Engels Friedrich
Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring"
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 produced by the working value-making class, but taken by the 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 logical destroys the possibility of any proper discrimination with respect to the matter." These remarks of Duehring are answered as follows by Engels:)
According to Marx, then, capital manifested itself as gold at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is just as if anybody were to say that specie had expressed itself as cattle for three thousand years, because formerly cattle had performed the gold functions along with others. Only Herr Duehring could be guilty of such a crude and distorted expression. Marx in his analysis of the economic forms in which the process of the circulation of commodities takes places simply declares gold to be the last form. "This last product of the circulation of commodities is the form in which capital first appears. Historically capital comes with the possession of property in the form of money, as hoards of money, merchant-capital, and usury-capital… This history is going on every day before our eyes. New capital comes on the scene, that is the market, – the market for commodities, the labor market or the money market, simply as money, money which is transformed into capital by a definite process." Again Marx states the fact. It is useless for you to struggle against it, Herr Duehring, Capital must express itself in gold.
Marx further examines the process by which money is transformed into capital and discovers that the form in which money circulates as capital is the inversion of the form in which it circulates as the universal equivalent. The individual owner of commodities sells to buy, he sells what he does not need, and buys with the money thus obtained what he does need. The budding capitalist buys on the contrary what he does not want himself, he buys to sell, and to sell for a higher money value than he put into the business, he makes a money profit, and this profit Marx calls surplus value.
What is the origin of this surplus value? Either the buyer buys goods below their value or the seller sells them above their value. In both cases gain and loss would balance one another, since every buyer is also a seller. It can also not arise from extortion, for extortion might enrich one at the expense of the other but it could not increase the total sum of money neither could it increase the amount of commodities in circulation. "The entire capitalist class of a country cannot overreach itself."
Now, we find that the totality of the capitalist class in every country grows richer before our very eyes, by the process of selling dearer than it bought, by appropriating surplus value. So we are just at the beginning of the discussion. Where does this surplus value come from? This question has to be answered on purely economic grounds to the exclusion of all cheating, and all invasion of force. How is it possible to keep selling dearer than one buys under the assumption that equal values are always exchanged for equal values?
The solution of this problem is the crowning glory of the work of Marx. He sheds clear daylight in economic places where the earlier socialists no less than the bourgeois economists have groped in utter darkness. From his work dates the origin of scientific socialism.
The solution is as follows. The power of increase in money which is transformed into capital cannot proceed from the money neither does it depend upon trade, since the money only realizes the price of the commodities and this price is, since we hold that only equal values are exchanged, no different from its value. On the same grounds the power of increase cannot come from the exchange of commodities. The change therefore depends upon the commodities which are exchanged, but not upon their value, since they are bought and sold at their value. It arises from their consumption-value as such; that is the change must arise out of the consumption of commodities. "In order for a commodity to derive value from consumption our possessor of money must be fortunate enough to discover a commodity whose use-value has the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose consumption would imply the expenditure of labor and thus be value-producing. And the possessor of money finds such a specific commodity on the market in the shape of labor-power." If, as we have seen, labor has no value this is by no means the case with labor-force. This has a value, as it is a commodity, and, as a matter of fact, it is a commodity to-day and this value is fixed "like that of every other commodity by the amount of labor time necessary for the production and reproduction of this specific commodity." It is fixed by the labor time which is necessary for the procuring of the means of livelihood required to maintain the laborer in a condition to continue laboring and reproduce his kind. Let us suppose that these means of livelihood represent, taking one day with another, six hours labor-time a day. Our budding capitalist who buys labor force for his business, that is hires a laborer, pays this laborer the full daily value of his labor force, if he pays him a sum of money which represents six hours of labor. If the laborer has only expended six hours in the service of the capitalist he has got the full return of his expenditure, the day's value of his labor-force has been paid. But money could not be transformed into capital in this fashion, it would have produced no surplus value. The buyer of labor-power has quite another view of the nature of his business. Since only six hours' work is necessary to maintain the laborer for twenty-four hours, it does not follow that the laborer cannot work twelve hours out of the twenty-four. The value of labor force and its realization in the labor-process are two different magnitudes. The owner of money pays out a day's value of labor-force but there belongs to him its use for the day, the whole day's labor. That the value which it produces in the course of a day is double its own value for the day is fortunate for the buyer but according to the laws of exchange no injustice to the seller. The laborer then costs the owner of money according to our calculation the value product of six hours' labor, but he gives him daily the value product of twelve hours' labor. The difference to the credit of the owner of the money is six hours' unpaid extra labor, an unpaid for surplus product, in which the labor of six hours is incorporated. The trick is done. Surplus value is produced, money is transformed into capital.
While Marx, in this way, proved how surplus value exists and the only possible way in which it can exist, under the laws which regulate the exchange of commodities he also exposed the present capitalistic methods of production and the methods of appropriation resting upon them and unveiled the secret upon which the whole arrangement of the society of to-day depends.
There is a necessary presupposition to this origin and birth of capital. "For the transformation of money into capital the money owner must first find free laborers in the market, free in the double sense that as a free person the laborer can use his labor power as a commodity, that he has no other wares to sell, that he is unemployed and that he is free of everything necessary to the realisation of his labor power." But this condition of a possessor of money or commodities on the one hand, and, on the other, of the possessor of nothing, except his own labor force, is no natural condition of affairs nor is it common to all periods of history; "it is clearly the result of a historical development, the product of a whole series of older forms of social production." And this free laborer first strikes our notice as a historical phenomenon at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century as a result of the dissolution of feudal society. Thereupon with the creation of the world trade and the world market which dates from the same period the foundation was laid for the mass of moveable wealth to become more and more transformed into capital and for the capitalistic system, directed more and more to the production of surplus value, to become the dominant system.
