, rent of possession is a phrase which covers both ground-rent and earnings of capital. Further, we find on page 174:

"The characteristic feature of earnings of capital is appropriation of the most important part of the product of labour-power. They cannot be conceived except as the correlative of some form of directly or indirectly subjected labour."

And on page 183:

Wages "are in all circumstances nothing more than the remuneration by means of which the worker's subsistence and possibility of propagation must generally be assured".

Finally, on page 195:

"What goes to rent of possession must be lost to wages, and vice versa, what reaches labour out of the general productive capacity (!) must be taken from the revenues of possession."

Herr Dühring leads us from one surprise to another. In his theory of value and the following chapters up to and in-

cluding the theory of competition, that is, from pages 1 to 155, the prices of commodities or values were divided first, into natural costs of production or production value, i.e., the out lays on raw materials, instruments of labour and wages; and second, into the surcharge or distribution value, the tribute levied sword in hand for the benefit of the monopolist class -- a surcharge which, as we have seen, could not in reality make any change in the distribution of wealth, for what it took with one hand it would have to give back with the other, and which, besides, in so far as Herr Dühring en lightens us as to its origin and content, came into existence out of nothing and so consisted of nothing. In the two succeeding chapters, which deal with the kinds of revenue, that is, from pages 156 to 217, there is no further mention of the surcharge. Instead, the value of every product of labour, that is, of every commodity, is now divided into the two following portions: first, the costs of production, in which the wages paid are included; and second the "net product obtained by the utilization of labour-power", which constitutes the master's income. This net product has a very well-known physiognomy, which no tattooing or feat of whitewashing can conceal. "In order to become quite clear about the relationships obtaining in this field," let the reader imagine the passages just cited from Herr Dühring printed opposite the passages previously cited from Marx on surplus-labour, surplus-product and surplus-value, and he will find that in his own style Herr Dühring is here directly copying from Capital.

Surplus-labour in whatever form, whether it be slavery, serfdom or wage-labour, is recognized by Herr Dühring as the source of the revenues of all ruling classes up to now: this is

taken from the much-quoted passage in Capital, 27:[*] Capital has not invented surplus-labour, and so on.

And what is the "net product" constituting "the master's income" but the surplus of the product of labour over and above the wages, which, despite their quite superfluous disguise as a remuneration, must generally assure the worker's subsistence and possibility of propagation even with Herr Dühring? How can the "appropriation of the most important part of the product of labour-power" be carried out unless, as Marx shows, the capitalist extorts from the worker more labour than is necessary for the reproduction of the means of subsistence the latter consumes, that is, unless the capitalist makes the worker work a longer time than is necessary for the replacement of the value of the wages paid the worker? Thus the prolongation of the working-day beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of the worker's means of subsistence, Marx's surplus-labour -- this, and nothing but this, is concealed behind Herr Dühring's "utilization of labour-power"; and his "net product" falling to the master -- how can it manifest itself otherwise than in the Marxian surplus product and surplus-value? And what, apart from its inexact formulation, is there to distinguish the Dühringian rent of possession from the Marxian surplus-value? For the rest, Herr Dühring has taken the name "rent of possession" ("Besitzrente ") from Rodbertus, who included both ground-rent and the rent of capital, or earnings of capital, under the one term rent, so that Herr Dühring had only to add "possession" to it.** So that no doubt may be left about his plagiarism, <"fnp280">

* Ibid., p. 235. --Ed.
** And not even this. Rodbertus says (Social Letters, Letter 2, page 59): "Rent, according to this" (his) "theory, is all income obtained without personal labour, solely on the ground of possession. " [Note and italics by Engels.]

Herr Dühring sums up in his own way the laws of the changes of magnitude in the price of labour-power and in surplus-value which are developed by Marx in Chapter XV (Capital, page 539 ff.)[*] and does so in such a manner that what falls to the rent of possession must be lost to wages, and vice versa; he thus reduces the particular Marxian laws, which are so rich in content, to a tautology without content, for it is self-evident that one part of a given magnitude falling into two parts cannot increase unless the other decreases. So Herr Dühring has succeeded in appropriating Marx's ideas in such a way that the "definitive and most rigorously scientific treatment in the sense of the exact disciplines", which is unquestionably present in Marx's exposition, is totally lost.

Therefore, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the astonishing uproar Herr Dühring raises in the Critical History over Capital, and in particular the dust he kicks up over the famous question which arises with surplus-value (and which he had better have left unasked, since he cannot answer it himself) -- that all this is only a military ruse, a sly manoeuvre to cover up the gross plagiarism of Marx perpetrated in the Course. In fact Herr Dühring had every reason for warning his readers not to occupy themselves with "the tangled skein which Herr Marx calls Capital ", with the bastards of historical and logical fantasy, the confused and nebulous Hegelian notions and jugglery, etc. This faithful Eckart had himself stealthily brought the Venus<"p281"> against whom he warns the German youth from the Marxian preserves to safety for his own use.[70] We congratulate him on this net product obtained by the utilization of Marx's labour-power, and on the peculiar light thrown by his annexation of Marxian surplus-value <"fnp281">

* Capital, Vol. I, p. 519 ff. --Ed.

under the name of rent of possession on the motives for his false and obstinate -- because repeated in two editions -- assertion that by the term surplus-value Marx meant only profit or earnings of capital.

So we have to portray Herr Dühring's achievements in his own words somewhat as follows:

"In Herr" Dühring's "view wages represent only the payment of that labour-time during which the worker is actually working to make his own existence possible. But for this only a few hours are required; all the rest of the working-day, which is often prolonged, yields a surplus in which what our author calls" rent of possession . . . "is contained. If we disregard the labour-time which at each stage of production is already contained in the instruments of labour and in the pertinent raw material, this surplus part of the working-day is the capitalist entrepreneur's share. The prolongation of the working-day is consequently sheer extortionate profit for the benefit of the capitalist. The venomous hatred Herr" Dühring "bestows on this conception of the business of exploitation is only too understandable. . . ."

But what is less understandable is how he will now return to his "mightier wrath".

<"p2s9">

NATURAL LAWS OF ECONOMICS. GROUND-RENT

With the best will in the world, we have so far been unable to discover how Herr Dühring can

"come forward with the claim to a new system which is not merely adequate for the epoch but authoritative for the epoch "

in the domain of economics.

But what we have not been able to discern in his theory of force, of value and of capital, may perhaps become as clear as daylight to us when we consider the "natural laws

of economics" advanced by Herr Dühring. For, as he puts it with his usual originality and trenchancy,

"the triumph of the higher scientific method consists in passing beyond the mere description and classification of apparently static material and attaining living insights which illuminate production. Knowledge of laws is therefore the most perfect knowledge, for it shows us how one process is conditioned by another."

The very first natural law of all economics has been specially discovered by Herr Dühring.

Adam Smith, "curiously enough, not only did not bring out the leading part played by the most important factor in all economic development, but also completely omitted its distinctive formulation, and thus unintentionally reduced to a subordinate role the power which placed its stamp on the development of modern Europe". This "fundamental law to which the leading role must be assigned is that of the technical equipment, one might even say armament, of man's natural economic energy".

This "fundamental law" discovered by Herr Dühring reads as follows:

Law No. 1. "The productivity of economic instruments, natural resources and human energy is increased by inventions and discoveries. "

We are amazed. Herr Dühring treats us as Molière's newly created nobleman is treated by the wag who announces the news to him that all through his life he has been speaking prose without knowing it. We knew long ago that in many cases the productive power of labour is increased by inventions and discoveries (but in very many cases it is not, as is proved by the mass of waste-paper in the archives of every patent office in the world); but we owe to Herr Dühring the enlightening information that this hoary banality is the fundamental law of all economics. If "the triumph of the higher scientific method" in economics, as in philosophy, consists only in giving a high-sounding name to the first commonplace that

comes to one's mind and trumpeting it forth as a natural or even a fundamental law, then it becomes possible for anybody, even for the editors of the Berlin Volkszeitung, to "lay deeper foundations" and to revolutionize science. We should then "in all rigour" be forced to apply to Herr Dühring himself Herr Dühring's judgement on Plato: <"p284">

"If however that is supposed to be economic wisdom, then the author of 'The Critical Foundations'[71] shares it with every person who ever had occasion to conceive an idea" -- or even only to babble -- "about anything that was obvious on the face of it."

If, for example, we say animals eat, in our innocence we are blithely saying something of great import; for we only have to say that eating is the fundamental law of all animal life, and we have revolutionized the whole of zoology.

Law No. 2. Division of Labour: "The separation of trades and the dissection of activities raises the productivity of labour."

In so far as this is true, it has likewise been a commonplace since Adam Smith. How far it is true will be shown in Part III.

Law No. 3. "Distance and transport are the chief causes which hinder or facilitate the co-operation of the productive forces."
Law No. 4. "The industrial state has an incomparably greater population capacity than the agricultural state."
Law No. 5. "In economics nothing takes place without a material interest."

These are the "natural laws" on which Herr Dühring founds his new economics. He remains faithful to his method which we have already described in philosophy. In economics too a few self-evident statements of the most distressing banality -- quite often very ineptly expressed to boot -- form the axioms which need no proof, the fundamental principles, the natural laws. Under the pretext of developing the content

of these laws, which have no content, he seizes the opportunity to pour out a wordy stream of economic twaddle on the various themes whose titles occur in these so-called laws -- inventions, division of labour, means of transport, population, interests, competition, and so forth -- a verbal outpouring whose flat commonplaces are seasoned only with oracular grandiloquence, and here and there with inept formulations or pretentious hair-splitting over all kinds of casuistical subtleties. Then finally we reach ground-rent, earnings of capital and wages, and as we have previously dealt only with the two latter forms of appropriation, in conclusion we shall now make a brief examination of the Dühringian conception of ground-rent.

We shall not consider those points which Herr Dühring has merely copied from his predecessor Carey; we are not concerned with Carey, nor with defending Ricardo's views on ground-rent against Carey's distortions and stupidities. We are only concerned with Herr Dühring, who defines ground rent as "that income which the proprietor as such draws from the land".

The economic concept of ground-rent Herr Dühring is to explain is straightway transferred by him into the juridical sphere, so that we are no wiser than before. Whether he likes it or not, our builder of deeper foundations must therefore condescend to give some further explanation. He compares the lease of a farm to a tenant with the loan of capital to an entrepreneur, but soon finds that this comparison like so many others is lame.

For, he says, "if one wanted to press the analogy further, the earnings left to the tenant after payment of ground-rent must correspond to the balance of earnings of capital left with the entrepreneur who puts the capital to use after he has paid interest. But it is not customary to regard

tenants' earnings as the main income and ground-rent as a balance. . . . A proof of this difference of conception is the fact that in the theory of ground-rent the case in which the land is worked by the owner is not separately treated, and no special emphasis is laid on the difference between the amount of rent in the case of a lease and where the owner produces the rent himself. At any rate no one has found it necessary to conceive the rent resulting from owner-cultivated land as divided in such a way that one portion represents as it were the interest on the landed property and the other the surplus earnings of enterprise. Apart from the tenant's own capital which he brings into the business, it would seem that his specific earnings are mostly regarded as a kind of wages. It is however hazardous to assert anything on this subject, as the question has never been raised with this precision. Wherever we are dealing with fairly large farms, it can easily be seen that it will not do to treat what are specifically the farmer's earnings as wages. For these earnings are themselves based on the contradiction with the rural labour-power through whose exploitation that form of income is alone made possible. It is clearly a part of the rent which remains in the hands of the tenant and by which the full rent, that the owner operating himself would obtain, is reduced."

The theory of ground-rent is a part of political economy which is specifically English, and necessarily so, because it was only in England that there existed a mode of production under which rent had in fact been separated from profit and interest. In England, as is well known, large landed estates and large-scale agriculture predominate. The landlords lease their lands in large, often very large, farms, to tenant-farmers who possess sufficient capital to operate them and who, unlike our peasants, do not work themselves but employ the labour of farm servants and day-labourers on the lines of full-fledged capitalist entrepreneurs. Here, therefore, we have the three classes of bourgeois society and the form of income peculiar to each: the landlord, drawing ground-rent; the capitalist, drawing profit; and the labourer, drawing wages. It has never occurred to any English economist to regard the farmer's earnings as a kind of wages, as seems to Herr Dühring

to be the case; even less could it be hazardous for such an economist to assert that the farmer's profit is what it indisputably, obviously and tangibly is, namely, profit on capital. iIt is perfectly ridiculous to say that the question of what the farmer's earnings actually are has never been raised in this definite form. In England there has been no need so much as to raise this question, both question and answer having long been present in the facts themselves, and since Adam Smith there has never been any doubt about them.

The case of owner-cultivation, as Herr Dühring calls it -- or rather, the operation of farms by bailiffs for the landowner's account, as is usually the case in Germany -- does not alter the matter. If the landowner also provides the capital and has the farm run for his own account, he pockets the profit on capital in addition to the ground-rent, which is self-evident and cannot be otherwise with the existing mode of production. If Herr Dühring asserts that up to now no one has found it necessary to conceive the rent (he should say revenue) resulting from owner-cultivation as divided into parts, this is simply untrue, and at best only proves his own ignorance once again. For example:

"The revenue derived from labour is called wages. That derived from stock, by the person who manages or employs it, is called profit. . . . The revenue which proceeds altogether from land is called rent and belongs to the landlord. . . . When those three different sorts of revenue belong to different persons, they are readily distinguished; but when they belong to the same, they are sometimes confounded with one another, at least in common language. A gentleman who farms a part of his own estate, after paying the expense of cultivation, should gain both the rent of the landlord and the profit of the farmer. He is apt to denominate, however, his whole gain, profit, and thus confounds rent with profit, at least in common language. The greater part of our North American and West Indian planters are in this situation. They farm, the greater part of them, their own estates, and accordingly we seldom hear of the rent of a plantation,

but frequently of its profit. . . . A gardener who cultivates his own garden with his own hands unites in his own person the three different characters of landlord, farmer, and labourer. His produce, therefore, should pay him the rent of the first, the profit of the second, and the wages of the third. The whole, however, is commonly considered as the earnings of his labour. Both rent and profit are, in this case, confounded with wages." <"p288">

This passage is from the sixth chapter of Book I of Adam Smith.[72] The case of owner-cultivation was thus investigated a hundred years ago, and the doubts and uncertainties which so worry Herr Dühring in this connection are merely due to his own ignorance.

He finally escapes from his quandary by an audacious trick.

The farmer's earnings depend on the exploitation of "the rural labour-power" and are therefore obviously a "part of the rent", by which the "full rent", which should really flow into the landlord's pocket, is "reduced".

From this we learn two things. Firstly, that the farmer "reduces" the landlord's rent, so that, according to Herr Dühring, it is not the farmer who pays rent to the landlord, as was considered to be the case hitherto, but the landlord who pays rent to the farmer -- certainly a "fundamentally original view". Secondly, we learn at last what Herr Dühring thinks ground-rent is, namely, the whole surplus-product obtained in farming by the exploitation of rural labour. But as this surplus-product has been divided into ground-rent and profit on capital in all political economy hitherto -- save perhaps by a few vulgar economists -- we are compelled to note that Herr Dühring "does not hold the accepted view" of ground-rent either.

According to Herr Dühring, therefore, the only difference between ground-rent and earnings of capital is that the former is obtained in agriculture and the latter in industry or trade. It was inevitable that Herr Dühring should arrive at this

uncritical and confused view. We saw that his starting-point was the "truly historical conception" that domination over the land could be based only on domination over man. Therefore, as soon as land is cultivated by means of any form of subjugated labour, a surplus arises for the landlord, and it is precisely this surplus which is the rent, just as in industry the surplus of the labour product over and above the earnings of labour constitutes the earnings of capital.

"Thus it is clear that ground-rent exists on a considerable scale wherever and whenever agriculture is carried on by means of any form of the subjection of labour."

In this presentation of rent as the whole surplus-product obtained in agriculture, Herr Dühring is running slap into both the English farmer's profit and the division of that surplus-product into ground-rent and farmer's profit, a division borrowed from English farming and recognized in all classical political economy, and hence slap into the pure, precise conception of rent. What does Herr Dühring do? He pretends that he does not have the slightest inkling of the division of the surplus-product of agriculture into farmer's profit and ground-rent, and therefore of the whole theory of rent of classical political economy; that the question of what farmer's profit really is has never yet been raised "with this precision" in the whole of political economy; and that he is dealing with an entirely unexplored subject about which there is no knowledge but only illusion and uncertainty. And he flees from this annoying England -- where, without the intervention of any theoretical school, the surplus-product of agriculture is so remorselessly divided into its elements, ground rent and profit on capital -- to his well-beloved jurisdiction of the Prussian Landrecht, where owner-cultivation is in full patriarchal bloom, where "the landlord understands by rent

the income from his estates" and the Junkers' views on rent; still claim to be authoritative for science, where, therefore, Herr Dühring can still hope to slip through with his confused ideas on rent and profit and even to find credence for his latest discovery that ground-rent is paid not by the farmer to the landlord but by the landlord to the farmer.

<"p2s10">

FROM THE CRlTlCAL HISTORY

Finally, let us take a glance at the Critical History of Political Economy, at "that enterprise" of Herr Dühring's which, as he says, "is wholly without precedent". Perhaps here at last we shall find the definitive and most rigorously scientific treatment he has so often promised us.

Herr Dühring makes a big fuss over his discovery that "economic science" is "an enormously modern phenomenon" (p. 12).

In fact, Marx says in Capital, "Political economy . . . as an independent science, first sprang into being during the period of manufacture", and in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 9, describes "classical political economy" as "beginning with William Petty in Britain and Boisguillebert in France, and ending with Ricardo in Britain and Sismondi in France".* Herr Dühring follows the path thus prescribed for him, except that in his view the higher economics begins only with the wretched abortions brought into existence by bourgeois science after the close of

* Capital, Vol. I, p. 364, and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1971, p. 52. --Ed.

its classical period. On the other hand, he is fully justified in triumphantly proclaiming at the end of his introduction:

"But if this enterprise is entirely without precedent in its outer observable characteristics and in the more novel half of its content, it is even more peculiarly mine in its inner critical points of view and its general standpoint" (p. 9). <"p291">

Actually, as far as both its outer and inner features are concerned, he could have announced his "enterprise" (the industrial term is well chosen) as The Ego and His Own.[43]

Since political economy, as it made its appearance in history, is in fact nothing but the scientific insight into the economics of the period of capitalist production, principles and theorems relating to it can be found, for example, in the writers of ancient Greek society, only in so far as certain phenomena -- commodity production, trade, money, interest-bearing capital, etc. -- are common to both societies. In so far as the Greeks make occasional excursions into this sphere, they show the same genius and originality as in all others. Historically, therefore, their views form the theoretical starting-points of the modern science. Let us now listen to the world-historic Herr Dühring.

"Strictly speaking (!), we have absolutely nothing positive to report from antiquity concerning scientific economic theory, and the totally unscientific Middle Ages give still less occasion for this" (for this -- for reporting nothing!). "But as the fashion of vaingloriously displaying a semblance of erudition . . . has defaced the true character of modern science, notice must be taken of at least a few examples."

Herr Dühring then produces examples of a critique which is in truth free from even the "semblance of erudition".

Aristotle's thesis runs:

"Of everything which we possess there are two uses: . . . The one is the proper, and the other is the improper or secondary use of it. For example, a shoe is used for wear, and is used for exchange; both are uses

<"p292"> of the shoe. He who gives a shoe in exchange for money or food to him who wants one, does indeed use the shoe as a shoe, but this is not its proper or primary purpose, for a shoe is not made to be an object of barter."[73]

This thesis is "not only expressed very trivially and pedantically" according to Herr Dühring. But, moreover, those who see in it a "distinction between use-value and exchange-value" fall prey to a freakish mood in which they forget that nothing has been left of use-value and exchange-value "in the most recent period" and "in the framework of the most advanced system", which of course is Herr Dühring's own.

"In Plato's writings on the state, people . . . claim to have found the modern chapter on the economic division of labour."[*]

This no doubt refers to the passage in Capital, Ch. XII, 5 (p. 369 of the third edition),** where the views of classical antiquity on the division of labour are on the contrary shown to have been "in most striking contrast" with the modern view. Herr Dühring has nothing but sneers for Plato's presentation -- for his time full of genius<"p292a"> -- of the division of labour as the natural basis of the city (which for the Greeks was identical with the state);[74] and this on the ground that he did not mention -- though the Greek Xenophon did, Herr Dühring --

the "limit set by the actual extent of the market to the further ramification of professions and the technical dissection of special operations -- only the conception of this limit constitutes the knowledge thanks to which this idea, which is otherwise hardly fit to be called scientific, becomes a major economic truth". <"fnp292">

* All italics in quotations from Dühring and other authors in this chapter are Marx's. --Ed.
** Capital, English ed., Vol. I, p. 365. --Ed.

It was actually "Professor" Roscher, of whom Herr Dühring is so contemptuous, who set up this "limit" at which the idea of the division of labour is supposed first to become "scientific", and who therefore explicitly pointed to Adam Smith as the discoverer of the law of the division of labour. In a society in which commodity production is the dominant form of production, "the market" -- to adopt Herr Dühring's style for once -- was a "limit" very well known to "business people". But more than "the knowledge and instinct of routine" is needed to realize that it was not the market that created the capitalist division of labour, but that, on the contrary, it was the dissolution of former social connections and the resulting division of labour that created the market (see Capital, Vol. I, Ch. XXIV, 5: "Creation of the Home Market for Industrial Capital").*

"The role of money has at all times provided the first and main stimulus to economic (!) ideas. But what did an Aristotle know of this role? No more, clearly, than was contained in the idea that exchange through the medium of money had followed primitive exchange by barter."

But when "an" Aristotle presumes to discover the two different forms of the circulation of money, the one in which it operates as a mere medium of circulation, and the other<"p293"> in which it operates as money-capital, according to Herr Dühring he is "only expressing a moral antipathy".[75]

When "an" Aristotle carries his audacity so far as to attempt an analysis of money in its "role" as a measure of value and indeed correctly poses this problem which is so decisive<"p293a"> for the theory of money, "a" Dühring prefers to say nothing (and for good private reasons) about such impermissible temerity.[76] <"fnp293">

* Ibid., p. 471. --Ed.

The net result is that Greek antiquity, as mirrored in the "notice taken" by Dühring, in fact possessed "only quite ordinary ideas" (p. 25), if such "niaiserie "[*] (p. 19) has anything whatever in common with ideas, whether ordinary or extraordinary.

It would be better to read Herr Dühring's chapter on mercantilism in the "original", that is, in F. List's National System, Chapter 29: "The Industrial System, Incorrectly Called the Mercantile System by the School". The great care with which here too Herr Dühring manages to avoid any "semblance of erudition" is shown by the following passage, among others:

List, Chapter 28: "The Italian Political Economists", says:

"Italy has been the forerunner of all modern nations, in the theory as well as in the practice of Political Economy,"

and then he cites, as <"p294">

"the earliest work written specially on Political Economy in Italy, that of Antonio Serra of Naples (in 1613), on the means of providing 'the Kingdoms' with an abundance of gold and silver".[77]

Herr Dühring confidently accepts this and is therefore able to regard Serra's Breve trattato

"as a kind of inscription at the entrance to the more recent prehistory of economics".

His treatment of the Breve trattato is in fact limited to this "piece of literary buffoonery". Unfortunately,<"p294a"> the actual facts of the case were different; in 1609, that is, four years before the Breve trattato, Thomas Mun's A Discourse of Trade, etc., had appeared.[78] The particular significance of this book was that, already in its first edition, it was directed <"fnp294">

* "Nonsense". --Ed.

against the original monetary system which was then still defended in England as the practice of the state, and that hence it represented the conscious self-separation of the mercantile system from the system which gave it birth. Even in its original form the book went through several editions and exercised a direct influence on legislation. In the edition of 1664 (England's Treasure, etc.), which had been completely rewritten by the author and was published after his death, it remained the mercantilist gospel for another hundred years. If therefore mercantilism has an epoch-making work "as a kind of inscription at the entrance", it is this book, and for this very reason it simply does not exist for Herr Dühring's "history which most carefully observes distinctions of rank".

Of Petty, the founder of modern political economy, Herr Dühring tells us that

there was "a fair measure of superficiality in his way of thinking" and that he had "no sense of the intrinsic and nicer distinctions between concepts", while he possessed "a versatility which knows a great deal but skips lightly from one thing to another without taking root in any idea of a more profound character"; . . . that he "proceeds very crudely in economic matters", and that he "achieves naivetés whose contrasts . . . may at times well amuse a more serious thinker".

What inestimable condescension for the "more serious thinker" Herr Dühring to deign to take any notice at all of "a Petty"! And how he takes notice of him!

Petty's thesis on

"labour and even labour-time as a measure of value, of which imperfect vestiges can be found in his writings",

are totally ignored apart from this sentence. Imperfect vestiges forsooth! In his Treatise on Taxes and Contributions (first edition, 1662), Petty gives a perfectly clear and <"p296">

correct analysis of the magnitude of value of commodities.[79] In illustrating this magnitude at the outset by the equal value of precious metals and corn which cost the same quantity of labour, he says the first and last "theoretical" word on the value of the precious metals. But he also lays it down in a precise and general way that the values of commodities are measured by equal labour. He applies his discovery to the solution of various problems, some of which are very complicated, and he draws important conclusions from the fundamental proposition on various occasions and in various works, even where he does not repeat it. In his very first work he says:

"This" (estimation by equal labour), "I say, to be the foundation of equalizing and balancing of values ; yet in the superstructures and practices hereupon, I confess there is much variety, and intricacy."

Petty is thus equally conscious of the importance of his discovery and of the difficulty of using it in detail. He therefore tries to find another way for certain purposes of detail.

"A natural par" should therefore be found between land and labour so that value may be expressed at will "by either of them alone as well or better than by both".

Even this error is an error of genius.

Herr Dühring makes this sharply conceived observation on Petty's theory of value:

"Had his own thought been sharper, it would be quite impossible to find vestiges of a contrary view in other passages to which we have previously referred";

that is to say, to which no "previous" reference has been made except that the "vestiges" are "imperfect". This is very characteristic of Herr Dühring's method -- to allude to something "previously" in a meaningless phrase, in order "sub-

sequently" to make the reader believe that he has "previously" been made acquainted with the main point, which in fact the said author has slid over both previously and subsequently.

Now in Adam Smith there are not only "vestiges" of "contrary views" on the concept of value, not only two but even three,<"p297"> and strictly speaking even four, sharply contrary opinions on value, running quite cheerfully side by side and together.[80] But what is natural in a writer who is the founder of political economy and is necessarily feeling his way, experimenting, and struggling with a chaos of ideas which are only just taking shape, may seem strange in a writer who is surveying and summarizing more than a century and a half of investigation, the results of which have already passed in part from books into the general consciousness. To pass from the sublime to the ridiculous, Herr Dühring himself gives us, as we have seen, five different kinds of value to choose from at will, and with them, an equal number of contrary views. Of course, "had his own thought been sharper", he would not have had to expend so much effort in trying to throw his readers back from Petty's perfectly clear conception of value into the uttermost confusion.

Petty's Quantulumcunque* Concerning Money is a smoothly finished work which is cast in a single block; it was published in 1682, ten years after his Anatomy of Ireland (this "first"<"p297a"> appeared in 1672, not in 1691 as stated by Herr Dühring, who takes it second-hand from "the most current text book compilations").[81] The last vestiges of mercantilist views to be found in his other writings have completely disappeared here. In content and form it is a little masterpiece, and for

* A Few Words. . . --Ed.

this very reason Herr Dühring does not so much as mention its title. It is quite appropriate that, confronted with the most brilliant and original of economic pioneers, our vainglorious and pedantic mediocrity should only snarl his displeasure and take offence at the fact that the flashes of theoretical insight do not proudly parade about in rank and file as ready-made "axioms", but leap sporadically to the surface from the depths of "crude" practical material such as taxes.

Herr Dühring treats Petty's founding of "Political Arithmetic ", commonly called statistics, in the same way as his specifically economic work. He maliciously shrugs his shoulders<"p298"> at the odd methods used by Petty. Considering the grotesque methods still employed in this field a century later even by Lavoisier[82] and the great distance separating even contemporary statistics from the goal which Petty assigned them in such bold strokes, such self-satisfied priggishness two centuries post festum * stands out in all its undisguised stupidity.

Petty's most important ideas, which get such scant attention in Herr Dühring's "enterprise", are in the latter's view nothing but disconnected brainwaves, chance thoughts and incidental comments, to which a significance they totally lack intrinsically is for the first time attached in our day by citing excerpts torn from their context, and which therefore play a part not in the real history of political economy, but only in modern books below the standard of Herr Dühring's deep-rooted criticism and "treatment of history in the grand manner". In his "enterprise" he seems to have had in view a circle of blindly faithful readers who would never make

* After the event. --Ed.

so bold as to ask for proof of an assertion. We shall return to this point soon (when dealing with Locke and North), but must first take a fleeting glance at Boisguillebert and Law.

With regard to the former, we must underline the sole find made by Herr Dühring: he has discovered a previously ignored connection between Boisguillebert and Law. Boisguillebert asserts that the precious metals could be replaced by credit money<"p299"> (un morceau de papier )[*] in the normal monetary functions they fulfil in commodity circulation.[83] Law on the other hand imagines that any "increase" whatever in the number of these "pieces of paper" increases the wealth of a nation. Herr Dühring draws from this the conclusion that Boisguillebert's "turn of thought already harboured a new turn in mercantilism" -- in other words, already included Law. This is made crystal clear in the following:

"All that was necessary was to assign to the 'simple pieces of paper' the same role that the precious metals should have played, and a metamorphosis of mercantilism was thus immediately accomplished."

The metamorphosis of my uncle into my aunt can be immediately accomplished in the same way. True, Herr Dühring adds appeasingly: "Of course Boisguillebert had no such intention."

But how, in the devil's name, could he intend to replace his own rationalist conception of the money function of the precious metals by the superstitious conception of the mercantilists merely because he held that the precious metals can be replaced in this role by paper money?

Yet Herr Dühring continues in his serio-comic style: <"fnp299">

* A piece of paper. --Ed.

page 300

"Nevertheless it may be conceded that here and there our author succeeded in making a really apt remark" (p. 83).

In reference to Law, Herr Dühring only succeeds in making this "really apt remark":

"Law too was obviously never able completely to eradicate the above named basis" (namely, "the basis of the precious metals"), "but he pushed the note issue to its extreme limit, that is to say, to the collapse of the system" (p. 94).

In reality, however, these paper butterflies, mere money tokens, were intended to flutter about among the public,<"p300"> not in order to "eradicate" the basis of the precious metals, but to entice them from the pockets of the public into the depleted treasuries of the state.[84]

To return to Petty and the inconspicuous role in the history of economics assigned him by Herr Dühring. Let us first listen to what we are told about Petty's immediate successors,<"p300a"> Locke and North. Locke's Considerations on Lowering the of Interest and Raising of Money, and North's Discourses upon Trade, appeared in the same year, 1691.[85]

"What he" (Locke) "wrote on interest and money does not go beyond the framework of the reflections which were current under the dominion of mercantilism in connection with the events of political life" (p. 64).

To the reader of this "report" it should now be patently clear why Locke's Lowering of Interest had such an important influence, in more than one direction, on political economy in France and Italy during the latter half of the eighteenth century.

"Many businessmen thought the same" (as Locke) "on free play for the rate of interest, and the developing situation also produced the tendency to regard restrictions on interest as ineffective. At a period when a Dudley North could write his Discourses upon Trade in the direction of free trade, a great deal must already have been in the air, as it were, which

page 301

made the theoretical opposition to restrictions on interest rates seem something, not at all extraordinary" (p. 64).

So Locke had only to regurgitate the ideas of this or that contemporary "businessman", or to breathe in much of what was "in the air, as it were", to be able to theorize on free play for the rate of interest without saying anything "extraordinary"! In fact, as early as 1662 Petty in his Treatise on Taxes and Contributions had contrasted interest, as "rent of money which we call usury", with "rent of land and houses", and lectured the landlords, who wished to keep down by legislation not of course the rent of land but the rent of money,<"p301"> on "the vanity and fruitlessness of making civil positive law against the law of nature".[86] In his Quantulumcunque (1682) he therefore declared that the legal regulation of the rate of interest was as stupid as the regulation of the export of precious metals or of the exchange rate. In the same work he made definitive statements on the "raising of money" (for example, the attempt to call sixpence a shilling by doubling the number of shillings coined from one ounce of silver).

With regard to this last point, Locke and North did little more than copy him. With regard to interest, however, Locke followed Petty's parallel between interest on money and rent of land, while North goes further and opposes interest as "rent of stock" to rent of land and the stocklords to the landlords. While free play for the rate of interest as demanded by Petty is accepted by Locke only with reservations, North accepts it unconditionally.

Herr Dühring, himself still a bitter mercantilist in the "subtler" sense, surpasses himself when he dismisses Dudley North's Discourses upon Trade with the comment that they were written "in the direction of free trade". It is like saying

page 302

of Harvey that he wrote "in the direction" of the circulation of the blood. Apart from its other merits, North's work is a classical exposition, driven home with relentless logic, of the doctrine of free trade, whether in foreign or in internal commerce -- certainly "something extraordinary" in the year 1691!

For the rest, Herr Dühring informs us that

North was a "merchant" and a bad type into the bargain, also that his work "met with no approval".

Indeed! How could a book of this sort have met with "approval" among the mob setting the tone at the time of the final triumph of protectionism in England? But this did not hinder its immediate effect on theory, as can be seen from a whole series of economic works published in England shortly after, some of them even in the seventeenth century.

Locke and North gave us proof of how the first bold strokes which Petty made in almost every sphere of political economy were taken up one by one and elaborated by his English successors. The traces of this process during the period 1691 to 1752 are obvious to the most superficial observer from the fact that all the more important economic writings of that time start from Petty, either positively or negatively. This period, which abounded in original thinkers, is therefore the most important for the investigation of the gradual genesis of political economy. The "treatment of history in the grand manner", which chalks up against Marx the unpardonable sin of making so much fuss over Petty and the writers of that period in Capital, simply strikes them right out of history. From Locke, North, Boisguillebert and Law it jumps straight to the Physiocrats, and then, at the entrance to the real temple of political economy, there

page 303

appears -- David Hume. With Herr Dühring's permission, we restore the chronological order, with Hume before the Physiocrats.<"p303">

Hume's economic Essays appeared in 1752.[87] In the related essays, "Of Money", "Of the Balance of Trade", "Of Commerce", Hume follows Jacob Vanderlint's Money Answers All Things, London, 1734, step by step, often even down to its idiosyncrasies. However unknown this Vanderlint may have remained to Herr Dühring, references to him can be found in English economic works as late as the end of the eighteenth century, that is to say, in the period after Adam Smith.

Like Vanderlint, Hume treated money as a mere token of value; he copied Vanderlint almost word for word (this is important, as he might have taken the token of value theory from many other sources) on why the balance of trade cannot be permanently either favourable or unfavourable to a country; like Vanderlint, he teaches the equilibrium of balances, which is brought about naturally, in accordance with the different economic situations in the individual countries; like Vanderlint, he preaches free trade, but less boldly and consistently; like Vanderlint, though more superficially, he emphasizes wants as the motive forces of production; he follows Vanderlint in the influence on commodity prices which he wrongly ascribes to bank money and government securities in general; like Vanderlint, he rejects credit money; like Vanderlint, he makes commodity prices dependent on the price of labour, that is, on wages; he even copies Vanderlint's whimsical idea that the accumulation of treasure keeps commodity prices down, etc., etc.

At a much earlier point Herr Dühring had spoken in oracular undertones about how others had misunderstood

page 304

Hume's theory of money, with a particularly menacing reference to Marx, who in Capital had, moreover, subversively pointed to Hume's secret connections with Vanderlint and J. Massie,[*] who will be mentioned later.

As for this misunderstanding, the facts are as follows. With the best will in the world -- though in his own luminous way -- Herr Dühring can only repeat his predecessors' errors concerning Hume's actual theory of money, according to which money is a mere token of value, and therefore, other things being equal, commodity prices rise in proportion to the increase in the volume of money in circulation and fall in proportion to its decrease. But after propounding the above theory, Hume himself raises the objection (as Montesquieu, starting from the same premises, had done previously) that

nevertheless "it is certain" that since the discovery of the mines in America "industry has increased in all the nations of Europe, except in the possessors of those mines", and that this "may justly be ascribed, amongst other reasons, to the increase of gold and silver".

His explanation of this phenomenon is that

"though the high price of commodities be a necessary consequence of the increase of gold and silver, yet it follows not immediately upon that increase; but some time is required before the money circulates through the whole state and makes its effect be felt on all ranks of people". In this interval it has a beneficial effect on industry and trade.

At the end of this analysis Hume also tells us why this is so, although much more one-sidedly than many of his predecessors and contemporaries: <"p304">

"It is easy to trace the money in its progress through the whole commonwealth; where we shall find, that it must first quicken the diligence of every individual before it increases the price of labour. "[88] <"fnp304">

* See Marx, Capital, Vol. I. p. 124, first footnote, and p. 514, third footnote. --Ed.

page 305

In other words, Hume is here describing the effect of a revolution in the value of the precious metals, namely, a depreciation, or, which is the same thing, a revolution in the measure of value of the precious metals. He correctly ascertains that, in the gradual process of readjustment in the prices of commodities, this depreciation "increases the price of labour" -- in ordinary language, wages -- only in the last instance; that is to say, it increases the profit made by merchants and manufacturers at the cost of the worker (which he nevertheless thinks is quite in order) and thus "quickens diligence". But he does not ask himself the real scientific question, namely, whether and in what way an increase in the supply of the precious metals, their value remaining the same, affects the prices of commodities; and he lumps together every "increase of the precious metals" with their depreciation. Hume therefore does precisely what Marx says he does (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 173).* We shall come back once more to this point in passing, but we must first turn to Hume's essay "On Interest".

Hume's arguments, expressly directed against Locke, that the rate of interest is not regulated by the amount of money available but by the rate of profit, and his other explanations of the causes determining the high or low level of the rate of interest, are all to be found, much more exactly though less brilliantly stated, in An Essay on the Governing Causes of the Natural Rate of Interest, wherein the sentiments of Sir W. Petty and Mr. Locke, on that head, are considered. This work appeared in 1750, two years before Hume's essay; its author was J. Massie, a writer active in various fields who had a wide public, as can be seen from contemporary

* English ed., Lawrence and Wishart, p. 160 ff. --Ed.

page 306

English literature. Adam Smith's discussion of the rate of interest is closer to Massie than to Hume. Neither Massie nor Hume knows or says anything regarding the nature of "profit", which plays a role with both.

"In general," Herr Dühring sermonizes us, "the estimate of most of Hume's commentators has been very prejudiced, and ideas have been attributed to him which he never entertained in the least."

Herr Dühring himself gives us more than one striking example of this "procedure".

For example, Hume's essay on interest begins as follows: <"p306">

"Nothing is esteemed a more certain sign of the flourishing condition of any nation than the lowness of interest: and with reason; though I believe the cause is somewhat different from what is commonly apprehended."[89]

Thus in the very first sentence Hume cites the view that the lowness of interest is the surest indication of the flourishing condition of a nation as a commonplace which had already become trivial in his day. Actually, this "idea" had had fully a hundred years, since Child, to become generally current. But we are told:

"Among the views" (of Hume) "on the rate of interest we must mainly stress the idea that it is the true barometer of conditions" (which?) "and that its lowness is an almost infallible sign of the prosperity of a nation" (p. 130).

Who is the "prejudiced" and predisposed "commentator" who says this? None other than Herr Dühring.

It arouses the naive astonishment of our critical historian that Hume, in connection with some felicitous idea or other, "does not even claim to have originated it". This would not have happened to Herr Dühring.

We have seen how Hume confuses every increase in the precious metals with such an increase as is accompanied by

page 307

a depreciation, a revolution in their own value, hence, in the measure of value of commodities. This confusion was inevitable in Hume because he had not the slightest insight into the function of the precious metals as the measure of value. It was impossible for him to have it because he had absolutely no knowledge of value itself. The very word is to be found perhaps only once in his essays, in the passage where, in attempting to correct Locke's erroneous notion that the precious metals had "only an imaginary value",<"p307"> he makes matters even worse by saying that they had "chiefly a fictitious value".[90]

In this he is much inferior not only to Petty but to many of his English contemporaries. He shows the same "backwardness" in still proclaiming the old-fashioned notion that the "merchant " is the mainspring of production, which Petty had long passed beyond. As for Herr Dühring's assurance that in his essays Hume was concerned with the "chief economic relationships", if the reader only compares Cantillon's work quoted by Adam Smith (which appeared the same year as Hume's essays, 1752, but many years<"p307a"> after its author's death), he will be surprised at the narrow field covered by Hume's economic writings.[91] As we have said, despite the letters-patent issued to him by Herr Dühring, Hume remains a respectable figure in the field of political economy too, but here he is anything but an original investigator, and even less an epoch-making one. The influence of his economic essays on the educated circles of his day was due not merely to his excellent presentation, but much more to the fact that they were a progressive and optimistic glorification of the thriving industry and trade of the time -- in other words, of the capitalist society which was then rapidly rising in England, and whose "applause" they were

page 308

therefore bound to gain. Let one instance suffice here. Everyone knows the passionate fight the masses of the English people were waging, precisely in Hume's day, against the system of indirect taxes methodically exploited by the notorious Sir Robert Walpole for the relief of the landlords and of the rich in general. Without mentioning his name, Hume polemizes against his ever-present authority Vanderlint, the stoutest opponent of indirect taxation and the most determined advocate of a land tax, in his essay "Of Taxes" as follows: <"p308">

"They" (taxes on consumption) "must be very heavy taxes, indeed, and very injudiciously levied, which the artisan will not, of himself, be enabled to pay, by superior industry and frugality, without raising the price of his labour. "[92]

It is almost as if Robert Walpole himself were speaking, especially if we add the passage in the essay on "Public Credit" in which Hume says with reference to the difficulty of taxing the state's creditors: <"p308a">

"The diminution of their revenue . . . would not be disguised under the appearance of a branch of excise or customs."[93]

As might have been expected of a Scotchman, Hume's admiration of bourgeois acquisitiveness was in no way purely platonic. A poor devil by origin, he worked himself up to a very weighty annual income of �1,000; which Herr Dühring (as he is not dealing with Petty here) tactfully expresses in this way:

"On the basis of very slight means, he succeeded by good domestic economy in reaching the position of not having to write to please anyone."

Herr Dühring says further:

"He had never made the slightest concession to the influence of parties, princes or universities." <"p309">

page 309

There is no evidence that Hume ever entered into a literary partnership with a "Wagener",[94] but it is well known that he was an indefatigable partisan of the Whig oligarchy, which thought highly of "Church and state", and that in reward for these services he was given first a secretaryship in the Embassy in Paris and subsequently the incomparably more important and better-paid post of an Under-Secretary of State. <"p309a">

"In politics Hume was and always remains conservative and strongly monarchist in his views. For this reason he was never so bitterly denounced for heresy as was Gibbon by the supporters of the established church,"

says old Schlosser.[95] <"p309b">

"This selfish Hume", "this lying historian" reproaches the English monks with being fat, having neither wife nor family and living by begging, "but he himself never had family or a wife and . . . was a great, fat fellow, fed, in considerable part, out of public money, without having merited it by any real public services," says the "rude" plebeian Cobbett.[96] Hume was "in essential respects greatly superior to a Kant in the practical management of life",

says Herr Dühring.

But why is Hume given such an exaggerated position in the Critical History ? Simply because this "serious and subtle thinker" has the honour of enacting the Dühring of the eighteenth century. Hume serves as proof that

"the creation of this whole branch of science" (economics) "is the achievement of a more enlightened philosophy",

and similarly Hume as a precursor is the best guarantee that this whole branch of science will find its immediately foreseeable close in that phenomenal man who has transformed the merely "more enlightened" philosophy into the absolutely luminous philosophy of reality, and with whom, just as with Hume, and what is

page 310

"unprecedented on German soil . . . the cultivation of philosophy in the narrow sense of the word is combined with scientific endeavours in economics".

Accordingly we find Hume, who in any case is respectable as an economist, inflated into an economic star of the first magnitude, whose importance could hitherto be denied only by the same envy which has hitherto so obstinately hushed up Herr Dühring's achievements, which are "authoritative for the epoch".

* * *

The Physiocratic school, as everyone knows, left us a riddle in the form of Quesnay's Tableau Economique<"p310"> on which all critics and historians of political economy have so far broken their teeth in vain.[97] This Tableau, which was intended to bring out clearly the Physiocrats' conception of the production and circulation of a country's total wealth, has remained pretty obscure for succeeding economists. Here too Herr Dühring will at last give us light.

What this "economic image of the relations of production and distribution means in Quesnay himself", he says, can only be explained if one has "first carefully examined the leading ideas which are peculiar to him". All the more so because hitherto these have only been set forth with "wavering indefiniteness", and their "essential features cannot be recognized" even in Adam Smith.

Herr Dühring will now once and for all put an end to this traditional "superficial reporting". He then proceeds to fool the reader through five whole pages, five pages in which all kinds of pretentious phrases, constant repetitions and calculated confusion are designed to conceal the awkward fact that Herr Dühring has hardly as much to tell us about Quesnay's "leading ideas" as "the most current textbook compilations" against which he tirelessly warns us.

page 311

It is "one of the most dubious aspects" of this introduction that here too the Tableau, which so far has only been mentioned by name, is just casually snuffled at and then gets lost in all sorts of "reflections", such as, for example, "the difference between input and output". Though the latter, "it is true, is not to be found complete in Quesnay's idea", Herr Dühring on the other hand will give us a dazzling example of it as soon as he passes from his lengthy introductory "input" to his remarkably short-winded "output", that is to say, to his elucidation of the Tableau itself. We shall now give all, but literally all, he feels it right to tell us of Quesnay's Tableau.

In his "input" Herr Dühring says:

"It seemed self-evident to him" (Quesnay) "that the revenue" (Herr Dühring had just spoken of the net product) "must be thought of and treated as a money value. . . . He tied his deliberations (!) immediately with the money values which he assumed as the results of the sales of all agricultural products when they first change hands. In this way (!) he operates with several milliards" (that is, of money values) "in the columns of his Tableau. "

We have therefore learnt three times over that, in his Tableau, Quesnay operates with the "money values" of "agricultural products", including the money values of the "net product" or "net revenue". Further on in the text we find:

"Had Quesnay considered things from a really natural standpoint, and had he rid himself not only of regard for the precious metals and the quantity of money but also of regard for money values. . . . But as it is he calculates solely with sums of values and imagined (!) the net product in advance as a money value. "

So for the fourth and fifth time, there are only money values in the Tableau !

page 312

"He" (Quesnay) "obtained it" (the net product) "by deducting the expenses and thinking (!) principally" (not traditional, but for that matter all the more superficial, reporting) "of that value which would accrue to the landlord as rent."

We have still not advanced a step; but now it is coming:

"On the other hand, however, now also " -- this "however, now also" is a gem! -- "the net product enters into circulation as a natural object, and in this way becomes an element which should serve . . . to maintain the class which is described as sterile. Here we can immediately (!) see the confusion arising from the fact that in one case it is the money value, and in the other the thing itself, which determines the course of thought."

In general, it seems, all circulation of commodities suffers from the "confusion" that commodities enter into circulation simultaneously as "natural objects" and as "money values". But we are still moving in a circle about "money values", for "Quesnay is anxious to avoid a double booking of the economic revenue".

With Herr Dühring's permission: in Quesnay's Analysis the various kinds of products figure as "natural objects" at the foot of the Tableau, and their money values are given up above in the Tableau itself. Subsequently Quesnay even made his assistant, the Abbe Baudeau, include the natural objects in the Tableau itself, beside their money values.

After all this "input", we at last get the "output". Listen and marvel at these words:

"Nevertheless, the inconsistency" (referring to the role assigned by Quesnay to the landlords) "at once becomes clear as soon as we enquire what becomes of the net product which has been appropriated as rent in the course of economic circulation. Here the Physiocrats and the Tableau Economique could offer nothing but confusion and arbitrariness culminating in mysticism."

All's well that ends well. So Herr Dühring does not know "what becomes of the net product, which has been

page 313

appropriated as rent in the course of economic circulation" (as represented in the Tableau ). To him, the Tableau is the "squaring of the circle". By his own confession, he does not understand the ABC of Physiocracy. After all the beating about the bush, the threshing of straw, the jumping hither and thither, the harlequinades, episodes, diversions, repetitions and stupefying mix-ups whose sole purpose was to prepare us for the imposing revelation, "what the Tableau means in Quesnay himself" -- after all this we finally get Herr Dühring's shamefaced confession that he himself does not know.

Once he has shaken off this painful secret, this Horatian "black care" which sat hunched on his back during his ride through the land of the Physiocrats, our "serious and subtle thinker" blows another merry blast on his trumpet:

"The lines which Quesnay draws to and fro" (in all there are just five of them!) "in his otherwise pretty simple (!) Tableau, and which are meant to represent the circulation of the net product", make one wonder whether "these whimsical combinations of columns" may not be based on some mathematical fantasy; they are reminiscent of Quesnay's attempts to square the circle -- and so forth.

Since, by his own admission, Herr Dühring was unable to understand these lines in spite of their simplicity, he had to follow his favourite procedure of casting suspicion on them. And now he can confidently deliver the coup de grâce to the vexatious Tableau : "We have considered the net product in this its most dubious aspect," etc. So the forced confession that he does not understand the first thing about the Tableau Economique and the "role" played by the net product which figures in it -- that is what Herr Dühring calls "the most dubious aspect of the net product"! What grim humour!

page 314

But in order that our readers may not remain in the same state of cruel ignorance about Quesnay's Tableau<"p314"> as that in which those who receive their economic wisdom "first hand" from Herr Dühring necessarily find themselves, here is a brief explanation.[98]

As is known, the Physiocrats divide society into three classes: (1) The productive class, i.e., the class which is actually engaged in agriculture -- tenant-farmers and agricultural labourers; they are called productive, because their labour yields a surplus -- rent. (2) The class which appropriates this surplus, including the landowners and their retainers, the prince and in general all officials paid by the state, and finally also the Church in its special character as appropriator of tithes. For the sake of brevity, in what follows we call the first class simply "farmers", and the second class "landlords". (3) The industrial or sterile class, sterile because, in the view of the Physiocrats, it adds to the raw materials delivered to it by the productive class only as much value as it consumes in means of subsistence supplied to it by that same class. Quesnay's Tableau was intended to portray how the total annual product of a country (in fact, France) circulates among these three classes and serves annual reproduction.

The first premise of the Tableau is that the farming system and with it large-scale agriculture as understood in Quesnay's time, had been generally introduced, Normandy, Picardy, Ile de France and a few other French provinces serving as prototypes. The farmer therefore appears as the real leader in agriculture, representing the whole productive (agricultural) class in the Tableau and paying the landlord a rent in money. An invested capital or inventory of ten milliard livres is assigned to the farmers as a whole; of this

page 315

sum, one-fifth, or two milliards, is the working capital which has to be replaced every year -- this figure too was estimated on the basis of the best-managed farms in the above provinces.

Further premises: (1) that for the sake of simplicity constant prices and simple reproduction prevail; (2) that all circulation which takes place solely within one class is excluded, and that only circulation between class and class is taken into account; (3) that all purchases and sales taking place between class and class in the course of the working year are combined in a single total sum. Lastly, it must be borne in mind that in Quesnay's time the home industry of the peasant family itself provided by far the greater portion of its needs other than food in France, as more or less in all Europe, and that it is therefore taken for granted here as accessory to agriculture.

The starting-point of the Tableau is the total harvest, the gross product of the annual yield of the soil, which is consequently placed as the first item, or the "total reproduction" of the country, in this case France. The total value of this gross product is estimated on the basis of the average prices of agricultural products among the trading nations. It comes to five milliard livres, a sum which roughly expresses the money value of the gross agricultural production of France based on such statistical estimates as were then possible. This and nothing else is the reason why Quesnay<"p315"> in his Tableau "operates with several milliards", to be precise, with five milliards, and not with five livres tournois. "[99]

The whole gross product, five milliards in value, is therefore in the hands of the productive class, that is, in the first place of the farmers, who have produced it by advancing an annual working capital of two milliards, which corre-

page 316

sponds to an invested capital of ten milliards. The agricultural products -- foodstuffs, raw materials, etc. -- which are required for the replacement of the working capital, including therefore the maintenance of all persons directly engaged in agriculture, are taken in natura [*] from the total harvest and expended for the purpose of new agricultural production. Since, as we have seen, constant prices and simple reproduction on a given scale are assumed, the money value of the portion which is thus taken from the gross product is equal to two milliard livres. This portion, therefore, does not enter into general circulation. For, as we have noted, circulation which takes place merely within a particular class, and not between one class and another, is excluded from the Tableau.

After the replacement of the working capital out of the gross product there remains a surplus of three milliards, of which two milliards are in foodstuffs and one in raw materials. But the rent which the farmers have to pay the landlords is only two-thirds of this sum, equal to two milliards. It will soon be seen why it is only these two milliards which figure under the heading of "net product" or "net income".

But before the movement described in the Tableau begins, there is also the whole pécule,** two milliards in cash, in the hands of the farmers, in addition to the "total reproduction" of agriculture amounting to five milliards in value, of which three milliards enter into general circulation. This comes about in the following way. <"fnp316">

* In kind. --Ed.
** Hoard. --Ed.

page 317

As the total harvest is the starting-point of the Tableau, it likewise forms the closing point of an economic year, for example, of the year 1758, after which a new economic year begins. During the course of this new year, 1759, the portion of the gross product destined to enter into circulation is distributed among the two other classes through the medium of a number of individual payments -- purchases and sales. But these successive and splintered movements stretching over a whole year are combined -- as was in any case unavoidable in the Tableau -- into a few characteristic transactions each of which embraces a whole year's operations in one stroke. This, then, is how the money paid by the farmer class to the landlords as rent for the year 1757, amounting to two milliards, flows back to it at the close of 1758 (the Tableau itself will show how this comes about), so that the farmer class can again throw this sum into circulation in 1759. But since, as Quesnay observes, this sum is much larger than is actually required for the total circulation of the country (France), in which payments are constantly being repeated piecemeal, the two milliard livres in the hands of the farmers represent the total money in circulation in the nation.

The class of landlords drawing rent first appears in the role of receivers of payments, which incidentally is the case even today. On Quesnay's assumption the landlords proper receive only four-sevenths of the two milliards of rent, two-sevenths go to the government and one-seventh to the receivers of tithes. In Quesnay's day the Church was the biggest landlord in France and in addition received tithes on all other landed property.

The working capital (avances annuelles ) expended by the "sterile" class in the course of a whole year consists of raw

page 318

materials to the value of one milliard -- only raw materials, because tools, machinery, etc., are included among the products of that class itself. But the many different roles played by such products in the industrial enterprises of this class do not concern the Tableau any more than the circulation of commodities and money which takes place exclusively within this sphere. The wages for the labour by which the sterile class transforms the raw materials into manufactured goods is equal to the value of the means of subsistence which it receives in part directly from the productive class, and in part indirectly, through the landlords. Although it is itself divided into capitalists and wage-workers, according to Quesnay's basic conception it forms an integral class which is in the pay of the productive class and of the landlords. The total industrial production, and consequently also its total circulation, which is distributed over the year following the harvest, is likewise combined into a single whole. It is therefore assumed that the annual commodity production of the sterile class is entirely in its hands at the beginning of the movement set out in the Tableau, and consequently that its whole working capital, consisting of raw materials to the value of one milliard, has been converted into goods to the value of two milliards, one-half of which represents the price of the means of subsistence consumed during this transformation. An objection might be raised here. Surely the sterile class also consumes industrial products for its own domestic needs; where are these shown, if its own total product passes through circulation to the other classes? This is the answer we are given: the sterile class not only consumes a portion of its own commodities itself, but in addition strives to retain as much of the rest as possible. It therefore sells the commodities thrown by it into circulation above their real value,

page 319

and it must do so, as we have evaluated these commodities at the total value of their production. This, however, does not affect the figures of the Tableau, for the two other classes receive manufactured goods only to the value of their total production.

So now we know the economic position of the three different classes at the beginning of the movement set out in the Tableau.

After its working capital has been replaced in kind, the productive class still has three milliards of the gross product of agriculture and two milliards in money. The landlord class first appears only with its rent claim of two milliards on the productive class. The sterile class disposes of two milliards in manufactured goods. Circulation passing between only two of these three classes is called imperfect by the Physiocrats, circulation which takes place between all three classes is called perfect.

Now for the economic Tableau itself.

First (imperfect) Circulation : The farmers pay the landlords the rent due to them with two milliards of money, without receiving anything in return. With one of these two milliards the landlords buy means of subsistence from the farmers, to whom one half of the money expended by them in the payment of rent thus returns.

In his Analyse du Tableau Economique Quesnay does not make further mention of the state, which receives two sevenths, or of the Church, which receives one-seventh, of the ground-rent, as their social roles are generally known. In regard to the landlord class proper, however, he says that its expenditure (in which that of all its retainers is included) is unfruitful expenditure at least as regards the great bulk of it, with the exception of that small portion which is used

page 320

"for the maintenance and improvement of their lands and the raising of their standard of cultivation". But by "natural law" their proper function consists precisely in "the provision of good management and expenditures for the maintenance of their patrimony", or, as is explained further on, in making the avances foncières, that is, outlays for the preparation of the soil and for the provision of all equipment needed by the farms, which enable the farmer to devote his whole capital exclusively to the business of actual cultivation.

Second (perfect) Circulation : With the second milliard of money still remaining in their hands, the landlords purchase manufactured goods from the sterile class, and the latter, with the money thus obtained, purchases from the farmers means of subsistence for the same sum.

Third (imperfect) Circulation : The farmers buy from the sterile class, with one milliard of money, a corresponding amount of manufactured goods; a large part of these goods consists of agricultural implements and other means of production required in agriculture. The sterile class returns the same money to the farmers, buying raw materials with it to the value of one milliard to replace its own working capital. Thus the two milliards expended by the farmers in payment of rent have flowed back to them, and the movement is closed. So this is the solution of the great riddle,

"What becomes of the net product which has been appropriated as rent in the course of economic circulation?"

We saw above that at the starting-point of the process there was a surplus of three milliards in the hands of the productive class. Of these, only two were paid as net product in the form of rent to the landlords. The third milliard of the surplus constitutes the interest on the total invested capital

page 321

of the farmers, that is, ten per cent on ten milliards. They do not receive this interest -- this should be carefully noted -- from circulation; it exists in natura in their hands, and they realize it only in circulation, by thus converting it into manufactured goods of equal value.

If it were not for this interest, the farmer -- the chief agent in agriculture -- would not advance the capital for investment in it. Already from this standpoint, the appropriation by the farmer of that portion of the agricultural surplus revenue which represents interest is, according to the Physiocrats, as necessary a condition of reproduction as the farmer class itself, and hence this element cannot be put in the category of the national "net product" or "net income"; for the latter is characterized precisely by the fact that it is consumable without any regard to the immediate needs of national reproduction. But according to Quesnay, this fund of one milliard serves for the most part to cover the repairs which become necessary in the course of the year and the partial renewals of invested capital; further, as a reserve fund against accidents; and lastly, where possible, for the enlargement of the invested and working capital as well as for the improvement of the soil and the extension of cultivation.

The whole process is certainly "pretty simple". There enter into circulation: from the farmers, two milliards in money for the payment of rent, and three milliards in products, of which two-thirds are means of subsistence and one-third raw materials; from the sterile class, two milliards in manufactured goods. Of the means of subsistence amounting to two milliards, one half is consumed by the landlords and their retainers, the other half by the sterile class in payment for its labour. The raw materials to the value of one milliard replace the working capital of this latter class. Of the

page 322

manufactured goods in circulation, amounting to two milliards, one half goes to the landlords and the other to the farmers, for whom it is only a converted form of the interest on their invested capital accruing at first hand from agricultural reproduction. But the money thrown into circulation by the farmer in payment of rent flows back to him through the sale of his products, and thus the same process can take place afresh in the next economic year.

And now we must admire Herr Dühring's "truly critical" exposition, which is so infinitely superior to the "traditional superficial reporting". After mysteriously pointing out to us five times in succession how hazardous it was for Quesnay to operate in the Tableau with mere money values -- which moreover turned out to be untrue -- he asks:

"What becomes of the net product which has been appropriated as rent in the course of economic circulation?" and he finally reaches the conclusion that "the economic Tableau could offer nothing but confusion and arbitrariness culminating in mysticism".

We have seen that the Tableau -- this description of the annual process of reproduction through the medium of circulation which was as simple as for its time it was inspired -- gives a very exact answer to the question of what becomes of this net product in the course of economic circulation. Thus once again it is with Herr Dühring and Herr Dühring alone that the "mysticism" and the "confusion and arbitrariness" remain as "the most dubious aspect" and the sole "net product" of his study of Physiocracy.

Herr Dühring is just as familiar with the historical influence of the Physiocrats as with their theories.

"With Turgot," he teaches us, "Physiocracy in France came to an end both in practice and in theory."

page 323

That Mirabeau, however, was essentially a Physiocrat in his economic views; that he was the leading economic authority in the Constituent Assembly of 1789; that in its economic reforms this Assembly translated a substantial portion of the Physiocrats' principles from theory into practice, and in particular laid a heavy tax on ground-rent, the net product appropriated by the landlords "without any equivalent in return" -- all this does not exist for "a" Dühring.

Just as the bold stroke drawn through the years 1691 to 1752 removed all of Hume's predecessors, so another stroke obliterated Sir James Steuart, who came between Hume and Adam Smith. There is not a syllable in Herr Dühring's "enterprise" on Steuart's great <"p323"> work, which, apart from its historical importance, permanently enriched the domain of political economy.[100] But, instead, Herr Dühring applies the most abusive epithet in his vocabulary to him and says that he was "a professor " in Adam Smith's time. Unfortunately this insinuation is a pure invention. As a matter of fact, Steuart was a large landowner in Scotland who was banished from Great Britain for alleged complicity in the Stuart plot and who made himself familiar with economic conditions in various countries through long residence and his journeys on the Continent.

In a word, according to the Critical History the sole value of all earlier economists is to serve either as "pegs" for Herr Dühring's "authoritative" and deeper foundations, or still more, because of their badness, as a foil to him. Nevertheless, there are also a few heroes of political economy who represent not only the "pegs" of "the deeper foundations", but the "principles" out of which these "foundations" are not "developed" but actually "composed", as prescribed in the natural philosophy -- for example, the "eminent and

page 324

incomparable" List, who puffed up the "more subtle" mercantilistic teachings of a Ferrier and others into "mightier" words for the benefit of German manufacturers; then Carey who reveals the true essence of his wisdom in the following sentence: <"p324">

"Mr. Ricardo's system is one of discords . . . its whole tends to the production of hostility among classes. . . . His book is the true manual of the demagogue, who seeks power by means of agrarianism, war, and plunder";[101]

and, at long last, the Confucius[*] of the London City, MacLeod.

So people who want to study the history of political economy in the present and the immediately foreseeable future will continue to be on much safer ground if they familiarize themselves with the "watery products", "commonplaces" and "pauper's broth" of "the most current textbook compilations", rather than rely on Herr Dühring's "treatment of history in the grand manner".

* * *

What, then, is the final result of our analysis of Dühring's "very own system" of political economy? Nothing, except the fact that with all the big words and the still bigger promises, we are left in the dark just as much as in the Philosophy. His theory of value, this "touchstone of the worth of economic systems", amounts to this: that by value Herr Dühring understands five totally different and flagrantly self-contradictory things, and, therefore, at best, he himself does not know what he wants. The "natural laws of all econom- <"fnp324">

* The German edition of Anti-Dühring has the pun Confusius instead of Confucius, as in Marx's manuscript of Chapter X. --Ed.

page 325

ics", ushered in with such pomp, prove to be merely the worst kind of universally familiar platitudes, and often even these are wrongly grasped. The sole explanation of economic facts his very own system can give us is that they are the result of "force", a formula with which the philistine of all nations has consoled himself for thousands of years for every hardship befalling him, and which leaves us just where we were. But instead of investigating the origin and effects of this force, Herr Dühring expects us gratefully to content our selves with the mere word "force" as the last final cause and ultimate explanation of all economic phenomena. Compelled to give further elucidations of the capitalist exploitation of labour, he first represents it in general as based on taxes and price surcharges, thus completely appropriating the Proudhonian "prior deduction" (prélèvement ), and he then proceeds to explain this exploitation in particular by means of Marx's theory of surplus-labour, surplus-product and surplus-value. In this way he manages to bring about a happy reconciliation of two totally contradictory outlooks by copying down both without taking his breath. And just as in philosophy he could not find words hard enough for the very Hegel whom he so constantly exploited and at the same time diluted, so in the Critical History the most baseless calumniation of Marx only serves to conceal the fact that everything in the Course about capital and labour which makes any sense at all is likewise a diluted plagiarism of Marx. His ignorance, that in the Course puts the "large landed proprietor" at the beginning of the history of civilized peoples and is oblivious of the common ownership of land in tribal and village communities which is the real starting-point of all history -- this ignorance, which is nowadays almost inconceivable, is well-nigh surpassed by that

page 326

of the Critical History, which immoderately glories in "the universal breadth of its historical survey", and of which we have given only a few deterrent examples. In a word: first the colossal "input" of self-praise, of charlatan blasts on his own trumpet, of promises each surpassing the other; and then the "output" -- exactly nil.

NOTES

^<"en58">[58] In Part II of Anti-Dühring, all page numbers except those in Chapter X, refer to the second edition of Dühring's A Course of Political and Social Economy. [p. 193]

^<"en59">[59] I.e., in the second edition of Dühring's A Course of Political and Social Economy (see Note 19).

[Note 19: Dühring, A Course of Philosophy, Leipzig, 1875; A Course of Political and Social Economy, 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1876; A Critical History of Political Economy and Socialism, 2nd ed., Berlin, 1875.] [p. 199]

^<"en60">[60] The reference is to A. Thierry, (who as a young man served as a secretary to Saint-Simon,) F. Guizot, F. Mignet and A. Thiers. [p. 203]

^<"en61">[61] The 5,000 million francs France paid to Germany as an indemnity in 1871-73 under the terms of the peace treaty, after her defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. [p. 212]

^<"en62">[62] The Prussian Landwehr system under which units of the armed forces were formed of older able-bodied reservists who were assigned to the Landwehr after they had served in the regular army. The Landwehr was first formed in Prussia in 1813-14 as a people's militia to combat Napoleon. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, it was used in battle alongside regular troops. [p. 216]

^<"en63">[63] I.e., in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. [p. 216]

^<"en64">[64] In the Battle of St.-Privat, August 18, 1870, German troops defeated the French army of the Rhine at the cost of enormous losses, known as the Battle of Gravelotte. [p. 217]

^<"en65">[65] The end of the note given in parenthesis was added by Engels in the third edition of Anti-Dühring, published in 1894. [p. 222]

^<"en66">[66] The works of G. Maurer (in 12 volumes) deal with the economic and social role of the Mark, the ancient German village community, and with the organization of the agrarian and urban communities of medieval Germany. [p. 225]

^<"en67">[67] David Ricardo, Works and Correspondence, Vol. I, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Cambridge University Press, 1951, p. 11. [p. 250]

^<"en68">[68] Marx makes a detailed criticism of the Lassallean slogan of "full" or "undiminished proceeds of labour" in Section I, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1972, pp. 10-14. [p. 258]

^<"en69">[69] Marx planned to have the second volume include the second and third books of Capital, but subsequently the third book appeared separately as Volume III. [p. 273]

^<"en70">[70] Faithful Eckart -- a character in German medieval folklore, a devoted and reliable guard, who kept watch at the foot of a mountain and warned everyone who approached it of the danger of Venus' charms. [p. 281]

^<"en71">[71] An allusion to Dühring's Kritische Grundlegung der Volkswirthschaftslehre (Critical Foundations of Economics ), Berlin, 1866. [p. 284]

^<"en72">[72] Adam Smith, An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by E. Cannan, Modern Library edition, Random House, New York, 1937, pp. 52-54; all italics are Engels'. [p. 288]

^<"en43">[43] The allusion is to Max Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and His Own ), which Marx and Engels devastatingly criticized in The German Ideology. [p. 291]

^<"en73">[73] Aristotle, Politics, translated by Benjamin Jowett, revised edition, Oxford, 1966, 1257a, or the Penguin Books edition, translated by J. A. Sinclair, 1962, p. 41. Marx quotes this passage in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (see English ed., Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1971, p. 27, footnote) and in Capital (see English ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1961, Vol. I, p. 85, footnote). [p. 292]

^<"en74">[74] Plato's Republic, Book II, translated by Benjamin Jowett, World Publishing Company edition, Cleveland, 1946, pp. 67-73, or the Penguin Books edition, translated by H. P. Lee, 1955, pp. 102-09. [p. 292]

^<"en75">[75] Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Chapters 8-9, Oxford, 1966, 1256a-1258a, or the Penguin Books edition, 1962, pp. 38-45; see also Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, London, 1971, p. 137, footnote, and Capital, Moscow, 1961, Vol. I, p. 152, first footnote. [p. 293]

^<"en76">[76] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 5, translated by W. D. Ross, Oxford, 1925, 1133a and b, or the Penguin Books edition translated by J. A. K. Thomson, 1953, pp. 151-54; see also Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, London, 1971, p. 68, footnote, and Capital, Moscow, 1961, Vol. I, pp. 59-60. [p. 293]

^<"en77">[77] F. List, The National System of Political Economy, translated by S. S. Lloyd, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1904, pp. 263 and 265.
For Antonio Serra's Breve Trattato, see Scrittori classici italiani di economia politica, edited by P. Cusiodi, Vol. I, Milan, 1803. [p. 294]

^<"en78">[78] Marx erred in asserting that Mun's A Discourse of Trade, from England into the East Indies appeared in 1609; it was apparently written around 1615 and was published in 1621. But this does not affect the validity of his evaluation of Mun's work as vastly superior to and far more important and influential than Serra's.
A Discourse of Trade is available in a reprint by the Facsimile Text Society, New York, in 1930. Mum's England's Treasure by Foreign Trade, to which Marx refers a few lines later, is available in a reprint by the Economic History Society, London, in 1928. [p. 294]

^<"en79">[79] The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, edited by C. H. Hull of Cambridge, 1877, Vol. I, p. 44. [p. 296]

^<"en80">[80] For Marx's criticism of Adam Smith's inconsistent theories of value, see Theories of Surplus-Value, Part I, FLPH, Moscow, no date, pp. 68-76,

91-100 and 147, and Part II, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1968, pp. 217-22 and 401-04. [p. 297]

^<"en81">[81] The Quantulumcunque Concerning Money was written in 1682 in the form of an address to Lord Halifax and was published in London in 1695. The Political Anatomy of Ireland was written in 1672 and published in London in 1691. The latter is included in Hull, The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, Vol. I, and the former in Hull, Vol. II. [p. 297]

^<"en82">[82] Marx is referring to the economic works of the French chemist A. L. Lavoisier: De la richesse territoriale du royaume de France, Essai sur la population de la ville de Paris, sur la richesse et ses consommations and Essai d'arithmétique politique, which was written jointly by Lavoisier and the equally celebrated French mathematician G. L. Lagrange. Marx used these works as published in Mélanges d'économie politique. . . , edited by E. Daire and G. de Molinari, Vol. I, pp. 575-620, Paris, 1847. [p. 298]

^<"en83">[83] P. Boisguillebert, Dissertation sur la nature des richesses, de l'argent et des tributs, Chapter II, in Economistes financiers du XVIII-e siècle, Paris, 1843, p. 397. [p. 299]

^<"en84">[84] John Law, an English economist and financier, tried to put into practice his absurd theory that the state can automatically increase its wealth by issuing banknotes. In 1716 he founded a private bank in France, which became a state bank in 1718. Parallel with its unlimited emission of banknotes, Law's bank withdrew coins from circulation. As a result, Stock Exchange speculation rose to an unheard-of scale and culminated in 1720 in the bankruptcy of the bank and of the Law system itself. [p. 300]

^<"en85">[85] John Locke, Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interests and Raising the Value of Money, in Complete Works of John Locke, Ward, Lock and Co., London, New York, 1888 (?), Vol 4 and Dudley North, Discourses Upon Trade, reprinted by the Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1907. [p. 300]

^<"en86">[86] Petty, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 47-48. [p. 301]

^<"en87">[87] In David Hume's Political Discourses, Edinburgh, 1752. The standard edition is David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1875, in 2 volumes, to which all subsequent references to Hume in these notes are made. [p. 303]

^<"en88">[88] David Hume, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 313-14. [p. 304]

^<"en89">[89] Ibid., p. 320. [p. 306]

^<"en90">[90] Ibid., p. 321. [p. 307]

^<"en91">[91] The date is inaccurate -- the first edition of Richard Cantillon's book Essai sur la nature du commerce en général (Essay on the Nature of Trade in General ) appeared not in 1752 but in 1755, as Marx himself pointed out in Capital, Vol. I (see English ed., Moscow, 1961, Vol. I, p. 555, second footnote). Cantillon's work, edited by H. Higgs, was reprinted with an English translation by the Royal Economic Society, London, 1931. Adam Smith mentions Cantillon's book in The Wealth of Nations, edited by E. Cannan, Modern Library edition, New York, 1937, p. 68. [p. 307]

^<"en92">[92] David Hume, op. cit., p. 360. [p. 308]

^<"en93">[93] Ibid., p. 369. [p. 308]

^<"en94">[94] In 1866 Bismarck, acting through his adviser G. Wagener, requested Dühring to draw up a memorandum on the labour question for the Prussian Government. Dühring, who advocated harmony between capital and labour, complied with this request. However, his work was published without his knowledge, first anonymously, and later under Wagener's signature. This gave Dühring grounds for suing Wagener on a charge of breaking the copyright laws. In 1868 Dühring won his case. At the climax of this scandal, he published The Fate of My Memorandum on the Social Problem for the Prussian Ministry of State. [p. 309]

^<"en95">[95] F. C. Schlosser, Weltgeschichte für das deutsche Volk (World History for the German People ), Vol. 17, Frankfurt-on-Maine, 1855, p. 76. [p. 309]

^<"en96">[96] W. Cobbett, A History of the Protestant "Reformation" in England and Ireland, London, 1824, §§149, 116 and 130. [p. 309]

^<"en97">[97] Quesnay's Tableau Economique was first published in 1758 and his Analyse du Tableau in 1766. A facsimile of the original Tableau was reprinted by the British Economic Association, London, in 1894 and a facsimile of the third edition of the Tableau and the Analyse with a translation (edited by Marguerite Kuczynski and Ronald L. Meek) by MacMillan, London, in 1972. [p. 310]

^<"en98">[98] Marx also discusses Quesnay's Tableau at some length in his Theories of Surplus-Value, Part I, Moscow, no date, Chapter VI. pp. 299-334, and Addendum, pp. 367-68. In assessing the significance of the Tableau in the history of political economy, Marx says that it "was a conception of great genius, incontestably the most brilliant of which political economy up to then had been guilty" (ibid., p. 334, translation revised).

Marx gives two diagrammatic versions of the Tableau in his Theories of Surplus-Value, Part I, the first on p. 299 and the second on p. 367. The latter, a partially condensed version of that given by Quesnay in his Analyse, is reproduced here. [p. 314]

^<"en99">[99] Livre tournois -- a French coin named after the town of Tours; from 1740 onwards it was equal to one franc; in 1795 it was replaced by the franc. [p. 315]

^{<"en100">[100]} Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, in 2 volumes, edited by Andrew S. Skinner, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh and London, 1966. [p. 323]

^{<"en101">[101]} H. C. Carey, The Past, the Present, and the Future, Philadelphia,1848, pp. 74-75. [p. 324]

FREDERICK ENGELS

ANTI-DÜHRING

(Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science)

-- Section 2 --Part II: Political Economy

-- Section 2 --
Part II: Political Economy