indefinite private ownership into the ownership exercised by a great landlord, who naturally cannot cultivate his land without slaves.
In the first place the domination of nature and the cultivation of private landed property do not imply the same thing. The domination of nature in industrial affairs is displayed in a manner altogether different from that in agricultural affairs, for these latter are always at the mercy of the climate instead of being supreme over the climate.
In the second place if we limit ourselves to the exploitation of private property in land in large amounts we come to the question as to whom the land belongs. We find that in the beginnings of civilised peoples the land was not owned by great landlords but was held in common by tribal and village communities. From India to Ireland the exploitation of land property in large tracts has proceeded from the tribal and village communal ownership which was the original form.
Sometimes the land was cultivated in common for the benefit of the common members, sometimes in separate pieces, parcelled by the community to separate families from time to time with wood and willow land retained for communal use.
It is pure imagination on the part of Herr Duehring to declare that the exploitation of landed property is responsible for the existence of master and servant. Who is the owner of private landed property in the entire Orient where the land is possessed by the community or the State and the word landlord is not to be found in the language? The Turks first introduced a species of feudalism into the lands which they conquered. The Greeks in heroic times had a classified system of rank which itself bore witness to a long unknown preceding history, but the land was then cultivated by an independent peasantry. The large possessions of the nobles and leaders of the tribes were the exception and had no permanence. Italy was originally cultivated by small peasant farmers; when in the latter days of the Roman Republic the great holdings, the _latifundia_ destroyed the small farmer-holdings, cattle raising was substituted for agriculture, and as Pliny points out Italy was ruined (_latifundia Italiam perdidere_).
In the whole of Europe during the Middle Ages small farming was the rule and it is very appropriate to the above discussion to note what tasks these peasants were obliged to perform for the feudal lords. The Frisians, lower Saxons, Flemings and people from the lower Rhine who invaded the lands of the Slavs to the east of the Elbe and cultivated them did so under very favorable terms of rent but by no means under a species of slavery. In North America, by far the greatest amount of the land is cultivated by the labor of free small farmers, while the great landed proprietors of the South with their slaves and extravagant farming methods destroyed the soil until the land ceased to be productive and the cultivation of cotton travelled ever Westward. In Australia and New Zealand the attempts to artificially establish an agrarian aristocracy by the British government have failed. In short, if we except the tropical and sub-tropical colonies, in which the climate is prohibitive of agriculture by Europeans, it seems that the idea of a great land holding class originally dominating nature by means of the employment of slaves and serfs is a pure product of the imagination. Things are quite otherwise. If one goes to the older countries like Italy the land was not waste originally but the transformation of the agricultural land cultivated by the small farmers into cattle-land utterly ruined the country.
Latterly, for the first time since the growth in the intensity of the population has increased the value of land and especially since the progress in agriculture has made possible the reclamation of poor lands, the greater landlordism has begun to obtain possession of waste and pasture lands and has stolen the old communal lands of the peasants in this country, as well in England as in Germany. And this has not happened without a counter-poise. For every acre of common land which the great landlords in England converted into arable land they have made at least three acres of arable land in Scotland into shooting preserves and mere places for the hunting of wild animals.
We have to consider the declaration of Herr Duehring to the effect that the cultivation of large parcels of land has not come into existence otherwise than through great landlords and their slaves, a declaration which we have seen implies an entire ignorance of history.
We have now to see how far at different epochs the cultivation of the soil has been carried on by means of slaves, as in the palmy days of Greece, or by means of tenants, like the socage tenure, since the Middle Ages, and then what has been the social function of the greater landlordism at different periods of history.
If Herr Duehring means that the mastery of man by men as a preliminary to the mastery of nature by man is a universal law, that our present economic condition, the stage attained to-day in agriculture and industry, is the result of a society which has developed itself in class antagonisms, in mastership on the one hand and in slavery on the other hand, he says something which is a mere commonplace since the publication of the Communist Manifesto. We have thus to explain the existence of these classes and when Herr Duehring has no further explanation to give than "force" we are right back at the beginning again. The mere fact that the subject and the plundered have always been more numerous and that therefore the actual force has rested with them is enough to show the stupidity of the entire force theory. We have therefore still to explain the origin of master and subject classes. They have come into being in two ways.
When men originally sprang from the lower animals they came into history, still half-wild animals, elementary, with no power over the forces of nature, still unacquainted with their own powers, as poor as the animals and hardly more productive than they. There prevailed a certain equality in the conditions of life and as far as the heads of families were concerned an equality of social condition--there was at least an absence of those class distinctions which developed later in the agricultural communities. In such a social state there were certain common interests which overrode the interests of the individual in certain respects, the settlement of disputes, the repression of individuals who exceeded their rights, the looking after the water supply, particularly in hot countries, and finally under the conditions of life in the primeval forests, religious functions. We find analogous communal duties exercised by communal officials at all periods as well in the oldest German mark communities as in India to-day. These are contemporaneous with a sort of beginning of authority and state power in a rudimentary form. The productive forces develop; a denser population produces common and then conflicting interests between members of the society, the grouping of which in accordance with a new division of labor causes the creation of new organs for the purpose of maintaining the society on the one hand and repressing the antagonistic interests on the other. These organs which act for the entire group have different forms according to the varying circumstances of the individual groups, partly through the natural growth of a hereditary leadership in a world where everything proceeds naturally and partly through a growing need owing to the development of conflicts with other groups. How these social functions which were subsidiary to society came in the course of time to triumph over society; how the original servant, under favorable conditions became transformed into the master, how, according to circumstances, this master made his appearance as Oriental despot or satrap, as Greek chieftain, as Celtic clan chief, etc., how far he relied on force for this transformation and finally how the individual leaders associated themselves into a dominant class we have here no opportunity to consider. We can only state that real social duties lay at the base of the political domination and that the political supremacy has only existed as long as the politically supreme fulfilled these social functions. How many despotisms have risen and fallen among the Persians and Hindoos, and everybody knows quite well that the public management of the irrigation was the prime necessity of agriculture in those places. The "educated" English were the first to observe this among the Hindoos; they let the canals and locks fall into disuse and they have now discovered by the regular recurrence of famine that they have neglected the only opportunity to make their rule at least as righteous as that of their predecessors.
But there is another form of class distinction besides the one described. The natural division of labor in the agricultural families permitted at a certain point of prosperity the introduction of foreign labor power. This was particularly the case in countries where the old common ownership of the soil had disappeared or where at least the old system of common cultivation had become supplanted by the cultivation of separate plots by individual families. Production had so far developed that the human labor force was able to produce more than was necessary for the support of the individual laborer. The time was ripe for the employment of more labor-power, labor-power had become a value. But the limitations of the communal system did not afford any attainable surplus labor power. Yet war did give such an opportunity for getting surplus labor power and war was as old as the simultaneous existence of groups of communal groups in close juxtaposition. Up to this time men did not take prisoners of war, they killed them right off, and, at a still earlier date, they ate them. But at the stage of economic development of which we speak they had a value and they were not only allowed to live but were set to work. So force instead of being the master of economic conditions was pressed into the service of those conditions. Slavery was discovered. It soon became the dominant form of production among all people who had developed beyond the tribal communal stage and as a matter of fact was at the end one of the main reasons for the break up of the communal system. Slavery first made the division of labor between agriculture and industry completely possible and brought into existence the flower of the old world, Greece. Without slavery there would have been no Grecian state, no Grecian art and science and no Roman Empire. There would have been no modern Europe without the foundation of Greece and Rome. We must not forget that our entire economic, political and intellectual development has its foundation in a state of society in which slavery was regarded universally as necessary. In this sense we may say that without the ancient slavery there would have been no modern socialism.
It is very easy to make preachments about slavery and to express our moral indignation at such a scandalous institution. Unfortunately the whole significance of this is that it merely says that these old institutions do not correspond with our present conditions and the sentiments engendered by these conditions. We do not however in this way explain how these institutions came into existence, why they came into existence and the role which they have played in history. And when we enter upon this matter we are obliged to say in spite of all contradiction and accusations of heresy that the introduction of slavery under the conditions of that time was a great step forwards.
It is a fact that man sprang from the lower animals and has had to employ barbaric and really bestial methods in order to rid himself of barbarism. The old communal system where it persisted built up the most elementary form of the state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia. Only where it has been dissolved has the people progressed and the next economic step lay in the development of production by means of slave labor. It is evident that as long as human labor was so little productive that it afforded only a small surplus over the necessary means of life, the development of the productive forces, the institution of commerce, the development of the State and of law and the foundation of art and science were only possible through an increase in the subdivision of labor. This implied the broad division between the mass of the workers and the directors of labor, trade, state, state-business, and later the occupation of a few privileged persons in art and science. The simplest and most natural form of this subdivision of labor was slavery. In the conditions of the ancient, and especially the Greek world, the advance to a society founded on class distinction could only be for the slaves, the prisoners of war from whom the majority of slaves were recruited instead of being murdered as they would have been at an earlier date or instead of being eaten as they would have been at a stage still earlier.
Here we add that all the historical antitheses of robbers and robbed of master and subject classes find their explanation in the relatively undeveloped productivity of human labor. As long as the actual working people claim that they have no time left at the close of their necessary labors to attend to the common business of society--the organization of labor, the business of the government, the administration of justice, art, science, etc., just so long will distinct classes exist which are free from actual labor to carry on these functions. Naturally these classes do not hesitate to lean more and more and more upon the shoulders of the working class for their own advantage. The development of the great industry with its enormous increase in the forces of production for the first time permitted of the subdivision of labor in all social grades and thus allowed of the reduction of the time necessary for labor so that enough leisure remains for all to take part in the actual public business--theoretical as well as practical. So that now for the first time the dominant and exploiting classes have become superfluous and even an obstacle to social progress, and so now for the first time they will be unceremoniously brushed aside in spite of their "pure force."
When Herr Duehring then shows his scorn of the Greek civilisation because it was founded on slavery he might just as reasonably reproach the Greeks for not having steam engines and electric telegraphs. And when he explains that our modern wage slavery is only a somewhat transformed and ameliorated inheritance of chattel slavery and not to be explained from itself (that is from the economic laws of modern society) it only signifies that wage slavery, like chattel slavery, is a form of class domination and class subjection as every child knows, or it is false. So we might with the same right maintain that wage slavery is only a milder form of cannibalism, the established original method of disposing of conquered enemies.
The role which force has played in history with respect to economic development is therefore clear. In the first place, all political force rests originally on an economic social function, and developed in proportion as the old tribal communistic society was dissolved and transformed into various grades of private producers, and the administrators of the communal functions therefore became more widely separated from the rest of the community. In the second place, when political force, independent of society, has transformed itself from the position of servant to that of master, it may work in two directions. In the first place, it may work sensibly and in the direction of general economic development. In this case there is no quarrel between the two, economic development is advanced. Or it may work against it and then with few exceptions it succumbs to the economic development. These few exceptions consist of individual cases of tyranny where barbaric conquerors have overcome a country and have destroyed the economic forces which they did not know how to handle.
Thus the Christians in Spain destroyed the irrigation works upon which the highly developed agriculture and horticulture of that country depended. Every conquest by a more barbarous people interferes with economic development and destroys numerous productive forces. But in the great majority of instances of the permanent conquest of a country, the more barbaric conquerors are obliged to adopt the higher economic conditions into which their conquest has brought them. They are assimilated into the conquered people and are compelled to adopt their language. But where--apart from instances of conquest--the inner political forces of a country comes in conflict with its economic development, which at the present day is practically true of all political force, the battle has always ended with the destruction of the political force. Without exception and inexorably, economic development has attained its goal. The last most striking example of which we have already called attention to, the French Revolution. If, as according to Herr Duehring's teachings, the economic development and the economic conditions of a certain country are altogether dependent upon political forces there is no explanation of the fact that Frederick William IV after 1848 could not succeed, in spite of his army, in attaching the guilds of the Middle Ages and other romantic tomfooleries to the steam-engines, railroads and the newly developing greater industry, or why the Czar who is still much more powerful could not only not pay his debts but could not collect his forces without drawing on the credit of the economic conditions of Western Europe.
According to Herr Duehring force is the absolute evil. The first act of force is to him the first fall into sin. His whole conception is a preachment over the infection of all history up to the present time with the original sin. He talks about the disgraceful falsifying of all natural and social laws by the invention of the devil, force. That force plays another role in history, a revolutionary role, that it is in the words of Marx, the midwife of the old society which is pregnant with the new, that it is the tool by the means of which social progress is forwarded, and foolish, dead political forms destroyed,--of that Herr Duehring has no word to say, only with sighs and groans does he admit the possibility that force may be necessary for the overthrow of a thievish economic system. He simply declares that every application of force demoralizes him who uses it. And this in spite of the moral and intellectual uplift which has followed every victorious revolution. He says this in Germany, too, where a powerful and necessary uprising would at least have the advantage of abolishing the slavish snobbery of the national mind which has prevailed since the humiliation of the Thirty Years War. And this foolish and senseless sort of preaching is set up in opposition to the most revolutionary party known to history.
_V. Theory of Value._ It is now about a hundred years since a book appeared in Leipsic which by the beginning of this century had gone through thirty-one editions and which was distributed throughout the towns and the country districts by officials, preachers and humanitarians, of all sorts, and which was universally adopted in the schools as a reader. This book was called, "The Children's Friend" by Rochow. It had the object of teaching the children of the peasant and laboring classes their vocation in life and their duties to their social and political superiors, and making them satisfied with their lot in life, with black bread and potatoes, compulsory servitude, low wages, fatherly beatings and other similar agreeable things. In pursuit of this end, the youth in town and country was informed what a wise provision of nature it was that man was obliged to get his food and enjoyment by means of his labor, and how fortunate the peasant and handworker ought to feel that they were able to spice their food with hard labor while the spendthrift and the picture suffered the pangs of indigestion or lack of appetite. These commonplaces which old Rochow thought good enough for the peasant children of his day have been elevated into the "absolute fundamental" of the newest political economy by Herr Duehring.
Value is defined as follows by Herr Duehring "Value is what economic goods and activities will fetch in exchange." What they will fetch is shown "by the price or some other equivalent, wages for example." In other words Value is price. Or not to do Herr Duehring an injury and to show the absolute absurdity of his definition in his own language, "Value is prices." On page 19 he says "Value and its prices expressed in money" and he also affirms that the same value has very different prices and therefore has different values. If Hegel had not died long ago he would hang himself out of pure jealousy, for, with all his theology, he could not have produced this value which has as many different values as it has prices. One would have to possess the confidence of Herr Duehring to begin a new and more profound treatment of political economy with the declaration that there is no difference between value and price except that one is expressed in terms of money and the other is not.
(After gentle raillery of Duehring's statements Engels proceeds.)
The actual, practical value of an object according to Herr Duehring consists in two things, first in the amount of human labor contained in it and secondly in a forcibly imposed tax. In other words value as it exists to-day is a monopoly price. If all wares have this monopoly price, as according to this theory, only two things are possible.
Either every buyer, as buyer, loses what he made as seller, for prices have only changed their names, they are really the same, everything remains as it was and the much talked of exchange value is merely imaginary, or the imposed cost represents real values, values monopolising class, and this sum of values is simply unpaid labor. In this latter case we come, in spite of the force theory, and the compulsory taxation theory and the special exchange value theory back again to the Marxian theory of value.
The fixing of the value of a commodity by wages which is frequently confused by Adam Smith with the fixing of value by the time expended in labor has been, since the time of Ricardo, denounced by political economists and only to-day persists in popular economics. It is now the sycophants of the existing capitalistic system who declare that value is fixed by wages and therefore declare the profits of the capitalists to be higher kind of wages, wages of abstinence, in that the capitalist has not dissipated his capital, wages of superintendence, premiums on risks, etc. Herr Duehring only differs from them in that he calls profits robbery. In other words Herr Duehring founds his socialism on the worst teachings of the popular economists. His popular economics and his socialism stand or fall together.
It is clear that what a workman accomplishes and what he costs are different matters from what a machine makes and what it costs. The value which a workman makes in a day of twelve hours has nothing in common with the value of the means of life which he consumes in this working day and the periods of rest in connection with it. There may be one, three, four or seven hours of labor time incorporated in these means of livelihood according to the stage of the productivity of labor. Let us take seven hours as the necessary time for the production of them. Then Herr Duehring and the vulgar economists declare that the product of twelve hours labor has the value of the product of seven hours labor or in other words twelve is equal to seven. To make the matter more explicit, a peasant produces say twenty hectolitres of wheat in a year. During this time he consumes a sum of values which may be expressed by fifteen hectolitres. Then the twenty hectolitres have the same value as the fifteen in the same market under identical conditions. In other words 20 equals 15. And this is called political economy!
The entire development of human society from the position of savagery began from the day when the labor of a family resulted in the production of more than was necessity for its support, from the day when a part of the labor was no longer expended on mere means of living but was transformed into means of production. A surplus of labor product over and above the cost of the maintenance of labor, and the creation and increase of a social production and reserve fund out of this surplus was and is the foundation of all social, political and intellectual development. In history up to the present time this fund has been the property of a certain superior class which has, with its possession, also the political mastery and the spiritual supremacy.
The approaching social revolution will make this social production and reserve fund that is the entire mass of raw material, instruments of production, and means of life for the first time really social property, in that it will put an end to its monopolisation by the superior class and make it the common possession of the entire society.
It is one of two things. Suppose value shows itself in the cost of maintenance of the necessary labor, that is in present society in wages. If such is the case every worker gets the value of his product in wages and the robbery of the working class by the capitalistic class is an impossibility. Let it be granted that the cost of maintaining a worker in a given society is three marks. Then the daily product of the worker is, according to the popular economist, of the value of three marks. Now let us consider that the capitalist who employs this worker takes a profit on this product and sells it for four marks. Other capitalists do the same thing. But thereupon the worker can no longer maintain himself with three marks a day, it will cost him four marks. Other conditions remaining the same, wages expressed in terms of the means of life must remain the same and wages expressed in gold will rise therefore from three to four marks daily.
What the capitalists gain in the form of profit on the working class they have to return in the form of wages. So we are just where we were at the beginning. If wages signify value, no plunder of the working class by the capitalist is possible. But the creation of a surplus is impossible if, according to our hypothesis the workers consume as much as they produce. And since the capitalists produce no value it is impossible to see how they can live. And if such a surplus of production over consumption does exist, if such a production and reserve fund exists in the hands of the capitalists there is no other explanation possible than that the working class uses only enough values for its own maintenance and turns over the rest of the goods which it produces to the capitalist.
On the other hand, if this production and reserve fund actually exists in the hands of the capitalist class, if it has really come into existence through the piling up of profits, (we will leave rent out of the question for the present); it necessarily comes from the accumulated profits of the capitalist class taken from the working class over and above the sums paid by the capitalist class to the working class in the form of wages. Value therefore does not depend upon wages, but upon amount of labor. The working class renders to the capitalist class a greater amount of value than it receives in wages and thus the profit of capital as of all other forms of the appropriation of unpaid for products of labor is to be explained on the simple ground of the surplus value discovered by Marx.
_VI. Simple and Compound Labor._ (The argument of Duehring against which Engels here directs his efforts may be best summed up in Duehring's concluding words "Marx in his utterances on value cannot escape the lurking ghost of highly skilled labor. The prevalent notion of the intellectual classes has been a hindrance to him in this matter, for according to this idea it is an enormity to reckon the labor time of a barrow pusher and an architect as economic equivalents.")
Engels thereupon says "the passage in the works of Marx which caused this outbreak on the part of Duehring is very short." Marx is examining the question as to the basis of the value of commodities and answers it by the statement that it is the amount of human labor contained in them. "This" he goes on "is the expression of that simple labor force which belongs to the average human being without any special development. Skilled labor is a power or rather a multiple of simple labor, so that a small amount of skilled labor is equivalent to a larger amount of unskilled labor. Practice shows that this reduction to the terms of unskilled labor takes place. A commodity may be the product of skilled labor, its value may be equivalent to a product of unskilled labor skilled labor. The proportion in which different forms of labor are reduced to their general standard in unskilled labor is established by a social process going on behind the backs of the producers, and appears to them merely customary."
Here Marx is only dealing with the value of commodities, that is of objects produced and exchanged by private producers in a society consisting of private producers producing for their own profit. He is therefore not concerned here with "absolute value" whatever that may be but only with the value which is realised in a given form of society. This value under the given social conditions is shaped and measured by the human labor incorporated in the commodities and this human labor shows itself as the expression of simple human energy. But every piece of work is not merely an expression of simple labor force.
Very many labor products require the expenditure of more or less time, money, trouble, and acquired skill or knowledge. Do these kinds of compound labor show at the same period of time the same commodity values as simple labor, are they the expression of merely simple labor force? Evidently not. The product of an hour of compound labor is a commodity of higher, double or three times the value of a product of an hour of simple labor. The value of the product of compound labor can in this comparison be expressed through the measure of simple labor; and this reduction of compound labor is carried on by means of a social progress behind the back of the producer, by means of which can here be established according to the theory of value but not explained.
The thing which Marx states here is a simple fact which happens every day before our eyes in the present capitalistic society.
(After some invective and satire hurled at Duehring Engels proceeds:) Let us examine with regard to equality of value a little more closely.
All labor time is of equal value, that of the barrow pusher and that of the architect. Therefore labor time and consequently labor itself has a value. But labor is the creator of all values. It is the only thing which gives the original products of nature a value in the economic sense. Value in itself is nothing but the expression in a given object of necessary, social, human labor. One might just as well speak of and fix a value to labor as speak of the value of value, of the weight, not of a specific body, but of gravity itself. Herr Duehring calls people like Owen, St. Simon and Fourier, social alchemists. When he invents a value for labor time, that is for labor, he shows that he is far below these same alchemists.
For Socialism, which will emancipate human labor force from its place as a commodity, the understanding that labor has no value and can have none is a matter of the greatest importance. With an understanding of it, all attempts made by Herr Duehring by means of his crude worker-socialism (Arbeitersozialismus) to regulate the division of the means of existence, as a kind of higher wages, fall to the ground.
From it there follows the broader view, since it is controlled by purely economic motives, that distribution regulates itself in the interests of production, and production is advanced in the greatest degree by a method of distribution which permits all the social departments to develop, maintain, and express their capacities to the fullest possible extent. To the ideas of the intellectuals which have come into Herr Duehring's possession, it must always seem to be an enormity that it will abolish barrow pushing and architecture simultaneously as professions, and that the man who has given half an hour to architecture will also push the cart a little until his work as architect is again in demand. It would be a pretty sort of socialism which perpetuated the business of barrow-pushing.
If the equality of value of labor time has the significance that workers produce equal products in equal periods of time it is evidently false, unless an average is first taken. Of two workmen at the same branch of industry the value of the product of their labor time will differ according to the intensity of labor and their respective ability. No scheme of economic equality, at least on our planet, can remedy this unfortunate state of affairs. What then is left of the equality of all and every sort of labor? Nothing but high sounding phrases which have no economic value, nothing but the evident inability of Herr Duehring to distinguish between the fixing of value by labor and the fixing of value by the wages of labor, only the ukase, which is the foundation of the new social economy, that wages shall be equal for equal amounts of labor time. Really the old French communists and Weitling had much better grounds for their equality of wages theories.
How then do we solve the whole weighty question of the higher wages of compound labor? In a society of private producers, private individuals or their families have to bear the cost of creating intellectual workers. An intellectual slave always commanded a better price, an intellectual wage worker gets higher wages. In an organized socialist society, society bears the cost and to it therefore belong the fruits, the greater value produced by intellectual labor. The laborer himself has no further claim. Whence it follows that there are many difficulties connected with the beloved claim of the worker for the full product of his toil.
_VII. Capital and Surplus Value._ ("Marx does not have the usual economic idea of capital that it is means of production already produced, but he seeks to endow it with a special dialectic history in the metamorphosis of a historical idea.
Capital is expressed in gold, it creates an historical period which has its beginning in the sixteenth century and the establishment of a world-market. Any keen economic analysis is impossible with such a notion. Such barren conceptions which are half historical and half