KARL MARX.
In opening the present chapter in the previous edition of this book, I
said it was not a little remarkable that the works of Karl Marx, which
had then excited considerable commotion in other European countries,
were still absolutely unknown in England, though England was the country
where they were written, and to whose circumstances they were, in their
author's judgment, pre-eminently applicable. His principal work, "Das
Kapital," is a criticism of modern industrial development as explained
by English economists and exemplified in English society. It shows a
rare knowledge of English economic literature, even of the most obscure
writers; it goes very fully into the conditions of English labour as
described in our parliamentary reports; and out of four hundred odd
books it quotes, more than three hundred are English books. Its
illustrations are drawn from English industrial life, and its very money
allusions are stated in terms of English coin. Its chief doctrine,
moreover, was an old English doctrine, familiar among the disciples of
Owen; and to crown all, if the author's belief was true, England was the
country ripest for its reception, for the socialist revolution, he
thought, would inevitably come when the working class sunk into the
condition of a proletariat, and the working class of England had been a
proletariat for many years already. Yet Marx's work was not at that time
(1884) translated into English, though it had been into most other
European languages, and had enjoyed a very large sale even in Russia, to
whose circumstances it had admittedly very little adaptation. An English
translation appeared at length, however, in 1887, twenty years after the
publication of the original, and a considerable edition was disposed of
within a year, though the price was high. We have therefore grown more
familiar of late with the name and importance of Karl Marx.
Born at Treves in 1818, the son of a Christian Jew who had a high post
in the civil service, Marx was sent to the University of Bonn, towards
the end of the '30s, won a considerable reputation there in philosophy
and jurisprudence, determined, like Lassalle, to devote himself to the
academic profession, and seemed destined for an eminently successful
career, in which his subsequent marriage with the sister of the Prussian
Minister of State, Von Westphalen, would certainly have facilitated his
advancement. But at the University he came under the spell of Hegel, and
passed, step by step, with the Extreme Left of the Hegelian school, into
the philosophical, religious, and political Radicalism which finally
concentrated into the Humanism of Feuerbach. Just as he had finished his
curriculum, the accession of Frederick William IV. in 1840 stirred a
rustle of most misplaced expectation among the Liberals of Germany, who
thought the day of freedom was at length to break, and who rose with
generous eagerness to the tasks to which it was to summon them. Under
the influence of these hopes and feelings, Marx abandoned the
professorial for an editorial life, and committed himself at the very
outset of his days to a political position which compromised him
hopelessly with German governments, and forced him, step by step, into a
long career of revolutionary agitation and organization. He joined the
staff of the _Rhenish Gazette_, which was founded at that time in
Cologne by the leading Liberals of the Rhine country, including
Camphausen and Hansemann, and which was the organ of the Young Hegelian,
or Philosophical Radical Party, and he made so great an impression by
his bold and vigorous criticism of the proceedings of the Rhenish
Landtag that he was appointed editor of the newspaper in 1842. In this
post he continued his attacks on the Government, and they were at once
so effective and so carefully worded that a special censor was sent from
Berlin to Cologne to take supervision of his articles, and when this
agency proved ineffectual, the journal was suppressed by order of the
Prussian Ministry in 1843. From Cologne Marx went to Paris to be a joint
editor of the _Deutsche Franzoesische Jahrbuecher_ with Arnold Ruge, a
leader of the Hegelian Extreme Left, who had been deprived of his
professorship at the University of Halle by the Prussian Government, and
whose magazine, the _Deutsche Jahrbuecher_, published latterly at Leipzig
to escape the Prussian authority, had just been suppressed by the Saxon.
The _Deutsche Franzoesische Jahrbuecher_ were published by the well-known
Julius Froebel, who had some time before given up his professorship at
Zuerich to edit a democratic newspaper, and open a shop for the sale of
democratic literature; who professed himself a communist in Switzerland,
and had written some able works, with very radical and socialistic
leanings, but who seems to have gone on a different tack at the time of
the Lassallean movement, for he was--as Meding shows us in his "Memoiren
zur Zeitgeschichte"--the prime promoter of the ill-fated Congress of
Princes at Frankfort in 1865. The new magazine was intended to be a
continuation of the suppressed _Deutsche Jahrbuecher_, on a more extended
plan, embracing French as well as German contributors, and supplying in
some sort a means of uniting the Extreme Left of both nations; but no
French contribution ever appeared in it, and it ceased altogether in a
year's time, probably for commercial reasons, though there is no
unlikelihood in the allegation sometimes made, that it was stopped in
consequence of a difference between the editors as to the treatment of
the question of communism.
The Young Hegelians had already begun to take the keenest interest in
that question, but were, for a time, curiously perplexed as to the
attitude they should assume towards it. They seem to have been
fascinated and repelled by turns by the system, and to have been equally
unable to cast it aside or to commit themselves fairly to it. Karl Gruen,
himself a Young Hegelian, says that at first they feared socialism, and
points, for striking evidence of this, to the fact that the _Rhenish
Gazette_ bestowed an enthusiastic welcome on Stein's book on French
communism, although that book condemned the system from a theologically
orthodox and politically reactionary point of view. But he adds that the
Young Hegelians contributed to the spread of socialism against their
will, that it was through the interest they took in its speculations and
experiments that socialism acquired credit and support in public opinion
in Germany, and that the earliest traces of avowed socialism are to be
found in the _Rhenish Gazette_. If we may judge by the extracts from
some of Marx's articles in that journal which are given in Bruno Bauer's
"Vollstaendige Geschichte der Parthei-Kaempfe in Deutschland waehrend der
Jahre 1842-46," we should say that Marx was even at this early period a
decided socialist, for he often complains of the great wrong "the poor
dumb millions" suffer in being excluded by their poverty from the
possibility of a free development of their powers, "and from any
participation in the fruits of civilization," and maintains that the
State had far other duty towards them than to come in contact with them
only through the police. When Ruge visited Cabet in Paris, he said that
he and his friends (meaning, he explained, the philosophical and
political opposition) stood so far aloof from the question of communism
that they had never yet so much as raised it, and that, while there were
communists in Germany, there was no communistic party. This statement is
probably equivalent to saying that he and his school took as yet a
purely theoretical and Platonic interest in socialism, and had not come
to adopt it as part of their practical programme. Most of them were
already communists by conviction, and the others felt their general
philosophical and political principles forcing them towards communism,
and the reason of their hesitation in accepting it is probably expressed
by Ruge, when he says (in an article in Heinzen's "Die Opposition," p.
103), that the element of truth in communism was its sense of the
necessity of political emancipation, but that there was a great danger
of communists forgetting the political question in their zeal for the
social. It was chiefly under the influence of the Humanism into which
Feuerbach had transformed the Idealism of Hegel, that the Hegelian Left
passed into communism. Humanist and communist became nearly convertible
terms. Friedrich Engels mentions in his book on the condition of the
English working classes, published in 1845, that all the German
communists of that day were followers of Feuerbach, and most of the
followers of Feuerbach in Germany (Ruge seems to have remained an
exception) were communists. Lassalle was one of Feuerbach's
correspondents, and after he started the present socialist movement in
Germany, he wrote Feuerbach on 21st October, 1863, saying that the
Progressists were political rationalists of the feeblest type, and that
it was the same battle which Feuerbach was waging in the theological,
and he himself now in the political and economic sphere. Stein
attributed French socialism greatly to the prevailing sensualistic
character of French philosophy, which conceived enjoyment to be man's
only good, and never rose to what he calls the great German conception,
the logical conception of the Ego, the idea of knowing for the sake of
knowing. The inference this contrast suggests is that the metaphysics of
Germany had been her protector, her national guard, against socialism,
but as we see, at the very time he was writing the guard was turning
traitor, and a native socialism was springing up by natural generation
out of the idealistic philosophy. The fact, however, rather confirms the
force of Stein's remark, for the Hegelian idealism first bred the more
sensualistic system of humanism, and then humanism bred socialism.
Hegel had transformed the transcendental world of current opinion, with
its personal Deity and personal immortality, into a world of reason; and
Feuerbach went a step further, and abolished what he counted the
transcendency of reason itself. Heaven and God, he entirely admitted,
were nothing but subjective illusions, fantastic projections of man's
own being and his own real world into external spheres. But mind, an
abstract entity, and reason, a universal and single principle, were, in
his opinion, illusions too. There was nothing real but man--the concrete
flesh and blood man who thinks and feels. "God," says Feuerbach,
speaking of his mental development, "was my first thought, Reason my
second, Man my third and last." He passed, as Lange points out, through
Comte's three epochs. Theology was swept away, and then metaphysics, and
in its room came a positive and materialistic anthropology which
declared that the senses were the sole sources of real knowledge, that
the body was not only part of man's being, but its totality and essence,
and, in short, that man is what he eats--_Der Mensch ist was er isst_.
Man, therefore, had no other God before man, and the promotion of man's
happiness and culture in this earthly life--which was his only life--was
the sole natural object of his political or religious interest. This
system was popularized by Feuerbach's brother Friedrich, in a little
work called the "Religion of the Future," which enjoyed a high authority
among the German communists, and formed a kind of lectionary they read
and commented on at their stated meetings. The object of the new
religion is thus described in it:--"Man alone is our God, our father,
our judge, our redeemer, our true home, our law and rule, the alpha and
omega of our political, moral, public, and domestic life and work. There
is no salvation but by man." And the cardinal articles of the faith are
that human nature is holy, that the impulse to pleasure is holy, that
everything which gratifies it is holy, that every man is destined and
entitled to be happy, and for the attainment of this end has the right
to claim the greatest possible assistance from others, and the duty to
afford the same to them in turn.
Now the tendency of this metaphysical and moral teaching was strongly
democratic and socialistic. There was said to be in the existing
political system a false transcendency identical with that of the
current religious system. King and council hovered high and away above
the real life of society in a world of their own, looking on political
power as a kind of private property, and careless of mankind, from whom
it sprang, to whom it belonged, and by whom and for whom it should be
administered. "The princes are gods," says Feuerbach, "and they must
share the same fate. The dissolution of theology into anthropology in
the field of thought is the dissolution of monarchy into republic in the
field of politics. Dualism, separation is the essence of theology;
dualism, separation is the essence of monarchy. There we have the
antithesis of God and world; here we have the antithesis of State and
people." This dualism must be abolished. The State must be
_humanized_--must be made an instrument in the hands of all for the
welfare of all; and its inhabitants must be _politized_, for they, all
of them, constitute the _polis_. Man must no longer be a means, but must
be everywhere and always an end. There was nobody above man; there was
neither superhuman person, nor consecrated, person; neither deity, nor
divine right. And, on the other hand, as there is no person who in being
or right is more than man, so there must be no person who is less. There
must be no _unmenschen_, no slaves, no heretics, no outcasts, no
outlaws, but every being who wears human flesh must be placed in the
enjoyment of the full rights and privileges of man. The will of man be
done, hallowed be his name.
These principles already bring us to the threshold of socialism, and now
Feuerbach's peculiar ethical principle carries us into its courts. That
principle has been well termed Tuism, to distinguish it from Egoism. The
human unit is not the individual, but man in converse with man, the
sensual Ego with the sensual Tu. The isolated man is incomplete, both as
a moral and as a thinking being. "The nature of man is contained only in
the community, in the unity of man with man. Isolation is finitude and
limitation, community is freedom and infinity. Man by himself is but
man; man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God." Feuerbach
personally never became a communist, for he says his principle was
neither egoism nor communism, but the combination of both. They were
equally true, for they were inseparable, and to condemn self-love would
be, he declared, to condemn love to others at the same time, for love to
others was nothing but a recognition that their self-love was
justifiable. But it is easy to perceive the natural tendency of the
teaching that the social man was the true human unit and essence, and
was to the individual as a God. With most of his disciples Humanism
meant making the individual disappear in the community, making egoism
disappear in love, and making private property disappear in collective.
Hess flatly declared that "the species was the end, and the individuals
were only means." Ruge disputed this doctrine, and contended that the
empirical individual was the true human unit and the true end; but even
he said that socialism was the humanism of common life. Gruen passes into
socialism by simply applying to property Feuerbach's method of dealing
with theology and monarchy. He argues that if the true essence of man is
the social man, then, just as theology is anthropology, so is
anthropology socialism, for property is at present entirely alienated,
externalized from the social man. There is a false transcendency in it,
like that of divinity and monarchy. "Deal, therefore," he says, "with
the practical God, money, as Feuerbach dealt with the theoretical";
humanize it. Make property an inalienable possession of manhood, of
every man as man. For property is a necessary material for his social
activity, and therefore ought to belong as inalienably and essentially
to him as everything which he otherwise possesses of means or materials
for his activity in life; as inalienably, for example, as his body or
his personal acquirements. If man is the social man, some social
possession is then necessary to his manhood, and might be called an
essential part of it; but existing property is something outside, as
separate from him as heaven or the sovereign power. Gruen accordingly
says that Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" supplies the theoretical
basis for Proudhon's social system, because the latter only applies to
practical life the principles which the former applied to religion and
metaphysics, but he admits that neither Feuerbach nor Proudhon would
acknowledge the connection.
We thus see how theoretical humanism--a philosophy and a religion--led
easily over into the two important articles of practical humanism, a
democratic transformation of the State and a communistic transformation
of society. This was the ideal of the humanists, and it contains ample
and wide-reaching positive features; but when it came to practical
action they preferred for the present to take up an attitude of simple
but implacable negation to the existing order of things. No doubt
variety of opinion existed among them; but if they are to be judged by
what seemed their dominant interest, they were revolutionaries and
nothing else. They repudiated with one consent the socialist utopias of
France, and refrained on principle from committing themselves to, or
even discussing, any positive scheme of reconstruction whatsoever. They
held it premature to think of positive proposals, which would, moreover,
be sure to sow divisions among themselves. Their first great business
was not to build up, but to destroy, and their work in the meantime was
therefore to develop the revolutionary spirit to its utmost possible
energy, by exciting hatred against all existing institutions; in short,
to create an immense reservoir of revolutionary energy which might be
turned to account when its opportunity arrived. Their position is
singularly like the phase of Russian nihilism described by Baron Fircks,
and presented to us in Turgenieff's novels. It is expressed very plainly
by W. Marr, himself an active humanist, who carried Feuerbach's "Essence
of Christianity" as his constant companion, and founded a secret society
for promoting humanistic views. In his interesting book on Secret
Societies in Switzerland, he says, "The masses can only be gathered
under the flag of negation. When you present detailed plans, you excite
controversies and sow divisions; you repeat the mistake of the French
socialists, who have scattered their redoubtable forces because they
tried to carry formulated systems. We are content to lay down the
foundation of the revolution. We shall have deserved well of it if we
stir hatred and contempt against all existing institutions. We make war
against all prevailing ideas, of religion, of the State, of country, of
patriotism. The idea of God is the keystone of a perverted civilization.
It must be destroyed. The true root of liberty, of equality, of culture,
is Atheism. Nothing must restrain the spontaneity of the human mind."
All this work of annihilation could neither be done by reform, nor by
conspiracy, but only by revolution, and "a revolution is never made; it
makes itself." While the revolution was making, Marr founded an
association in Switzerland, "Young Germany," which should prepare
society for taking effective action when the hour came. There was a
"Young Germany" in Switzerland when he arrived there; part of a
federation of secret societies established by Mazzini in 1834, under the
general name of "Young Europe," and comprising three series of
societies:--"Young Italy," composed of Italians; "Young Poland," of
Poles; and "Young Germany," of Germans. But this organization was not at
all to Marr's mind, because it concerned itself with nothing but
politics, and because its method was conspiracy. "Great
transformations," he said, "are never prepared by conspiracies," and it
was a very great transformation indeed that he contemplated. He
therefore formed a "Young Germany" of his own. His plan was to plant a
lodge, or "family," wherever there existed a German working men's
association. The members of this family became members of the
association, and formed a leaven which influenced all around them, and,
through the wandering habits of the German working class, was carried to
much wider circles. The family met for political discussion once a week,
read Friedrich Feuerbach together on the Sundays with fresh recruits,
who, when they had mastered him, were said to have put off the old man;
and their very password was _humanity_, a brother being recognised by
using the half-word _human_--? interrogatively, and the other replying
by the remaining half--_itaet_. The members were all ardent democrats,
but, as a rule, so national in their sympathies that the leaders made it
one great object of their _disciplina arcani_ to stifle the sentiment of
patriotism by subjecting it to constant ridicule.
Their relations to communism are not quite easy to determine. Marr
himself sometimes expresses disapproval of the system. He says,
"Communism is the expression of impotence of will. The communists lack
confidence in themselves. They suffer under social oppression, and look
around for consolation instead of seeking for weapons to emancipate
themselves with. It is only a world-weariness desiring illusion as the
condition of its life." He says the belief in the absolute dependence of
man on matter is the shortest and most pregnant definition of communism,
and that it starts from the principle that man is a slave and incapable
of emancipating himself. But, on the other hand, he complains that the
members of "Young Germany" did not sufficiently appreciate the social
question, being disgusted with the fanaticism of the communists. By the
communists, he here means the followers of Weitling and Albrecht, who
were at that time creating a party movement in Switzerland. The prophet
Albrecht, as he is called, was simply a crazy mystic with proclivities
to sedition which brought him at length to prison for six years, and
which took there an eschatological turn from his having, it is said,
nothing to read but the Bible, so that on his release he went about
prophesying that Jehovah had prepared a way in the desert, which was
Switzerland, for bringing into Europe a reign of peace, in which people
should hold all things in common and enjoy complete sensuous happiness,
sitting under their common vine and fig-tree, with neither king nor
priest to make them any more afraid. Weitling was not quite so
unimportant, but the attention he excited at the time is certainly not
justified by any of the writings he has left us. He was a tailor from
Magdeburg, who was above his work, believing himself to be a poet and a
man of letters, condemned by hard fate and iniquitous social
arrangements to a dull and cruel lot. Having gone to Paris when
socialism was the rage there, he eagerly embraced that new gospel, and
went to Switzerland to carry its message of hope to his own German
countrymen. There he forsook the needle altogether, and lived as the
paid apostle of the dignity of manual labour, for which he had himself
little mind. His ideas are crude, confused, and arbitrary. His ideal of
society was a community of labourers, with no State, no Church, no
individual property, no distinction of rank or position, no nationality,
no fatherland. All were to have equal rights and duties, and each was to
be put in a position to develop his capacity and gratify his bents as
far as possible. He was moved more by the desire for abstract equality
than German socialists of the humanist or contemporary type, for they do
not build on the justice of a more equal distribution of wealth so much
as on the necessity of the possession of property for the free
development of the human personality. He is entirely German, however, in
his idea of the government of the new society. It was to be governed by
the three greatest philosophers of the age, assisted by a board of
trade, a board of health, and a board of education. In Switzerland he
founded, to promote his views, a secret society, the "Alliance of the
Just," which had branches in most of the Swiss towns. Its members were
chiefly Germans from Germany, for very few of the communists in
Switzerland were born Swiss, and according to Marr, who was present at
some of their meetings, they were three-fourths of them tailors. "I
felt," says Marr, "when I entered one of these clubs, that I was with
the mother of tailors. The tailor sitting and chatting at his work is
always extreme in his opinions. Tailor and communist are synonymous
terms." It was to some of the leaders of this alliance that Weitling
unfolded his wild scheme of a proletariat raid, according to which an
army of 20,000 brigands was to be raised among the proletariat of the
large towns, to go with torch and sword into all the countries of
Europe, and terrify the _bourgeoisie_ into a recognition of universal
community of goods. It is only fair to add that his proposal met with no
favour. Letters were found in his possession, and subsequently published
in Bluntschli's official report, which show that some of Weitling's
correspondents regarded his scheme with horror, and others treated it
with ridicule. One of them said it was trying to found the kingdom of
heaven with the furies of hell. The relations between "Young Germany"
and Weitling's allies were apparently not cordial, though they had so
much in common that, on the one hand, Weitling's correspondents urge him
to keep on good terms with "Young Germany," and, on the other, Marr says
he actually tried to get a common standing ground with the communists,
and thought he had found it in the negation of the present system of
things--the negation of religion, the negation of patriotism, the
negation of subjection to authority.
Now the importance of this excursus on the Young Hegelians lies in the
fact that Karl Marx was a humanist, and looked on humanism as the vital
and creative principle in the renovation of political and industrial
society. In the _Deutsche Franzoesische Jahrbuecher_ he published an
article on the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, in which he says: "The new
revolution will be introduced by philosophy. The revolutionary tradition
of Germany is theoretical. The Reformation was the work of a monk; the
Revolution will be the work of a philosopher." The particular philosophy
that was to do the work is that of the German critics, whose critique of
religion had ended in the dogma that man is the highest being for man,
and in the categorical imperative, "to destroy everything in the present
order of things that makes a man a degraded, insulted, forsaken, and
despised being." But philosophy cannot work a revolution without
material weapons; and it will find its material weapon in the
proletariat, which he owns, however, was at the time he wrote only
beginning to be formed in Germany. But when it rises in its strength, it
will be irresistible, and the revolution which it will accomplish will
be the only one known to history that is not utopian. Other revolutions
have been partial, wrought by a class in the interests of a class; but
this one will be a universal and uniform revolution, effected in the
name of all society, for the proletariat is a class which possesses a
universal character because it dissolves all other separate classes into
itself. It is the only class that takes its stand on a human and not a
historical title. Its very sorrows and grievances have nothing special
or relative in them; they are the broad sorrows and grievances of
humanity. And its claims are like them; for it asks no special
privileges or special prerogatives; it asks nothing but what all the
world will share along with it. The history of the world is the judgment
of the world, and the duration of an order of things founded on the
ascendancy of a limited class possessing money and culture, is
practically condemned and foredoomed by the rapid multiplication of a
large class outside which possess neither. The growth of this latter
body not merely tends to produce, but actually _is_, the dissolution of
the existing system of things. For the existing system is founded on the
assertion of private property, but the proletariat is forced by society
to take the opposite principle of the negation of private property for
the principle of its own life, and will naturally carry that principle
into all society when it gains the power, as it is rapidly and
inevitably doing. Marx sums up: "The only practical emancipation for
Germany is an emancipation proceeding from the standpoint of the theory
which explains man to be the highest being for man. In Germany the
emancipation from the middle ages is only possible as at the same time
an emancipation from the partial conquests of the middle ages. In
Germany one kind of bond cannot be broken without all other bonds being
broken too. Germany is by nature too thorough to be able to
revolutionize without revolutionizing from a fundamental principle, and
following that principle to its utmost limits; and therefore the
emancipation of Germany will be the emancipation of man. The head of
this emancipation is philosophy; its heart is the proletariat." He adds
that when things are ripe, "when all the inner conditions have been
completed, the German resurrection day will be heralded by the crowing
of the Gallic cock."
In this essay we mark already Marx's overmastering belief in natural
historical evolution, which he had learnt from Hegel, and which
prevented him from having any sympathy with the utopian projects of the
French socialists. They vainly imagined, he held, that they could create
a new world right off, whereas it was only possible to do so by
observing a rigorous conformity to the laws of the development already
in progress, by making use of the forces already at work, and proceeding
in the direction towards which the stream of things was itself slowly
but mightily moving. Hegel sought the principle of organic development
in the State, but Marx sought it rather in civil society, and believed
he had discovered it in that most mighty though unconscious product of
the large system of industry, the modern proletariat, which was born to
revolution as the sparks fly upward; and in the simultaneous decline of
the middle classes, that is, of the conservative element which could
resist the change. The process which was, as he held, now converting
society into an aggregate of beggars and millionaires was bound
eventually to overleap itself and land in a communism. I shall not
discuss the truth of this conception at present, but it contributes,
along with the sentiments of justice and humanity that animate--rightly
or wrongly--the ideal of the socialists, to lend something of a
religious force to their movement, for they feel that they are
fellow-workers with the nature of things.
We left Marx in Paris, and on returning to him, we find him engaged--as
indeed we usually do when his history comes into notice--in a threefold
warfare. Besides his general war against the arrangements of modern
society, he is always carrying on a bitter and implacable war against
the Prussian Government, and is often engaged in controversy--sometimes
very personal--with foes of his own philosophical or revolutionary
household. After the cessation of the _Deutsche Franzoesische
Jahrbuecher_, Marx edited a paper called _Vorwaerts_, and in this and
other journals open to him, he attacked the Prussian administration so
strongly that that administration complained to Guizot, who gave him
orders to quit France. His more personal controversy at this time arose
out of one of the schisms of the Young Hegelians, and he and his friend
Friedrich Engels wrote a pamphlet--"Die Heilige Familie"--against the
Hegelian Idealism, and especially against Bruno Bauer, who had offended
him--says Erdmann, in his "History of Philosophy"--at once as Jew, as
Radical, and as journalist. When expelled from France, he went to
Brussels, where he was allowed to continue his war upon the Prussian
Government without interference, till the revolution of 1848. During
this period he devoted his attention more particularly than hitherto to
commercial subjects, and published in 1846 his "Discours sur le
Libre-echange," and in 1847 his "Misere de la Philosophie," a reply to
Proudhon's "Philosophie de la Misere"--both in French.
While in Brussels, Marx received an invitation from the London Central
Committee of the Communist League to join that society. This league had
been founded in Paris in 1836, for the purpose of propagating communist
opinions among the working men of Germany. Its organization was
analogous to that of the International and other societies of the same
kind. A certain number of members constituted a _Gemeinde_, the several
_Gemeinden_ in the same town constituted a _Kreis_, a number of _Kreise_
were grouped into a leading _Kreis_, and at the head of the whole was
the Central Committee, which was chosen at a general congress of
deputies from all the _Kreise_, and which had since 1840 had its seat in
London. The method of the league was to establish, as a sphere of
operation, German working men's improvement associations everywhere. The
travelling custom of German working men greatly facilitated this work,
and numbers of these associations were soon founded in Switzerland,
England, Belgium, and the United States. The reason its committee
applied to Marx was that he had just published a series of pamphlets in
Brussels, in which, as he tells us, he "submitted to a merciless
criticism the medley of French-English socialism and communism and of
German philosophy, which then constituted the secret doctrine of the
League," and insisted that "their work could have no tenable theoretical
basis except that of a scientific insight into the economic structure of
society, and that this ought to be put into a popular form, not with the
view of carrying out any utopian system, but of promoting among the
working classes and other classes a self-conscious participation in the
process of historical transformation of society that was taking place
under their eyes." This is always with Marx the distinctive and ruling
feature of his system. The French schemes were impracticable utopias,
because they ignored the laws of history and the real structure of
economic society; and he claims that his own proposals are not only
practicable but inevitable, because they strictly observe the line of
the actual industrial evolution, and are thus, at worst, plans for
accelerating the day after to-morrow. But, besides this difference of
principle, Marx thought the League should also change its method and
tactics. Its work, being that of social revolution, was different from
the work of the old political conspirators and secret societies, and
therefore needed different weapons; the times, too, were changed, and
offered new instruments. Street insurrections, surprises, intrigues,
_pronunciamentos_ might overturn a dynasty, or oust a government, or
bring them to reason, but were of no avail in the world for introducing
collective property or abolishing wage labour. People would just begin
again the day after to work for hire and rent their farms as they did
before. A social revolution needed other and larger preparation; it
needed to have the whole population first thoroughly leavened with its
principles; nay, it needed to possess an international character,
depending not on detached local outbreaks, but on steady concert in
revolutionary action on the part of the labouring classes everywhere.
The cause was not political, or even national, but social; and
society--which was indeed already pregnant with the change--must be
aroused to a conscious consent to the delivery. What was first to be
done, therefore, was to educate and move public opinion, and in this
work the ordinary secret society went but a little way. A secret
propaganda might still be carried on, but a public and open propaganda
was more effectual and more suitable to the times. There never existed
greater facilities for such a movement, and they ought to make use of
all the abundant means of popular agitation and intercommunication which
modern society allowed. No more secret societies in holes and corners,
no more small risings and petty plots, but a great broad organization
working in open day, and working restlessly by tongue and pen to stir
the masses of all European countries to a common international
revolution. Marx sought, in short, to introduce the large system of
production into the art of conspiracy.
Finding his views well received by the Central Committee of the
Communist League, he acceded to their request to attend their General
Congress at London in 1847, and then, after several weeks of keen
discussion, he prevailed upon the Congress to adopt "the Manifesto of
the Communist party," which was composed by himself and Engels, and
which was afterwards translated from the German into English, French,
Danish, and Italian, and sown broadcast everywhere just before the
Revolution of 1848. This Communist League may be said to be the first
organization--and this Communist Manifesto the first public
declaration--of the International Socialist Democracy that now is. The
Manifesto begins by describing the revolutionary situation into which
the course of industrial development has brought modern society. Classes
were dying out; the yeomanry, the nobility, the small tradesmen, would
soon be no more; and society was drawn up in two widely separated
hostile camps, the large capitalist class or _bourgeoisie_, who had all
the property and power in the country, and the labouring class, the
proletariat, who had nothing of either. The _bourgeoisie_ had played a
most revolutionary part in history. They had overturned feudalism, and
now they had created proletarianism, which would soon swamp themselves.
They had collected the masses in great towns; they had kept the course
of industry in perpetual flux and insecurity by rapid successive
transformations of the instruments and processes of production, and by
continual recurrences of commercial crises; and while they had reduced
all other classes to a proletariat, they had made the life of the
proletariat one of privation, of uncertainty, of discontent, of
incipient revolution. They exploited the labourer of political power;
they exploited him of property, for they treated him as a ware, buying
him in the cheapest market for the cost of his production, that is to
say, the cost of his living, and taking from him the whole surplus of
his work, after deducting the value of his subsistence. Under the system
of wage labour, it could not be otherwise. Wages could never, by
economic laws, rise above subsistence. While wage labour created
property, it created it always for the capitalist, and never for the
labourer; and, in fact, the latter only lived at all, so far as it was
for the interests of the governing class, the _bourgeoisie_, to permit
him. Class rule and wage labour must be swept away, for they were
radically unjust, and a new reign must be inaugurated which would be
politically democratic and socially communistic, and in which the free
development of each should be the condition for the free development of
all.
The Manifesto went on to say that communism was not the subversion of
existing principles, but their universalization. Communism did not seek
to abolish the State, but only the _bourgeois_ State, in which the
_bourgeois_ exclusively hold and wield political power. Communism did
not seek to abolish property, but only the _bourgeois_ system of
property, under which private property is really already abolished for
nine-tenths of society, and maintained merely for one-tenth. Communism
did not seek to abolish marriage and the family, but only the
_bourgeois_ system of things under which marriage and the family, in any
true sense of those terms, were virtually class institutions, for the
proletariat could not have any family life worthy of the name, so long
as their wages were so low that they were forced to huddle up their
whole family regardless of all decency, in a single room, so long as
their wives and daughters were victims of the seduction of the
_bourgeoisie_, and so long as their children were taken away prematurely
to labour in mills for _bourgeois_ manufacturers, who yet held up their
hands in horror at the thought of any violation of the institution of
the family. Communism did not tend to abolish fatherland and
nationality--that was abolished already for the proletariat, and was
being abolished for the _bourgeoisie_, too, by the extensions of their
trade.
As to the way of emancipation, the proletariat must strive to obtain
political power, and use it to deprive the _bourgeoisie_ of all capital
and means of production, and to place them in the hands of the State,
_i.e._, of the proletariat itself organized as a governing body. Now,
for this, immediate and various measures interfering with property, and
condemned by our current economics, were requisite. Those measures
would naturally be different for different countries, but for the most
advanced countries the following were demanded: (1) Expropriation of
landed property and application of rent to State expenditure; (2)
abolition of inheritance; (3) confiscation of the property of all
emigrants and rebels; (4) centralization of credit in the hands of the
State by means of a national bank, with State capital and exclusive
monopoly; (5) centralization of all means of transport in hands of
State; (6) institution of national factories, and improvement of lands
on a common plan; (7) compulsory obligation of labour upon all equally,
and establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture; (8)
joint prosecution of agriculture and mechanical arts, and gradual
abolition of the distinction of town and country; (9) public and
gratuitous education for all children, abolition of children's labour in
factories, etc. The Manifesto ends by saying:--"The communists do not
seek to conceal their views and aims. They declare openly that their
purpose can only be obtained by a violent overthrow of all existing
arrangements of society. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic
revolution. The proletariat have nothing to lose in it but their chains;
they have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!"
When the French Revolution of February, 1848, broke out, Marx was
expelled without circumstance from Brussels, and received an invitation
from the Provisional Government of Paris to return to France. He
accepted this invitation, but was only a few weeks in Paris when the
German revolution of March occurred, and he hastened to the theatre of
affairs. With his friends, Freiligrath, Wolff, Engels, and others, he
established on June 1st in Cologne the _New Rhenish Gazette_, which was
the soul of the Rhenish revolutionary movement, the most important one
of the year in Germany, and that in which, as we have seen, the young
Lassalle first emerged on the troubled surface of revolutionary
politics. After the _coup d'etat_ of November, dissolving the Prussian
Parliament, the _New Rhenish Gazette_ strongly urged the people to stop
paying their taxes, and thus meet force by force. It inserted an
admonition to that effect in a prominent place in every successive
number, and Marx was twice tried for sedition on account of this
admonition, but each time acquitted. The newspaper, however, was finally
suppressed by civil authority after the Dresden insurrection of May,
1849, its last number appearing on June 19th in red type, and containing
Freiligrath's well-known "Farewell of the _New Rhenish
Gazette_"--spiritedly translated for us by Ernest Jones--which declared
that the journal went down with "rebellion" on its lips, but would
reappear when the last of the German Crowns was overturned.
Farewell, but not for ever farewell!
They cannot kill the spirit, my brother;
In thunder I'll rise on the field where I fell,
More boldly to fight out another.
When the last of Crowns, like glass, shall break
On the scene our sorrows have haunted,
And the people its last dread "Guilty" shall speak,
By your side you shall find me undaunted.
On Rhine or on Danube, in war and deed,
You shall witness, true to his vow,
On the wrecks of thrones, in the midst of the field,
The rebel who greets you now.
This vow is no mere Parthian flourish of poetical defiance. Freiligrath
and his friends undoubtedly believed at this time that the political
movements of 1848 and 1849 were but preliminary ripples, and would be
presently succeeded by a great flood-wave of revolution which they heard
already sounding along in their dangerously expectant ear. His poem on
the Revolution remains as evidence to us that in 1850 he still clung to
that hope, and it would not have been out of tune with his sanguine
beliefs of the year before if he promised, not merely that the spirit of
the journal would rise again, but that its next number would be
published, after the Deluge.
Meanwhile Marx went to London, where he remained for the rest of his
life. Finding that the revolutionary spirit did not revive, and that
historical societies, which have not lost their moral and economic
vitality, had a greater readjusting power against political disturbance
than he previously believed, he gave up for the next ten or twelve years
the active work of revolutionizing. The Communist League, which had got
disorganized in the revolutionary year, and was rent in two by a bitter
schism in 1850, was, with his concurrence, dissolved in 1852, on the
ground that its propaganda was no longer opportune; and the story of the
Brimstone League, with its iron discipline and ogrish desires, of which
Mehring says Marx was, during his London residence, the head-centre, is
simply a fairy tale of Karl Vogt's, whose baselessness Marx has himself
completely exposed. Before leaving the Communist League, two
circumstances may be mentioned, because they repeat themselves
constantly in this revolutionary history. The one is that this schism
took place not on a point of doctrine, but of opportunity; the extremer
members thought the conflict in Germany on the Hessian question offered
a good chance for a fresh revolutionary outbreak, and they left the
League because their views were not adopted. The other is that in one of
its last reports (quoted by Mehring) the League definitely justifies,
and even recommends, assassination and incendiarism--"the so-called
excesses, the inflictions of popular vengeance on hated individuals, or
on public buildings which revive hateful associations." For the next ten
years Marx lived quietly in London, writing for the _New York Tribune_
and other journals, and studying modern industry on this its "classical
soil." He read much in the British Museum Library, gaining his
remarkable acquaintance with the English economic writers, and it was
probably in this period he elaborated his famous doctrine of surplus
value, with its corollary of the right of the labourer to the full
product of his labour. There can be no doubt that the original
suggestion of this doctrine came from English sources, for it was taught
more than a generation before among the English socialists, notably by
William Thompson in his "Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution
of Wealth," which was published as early as 1824, and is actually quoted
by Marx in his work on Capital. Marx built up the doctrine, however,
into a more systematic form, and it is through him and not through the
Owenites it has come into the present socialist movement in which it
plays so conspicuous a part. During this period of reading and
rumination, Marx published a pamphlet against Louis Napoleon; another
against Lord Palmerston, which was widely circulated by David Urquhart;
a third of a personal and bitter character against his
fellow-socialist, Karl Vogt; and a more solid and important work, the
"Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie" (1859), the first fruits of his new
economic studies. But a revolutionist never permanently gives up
revolutionizing, and after his prolonged abstinence from that
excitement, Marx returned to it again in 1864, on the foundation of the
famous International Working Men's Association.
The International was simply the Communist League raised again from the
dead. Their principles were the same; their constitution was the same;
and Marx began his inaugural address to the International in 1864 with
the very words that concluded his Communistic Manifesto of 1847,
"Proletarians of all nations, unite!" When the representatives of the
English working men first suggested the formation of an international
working men's association, in the address they presented in the
Freemasons' Tavern to the French working men who were sent over at the
instance of Napoleon III. to the London Exhibition of 1862, they
certainly never dreamt of founding an organization of revolutionary
socialist democracy which in a few years to come was to wear a name at
which the world turned pale. Their address was most moderate and
sensible. They said that some permanent medium of interchanging thoughts
and observations between the working men of different countries was
likely to throw light on the economic secrets of societies, and to help
onwards the solution of the great labour problem. For they declared that
that solution had not yet been discovered, and that the socialist
systems which had hitherto professed to propound it were nothing but
magnificent dreams. Moreover, if the system of competition were to
continue, then some arrangement of concord between employer and labourer
must be devised, and in order to assert the views of the labouring class
effectively in that arrangement, a firm and organized union must be
established among working men, not merely in each country, but in all
countries, for their interests, both as citizens and as labourers, were
everywhere identical. Those ideas would constitute the basis of a very
rational and moderate programme. But when, in the following year, after
a meeting in favour of the Polish insurrection, which was held in St.
Martin's Hall under the presidency of Professor Beesly, and at which
some of the French delegates of 1862 were present, a committee was
appointed to follow up the suggestion, this committee asked Marx to
prepare a programme and statutes for the proposed association, and he
impressed upon it at its birth the stamp of his own revolutionary
socialism. He never had a higher official position in the International
than corresponding secretary for Germany, for it was determined,
probably with the view of securing a better hold of the great English
working class and their extensive trade organizations, that the
president and secretary should be English working men, and then, after a
time, the office of president was abolished altogether because it had a
monarchical savour. But Marx had the ablest, the best informed, and
probably the most made-up mind in the council; he governed without
reigning; and, with his faithful German following, he exercised an
almost paramount influence on its action from first to last, in spite of
occasional revolts and intrigues against an authority which democratic
jealousy resented as dictatorial, or--worse still--monarchical. The
statutes of the association, which were adopted at the Geneva Congress
of 1866, declared that "the economic subjection of the labourer to the
possessor of the means of labour, _i.e._ of the sources of life, is the
first cause of his political, moral, and material servitude, and that
the economic emancipation of labour is consequently the great aim to
which every political movement ought to be subordinated." Now no doubt
the "economic emancipation of labour" meant different things to
different sections of the Association's members. To the English trades
unionists it meant practically better wages; to the Russian nihilists it
meant the downfall of the Czar and of all central political authority,
and leaving the socialistic communal organization of their country to
manage itself without interference from above; to some of the French
members (as appeared at the Lausanne Congress in 1867) it meant the
nationalization of credit and all land except that held by peasant
proprietors, a class which it was necessary to maintain as a
counterpoise to the State; while, to the German socialists, it meant the
abolition of wages, the nationalization of land and the instruments of
production, the assumption by the State of a supreme direction of all
trade, commerce, finance, and agriculture, and the distribution by the
State of land, tools, and materials to guilds and productive
associations as the actual industrial executive. There were thus very
different elements in the composition of the International, but a _modus
vivendi_ was found for some years by nursing an ultimate ideal, which
was desirable, and meanwhile practically working for a proximate and
much narrower ideal, which was more immediately feasible or necessary.
The association could thus hold that nothing could benefit the working
class but an abolition of wages, and could yet, as it sometimes did,
help and encourage strikes which wanted only to raise wages. At its
Congress in Brussels in 1868 it declared that a strike was not a means
of completely emancipating the labourers, but was often a necessity in
the present situation of labour and capital. Most of the other practical
measures to which the association addressed itself--the eight hours
normal day of labour, gratuitous education, gratuitous justice,
universal suffrage, abolition of standing armies, abolition of indirect
taxes, prohibition of children's labour, State credit for productive
associations--contemplated modifications of the existing system of
things, but always contemplated them as aids to and instalments of the
coming transformation of that system. The consciousness was constantly
preserved that a revolution was impending, and that, as Lassalle said,
it was bound to come and could not be checked, whether it approached by
sober advances from concession to concession, or flew, with streaming
hair and shod with steel, right into the central stronghold.
This was very much the keynote struck by Marx in his inaugural address.
That address was simply a review of the situation since 1848, and an
encouragement of his forces to a renewal of the combat. Wealth had
enormously increased in the interval; colonies had been opened, new
inventions discovered, free trade introduced; but misery was not a whit
the less; class contrasts were even deeper marked, property was more
than ever in the hands of the few; in England the number of landowners
had diminished eleven per cent. in the preceding ten years; and if this
rate were to continue, the country would be rapidly ripe for revolution.
While the old order of things was thus hastening to its doom, the new
order of things had made some advances. The Ten Hours Act was "not
merely a great practical result, but was the victory of a principle. For
the first time the political economy of the _bourgeoisie_ had been in
clear broad day put in subjection to the political economy of the
working class." Then, again, the experiment of co-operation had now been
sufficiently tried to show that it was possible to carry on industry
without the intervention of an employing class, and had spread abroad
the hope that wage labour was, like slavery and feudal servitude, only a
transitory and subordinate form, which was destined to be superseded by
associated labour. The International had for its aim to promote this
associated labour; only it sought to do so, not piecemeal and
sporadically, but systematically, on a national scale, and by State
means. And for this end the labouring class must first acquire political
power, so as to obtain possession of the means of production; and to
acquire political power, they must unite.
The International, though, as we have seen, possessing no real
solidarity in its composition, held together till the outbreak of the
Franco-German war, and of the revolution of the Paris Commune. It was,
of course, strongly opposed to the war, as it was to all war; and
strongly in favour of the revolution, as it was of all revolution. Its
precise complicity in the work of the Commune is not easy to determine,
but there can be no doubt that its importance has been greatly
exaggerated, both by the fears of his enemies and the vanity of its
members. Some of the latter were certainly among those who sat in the
Hotel de Ville, but none of them were leading minds there; and, as for
the Association itself, it never had a real membership, or
ramifications, of any formidable extent. For example, the English trades
unions were in connection with it, and their members might be, in a
sense, counted among its members, but it is certain they never
recognised it as an authority over them, and they probably subscribed to
it mainly as to a useful auxiliary in a strike. The leaders of the
International, however, were, undoubtedly, heart and soul with the
Commune, and approved probably both of its aims and methods, and Marx,
at the Congress of the International, at the Hague, in 1872, drew, from
its failure the lesson, that "revolution must be solidary" in order to
succeed. A revolution in one capital of Europe must be supported by
simultaneous revolutions in the rest. But, while there is little ground
for the common belief that the International had any important influence
in creating the insurrection of the Commune, it is certain that the
insurrection of the Commune killed the International. The English
members dropped off from it and never returned, and at its first
Congress after the revolution (the Hague, 1872), the Association itself
was rent by a fatal schism arising from differences of opinion on a
question as to the government of the society of the future, which would
probably not have become a subject of such keen present interest at the
time but for the Paris Commune. The question concerned the maintenance
or abolition of the State, of the supreme central political authority,
and the discussion brought to light that the socialists of the
International were divided into two distinct and irreconcilable
camps--the Centralist Democratic Socialists, headed by Marx, and the
Anarchist Socialists, headed by Michael Bakunin, the Russian
revolutionist. The Marxists insisted that the socialist _regime_ of
collective property and systematic co-operative production could not
possibly be introduced, maintained, or regulated, except by means of an
omnipotent and centralized political authority--call it the State, call
it the collectivity, call it what you like--which should have the final
disposal of everything. The Bakunists held that this was just bringing
back the old tyranny and slavery in a more excessive and intolerable
form. They took up the tradition of Proudhon, who said that "the true
form of the State is anarchy," meaning by anarchy, of course, not
positive disorder, but the absence of any supreme ruler, whether king or
convention. They would have property possessed and industry pursued on a
communistic principle by groups or associations of workmen, but these
groups must form themselves freely and voluntarily, without any social
or political compulsion. The Marxists declared that this was simply a
retention of the system of free competition in an aggravated form, that
it would only lead to confusion worse confounded, and that the
Bakunists, even in trying to abolish the evils of _laissez-faire_, were
still foolishly supposing that the world could go of itself. This
division of opinion--really a broader one than that which parts
socialist from orthodox economist--rent the already enfeebled
International into two separate organizations, which languished for a
year or two and passed away. And so, with high thoughts of spreading a
reign of fraternity over the earth, the International Working Men's
Association perished, because, being only human, it could not maintain
fraternity in its own narrow borders. This is a history that repeats
itself again and again in socialist movements. As W. Marr said in the
remark quoted above, revolutionists will only unite on a negation; the
moment they begin to ask what they will put in its place they differ and
dispute and come to nought. Apprehend them, close their meetings, banish
their leaders, and you but knit them by common suffering to common
resistance. You supply them with a negation of engrossing interest, you
preoccupy their minds with a negative programme which keeps them united,
and so you prevent them from raising the fatal question--What next?
which they never discuss without breaking up into rival sects and
factions, fraternal often in nothing but their hatred. "It is the shades
that hate one another, not the colours." Such disruptions and secessions
may--as they did in Germany--by emulation increase for a time the
efficiency of the organization as a propagandist agency, but they
certainly diminish its danger as a possible instrument of insurrection.
A socialist organization seems always to contain two elements of
internal disintegration. One is the prevalence of a singular and almost
pathetic mistrust of their leaders, and of one another. The law of
suspects is always in force among themselves. At meetings of the German
Socialists, Liebknecht denounces Schweitzer as an agent of the Prussian
Government, Schweitzer accuses Liebknecht of being an Austrian spy, and
the frequent hints at bribery, and open charges of treason against the
labourers' cause, disclose to us now duller and now more acute phases of
that unhappy state of mutual suspicion, in which the one supreme,
superhuman virtue, worthy to be worshipped, if haply it could anywhere
be discovered, is the virtue men honoured even in Robespierre--the
incorruptible. The other source of disintegration is the tendency to
intestine divisions on points of doctrine. A reconstruction of society
is necessarily a most extensive programme, and allows room for the
utmost variety of opinion and plan. The longer it is discussed, the
more certainly do differences arise, and the movement becomes a strife
of schools in no way formidable to the government. All this only
furnishes another reason for the conclusion that in dealing with
socialist agitations, a government's safest as well as justest policy
is, as much as may be, to leave them alone. Their danger lies in the
cloudiness of their ideas, and that can only be dispersed in the free
breezes of popular discussion. The sword is an idle method of reasoning
with an idea; an idea will eventually yield to nothing but argument.
Repression, too, is absolutely impossible with modern facilities of
inter-communication, and can at best but drive the offensive elements
for a time into subterranean channels, where they gather like a
dangerous choke-damp that may occasion at any moment a serious
explosion.
After the fall of the International, Marx took no further part in public
movements, but occupied his time in completing his work _Das Capital_,
under frequent interruption from ill-health, and he died in Paris in the
spring of 1883, leaving that work still unfinished.
The _Das Capital_ of Marx may be said to be the sacred book of
contemporary socialism, and though, like other sacred books, it is
probably a sealed one to the body of the faithful, for it is extremely
stiff reading, it is the great source from which socialist agitators
draw their inspiration and arguments. Apart from the representative
authority with which it is thus invested, it must be at once
acknowledged to be an able, learned, and important work, founded on
diligent research, evincing careful elaboration of materials, much
acuteness of logical analysis, and so much solicitude for precision that
a special terminology has been invented to secure it. The author's taste
for logical distinctions, however, as he has actually applied it, serves
rather to darken than to elucidate his exposition. He overloads with
analysis secondary points of his argument which are clear enough without
it, and he assumes without analysis primary positions which it is most
essential for him to make plain. His style and method carries us back to
the ecclesiastical schoolmen. His superabounding love of scholastic
formalities is unmodern; and one may be permitted to hope that the odium
more than theological with which he speaks of opponents has become
unmodern too.
Marx's argument takes the form of an inquiry into the origin and social
effects of capital; understanding the word capital, however, in a
peculiar sense. Capital, according to the elementary teaching of
political economy, always means the portion of wealth which is saved
from immediate consumption to be devoted to productive uses, and it
matters not whether it is so saved and devoted by the labourer who is to
use it, or by some other person who lends it to the labourer at interest
or employs the labourer to work with it at a fixed rate of wages. A
fisherman's boat is capital as much as a Cunard Company's steamer,
although the boat is owned by the person who sails it and the steamer by
persons who may never have seen it. The fisherman is labourer and
capitalist in one, but in the case of the steamer the capital is
supplied by one set of people and the labour undertaken by another. Now
Marx speaks of capital only after this division of functions has taken
place. It is, he says, not a logical but a historical category. In
former times men all wrought for the supply of their own wants, the seed
and stock they received was saved and owned by themselves, capital was
an instrument in the hands of labour. But in modern times, especially
since the rise of foreign commerce in the 16th century, this situation
has been gradually reversed. Industry is now conducted by speculators,
who advance the stock and pay the labourer's wages, in order to make
gain out of the excess of the product over the advances, and labour is a
mere instrument in the hands of capital. The capitalist is one who,
without being personally a producer, advances money to producers to
provide them with materials and tools, in the hope of getting a larger
sum of money in return, and capital is the money so advanced. With this
representation of capital as money, so long as it is but a popular form
of speech, no fault need be found, but Marx soon after falls into a
common fallacy and positively identifies capital with money, declaring
them to be only the same thing circulating in a different way. Money as
money, he says, being a mere medium of exchange, is a middle term
between two commodities which it helps to barter, and the order of
circulation is C--M--C, i.e. _commodity_ is converted into _money_ and
_money_ is reconverted into _commodity_. On the other hand, money as
capital stands at the two extremes, and commodity is a middle term, a
medium of converting one sum of money into another and greater; the
order of circulation being expressed as M--C--M. Of course capital, like
other wealth, may be expressed in terms of money, but to identify
capital with money in this way is only to introduce confusion, and the
real confusion is none the less pernicious that it presents itself under
an affectation of mathematical precision.
Capital, then, as Marx understands it, may be said to be independent
wealth employed or its own increase, and in "societies in which the
capitalistic method of production prevails" all wealth bears
distinctively this character. In more primitive days, wealth was a store
of means of life produced and preserved for the supply of the producer's
future wants, but now it "appears as a huge collection of wares," made
for other people's wants, made for sale in the market, made for its own
increase. What Marx wants to discover is how all this independent wealth
has come to accumulate in hands that do not produce it, and in
particular from whence comes the increase expected from its use, because
it is this increase that enables it to accumulate. What he endeavours to
show is that this increase of value cannot take place anywhere except in
the process of production, that in that process it cannot come from the
dead materials, but only from the living creative power of labour that
works upon them, and that it is accordingly virtually stolen from the
labourers who made it by the superior economic force of the owners of
the dead materials, without which indeed it could not be made, but whose
service is entitled to a much more limited reward.
No increase of value, he contends, can occur in the process of exchange,
for an exchange is a mere transposition of things of equal value. In one
sense both parties in the transaction are gainers, for each gets a thing
he wants for a thing he does not want. The usefulness of the two
commodities is thus increased by the exchange, but their value is not.
An exchange simply means that each party gives to the other equal value
for equal value, and even if it were possible for one of them to make a
gain in value to-day--to get a more valuable thing for a less valuable
thing--still, as all the world is buyer and seller in turn, they would
lose to-morrow as buyers what they gained to-day as sellers, and the old
level of value would be restored. No increase whatever would be
effected. There is indeed a class of people whom he describes as always
buying and never selling--the unproducing class who live on their money,
and who, he says, receive by legal titles or by force wealth made by
producers without giving anything in exchange for it. And it may be
supposed that perhaps value is created by selling things to this class
of persons, or by selling things to them above their true value, but
that is not so; you would have brought no new value into the world by
such a transaction, and even if you got more for your goods than their
worth, you would only be cheating back from these rich people part of
the money that they had previously received for nothing. Another
supposition remains. Perhaps new value is created in the process of
exchange when one dealer takes advantage of another--when Peter, say,
contrives to induce Paul to take L40 worth of wine for L50 worth of
iron. But in this case there has been no increase of value; the value
has merely changed hands; Peter has L10 more than he had before, and
Paul L10 less. The commodities have between them after the transaction,
as they had before it, a total value of L90, and that total cannot be
increased by a mere change of possessor.
Having thus established to his satisfaction that commerce, being only a
series of exchanges, cannot produce any increase of value, or what he
terms surplus value, Marx says that that only makes the problem of the
origin of surplus value more enigmatical than ever. For we are thus left
in presence of an apparent contradiction: surplus value cannot spring up
in the circulation of commodities because circulation is nothing but an
exchange of equivalents; and yet surplus value cannot spring up anywhere
except in circulation, because the class of persons who receive it and
live by it do not produce. Here, then, is a riddle, and Marx sets
himself to rede it. True, he says, value is not created directly in the
market, but a commodity is purchased in the market which has the
remarkable property of creating value. That commodity is the human
powers of labour. The very use of these powers, their consumption, their
expenditure, is the creation of value. But marvellous as they are, their
possessor is obliged to sell them, because while they are yielding their
product he must meanwhile live, and he sells a day's use of them for a
day's means of living. They create in a day far more than the value of
the wages for which they are bought. This excess is surplus value, and
is the secret and fountainhead of all accumulations of capital. Powers
which can create six shillings worth in a day may be procured in the
market for three shillings, because three shillings will pay for their
necessary maintenance. Surplus value is the difference between the value
of the labourer's necessary maintenance and the value of the labourer's
production, and it is in the present system entirely appropriated by the
dealer who advances him his wages.
Marx thus bases his argument on two principles which he borrows from
current economic writers, without, however, observing the limitations
under which those writers taught them, and introducing besides important
modifications of his own. The one principle is that value comes from
labour, or as economists stated their law, that the natural value of
commodities is determined by the cost of their production. The second is
only a special application of the first; that the natural wages of
labour are determined by the cost of its production, and that the cost
of the production of labour is the cost of the labourer's subsistence.
The fault he finds with the present system is accordingly this, that
while labour creates all value it is paid only by its stated living, no
matter how much value it creates; and he then goes over the phenomena of
modern industrial life to show how each arrangement is invented so as to
extract more and more value out of the labourer by prolonging his hours
of work or enhancing its speed without giving him any advantage whatever
from the increase of value so obtained. We shall get a fair view of
Marx's argument, therefore, if we follow it through the successive
heads: 1st, Value; 2nd, Wages; 3rd, Normal day of labour; 4th,
Machinery; 5th, Piecework; 6th, Relative over-population.
1st. _Value._ Marx holds that all capital--all industrial advances
except wages--is absolutely unproductive of value, and therefore not
entitled to the acknowledgment known as interest. The original value of
all such capital--the purchase price of the materials, together with a
certain allowance made for tear and wear of machinery--is carried
forward into the value of the product, and preserved in it, and even
that could not be done except by labour. The old value is preserved by
labour, and all new value is conferred by it, and therefore interest is
a consideration entirely out of the question. It is obvious to object
that labour by itself is as unproductive as capital by itself, but Marx
would reply that while labour and capital are equally indispensable to
produce new commodities, it is labour alone that produces new value, for
value is only so much labour preserved, it is merely a register of so
many hours of work. His whole argument thus turns upon his doctrine of
the nature of value, and that doctrine must therefore be closely
attended to.
What, then, is value? Marx considers that most errors on this subject
have arisen from confusing value with utility on the one hand or with
price on the other, and he regards his discrimination of value from
these two ideas as his most important contribution to political economy.
He takes his start from the distinction current since the days of Adam
Smith between value in use and value in exchange, and of course agrees
with Smith in making the value of a commodity in exchange to be
independent of its value in use. Water had great value in use and none
in exchange, and diamonds had great value in exchange and little in use.
Value in use is therefore not value strictly so called, it is utility;
but strictly speaking value in exchange, according to Marx, is not value
either, but only the form under which in our state of society value
manifests itself. There was no exchange in primitive society when every
family produced things to supply its own wants, and there would be no
exchange in a communism, for in an exchange the transacting parties
stand to one another equally as private proprietors of the goods they
barter. And where there was no exchange there could of course be no
exchange value. No doubt there was value for all that in primitive
times, and there would be value under a communism, though it would
manifest itself in a different form. But as we live in an exchanging
society, where everything is made for the purpose of being exchanged, it
is in exchange alone that we have any experience of value, and it is
only from an examination of the phenomena of exchange that we can learn
its nature.
What, then, is value in exchange? It is the ratio in which one kind of
useful commodity exchanges against another kind of useful commodity.
This ratio, says Marx, does not in the least depend on the usefulness of
the respective commodities, or their capacity of gratifying any
particular want. For, first, that is a matter of quality, whereas value
is a ratio between quantities; and second, two different kinds of
utility cannot be compared, for they have no common measure; but value,
being a ratio, implies comparison, and comparison implies a common
measure. A fiddle charms the musical taste, a loaf satisfies hunger, but
who can calculate how much musical gratification is equivalent to so
much satisfaction of hunger. The loaf and the fiddle may be compared in
value, but not by means of their several uses. Third, there are many
commodities which are useful and yet have no value in exchange: air, for
example, water, and, he adds, virgin soil. In seeking what in the
exchange the value depends on, we must therefore leave the utility of
the commodities exchanged entirely out of account; and if we do so,
there is only one other attribute they all possess in common, and it
must be on that attribute that their value rests. That attribute is that
they are all products of labour. While we looked to the utility of
commodities, they were infinite in their variety, but now they are all
reduced to one sober characteristic they are so many different
quantities of the same material, labour. Diversity vanishes; there are
no longer tables and chairs and houses, there is only this much and that
much and the next amount of preserved human labour. And this labour
itself is not discriminated. It is not joiner work, mason work, or
weaver work; it is merely human labour in the abstract, incorporated,
absorbed, congealed in exchangeable commodities. In an exchange
commodities are quantities of labour jelly, and they exchange in the
ratio of the amount of labour they have taken in.
Value, then, is quantity of abstract labour, and now what is quantity of
labour? How is it to be ascertained? Labour is the exertion or use of
man's natural powers of labour, and the quantity of labour is measured
by the duration of the exertion. Quantity of labour is thus reduced to
time of labour, and is measured by hours and days and weeks. Marx
accordingly defines value to be an immanent relation of a commodity to
time of labour, and the secret of exchange is that "a day's labour of
given length always turns out a product of the same value." Value is
thus something inherent in commodities before they are brought to
market, and is independent of the circumstances of the market.
Marx has no sooner reduced value to the single uniform element of time
of labour, and excluded from its constitution all considerations of
utility and the state of the market, than he reintroduces those
considerations under a disguised form. In the first place, if a day's
labour of given length always produces the same value, it is obvious to
ask whether then an indolent and unskilful tailor who takes a week to
make a coat has produced as much value as the more expert hand who turns
out six in this time, or, with the help of a machine, perhaps twenty?
Marx answers, Certainly not, for the time of labour which determines
value is not the time actually taken, but the time required in existing
social conditions to produce that particular kind of commodity--the time
taken by labour of average efficiency, using the means which the age
affords--in short, what he calls the socially necessary time of labour.
Value is an immanent relation to socially necessary time of labour.
Marx's standard is thus, after all, not one of quantity of labour pure
and simple; it takes into account, besides, the average productive power
of labour in different branches of industry. "The value of a commodity,"
says he, "changes directly as the quantity, and inversely as the
productive power, of the labour which realizes itself in that
commodity." Before we know the value of a commodity we must therefore
know not only the quantity of labour that has gone into it, but the
productive power of that labour. We gather the quantity from the
duration of exertion, but how is average productive power to be
ascertained? By simply ascertaining the total product of all the labour
engaged in a particular trade, and then striking the average for each
labourer. Diamonds occur rarely in the crust of the earth, and therefore
many seekers spend days and weeks without finding one. Hits and misses
must be taken together; the productive power of the diamond seeker is
low; or, in other words, the time of labour socially necessary to
procure a diamond is high, and its value corresponds. In a good year the
same labour will produce twice as much wheat as in a bad; its productive
power is greater; the time socially necessary to produce wheat is less,
and the price of the bushel falls. The value of a commodity is therefore
influenced by its comparative abundance, whether that be due to nature,
or to machinery, or to personal skill.
But, in the next place, if value is simply so much labour, it would seem
to follow, on the one hand, that nothing could have value which cost no
labour, and, on the other, that nothing could be devoid of value which
cost labour. Marx's method of dealing with these two objections deserves
close attention, because it is here that the fundamental fallacy of his
argument is brought most clearly out. He answers the first of them by
drawing a distinction between _value_ and _price_, which he and his
followers count of the highest consequence. Things which cost no labour
may have a _price_, but they have no _value_, and, as we have seen, he
mentions among such things conscience and virgin soil. No labour has
touched those things; they have no immanent relation to socially
necessary time of labour; they have not, and cannot have, any value, as
Marx understands value. But then, he says, they command a price. Virgin
soil is actually sold in the market; it may procure things that have
value though it has none itself. Now, this distinction between value and
price has no bearing on the matter at all, for the simple reason that,
as Marx himself admits, price is only a particular form of value. Price,
he says, is "the money form of value"; it is value expressed in money;
it is the exchange value of a commodity for money. To say that
uncultivated land may have a price but not a value is, on Marx's own
showing, to say that it has an exchange value which can be definitely
measured in money, and has yet no value. But he has started from the
phenomena of exchange; he has told us that exchange value is the only
form in which we experience value now; and he thus arrives at a theory
of value which will not explain the facts. If he argued that a thing had
value, but no exchange value, his position might be false, but he says
that a thing may have exchange value but no value, and so his position
is contradictory. Moreover, he describes money accurately enough as a
measure of value, and says that it could not serve this function except
it were itself valuable, _i.e._, unless it possessed the quality that
makes all objects commensurable, the quality of being a product of
labour. Yet here we find him admitting that virgin soil, which, _ex
hypothesi_, does not possess that quality, and ought therefore to be
incommensurable with anything that possesses it, is yet measured with
money every day. Such are some of the absurdities to which Marx is
reduced by refusing to admit that utility can confer value independently
of labour.
Let us see now how he deals with the other objection. If labour is just
value-forming substance, and if value is just preserved labour, then
nothing which has cost labour should be destitute of value. But Marx
frankly admits that there are such things which have yet got no value;
and they have no value, he explains, because they have no utility.
"Nothing can have value without being useful. If it is useless, the work
contained in it is useless, and therefore has no value." He goes
further; he says that a thing may be both useful and the product of
labour and yet have no value. "He who by the produce of his labour
satisfies wants of his own produces utility but not value. To produce a
ware, _i.e._, a thing which has not merely value in use, but value in
exchange, he must produce something which is not only useful to himself,
but useful to others," _i.e._, socially useful. A product of labour
which is useless to the producer and everybody else has no value of any
sort; a product of labour which, while useful to the producer, is
useless to any one else, has no exchange value. It satisfies no want of
others. This would seem to cover the case of over-production, when
commodities lose their value for a time because nobody wants them.
Lassalle explained this depreciation of value by saying that the time of
labour socially necessary to produce the articles in question had
diminished. Marx explains it by saying that the labour is less socially
useful or not socially useful at all. And why is the labour not socially
useful? Simply because the product is not so. The social utility or
inutility of the labour is a mere inference from the social utility or
inutility of the product, and it is therefore the latter consideration
that influences value. Marx tries in vain to exclude the influence of
that consideration, or to explain it as a mere subsidiary qualification
of labour. Labour and social utility both enter equally into the
constitution of value, and Marx's radical error lies in defining value
in terms of labour only, ignoring utility.
For what, after all, is value? Is Marx's definition of it in the least
correct? No. Value is not an inherent relation (whatever that may mean)
of a commodity to labour; it is essentially a social estimate of the
relative importance of commodities to the society that forms the
estimate. It is not an immanent property of an object at all; it is a
social opinion expressed upon an object in comparison with others. This
social opinion is at present collected in an informal but effective way,
through a certain subtle tact acquired in the market, by dealers
representing groups of customers on the one hand, and manufacturers
representing groups of producers on the other; and it may be said to be
pronounced in the verdict of exchange, _i.e._, according to Mill's
definition of value, in the quantity of one commodity given in exchange
for a given quantity of another. Now, on what does this social estimate
of the relative importance of commodities turn? In other words, by what
is value and difference in value determined? Value is constituted in
every object by its possession of two characteristics: 1st, that it is
socially useful; 2nd, that it costs some labour or trouble to procure
it. No commodity lacks value which possesses both of these
characteristics; and no commodity has value which lacks either of them.
Now there are two kinds of commodities. Some may be produced to an
indefinite amount by means of labour, and since all who desire them can
obtain them at any time for the labour they cost, their social
desirableness, their social utility, has no influence on their value,
which, therefore, always stands in the ratio of their cost of production
alone. Other classes of commodities cannot be in this way indefinitely
multiplied by labour; their quantity is strictly limited by natural or
other causes; those who desire them cannot get them for the mere labour
of producing them; and the value of commodities of this sort will
consequently always stand in excess of their relative cost of
production, and will be really determined by their relative social
utility. In fact, so far from the labour required for their production
being any guide to their value, it is their value that will determine
the amount of labour which will be ventured in their production. A
single word may be added in explanation of the conception of social
utility. Of course a commodity which is of no use to any one but its
owner has no economic value, unless it happens to get lost, and, in any
case, it is of no consequence in the present question. The social
utility of a commodity is its capacity to satisfy the wants of others
than the possessor, and it turns on two considerations: 1st, the
importance of the want the commodity satisfies, and, 2nd, the number of
persons who share the want. All commodities which derive a value from
their rarity or their special excellence belong to this latter class,
and the vice of Marx's theory of value is simply this, that he takes a
law which is true of the first class of commodities only to be true of
all classes of them.
2. _Wages._ Having concluded by the vicious argument now explained that
all value is the creation of the personal labour of the workman--is but
the registered duration of exertion of his labouring powers--Marx next
proceeds to show that, as things at present exist, the value of these
labouring powers themselves is fixed not by what they create but by what
is necessary to create or at least renovate them. The rate of wages,
economists have taught, is determined by the cost of the production of
labouring powers, and that is identical with the cost of maintaining the
labourer in working vigour. Marx accepts the usual explanations of the
elasticity of this standard of cost of subsistence. It includes, of
course, the maintenance of the labourer's family as well as his own,
because he will die some day, and the permanent reproduction of powers
of labour requires the birth of fresh hands to succeed him. It must also
cover the expenses of training and apprenticeship, and Marx would
probably agree to add, though he does not actually do so, a
superannuation allowance for old age. It contains, too, a variable
historical element, differs with climate and country, and is, in fact,
just the customary standard of living among free labourers of the time
and place. The value of a commodity is the time of labour required to
deliver it in _normal goodness_, and to preserve the powers of labour in
normal goodness a definite quantity of provisions and comforts is
necessary according to time, country, and customs. The part of the
labouring day required to produce this definite quantity of provisions
and comforts for the use of the day may be called the _necessary time of
labour_--the time during which the workman produces what is necessary
for keeping him in existence--and the value created in this season may
be called _necessary value_. But the workman's physical powers may hold
on labouring longer than this, and the rest of his working day may
accordingly be called _surplus time of labour_, and the value created in
it _surplus value_. This surplus value may be created or increased in
two ways: either by reducing or cheapening the labourer's subsistence,
_i.e._, by shortening the term of necessary labour; or by prolonging the
length of the working day, _i.e._, by increasing the term of surplus
labour. There are limits indeed within which this kind of action must
stop. The quantity of means of life cannot be reduced below the minimum
that is physically indispensable to sustain the labourer for the day,
and the term of labour cannot be stretched beyond the labourer's
capacity of physical endurance. But within these limits may be played an
important _role_, and the secret of surplus value lies in the simple
plan of giving the labourer as little as he is able to live on, and
working him as long as he is able to stand. A labourer works 12 hours a
day because he cannot work longer and work permanently and well, and he
gets three shillings a day of wages, because three shillings will buy
him the necessities he requires. In six hours' labour he will create
three shillings' worth of value, and he works the other six hours for
nothing, creating three shillings' worth of surplus value for the master
who advances him his wages. It is from these causes that we come on the
present system of things to the singular result that powers of labour
which create six shillings a day are themselves worth only three
shillings a day. This absurd conclusion, says Marx, could never have
held ground for an hour, had it not been hid and disguised by the
practice of paying wages in money. This makes it seem as if the labourer
were paid for the whole day when he is only paid for the half. Under the
old system of feudal servitude there were no such disguises. The
labourer wrought for his master one day, and for himself the other five,
and there was no make-believe as if he were working for himself all the
time. But the wages system gives to surplus labour that is really unpaid
the false appearance of being paid. That is the mystery of iniquity of
the whole system, the source of all prevailing legal conceptions of the
relation of employer and employed, and of all the illusions about
industrial freedom. The wages system is the lever of the labourer's
exploitation, because it enables the capitalist to appropriate the
entire surplus value created by the labourer--_i.e._, the value he
creates over and above what is necessary to recruit his labouring powers
withal.
Now surplus value, as we have seen, is of two kinds, absolute and
relative. Absolute surplus value is got by lengthening the term of
surplus labour; relative surplus value by shortening the term of
necessary labour, which is chiefly done by inventions that cheapen the
necessaries of life. The consideration of the first of these points
leads Marx into a discussion of the normal length of the day of labour;
and the consideration of the second into a discussion of the effects of
inventions and machinery on the condition of the working classes. We
shall follow him on these points in their order.
3. _Normal day of labour._ There is a normal length of the day of
labour, and it ought to be ascertained and fixed by law. Some bounds are
set to it by nature. There is a minimum length, for example, beneath
which it cannot fall; that minimal limit is the time required to create
an equivalent to the labourer's living; but as under the capitalistic
system the capitalist has also to be supported out of it, it can never
be actually shortened to this minimum. There is also a maximum length
above which it cannot rise, and this upper limit is fixed by two sorts
of considerations, one physical, the other moral. 1st. _Physical
limits._ These are set by the physical endurance of the labourer. The
day of labour cannot be protracted beyond the term within which the
labourer can go on from day to day in normal working condition to the
end of his normal labouring career. This is always looked to with
respect to a horse. He cannot be wrought more than eight hours a day
regularly without injury. 2nd. _Moral limits._ The labourer needs time
(which the horse does not, or he would perhaps get it) for political,
intellectual, and social wants, according to the degree required by
society at the time. Between the maximum and minimum limit there is,
however, considerable play-room, and therefore we find labouring days
prevailing of very different length, 8 hours, 10, 12, 14, 16, and even
18 hours. There is no principle in the existing industrial economy which
fixes the length of the day; it must be fixed by law on a sound view of
the requirements of the case. Marx pitches upon 8 hours as the best
limit, because it affords a security for the permanent physical
efficiency of the labourer, and gives him leisure for satisfying those
intellectual and social wants which are becoming every day more largely
imperative. He makes no use of the reason often urged for the 8 hours
day, that the increased intelligence it would tend to cultivate in the
working class would in many ways conduce to such an increase of
production as would justify the shorter term of work. But he is very
strong for the necessity of having it fixed by law, and points out that
even then employers will need to be carefully watched or they will find
ways and means of extending the day in spite of the law. When the day
was fixed in England at 10 hours in some branches of industry, some
masters gained an extra quarter or half-hour by taking five minutes off
each meal time, and the profit made in these five minutes was often very
considerable. He mentions a manufacturer who said to him, "If you allow
me ten minutes extra time every day, you put L1,000 a year into my
pocket," and he says that is a good demonstration of the origin of
surplus value, for how much of this L1,000 would be given to the man
whose extra ten minutes' labour had made it? Marx enters very fully into
the history of English factory legislation, acknowledges the great
benefit it has conferred both upon the labouring class and the
manufacturers, and says that since the Act of 1850 the cotton industry
has become the model industry of the country. As might be expected, he
thinks the gradual course taken by English legislation on the subject
much inferior, as a matter of principle, to the more revolutionary
method taken by France in 1848, when a twelve hours Act was introduced
simultaneously as a matter of principle for every trade in the whole
country; but he admits that the results were more permanent in England.
4. _Effects of machinery, and the growth of fixed capital on the working
classes._ The whole progress of industrial improvements is a history of
fresh creations of relative surplus value, and always for the benefit of
the capitalist who advances the money. Everything that economizes labour
or that adds positively to its productivity, contracts the labourer's
own part of the working day and prolongs the master's. Division and
subdivision of labour, combination, co-operation, organization,
inventions, machinery, are all "on the one hand elements of historical
progress and development in the economic civilization of society, but on
the other are all means of civilized and refined exploitation of the
labourer." They not only increase social wealth at his expense, but in
many cases they do him positive injury. These improvements have cost
capitalists nothing, though capitalists derive the whole advantage from
them. Subdivision, combination, organization, are simply natural
resources of social labour, and natural resources of any kind are not
produced by the capitalist. Inventions, again, are the work of science,
and science costs the capitalist nothing. Labour, association,
science--these are the sources of the increase; capital is nowhere, yet
it sits and seizes the whole. Machinery, of course, is capital, but then
Marx will not admit that it creates any value, and contends that it
merely transfers to the product the value it loses by tear and wear in
the process of production. The general effect of industrial
improvements, according to Marx, is--1st, to reduce wages; 2nd, to
prolong the day of labour; 3rd, to overwork one-half of the working
class; 4th, to throw the rest out of employ; and, 5th, to concentrate
the whole surplus return in the hands of a few capitalists who make
their gains by exploiting the labourers, and increase them by exploiting
one another. This last point we need not further explain, and the third
and fourth we shall unfold under the separate heads of Piecework and
Relative Over-population. The remaining two I shall take up now, and
state Marx's views about a little more fully.
(_a_). Industrial improvements tend to reduce wages. They do so, says
Marx, through first mutilating the labourer intellectually and
corporeally. As a result of subdivision of labour, workmen are rapidly
becoming mere one-sided specialists. Headwork is being separated more
and more from handwork in the labourer's occupation, and this
differentiation of function leads to a hierarchy of wages which affords
great opportunity for exploiting the labourer. Muscular power is more
easily dispensed with than formerly, and so the cheaper labour of women
and children is largely superseding the dearer labour of men. If this
goes on much further, the manufacturer will get the labour of a whole
family for the wages he used to pay to its head alone, and the labourer
will be converted into a slave-dealer who sells his wife and children
instead of his own labour. That this kind of slavery will find no sort
of resistance from either master or labourer, is to Marx's mind placed
beyond doubt by the fact that though the labour of children under 13
years of age is restricted in English factories, advertisements appear
in public prints for "children that can pass for 13."
(_b_). Industrial improvements tend to lengthen the day of labour.
Machinery can go on for ever, and it is the interest of the capitalist
to make it do so. He finds, moreover, a ready and specious pretext in
the greater lightness of the work as compared with hand labour, for
keeping the labourer employed beyond the normal limits of human
endurance. Capitalists always complain that long hours are a necessity
in consequence of the increasing extent of fixed capital which cannot
otherwise be made to pay. But this is a mistake on their part, says
Marx. For, according to the factory inspector's reports, shortening the
day of labour to 10 hours has increased production and not diminished
it, and the explanation is that the men can work harder while they are
at it, if the duration of their labour is shortened. Shortening the day
of labour has not only increased production, but actually increased
wages. Mr. Redgrave, in his Report for 1860, says that during the period
1839-1859 wages rose in the branches of industry that adopted the ten
hours' principle, and fell in trades where men wrought 14 and 15 hours a
day. Small wages and long hours are always found to go together, because
the same causes which enable the employer to reduce wages enable him to
lengthen the labouring day.
5. _Piecework._ Industrial improvements tend, Marx maintains, to
overwork, to undue intensification of labour, for machinery can go at
almost any rate all day and all night, and labourers are compelled by
various expedients to work up to it. Among these expedients none is more
strongly condemned by Marx than piecework, as encouraging over-exertion
and overtime. He says that though known so early as the 14th century,
piecework only came into vogue with the large system of production, to
which he thinks it the most suitable form of payment. He states (though
this is not quite accurate) that it is the only form of payment in use
in workshops that are under the factory acts, because in these workshops
the day of labour cannot be lengthened, and the capitalist has no other
way open to him of exploiting the labourer but by increasing the
intensity of the labour. He ridicules the idea of a writer who thought
"the system of piecework marked an epoch in the history of the working
man, because it stood halfway between the position of a mere wage
labourer depending on the will of the capitalist and the position of the
co-operative artisan who in the not distant future promises to combine
the artisan and the capitalist in his own person." Better far, he holds,
for the labourer to stick to day's wages, for he can be much more easily
and extensively exploited by the piece system. He contends that
experience has proved this in trades like the compositors and ship
carpenters, in which both systems of payment are in operation side by
side, and he cites from the factory inspectors' reports of 1860 the case
of a factory employing 400 hands, 200 paid by the piece and 200 by the
day. The piece hands had an interest in working overtime, and the day
hands were obliged to follow suit without receiving a farthing extra for
the additional hour or half-hour. This might be stopped by further
legislation, but then Marx holds that the system of piece payment is so
prone to abuse that when one door of exploitation shuts another only
opens, and legislation will always remain ineffectual. Every peculiarity
of the system furnishes opportunity either for reducing wages or
increasing work. On the piece system the worth of labour is determined
by the worth of the work it does, and unless the work possess average
excellence the stipulated price is withheld. There is thus always a
specious pretext ready to the employer's hand for making deductions from
wages on the ground that the work done did not come up to the stipulated
standard. Then again, it furnishes the employer with a definite measure
for the intensity of labour. He judges from the results of piecework how
much time it generally takes to produce a particular piece, and
labourers who do not possess the average productivity are turned off on
the ground that they are unable to do a minimum day's work. Even those
who are kept on get lower average wages than they would on the day
system. The superior workman earns indeed better pay working by the
piece, but the general body do not. The superior workman can afford to
take a smaller price per piece than the others, because he turns out a
greater number of pieces in the same time, and the employer fixes, from
the case of the superior workman, a standard of payment which is
injurious to the rest. In the end a change from day's wages to piece
wages will thus be found to have merely resulted in the average labourer
working harder for the same money. Marx, however, admits that when a
definite scale of prices has been in long use and has become fixed as a
custom, there are so many difficulties to its reduction that employers
are obliged, when they seek to reduce it, to resort to violent methods
of transforming it into time wages again. He gives an example of this
from the strike of the Coventry ribbon-weavers in 1860, in resistance to
a transformation of this kind.
These are only some of the evils Marx lays at the door of piecework; he
has many more charges. From rendering the superintendence of labour
unnecessary, it leads to abuses like the sub-contracts known in this
country as "the sweating system," or what is a variety of the same, to
contracts of the employer with his manager, whereby the latter becomes
responsible for the whole work, and employs and pays the men. From
making it the pecuniary interest of the labourer to work overtime,
piecework induces him to overstrain his powers, and both to transgress
the legal or normal limits of the day of labour, and to raise or exceed
the normal degree of the intensity of labour. Marx, quoting from
Dunning, says that it was customary in the engineering trade in London
for employers to engage a foreman of exceptional physical powers, and
pay him an extra salary per quarter to keep the men up to his own pace;
an expedient which, he adds, is actually recommended to farmers by
Morton in his "Agricultural Encyclopaedia." He attributes to piecework,
especially in its operation on women and children, the degeneration of
the labouring class in the potteries, which is shown in the Report of
the Commission on the Employment of Children. But while Marx thus
objects to piecework because it leads to overwork, he objects to it also
because it leads to underwork. It enables employers to engage more hands
than they require, when they entertain perhaps only an imaginary
expectation of work, for they know they run no risk, since paying by the
piece they pay only for what is done. The men are thus imperfectly
employed and insufficiently paid.
6. _Relative Over-population._ One of the worst features of modern
industrial development is the vast number of labourers whom it
constantly leaves out of employ. This Marx calls relative
over-population. Of absolute over-population he has no fear. He is not a
Malthusian. He holds that there is no population law applicable to all
countries and times alike. Social organisms differ from one another as
do animals and plants; they have different laws and conditions. Every
country and age has its own law of population. A constant and
increasing over-population is a characteristic of the present age; it is
a necessary consequence of the existing method of carrying on industry;
but it is nothing in the nature of an absolute over-growth; it is only,
to Marx's thinking, a relative superfluity. There is plenty of work for
all, more than plenty. If those who have employment were not allowed to
be overwrought, and if work were to-morrow to be limited to its due
amount for every one according to age and sex, the existing working
population would be quite insufficient to carry on the national
production to its present extent. Even in England, where the technical
means of saving labour are enormous, this could not be done except by
converting most of our present "unproductive" labourers into productive.
There is therefore, Marx conceives, no reason why any one should be out
of work; but at present, what with the introduction of new machinery,
the industrial cycles, the commercial crises, the changes of fashion,
the transitions of every kind, we have always, besides the industrial
army in actual service, a vast industrial reserve who are either
entirely out of employment or very inadequately employed. This relative
over-population is an inevitable consequence of the capitalistic
management of industry, which first compels one-half of the labouring
community to do the work of all, and then makes use of the redundancy of
labour so created to compel the working half to take less pay. Low wages
spring from the excessive competition among labourers caused by this
relative over-population. "Rises and falls in the rate of wages are
universally regulated by extensions and contractions in the industrial
reserve army which correspond with changes in the industrial cycle. They
are not determined by changes in the absolute number of the labouring
population, but through changes in the relative distribution of the
working class into active army and reserve army--through increase or
decrease in the relative numbers of the surplus population--through the
degree in which it is at one time absorbed and at another dismissed."
The fluctuations in the rate of wages are thus traced to expansions or
contractions of capital, and not to variation in the state of
population. Marx ridicules the theory of these fluctuations given by
political economists, that high wages lead to their own fall by
encouraging marriages, and so in the end increasing the supply of
labour, and that low wages lead to their own rise by discouraging
marriages and reducing the supply of labour. That, says Marx, is very
fine, but before high wages could have produced a redundant population
(which would take eighteen years to grow up), wages would, with modern
industrial cycles, have been up, down, and up again through ordinary
fluctuations of trade.
Relative over-population is of three kinds: current, latent, and
stagnant. Current over-population is what comes from incidental causes,
the ordinary changes that take place in the every-day course of
industry. A trade is slack this season and brisk the next, has perhaps
its own seasons, like house-painting in spring, posting in summer. Or
one trade may from temporary reasons be busy, while others are
depressed. In the last half year of 1860 there were 90,000 labourers in
London out of employment, and yet the factory inspectors report that at
that very time much machinery was standing idle for want of hands. This
comes from the labourer being mutilated--that is, specialized--under
modern subdivision of labour, and fit for only a single narrow craft.
Another current cause of over-population is that under the stress of
modern labour the workman is old before his years, and while still in
middle life becomes unfit for full work, and passes into the reserve.
Marx says this is the real reason for the prevalence of early marriages
among the working class. They are generally condemned for being
improvident, but they are really resorted to from considerations of
providence, for working men foresee that they will be prematurely
disabled for work, and desire, when that day comes, to have grown-up
children about them who shall be able to support them. Other current
causes are new inventions and new fashions, which always throw numbers
out of work. Latent over-population is what springs from causes whose
operation is long and slow. The best example of it is the case of the
agricultural labourers. They are being gradually superseded by
machinery, and as they lose work in the country they gather to the towns
to swell the reserve army there. A great part of the farm servants are
always in this process of transition, a few here, and a few there, and a
few everywhere. The constancy of this flow indicates a latent
over-population in the rural districts, and that is the cause of the low
wages of agricultural labourers. By stagnant over-population Marx means
that which is shown in certain branches of industry, where none of the
workmen are thrown back entirely into the reserve, but none get full
regular employment.