Heinrich Karl Marx was born at Treves, in Rhenish Prussia, May 5,
1818, and died in London, March 14, 1883. One of the most advanced
leaders of the modern socialist movement in Germany, he was a
brilliant university graduate both at Berlin and Bonn. Going at
once into journalism, Marx from the outset of his career was known
as a pronounced socialist. He became celebrated as collaborator
with Heine in conducting the journal which has since become the
most influential organ in the world of socialism, "Vorwaerts." He
was expelled successively from Germany, France, and Belgium, but
found a refuge in England, where he lived from 1849 till the close
of his life. The keynote of Marxist economy is the advocacy of the
claims of labour against those of capitalism. Marx was a skilled
linguist, and his philological talent enabled him to propagate his
views with special facility, so that he was the real founder of
international socialism. His famous social work, "Capital: A
Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production" ("Das Kapital"), which
was originally entitled "A Criticism of Political Economy,"
appeared in 1867, and has influenced the labour movement more than
any other composition in literature. A keen historical survey of
capital and also a vivid forecast, Marx's analysis of the economic
development of modern society has been justified in many respects
by subsequent events.
_I.--The Genesis of Capitalist Production_
Money and commodities are not capital, any more than are the means of
production and of subsistence. They need to be transformed into capital.
This transformation can only take place under conditions that separate
labourers from all property, and from the means by which they can
realise the profits of their labour; that is to say, from the possession
of their means of production. The process of this separation clears the
way for the capitalist system.
The economic structure of capitalistic society has developed from the
economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set
free the elements of the former. The immediate producer, the labourer,
could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached
as a serf to the soil. Then, to be able to sell his labour wherever he
could find a market, he must further have escaped from the mediaeval
guilds and their rules and regulations, as from so many fetters on
labour. But these new freedmen, on the other hand, only thus made
merchandise of their labour after they had been deprived of their own
means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence furnished
under the old feudalism. And the history of this, their expropriation,
is written in history in characters of blood and fire.
The industrial capitalists, the new potentates, had to displace not only
the guild-masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, who were in
possession of the sources of wealth. But though the conquerors thus
triumphed, they have risen by means as opprobrious as those by which,
long before, the Roman freedman overcame his _patronus_. The servitude
of the labourer was the starting point of the development which involved
the rise of the labourer and the genesis of the capitalist. The form of
this servitude was changed by the transformation of feudal exploitation
into capitalist exploitation.
The inauguration of the capitalist era dates from the sixteenth century.
The process consisted in the tearing of masses of men from their means
of subsistence, to be hurled as free proletarians on the labour market.
The basis of the whole process is the expropriation of the peasant from
the soil. The history of this expropriation, differing in various
countries, has the classic form only in England.
The prelude of the revolution which founded the capitalist mode of
production was played at the beginning of the sixteenth century by the
breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart
well says, "everywhere uselessly filled house and castle." The old
nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars; the new was a child
of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. Transformation
of arable land into sheepwalks was therefore its cry, and an
expropriation of small peasants was initiated which threatened the ruin
of the country. Thornton declares that the English working-class was
precipitated without any transition from its golden into its iron age.
To the evictions a direct impulse had been given by the rapid increase
of the Flemish wool manufacturers and the corresponding rise in the
price of wool in England. At length such a deterioration ensued in the
condition of the common people that Queen Elizabeth, on a journey
through the land, exclaimed, "_Pauper ubique jacet_," and in the
forty-third year of her reign the nation was constrained to acknowledge
the terrible pauperism that had arisen by the introduction of the
poor-rate.
Even in the last decade of the seventeenth century, the yeomanry, or
independent peasants, outnumbered the farmers, and they formed the main
strength of Cromwell's army. About 1750 the yeomen had vanished, and not
long afterwards was lost the common land of the agricultural labourer.
Communal property was an old institution which had lived on under the
aegis of feudalism. Under the "glorious revolution" which brought William
of Orange to England, the landlord and capitalist appropriators of
surplus value inaugurated the new era by thefts of land on a colossal
scale. Thus was formed the foundation of the princely domains of the
English oligarchy. In the eighteenth century the law itself became the
instrument of the theft of the people's land, and the transformation of
communal land into private property had for its sequel the parliamentary
form of robbery in shape of the Acts for the Enclosure of Commons.
Immense numbers of the agricultural population were by this
transformation "set free" as proletarians for the manufacturing
industry.
After the foregoing consideration of the forcible creation of a class of
outlawed proletarians, converted into wage-labourers, the question
remains,--Whence came the capitalists originally? The capitalist farmer
developed very gradually, first as a bailiff, somewhat corresponding to
the old Roman _villicus_; then as a _metaver_, or semi-farmer, dividing
stock and product with the landowner; next as the farmer proper, making
his own capital increase by employing wage-labourers, and paying part of
the profit to the landlord as rent. The agricultural revolution of the
sixteenth century enriched the farmer in proportion as it impoverished
the mass of the agricultural people. The continuous rise in the price of
commodities swelled the money capital of the farmer automatically, and
he grew rich at the expense both of landlord and labourer. It is thus
not surprising that at the close of the sixteenth century England had a
class of capitalist farmers who were wealthy, considering the conditions
of the age.
_II.--The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist_
By degrees the agricultural population was transformed into material
elements of variable capital. For the peasants were constrained, now
that they had been expropriated and cast adrift, to purchase their value
in the form of wages from their new masters, the industrial capitalists.
So they were transformed into an element of constant capital.
Consider the case of Westphalian peasants who, in the time of Frederic
II., were all spinners of flax, and were forcibly expropriated from the
soil they had owned under feudal tenure. Some, however, remained and
were converted into day-labourers for large farmers. At the same time
arose large flax-spinning and weaving factories in which would work men
who had been "set free" from the soil. The flax looks just the same as
before, but a new social soul has entered its body, for it now forms a
part of the constant capital of the master manufacturer.
The flax which was formerly produced by a number of families, who also
spun it in retail fashion after growing it, is now concentrated in the
establishment of a single capitalist, who employs others to spin and
weave it for him. So the extra labour which formerly realised extra
income to many peasant families now brings profit to a few capitalists.
The spindles and the looms formerly scattered over the country are now
crowded into great labour barracks. The machines and raw material are
now transformed from means of independent livelihood for the peasant
spinners and weavers into means for mastering them and extracting out of
them badly-paid labour.
The genesis of the industrial capitalist did not proceed in such a
gradual way as that of the farmer, for it was accelerated by the
commercial demands of the new world-market created by the great
discoveries of the end of the fifteenth century. The Middle Ages had
handed down two distinct forms of capital--the usurer's capital and the
merchant's capital. For a time the money capital formed by means of
usury and commerce was prevented from conversion into industrial
capital, in the country by feudalism, in the towns by the guilds. These
hindrances vanished with the disappearance of feudal society and the
expropriation and partial eviction of the rural population. The new
manufactures were established at seaports, or at inland points beyond
the control of the old municipalities and their guilds. Hence, in
England arose an embittered struggle of the corporate towns against
these new industrial nurseries.
The power of the state, concentrating and organising the force of
society, hastened the transition, shortening the process of
transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist
mode.
The next development of the capitalist era was the rise of the stock
exchange and the great banks. The latter were at first merely
associations of private speculators, who, in exchange for privileges
bestowed on them, advanced money to help the governments. The Bank of
England, founded in 1684, began by lending money to the government at
eight per cent. At the same time it was empowered by parliament to coin
money out of the same capital, by lending it again to the public in the
form of bank-notes.
By degrees the Bank of England became the eternal creditor of the
nation, and so arose the national debt, together with an international
credit system, which has often concealed one or other of the sources of
primitive accumulation of this or that people. One of the main lines of
international business is the lending out of enormous amounts of capital
by one country to another. Much capital which to-day appears in America
without any certificate of birth, was yesterday in England, the
capitalised blood of her children.
Terrible cruelty characterised much of the development of industrial
capitalism, both on the Continent and in England. The birth of modern
industry is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the
royal navy, the factories were recruited by the press-gang. Cottages and
workhouses were ransacked for poor children to recruit the factory
staffs, and these were forced to work by turns during the greater part
of the night. As Lancashire was thinly populated and great numbers of
hands were suddenly wanted, thousands of little hapless creatures, whose
nimble little fingers were especially wanted, were sent down to the
north from the workhouses of London, Birmingham, and other towns. These
apprentices were flogged, tortured, and fettered. The profits of
manufacturers were enormous. At length Sir Robert Peel brought in his
bill for the protection of children.
With the growth of capitalist production during the manufacturing period
the public conscience of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame, and
the nations cynically boasted of every infamy that reinforced
capitalistic accumulation. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade. The
child-slavery in the European manufactories needed for its pedestal the
slavery, pure and simple, of the negroes imported into America. If
money, according to Marie Augier, "comes into the world with a
congenital bloodstain on one cheek," capital comes dripping from head to
foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
_III.--Commodities, Exchange and Capital_
A commodity is an object, external to ourselves, which by its properties
in some way satisfies human wants. The utility of a thing constitutes
its use-value. Use-values of commodities form the substance of all
wealth, and also become the material repositories of exchange-value. The
magnitude of the value of any article is determined by the labour-time
socially necessary for its production. So the value of a commodity would
remain constant if the labour-time required for its production also
remained constant. But the latter varies with every variation in the
productiveness of labour.
An article may have use-value, and yet be without value, if its utility
is not due to labour, as in the case of air, or virgin soil, or natural
meadows. If a thing be useless, so is the labour contained in it, for,
as the labour does not count as such, it therefore creates no value. A
coat is worth twice as much as ten yards of linen, because the linen
contains only half as much labour as the coat. All labour is the
expenditure of human labour-power in a special form and with a definite
aim, and in this, its character of concrete useful labour, it produces
use-values.
Everyone knows, if he knows nothing else, that commodities have a value
form common to them all, and presenting a marked contrast with the
varied bodily forms of their use-values. I mean their money form.
Every owner of a commodity wishes to part with it in exchange for other
commodities, but only those whose use-value satisfies some want of his.
To the owner of a commodity, every other commodity is, in regard to his
own, a particular equivalent. Consequently his own commodity is the
universal equivalent for all others. But, since this applies to every
owner, there is, in fact, no commodity acting as a universal equivalent.
It was soon seen that a particular commodity would not become the
universal equivalent except by a social act. The social action,
therefore, has set apart the particular commodity in which all values
are represented, and the bodily form of this commodity has become the
form of the socially recognised universal equivalent--money.
The first chief function of money is to supply commodities with the
material for the expression of their values. It thus serves as a
universal measure of value, and only by virtue of this function does
gold, the commodity _par excellence_, become money. But money itself has
no price. As the measure of value and the standard of price, money has
two distinct functions to perform. It is the measure of value inasmuch
as it is the socially recognised incarnation, of human labour; it is the
standard of price inasmuch as it is a fixed weight of metal. As the
measure of value it serves to convert the values of all the various
commodities into prices or imaginary quantities of gold. As the standard
of price it measures those quantities of gold.
The word pound was the money-name given to an actual pound weight of
silver. When, as a measure of value, gold superseded silver, the word
pound became, as a money-name, differentiated from the same word as a
weight-name. The prices, or quantities of gold, into which the values of
commodities are ideally changed are now expressed in the names of coins,
or in the legally valid names of the subdivisions of the gold standard.
Hence, instead of saying, "A quarter of wheat is worth an ounce of
gold," the English would say, "It is worth L3 17s. 10-1/2d." In this
fashion commodities express by their prices how much they are worth, and
money serves as _money of account_ whenever it is a question of fixing
the value of an article in its money-form. When Anarcharsis was asked
for what purpose the Greeks used money, he replied, "For reckoning."
Every labourer in adding new labour also adds new value. In what way?
Evidently, only by labouring productively in a particular way: the
spinner by his spinning, the weaver by his weaving, the smith by his
forging. Each use-value disappears, only to reappear under a new form in
some new use-value. By virtue of its general character, as being
expenditure of human labour-power in the abstract, spinning adds a new
value to the values of cotton and spindle. On the other hand, by virtue
of its special character, as being a concrete, useful process, the same
labour of spinning both transfers the values of the means of production
to the product and preserves them in the product. Hence at one and the
same time there is produced a twofold result.
By the simple addition of a certain quantity of labour, new value is
added, and by the quality of this added labour the original values of
the means of production are preserved in the product. That part of
capital which is represented by means of production, by the raw
material, auxiliary material, and the instruments of labour, does not,
in the process of production, undergo any quantitative alteration of
value. I therefore call it the constant part of capital, or, more
briefly, _constant capital_.
On the other hand, that part of capital represented by labour-power
does, in the process of production, undergo an alteration of value. It
both reproduces the equivalent of its own value, and also produces an
excess, a surplus value, which may itself vary. This part of capital is
continually being transformed from a constant into a variable magnitude.
I therefore call it the variable part of capital, or, shortly, _variable
capital_.
_IV.--Accumulation of Capital_
The first condition of the accumulation of capital is that the
capitalist must have contrived to sell his commodities, and to
re-convert the greater portion of the money thus received into capital.
Whatever be the proportion of surplus-value which the industrial
capitalist retains for himself or yields up to others, he is the one
who, in the first instance, appropriates it.
The process of production incessantly converts material wealth into
capital, into means of creating more wealth and means of enjoyment for
the capitalist. On the other hand, the labourer, on quitting the
process, is nothing more than he was when he began it. He is a source of
wealth, but has not the slightest means of making wealth his own. The
product of the labourer is incessantly converted not only into
commodities, but into capital, into means of subsistence that buy the
labourer, and into means of production that command the producers.
The capitalist as constantly produces labour-power; in short, he
produces the labourer, but as a wage-labourer. This incessant
reproduction, this perpetuation of the labourer, is the _sine qua non_
of capitalist production.
From a social point of view, the working-class is just as much an
appendage of capital as the ordinary instruments of labour. The
appearance of independence is kept up by means of a constant change of
employers, and by the legal fiction of a contract. In former times
capital legislatively enforced its proprietary rights over the free
labourer.
Capitalist production reproduces and perpetuates the condition for
exploiting the labourer. The economical bondage of the labourer is both
caused and hidden by the periodic sale of himself to changing masters.
Capitalist production, under its aspect of a continuous connected
process, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it
also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side
the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.
Capital pre-supposes wage-labour, and wage-labour pre-supposes capital.
One is a necessary condition to the existence of the other. The two
mutually call each other into existence. Does an operative in a
cotton-factory produce nothing but cotton goods? No, he produces
capital. He produces values that give fresh command over his labour, and
that, by means of such command, create fresh values.
Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration of means
of production, with a corresponding command over a larger or smaller
labour-army. Every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation.
The growth of social capital is affected by the growth of many
individual capitals.
With the accumulation of capital, therefore, the number of capitalists
grows to a greater or less extent. Two points characterise this kind of
concentration which grows directly out of, or rather is identical with,
accumulation. First, the increasing concentration of the social means of
production in the hands of individual capitalists is, other things
remaining equal, limited by the degree of increase of social wealth.
Secondly, the part of social capital domiciled in each particular sphere
of production is divided among many capitalists who face one another as
independent commodity-producers competing with each other.
Accumulation and the concentration accompanying it are, therefore, not
only scattered, but the increase of each functioning capital is thwarted
by the formation of new and the subdivision of old capitals.
Accumulation, therefore, presents itself on the one hand as increasing
concentration of the means of production and of the command over labour;
on the other, as repulsion of many individual capitalists one from
another.