coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.
The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of com- modities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long- as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.
Since Robinson Crusoe's experiences are a favourite theme with political economists,^ let us take a look at him on his 1 Even Rjcardo has his stories k la Robinson. " He makes the primitive hunter and the primitive fisher straightway, as owners of commodities, exchange fish and game in the proportion in which labour-time is incorporated in these exchange values. On this occasion he commits the anachronism of making these men apply to the calcula- tion, so far as their implements have to be taken into account, the annuity tables in 48 Capitalist Production.
island. Moderate though he be, yet some few wants he has to satisfy, and must therefore do a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats, fishing and hunting. Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source of pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation. In spite of the variety of hia work, he knows that his labour, whatever its form, is but the activity of one and the same Robinson, and consequently, that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour. Necessity itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between his different kinds of work. Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general activity than another, depends on the difficulties, greater or less as the case may be, to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. This our friend Eobinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production • and lastly, of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on an average, cost him. All the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion, even to Mr. Sedley Taylor. And yet those relations contain all that is essential to the determination of value.
Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson's island bathed in light to the European middle ages shrouded in dark- ness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterises the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organized on the basis of that production. But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the groundwork of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to current use on the London Exchange in the year 1817. * The parallelograms of Mr. Owen ' appear to be the only form of society, besides the bourgeois form, with which he was acquainted." (Karl Marx: "Zur Kritik," &c., p. 38, 39.)
Commodities. 49 assume a fantastic form different from tlieir reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and payments in kind. Here the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on production of com- modities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour. Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity -producing labour; but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantit}^ of his own personal labour-power. The tithe to be rendcxed to the priest is more matter of fact than his blessing. No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themseWes in this society; the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal rela- tions, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour.
For an example of labour in common or directly associated labour, we have no occasion to go back to that spontaneously developed form which we find on the threshold of the history of all civilized races.^ We have one close at hand in the patriarchal industries of a peasant family, that produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use. These different articles are, as regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, they are not commodities. The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, cattle tending, spinning, weaving and making clothes, which result in the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are, direct social functions, because functions of the family, which, just as much as a society based on the production of commodities, possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of labour. The distribution of the work within the family, and ■^ "A ridiculous presumption has latterly got abroad that common j)roperty in its primitive form is specifically a Slavonian, or even exclusively Russian form. It is the primitive form that we can prove to have existed amongst Romans, Teutons, and Celts, and even to this day we find numerous examples, ruins though they be, in India. A more exhaustive study of Asiatic, and especially of Indian forms of common property, would show how from the different forms of primitive common property, different forms of its dissolution have been developed. Thus, for instance, the various original types of Roman and Teutonic private property are deducible from different forms of Indian common property." (Karl Marx. " Zur Kritik," &c., p. 10.)
D 50 Capitalist Production.
the regulation of the labour- time of the several members, depend as well upon differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions varying with the seasons. The labour-power of each individual, by its very nature, operates in this case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour-power of the family, and therefore, the measure of the expenditure of individual labour- power by its duration, appears here by its very nature as a social character of their labour.
Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a com- munity of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community. All the charac- teristics of Robinson's labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual. Every- thing produced by him was exclusively the result of his own personal labour, and therefore simply an object of use for himself The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary. The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive organization of the community, and the degree of historical development attained by the producers. We will assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsis- tence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would, in that case, play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of the common labour borne by each individual, and of his share in the part of the total product des- tined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labour and to its products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but also to distribution.
Commodities. 5 1 The reliofious world is but the reflex of the real world. i.nd for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour — for such a society, (Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &;c., is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading- nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man in- dividually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellow men in a primitive tribal com- munity, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical re- lations of everyday life ofler to man none but perfectly in- telligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to nature.
The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off" its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is con- sciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.
52 Capitalist Pivduction.
This, however, demands for society a certain material ground- work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.
Political economy has indeed analysed, however incom- pletely, ' value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value.^ These formulae, which 1 The insufficiency of Ricardo's analysis of the magnitude of value, and his analysis is by far the best, will appear from the 3rd and 4th books of this work. As regards value in general, it is the weak point of the classical school of political economy that it nowhere, expressly and with full consciousness, distinguishes between labour, as it appears in the value of a product and the same labour, as it appears in the use- value of that product. Of course the distinction is practically made, since this school treats labour, at one time under its quantitative aspect, at another under its qualita- tive aspect. But it has not the least idea, that when the difference between various kinds of labour is treated as purely quantitative, their qualitative unity or equality, and therefore their reduction to abstract human labour, is imj^lied. For instance, Ricardo declares that he agrees with Destutt de Tracy in this proposition: "As it is certain that our physical and moral faculties are alone our original riches, the em- ployment of those faculties, labour of some kind, is our only original treasure, audit is always from this employment that all those things are created, which we call riches...It is certain, too, that all those things only represent the labour which has created them, and if they have a value, or even two distinct values, they can only derive them from that (the value) of the labour from which they emanate. " (Kicardo, The Principles of Pol. Econ. 3 Ed. Lond. 1821, p. 334). We would here only point out, that Kicardo puts his own more profound interpretation upon the words of Des- tutt. What the latter really says is, that on the one hand all things which constitute wealth represent the labour that creates them, but that on the other hand, they ac- quire their " two different values " (use-value and exchange-value) from "the value of labour." He thus falls into the commonplace error of the vulgar economists, who assume the value of one commodity (in this case labour) in order to determine the values of the rest. But Kicardo reads him as if he had said, that labour (not the value of labour) is embodied both in use-value and exchange-value. Nevertheless, Kicardo himself pays so little attention to the two-fold character of the labour which has a two-fold embodiment, that he devotes the whole of his chapter on " Value and Kiches, Their Distinctive Properties," to a laborious examination of the trivialities of a J. B. Say. And at the finish he is quite astonished to find that Destutt on the one hand agrees with him as to labour being the source of value, and on the other hand with J. B. Say as to the notion of value.
2 It is one of the chief failings of classical economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and, in particular, of their value, in discover- ing that form under which value becomes exchange-value. Even Adam Smith and Kicardo, the best representatives of the school, treat the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the inherent nature of commodities. The reason for this is not solely because their attention is entirely absorbed in the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value form of the product Commodities. 5 3 bear stamped upon them in unmistakeable letters, that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulae appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by nature as productive labour itself. Hence forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.^ of labour is not only the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production, and stamps that production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by nature for every state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value-form, and consequently* of the commodity-form, and of its further develop- ments, money-form, capital-form, &c. We consequently find that economists, who are thoroughly agreed as to labour time being the measure of the magnitude of value, have the most strange and contradictory ideas of money, the perfected form of the general equivalent. This is seen in a striking manner when they treat of banking, where the commonplace definitions of money will no longer hold water. This led to the rise of a restored mercantile system (Ganilh, &c.), which sees in value nothing but a social form, or rather the unsubstantial ghost of that form. Once for all I may here state, that by classical political economy, I understand that economy which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society, in contradistinction to vulgar economy, which deals with appearances only, ruminates without ceasing on the materials long since provided by scientific economy, and there seeks plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena, for bourgeois daily use, but for the rest, confines itself to systematizing in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the trite ideas held by the self -compla- cent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of all possible worlds.
1 ' ' Les economistes ont une singuliere maniere de proceder. II n'y a pour eux que deux sortes d'institutions, celles de I'art et celles de la nature. Les institutions de la feodalite sont des institutions artificielles, celles de la bourgeoisie sont des institu- tions naturelles. lis ressemblent en ceci aux theologiens, qui eux aussi etablissent deux sortes de religions. Toute religion qui n'est pas la leur, est une invention des hommes, tandis que leur propre religion est une emanation de Dieu — Ainsi il y a eu de I'histoire, mais il n'y en a plus." (Karl Marx. Misere de la Philosophic. Reponse a la Philosophie de la Misere par M. Proudhon, 1847 p. 113.) Truly comical is M. Bastiat, who imagines that the ancient Greeks and Romans lived by plunder alone. But when people plunder for centuries, there must always be something at hand for them to seize; the objects of plunder must be continually reproduced. It would thus appear that even Greeks and Romans had some process of production, consequently, an economy, which just as much constituted the material basis of their world, as bourgeois economy constitutes that of our modern world. Or perhaps Bas- tiat means, that a mode of production based on slavery is based on a system of plunder. In that case he treads on dangerous ground. If a giant thinker like Aristotle erred in his appreciation of slave labour, why should a dwarf economist like Bastiat be right in his appreciation of wage labour?— I seize this opportunity of shortly 54 Capitalist Production, ' To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange value. Since exchange value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an object, Nature has no more to do with it, than it has in fixing the course oi exchange.
The mode of pioduction in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois production. It therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating and characteristic manner as now-a-days. Hence its Fetish character is com- paratively easy to be seen through. But when we come to more concrete forms, even this appearance of simplicity vanishes. Whence arose the illusions of the monetary system? To it gold and silver, when serving as money, did not repre- sent a social relation between producers, but were natural objects with strange social properties. And modern economy, which looks down with such disdain on the monetary system, does not its superstition come out as clear as noon-day, when- ever it treats of capital? How long is it since economy dis- carded the physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of the soil and not out of society?
answering an objection taken by a German paper in America, to my work, " Zur Kritik der Pol. Oekonomie, 1859." In the estimation of that paper, my view that]each special mode of production and the social relations corresponding to it, in short, that the economic structure of society, is the real basis on which the juridical and political superstructure is raised, and to which definite social forms of thought correspond; that the mode of production determines the character of the social, political, and in- tellectual life generally, all this is very true for our own times, in which material interests preponderate, but not for the middle ages, in which Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics, reigned supreme. In the first place it strikes one as an odd thing for any one to suppose that these well-worn phrases about the middle ages and the ancient world are unknown to anyone else. This much, however, is clear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that ex- plains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part. For the rest, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Koman republic, for example, to be aware that its secret history, is the history of its landed projjerty. On the other hand, Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all economical forms of society.
Commodities. 55 But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another example relating to the commodity form. Could com- modities themselves speak, they would say: Our use- value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values. Now listen how those commodities speak through the mouth of the econo- mist. " Value " — {i.e., exchange value) " is a property of things, riches " — {i,e., use-value) " of man. Value, in this sense, neces- sarily implies exchanges, riches do not."^ "Riches" (use-value) *' are the attribute of men, value is the attribute of commodi- ties. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable...A pearl or a diamond is valuable " as a pearl or diamond.^ So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economical dis- coverers of this chemical element, who by-the-bye lay special claim to critical acumen, find however that the use-value of objects belongs to them independently of their material pro- perties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this view, is the peculiar circumstance that the use- value of objects is realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects and man, while, on the other hand, their value is real- ised only by exchange, that is, by means of a social process. Who fails here to call to mind our good friend, Dogberry, who informs neighbour Seacoal, that, " To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by nature."
1 Observations on certain verbal disputes in Pol. Econ., particularly relating to value and to demand and supply. Lond., 1821, p. 16.
3 The author of " Observations " and S. Bailey accuse Eicardo of converting ex- change value from something relative into something absolute. The opposite is the fact. He has explained the apparent relation between objects, such as diamonds and pearls, in which relation they appear as exchange values, and disclosed the true rela- tion hidden behind the appearances, namely, their relation to each other as mere expressions of human labour. If the followers of Ricardo answer Bailey somewhat rudely, and by no means convincingly, the reason is to be sought in this, that they were unable to find in Ricardo's own works any key to the hidden relations existing between value and its form, exchange value.
EXCHANGE.