A broad outline has now been given of the marvellous work which,
whatever judgment we may feel it necessary to pass upon the value of the
doctrines it enunciates, will remain for all time one of the loftiest
summits ever climbed by human thought, one of the imperishable monuments
of the creative powers of the human mind. Above all we are impressed and
charmed by the magnificent quality of the exposition, in which but one
defect can be pointed out, and this was probably imposed by the abnormal
conditions under which the author wrote.
We allude to the last chapter, the one that crowns the story of the
historic expropriation of the workers with the eloquent example of the
colonies. Logically this chapter should precede the penultimate chapter,
wherein Marx, from his account of these terrible happenings, casts the
horoscope of revolution. It is probable that the inversion was
deliberate, for the prophetic call to the proletarian revolution would
have been more likely to attract the attention of the censorship had it
been placed at the end of the volume.
Apart from this trifling matter, we cannot but admire the shapely
pyramidal construction, the harmonious and flowing movement of the book,
which, passing from the most subtle disquisitions upon the algebra of
value, deals with the complexities of factory life and machine
production, plunges into the inferno of workshops and mines and into the
infamous stews of unspeakable poverty, to conclude with a description of
the tragic expropriation of a suffering population. The work is a
masterpiece wherein all is great, all alike incomparable and
wonderful--the acuteness of the analysis, the statuesque majesty of the
whole, the style vibrant with sorrow or with indignation according as
the author is sympathising with the woes of the poor or scourging the
villainies of the mighty, the vast learning, and the torrential impetus
of passion. There is a stupendous harmony of irreconcilables, so that,
as in the mysterious creations of nature, we find an almost
inconceivable association of real symmetry with apparent disorder; an
association of minute attention to detail with monumental synthesis, an
association of mathematics with history, an association of repose with
movement; so that in all its fibres the book seems to be the offspring
of an unfathomable and transcendental union between superhuman labour
and superhuman pain.
Nothing, therefore, is more natural or more readily explicable than the
phenomenal success of _Capital_, a success which has rarely been
paralleled in the history of intellectual productions. Translated into
almost every language (recently even into Chinese); eagerly read by men
of learning no less than by statesmen, by reactionaries as well as by
rebels; quoted in parliaments and in meetings of the plebs, from the
pulpit and from the platform, in huts and in palaces--it speedily
secured a world-wide reputation for its author, making him the idol of
the most irreconcilable classes and of the most contrasted stocks.
Whereas, in fact, the prophetic announcement of the glorious advent of
collective property led to the assembling round Marx of all the common
people of the west, who hailed him as avenger, as leader, and as seer of
the onward march of the proletariat; in such countries as Russia, where
capitalist development was as yet in its infancy, the bourgeois classes
sang the praises of the book which announced the historic mission of
capitalism, and thus it was that the idol of the western pétroleurs
became in the far east of Europe the fetich of bankers and
manufacturers.
After the first shock of surprise, however, readers turned to the
dispassionate analysis of the individual doctrines advocated in the
work, and were not slow to bring to light certain gaps and sophisms. To
say truth, no sovereign importance can be attributed to any of these
criticisms, nor is it necessary to make much of the numerous attacks
upon the statistical demonstrations of _Capital_.
It is undeniable that Marx's thesis of the progressive concentration of
wealth into the hands of an ever-diminishing number of owners, and of
the correlatively progressive impoverishment of the common people, has
not been confirmed. It has indeed been confuted by the most
authoritative statistics collected since the publication of the book,
for these show that the greater recipients of income increase more than
proportionally to the medium and lesser recipients, whereas the number
of taxpayers in the lowest grades diminishes, with a proportionate
increase in the number of those at a slightly higher level. Further, as
far as this last fact is concerned, there can be no doubt that wages
have increased of late, so that they not merely rise above the miserable
level of bare subsistence specified by Lassalle, but also rise above the
level (which is still miserable, though a trifle higher) expressed in
the calculations of Marx.
It is, however, needful to add that the Marxist thesis merely points to
a general tendency, and does not imply a denial that more or less
considerable fluctuations may occur at particular periods. Moreover, the
concentration of wealth does not find expression solely in the
diminution of the numerical proportion between the greater and the
lesser recipients of income, but in addition in a diminution of the
ratio between the taxpayers and the population and in an increase in the
contrast between the wealth of the recipients of income in various
grades. Further, the most authoritative statistics demonstrate a
growing diminution in the ratio between the owners and the general
population. Again, no one can deny that the contrast between high grade
and low grade incomes has of late exhibited an enormous increase; that
banking concentration and the sway of the banks over industry (a source
of increasing disparity in fortunes) has attained in recent years an
intensity which even Marx could not have foreseen; and that,
subsequently to the publication of _Capital_ and to the death of its
author, the social fauna has been enriched by an economic animal of a
species previously unknown, the multimillionaire, whose existence
undeniably reveals an unprecedented advance in capitalist concentration.
Nay more, after Marx's death, agrarian and industrial concentration
attained preposterous proportions, such as he had never ventured to
predict. In the American Union, a single landed estate will embrace
territories equal to entire provinces, while industrial capital becomes
amassed by milliards in the hands of a few despotic trusts, so that
two-thirds of the entire working population are employed by
one-twentieth of all the separate enterprises in the country. These
statements concern the apex of the social pyramid; but even at the base
of that structure the phenomena are far from invalidating the Marxist
conception to the extent which many contend. Correlatively with the
undeniable rise in wages (which, moreover, has been arrested of late,
and has been replaced by a definite movement of retrogression), there
has occurred an enormously greater increase in income, and therefore a
deterioration in the relative condition of the workers. There has
further been manifest an increasing instability of employment, so that
unemployment has become more widespread and more frequent, exposing the
working classes to impoverishment and incurable degradation.
Marx's other theses, however, are open to more serious objection.
Retracing the thread of his demonstrations with special attention to his
study of primitive accumulation, no one can deny the absolute
authenticity of the facts he narrated. Nor can Marx be blamed for having
restricted his historic demonstration to England; though in actual fact
the expropriation of the cultivators has been carried out everywhere,
openly or tacitly, and everywhere this expropriation has been an initial
stage in the foundation of capitalist property. Even Russia, who
flattered herself upon her independence of the universal law and upon
escaping the fated expropriation of her peasants, Russia, whom Marx
himself, as if in a sudden fit of mental aberration, was on the point of
excluding from the sphere of his generalisations, has to submit to the
invariable rule, and to witness the transformation of her independent
peasant proprietors into proletarians.
The constitutional defect of this portion of Marx's book is of a very
different character. Although he tells the story of the expropriation of
the cultivators, he fails to explain why such expropriation must always
take place, he fails to bring this great historical event beneath the
sway of a universal economic theory. Now, putting aside the incongruity
that a book essentially founded upon logical demonstration should all at
once break off that demonstration to turn to a historical disquisition
and a simple record of facts, no one has any right to construct a
theoretical generalisation upon the bare narration of hard facts without
referring these to the general psychological and logical causes which
have produced them. It cannot be denied that in this respect Marx's
demonstration presents a defect which it is impossible to make good.
Yet more serious criticism may be directed against the theory of the
industrial reserve army, the theory wherein Marx attempts to sum up the
law of population of the capitalist era. For the theory is wholly based
upon the premise that the conversion of wage capital into technical
capital is competent to bring about the permanent unemployment of
labour, or definitively to reduce the demand for labour. Now this
premise will not hold, for technical capital, by promptly increasing the
profit of capital, and by lowering the price of the product in the long
run, provides for the capitalist, first of all, and subsequently for the
consumer, the possibility of fresh savings, and these in the end create
a further demand for labour, so that sooner or later there will be a
call upon the active services of the workers who are temporarily
unemployed. Vain, therefore, is any attempt to make technical capital
responsible for the relative excess of population, which technical
capital cannot possibly produce, for this phenomenon must be referred to
the presence and to the activity of a very different variety of capital,
and one not considered by Marx, namely unproductive capital.
But these criticisms, which after all touch no more than points of
detail, are mere trifles in comparison with the incurable contradictions
in which the author's fundamental theory is involved. In fact, by a
vigorous deduction from his premise that the value of commodities is
measured by the mass of labour incorporated in them, Marx arrives at the
fundamental and logical distinction between constant capital and
variable capital. If, however, the value of products be exclusively
determined by the mass of labour incorporated in them, it is evident
that the capital invested in machinery or in raw material can only
transmit to the product a value exactly equal to the quantity of labour
contained therein, without adding any surplus, and that it is therefore
constant capital; whereas wage capital transmits to the product value
equal to all the quantity of labour which it maintains and sets in
motion, a quantity which, as we know, exceeds the quantity of labour
contained in the capital itself. In other words, wage capital, besides
reproducing its own value, furnishes a supplement or a surplus value,
and is therefore variable capital. Consequently surplus value arises
exclusively from variable capital, and is therefore precisely
proportional to the quantity of this capital.
It further ensues that of two undertakings employing equal amounts of
aggregate capital, the one which employs a larger proportion of constant
capital ought to furnish a profit and a rate of profit lower than that
furnished by the other. But free competition among the capitalists
enforces an equal rate of profit upon the capitals invested in the
various undertakings, and leads to the immediate abandonment of
undertakings requiring a greater proportion of constant capital, and to
the correlative expansion of the others. There consequently results an
increase in the value of the products of the former undertakings, and a
diminution in the value of the products of the latter. This process
continues until the value of the respective products furnishes an equal
rate of profit to the capitals respectively employed in producing them.
Value, therefore, though in the first instance it is equivalent to the
labour employed in producing the products, necessarily diverges from
that standard in the end, and has then an utterly different measure.
Thus the theory we are discussing is peremptorily refuted, or is reduced
to absurdity.
From the outset Marx is distinctly aware of the existence of this
striking contradiction, which emerges in so formidable a manner in the
first stage of his investigation; he frankly recognises it, but
postpones its solution to the later volumes of his treatise. On the very
morrow, indeed, of the publication of the first volume, he ardently set
to work once more, and sketched to his friend, in monumental pages, the
design of the complete book. Just as St. Augustine was grieved that the
duties of his episcopate deprived him of the hours which he would have
preferred to devote to the writing of a volume to be the crown of his
_City of God_, so Marx was harassed by the thought of the time which the
work of party organisation filched from his scientific labours, and it
was solely that he might escape from the absorbing engagements involved
in the former task that in the Hague congress of 1872 he proposed the
transfer of the International to New York.
But now we unexpectedly reach a "dead point" in the biography of our
thinker, for his mental life, otherwise so normal and so brilliant, here
suddenly becomes obscured, and is tinged with mystery and enigma. For,
on the one hand, Marx clearly affirmed, and showed by his actions, that
he definitely wished to devote himself to the completion of his
treatise, whereas, on the other hand, it is undeniable that after the
publication of the first volume of _Capital_, he never wrote another
line of the book, and that all the posthumous additions to this volume
were composed prior to 1867. I do not mean to imply that during
subsequent years he gave himself up to inertia or repose, for it was
during this period that he wrote all the economic section in Engels'
booklet against Dühring; he learned Russian; he read the agricultural
statistics of numerous countries and the reports on poverty in Ireland;
he studied the matriarchal system; carried on ingenious discussions with
Engels concerning Carey's theory of rent and Bastiat's theory of the
cost of reproduction; threw light on the influence of fluctuations in
the value of money upon the rate of profit; sketched a mathematical
theory of commercial cycles--in a word, his thought-process remained so
active that when a certain publisher asked for the right to issue his
complete works, he replied, "My works, those which represent my present
thought, are not yet written." But the essential work of his life, the
work which had been so much cherished and which he again and again
turned over in his thoughts, seems, as far as palpable traces are
concerned, to have been entirely dismissed from his mind. We thus look
on, marvelling and grieved, at the sight of the enfeebled hero
withdrawing from the field, what time his banner, whose staff is not yet
firmly implanted in the ground, is left as a target for the easy
assaults of his emboldened adversaries.
There certainly contributed to this intellectual shipwreck the illnesses
and the misfortunes from which Marx suffered during the later years of
his life. His health had been gravely undermined by overwork during the
composition of the first volume of _Capital_ and during the task of
proletarian organisation; trouble from boils alternated with bronchitis,
liver disorder, headache, and lumbago. In vain did he seek health in
gentler climes, at Ramsgate, Ventnor, Neuenahr, Carlsbad, Algiers, Monte
Carlo, Vevey, and other fashionable health resorts. All attempts at
cure proving inefficacious, he had at length to settle down once more in
London.
In 1881 occurred the death of his wife; while the death of his beautiful
daughter Jenny, Longuet's wife, in January, 1883, was, if possible, a
yet more cruel blow. Marx never recovered from this last shock;
henceforward he was a broken man, the mere shadow of his former self; he
passed his time contemplating the portraits of his two dear ones which
Engels was to bury with him, and he no longer took any interest in the
world around him or in the social tumult of which he was the inspirer
and the originator. He died suddenly at two in the afternoon of March
14, 1883, while seated in his study chair. The titanic brain, which had
given a new world to humanity, which had broken once for all the
spiritual and material bondage of mankind, had ceased to live and to
vibrate.
Most distressing of all, he had taken with him to the grave the
solution of the formidable enigma which everyone, the vulgar and the
thinkers alike, had expected his genius to solve, and which no one else
could unravel. It is true that shortly before his death he showed his
friend the bulky manuscripts dictated in earlier days relating to the
_Criticism of Political Economy_, suggesting that something might be
made of this collection. It is also true that Engels, faithful executor
of his divinity's wishes, devoted himself with splendid zeal to the
publication of the manuscripts. But alas what delusion was in store for
the admirers of the master! What a Russian campaign of disaster
organised by enthusiastic lieutenants to the hurt of this Napoleon of
thought!
In 1885, two years after the death of Marx, there was published under
Engels' supervision a so-called second volume of _Capital_. But the
careless and pedestrian editorship, the long theoretical disquisitions
making no appeal to facts for their justification, disquisitions in
which the argumentative thread is continually broken, suffice to show
that what we have before us is not a book, hardly even a sketch for a
book, but a series of casual writings composed for the purposes of study
and for personal illumination. Moreover, the work is wholly devoted to
uninspiring monetary discussions upon the circulation of capital, to
dissertations concerning fixed and circulating capital, the formation of
metallic reserves, the circulation of commodity-capital, etc.
Noteworthy, in any case, are the investigations which aim at throwing
light on the process in virtue of which there is effected the formation
of metallic reserves which remain out of circulation for a longer or
shorter period. If, says Marx, a certain commodity requires for its
production six months of labour, and cannot be sold until two months
after its production has been completed, the capitalist, if he is to
continue the work of production during the period in which the commodity
remains unsold, has need of additional capital which he could dispense
with if the sale could be effected immediately after production. But
when, at the close of the circulation period, the capitalist resumes
possession of the capital first utilised and realises it in money, he
has no immediate need of all this capital, but only of the quantity
necessary to make good the additional capital which he has invested,
that is to say, a quantity of capital equal to the difference between
the primary capital and the supplementary capital; consequently the
excess remains at liberty, and goes to constitute and to increase
monetary reserves. These reserves are formed in addition, and by an
analogous process, on account of the wear of machinery; for the portions
of value transmitted by the machines to the product and correlative to
the wear of these machines are pent up until the day of the complete
destruction of the machines or of their necessary replacement. Thus the
difference between the period of production and the period of exchange
of the commodities, and the difference between the period of economic
redintegration and the period of technical redintegration of the
productive machinery, give rise to the formation of monetary or
capitalistic reserves, which become in their turn the source of
intricate developments and interesting complications.
The book likewise contains a masterly, though wordy and disconnected,
account of the circulation of capital. But absolutely nowhere does it
touch on or even hint at the theoretical enigma left unsolved in the
first volume. Solely in Engels' preface do we find an announcement that
the definitive solution will be furnished in a subsequent volume, and a
suggestion that in the interim economists engage in a sort of academic
debate, and bring forward their respective solutions. There actually
took part in this strange competition, with varying success, Conrad
Schmidt, Landé, Lexis, Skworzoff, Stiebeling, Julius Wolf, Fireman,
Lafargue, Soldi, Coletti, Graziadei, and myself. At length, however, in
1894, appeared the third volume, which was to reveal to an impatient
world the desired solution.
The solution reduces itself to this. It is true, says Marx, that the
value commensurate to labour ends by assigning to the capitals
respectively employed as constant and as variable, different rates of
profit, and that this is radically incompatible with competition. But it
is likewise true that products are not actually sold for their value,
but for their price of production, which is equal to the capital
consumed plus profit at the ordinary rate on the total capital employed.
Certainly if we consider the mass of products sold, we find that their
total price is precisely equal to their total value. But this integral
value is not distributed among the various products in proportion to the
quantity of labour incorporated in them, but in a lesser or greater
proportion, according as the products themselves contain a greater or
less proportion of the mean between the constant capital and the total
capital; that is to say, the products containing a proportion of
constant capital superior to the mean are sold at a price above their
value in order to eliminate the deficiency of profit due to the
preponderance of the capital which does not produce surplus value;
whereas the products containing a proportion of constant capital
inferior to the mean are sold at a price less than their value so as to
eliminate the excess of profit due to the preponderance of the capital
that produces surplus value; whilst only the products containing the
mean proportion of constant capital and total capital are sold at a
price precisely identical with their value.
But it soon becomes apparent that this so-called solution is little more
than a play upon words, or, better expressed, little more than a solemn
mystification. For when economists endeavour to throw light upon the
laws of value, they naturally consider the value at which the
commodities are actually sold, and not a fantastical or transcendental
value, not a value which neither possesses nor can possess any concrete
relationship to facts. It may well be that value as determined by
abstract economic theory will not always correspond precisely with value
as a concrete fact, for the complexities and the manifold vicissitudes
of real life impose obstacles; it may well be, indeed, that to the
rigidity of normal value, constituting the type of the relationship of
exchange, we ought to counterpose the comparatively transient
fluctuations of current value.
But it must be understood that no logical fact should stand in the way
of the realisation of normal value, for this, conversely, ought to be
derived by logical necessity from fundamental economic premises. Of a
value, indeed, which not only is not realised, but is not logically
capable of realisation, the economist neither can nor ought to take any
account; he should show in what respect, instead of being the expression
of what value is, it is the expression of what value is not and cannot
be; he should point out the negation of every correct and positive
theory of value. Now this value commensurate to labour, value as defined
by Marx's theory, not merely has its realisation restricted or modified
by the vicissitudes of reality, but further, as Marx himself is
constrained to recognise, is not logically capable of realisation,
seeing that it would give rise to results incompatible with the most
elementary advantage of those who effect the exchange of commodities;
consequently, it is not merely an abstraction remote from reality, but
is incompatible with reality; not only is it an impossibility in the
realm of fact, but further and above all it is a logical impossibility.
Thus, far from effecting the salvation of the threatened doctrine, this
alleged solution administers a death-blow, and implies the categorical
negation of what it professes to support. For what meaning can there
possibly be in this reduction of value to labour, the doctrine
dogmatically affirmed in the first volume, to one who already knows that
the author is himself calmly prepared to jettison it? Is there any
reason for surprise at Marx's hesitation to publish this so-called
defence; need we wonder that his hand trembled, that his spirit quailed,
before the inexorable act of destruction?
Despite all, however, genius will not be denied, and even this volume
contains here and there masterly disquisitions, enriching the science of
economics with new and fertile truths. It will be enough, in this
connection, to refer to two theories. The first of these, the theory of
the decline in the rate of profit, though not free from objection, is
none the less inspired and profound. The second is the theory of
absolute rent, a brilliant and acute deduction from the Marxist theory
of value. This theory, indeed, as we saw just now, leads to the
conclusion that value commensurate to labour furnishes an extra profit
to the capital which produces commodities requiring for their production
an above-average proportion of variable capital. Now, where free
competition exists, such extra profit cannot continue, and must
necessarily be eliminated by a reduction in the price of the product to
a point below its value. But when competition is not fully free, there
is no reason why such extra profit should not be permanent. Now agrarian
production requires an abnormally high proportion of variable capital,
and consequently agricultural produce, when sold for its value,
furnishes an extra profit. But since land is a monopolised element, this
extra profit can be permanently assigned to the owners of the soil,
because there is no effective competition to prevent their continuing to
draw it. There thus comes into existence an absolute land rent, in
opposition to or in addition to the differential rent of Ricardo's
theory. This absolute rent is not due to the varying cost of production
in different areas; it is not the exclusive appanage of lands more
favourably situated or of lands of better quality; it arises solely from
the excess in the value of agrarian produce over its cost of production,
and is a general attribute of land per se, in virtue of its quality as a
monopolised element. Marx acutely studies the manifold varieties of this
rent according as it is rendered in work, in produce, or in money; and
with sound and far-reaching intuition he deduces from his theory
explanations of the intricate agrarian relationships among the various
peoples of the globe.
Nor is this the only gem with which the work is adorned. Very remarkable
are the pages upon merchants' capital and moneylenders' capital, on
their despotic predominance prior to the inauguration of the capitalist
régime, and upon their inevitable dissolution after the advent of that
régime. The closing pages, however, seem to breathe a vague weariness,
and we find hardly any trace of masterly theoretical discussion of the
class struggle, of its origin, of the instruments through which it
operates, although this discussion, according to the author's original
plan, was to be the monumental crown of the titanic work.
Thus, however fragmentarily, and thanks to the help of lieutenants and
of disciples who were not always adequately instructed, the theoretical
treatise, at once the pride and the torment of our prophet, at length
arrived at completion. But the reader will not forget that to the
positive treatment of his subject, Marx always counterposed a
historico-critical investigation of the theories of his precursors, and
in the more mature design of his work such an exposition was to follow
upon the exposition of his own doctrines and to form their apt
complement. It remained, therefore, to bring to light this last part of
his researches, a duty which was faithfully discharged (after the death
of Engels) by Karl Kautsky, with the publication of the _History of the
Theory of Surplus Value_, which appeared in four volumes during the
years 1905 to 1910. Substantially, though publishers have preferred to
treat it as a work apart, this book is nothing other than the concluding
section of _Capital_, announced in the preface to the first volume,
where the author tells of a sequel to be devoted to the history of this
theory.
In the posthumous work Marx traces the development of the theory of
surplus value through its three essential stages, the prericardian, the
Ricardian, and the postricardian. To the first of these phases belong
the theories of the physiocratic school, whose essence Marx grasps with
marvellous acuteness, maintaining that the theories in question were the
doctrinal reflection of the interests of the rising capitalist class,
constrained to pretend that its own economic claims were the logical
expression of the advantage of the landed and feudalist classes then
politically dominant. Particularly noteworthy are the comments on the
teaching of Adam Smith. The second volume contains a searching criticism
of the Ricardian system, and above all of Ricardo's theories of value
and of profit. In the third section Marx passes judgment on the theories
of Ricardo's successors, Malthus, Senior, and John Stuart Mill, for
these writers, says Marx, follow the setting sun of bourgeois economic
science, follow that science to its now inevitable doom.
It was a fixed idea with Marx that the theoretical analysis of
capitalist relationships had secured its fullest and most adequate
expression in the pages of Ricardo; he believed that Ricardo had
supplied the ultimate synthesis possible on these lines; that any
further progress of economic science in its bourgeois trappings had
become impossible; that its decline amid contradictions and perversions
was inevitable; and that economics could only be renewed and reborn
when the disintegrated vesture of bourgeois economic relationships had
been completely thrown aside to give place to a definitive and superior
social form. It is scarcely necessary to point to the sophisms and the
arbitrary assumptions upon which this concept is based; but it must be
admitted that the poverty, deficiency, and incurable vanity of current
economic science increasingly tend to give the theory an awkward
semblance of truth.