A division of atheneum publishers, inc
Yüklə 0,99 Mb.
|
|
1 See Capital I, p.p. 47-48, footnote 32, and Theories of Surplus Value, III, pp. 571-76, and the above-mentioned letter to Engels of 7.7.66. 2 See the concluding sentence of Engels' book on Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical Philosophy, 1888, and an additional reference to the equal importance of the "developed economic and political conditions in England and France," in the Preface to the first German edition of his pamphlet on Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 1882. 22 MARXISM AND SOCIOLOGY a society based on the cleavage of classes, in which the bourgeois class controls other classes economically and therefore politically and culturally. So at last "la classe la plus laboricuse et la plus misérable" enters the widened horizon of social science. Marxian theory recognizes the class war of the oppressed and exploited wage labourers to be a war for the abolition of present-day society. As a materialistic science of the contemporary development of bourgeois society, Marxian theory is at the same time a practical guide for the proletariat in its struggle to realize proletarian society. The later artificial detachment of sociology as a special branch of learning, which dates its scientific origin from Comte, and at its best allows the great original thinkers who did the real productive work in this field to stand as its "forerunners," represents nothing more than an escape from the practical, and therefore also theoretical, tasks of the present historical epoch. Marx's new socialist and proletarian science which, in a changed historical situation, further developed the revolutionary theory of the classical founders of the doctrine of society, is the genuine social science of our time. 23 CHAPTER II THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICATION
The scope of the principle of historical specification is clearly demonstrated in this example. Landed property has been widely different in character and has played very different parts in the various historical epochs of society. The different ways in which primitive communal property in land had been broken up directly influenced the varied forms of the later development of society based upon private property.2 Up to the Middle Ages landed property, i.e., agriculture, constituted the central category dominating all the other categories of production, just as capital does in present-day bourgeois society.3 The different ways in which, in different parts of the world, feudal property in land, upon the victory of the bourgeois mode of production, was subjected to capital, the different ways in which rent was transformed into a part of capitalistic surplus value, and agriculture into an industry, determined to a great extent the structure of 1 See Misère de la philosophie, 1847 (MEGA, I, vi, p. 217). 2 See Critique of Political Economy, 1859, p. g, footnote i. 3 See the MSS. of a General Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, dated 25.8.57, first printed in Neue Zeit, XXI, i, pp. 710 el seq. (1903)— afterwards referred to as Introduction, 1857.
THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICATION the various capitalistic systems which arose therefrom. They retain an importance even for the forms of the labour movements which were later to arise within them, and for the different forms in which the transition to the socialist mode of production will ultimately be effected in each of the different systems. For this reason Marx investigated with particular care, to the end of his life, the history of landed property and rent as shown on the one hand in the United States, and on the other hand in Russia. Similarly, Lenin, in his book on The Development of Capitalism in Russia, at the end of the 19th century, analysed the specific historical forms of this transitionary process.1 Yet all this comprehensive study of the various historical forms, serves only, both with Marx and Lenin, as a base for the working out of the specific character of capitalistic rent in the fully developed bourgeois society. In the fundamental analysis of the modern Capitalistic Mode of Production which forms the subject matter of the first book of Capital, Marx does not deal with the category of rent at all. What is discussed here, in addition to the general function of the soil as an element of the labour process itself,2 is only the manner in which the historical transition to the modern capitalistic mode of production reacted upon the conditions of the agricultural proletariat, first, in fully developed industrial countries,3 second, in such countries as Ireland that have fallen behind in the process of industrialization,4 and finally in actual colonies.5 The proper place for a discussion of "rent" is in a section of the third book of Capital in which the forms of Capitalistic Distribution are 1 Lenin began to write this book in 1896 while he was in prison and went on with it during his exile in Siberia. The first Russian edition appeared in 1899, the second in 1907. German edition in vol. Ill of Collected Works, Vienna-Berlin, 1929. 2 See Capital, I, pp. 139 et seq. 3 Ibid, pp. 639 et seq. 4 Ibid, pp. 664 et seq. 5 Ibid, the whole chapters xxiv and xxv dealing with So-called Primitive Accumulation and Modern Colonial System.
KARL MARX analysed, as they arise from the historical forms of Capitalistic Production.1 Even here, there is no room for an independent analysis of earlier historical forms. A few scattered remarks serve to illuminate the contrast between the modern bourgeois form of landed property and past historical forms ; and consideration of the historical Genesis of Capitalistic Rent is relegated to a. supplementary chapter at the end.2 "Rent," then, as discussed in the Marxian theory, is in no way a general term referring to landed property of all epochs. It refers to "a specific historical form into which feudal land ownership and small peasants' agriculture have been transformed through the influence of capital and of the capitalistic mode of production."3 In this sense, and in this sense only, an analysis of modern capitalistic rent, or of the portion of the surplus value produced by the industrial capital which falls into the hands of the capitalistic landowner, forms a necessary part of the complete analysis of the process of capitalistic production contained in the three books of Capital. The principle of historical specification is further demonstrated by the way Marx deals with the different historical forms of "capital" itself. Just as in the present epoch Industrial Capital appears as the standard form of all capital, so did "Merchants' Capital" and its twin brother, "Interest-bearing Capital," and the various sub-forms of these (more exactly described by Marx as "capital for trading in goods," "capital for trading in money," "capital for lending money"), occupy an independent and, in certain respects, a predominating position in the epochs preceding capitalistic society and, indeed, in the first phases of capitalist society itself. Even within the fully developed capitalist economy of to-day the merchant and the banker, though not involved in actual production like the industrial capitalist, perform a definite 1 See Capital, III, ii, pp. 153-348. 2 Ibid, pp. 315-348. 3 Ibid, pp. 153 et seq. 26 THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICATION function in the circulation of capital. They also participate in the distribution of the "surplus value; "a considerable part of the yearly amount at the disposal of the capitalist class as a whole falls to their share as "commercial profit" and "interest" — just as we have seen another part of it going in the form of "rent" to the landed-property-owners who have as little to do with actual production. Moneylenders' capital has even recaptured an important position — though not, as some Marxists have recently believed, a definite supremacy — in its new form as an integral part of the modern so-called "finance capital," i.e., a system of highly concentrated capital obtained by the fusion of private and State-controlled bank capital with trust and State-controlled industrial capital.1 The Marxian analysis of modern capitalistic production starts from the assumption that the previously independent forms of trading-capital and money-capital have been transformed into mere accessories of the now prevailing form. It is true that all capitalistic production bears the stamp of its historical origin from the intrusion of the merchant into the sphere of feudal production. Capitalistic production remains, even to-day, essentially a production for sale. Every article resulting from capitalistic production is to be sold as a commodity, whether to another industrial capitalist who needs it for carrying on his own process of production or, ultimately, to the immediate consumer. Again, all capitalistic production is conditioned by a given amount of disposable money. Thus the very way in which "capital" first arose and gained control of production through the money supplied by wealthy individuals, merchants, usurers, etc., constantly repeats itself under the present conditions of a fully developed industrial production. "Every new aggregate of capital," says Marx, "comes on the stage, that is, on the market, whether of commodities, labour, or money, even in our days, 1 See Hilferding, Finance Capital, 1910, and Lenin, Imperialism as the last stage of Capitalism, 1917. 27 KARL MARX in the form of money that by a definite process has to be transformed into capital."1 Nevertheless the "secret," not only of "how capital produces" but also of "how capital is produced" — and incidentally the key to the abolition of all capitalistic exploitation and wage slavery — can in no way be discovered through an analysis of the functions performed by those "accessory" forms of capital in the process of circulation, or of the revenues which accrue to the capitalists concerned, in consideration of the "services" performed in that sphere. "One will therefore understand," says Marx, "why in our analysis of the basic form of capital, of the form in which it determines the economic organization of modern society, its popular, and, as it were, antediluvian forms, 'trading capital' and 'usurers' capital,' for the present (viz., in the analysis of the actual process of the capitalistic production in the first book of Capital) are entirely ignored."2 Even when, in the second and third books of Capital, Marx comes back to these "antediluvian forms" in dealing with Capitalistic Circulation and Distribution, he takes as his main theme not their historical development but only the specific forms into which they have been transformed by the action of modern industrial capital.3 The historical analyses which run through the whole of the sections concerned, and both of the supplementary chapters under the headings "Historical data concerning merchants' capital" and "Pre-capitalistic conditions"4 merely serve to enlighten that great historical process through which, in the course of centuries and millenaries, trade and money transactions lost more and more of their originally dominating position until they assumed their present place as mere sub-
2 Ibid, p. 126. 3 Ibid, II, i-iv; III, xvi, xix, xxi-xxxv. 4 Ibid, III, xx and xxxvi. 28 THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICATION ordinate modes of existence of the various functions which industrial capital sometimes adopts and sometimes discards within the sphere of its circulation. There is one aspect alone under which rent as well as trading capital and money-capital might have been treated as a proper theme in Marx's analysis of the modern capitalistic mode of production. According to an original and more comprehensive scheme of procedure, Marx would have followed up the more strictly economic topics of production, circulation and distribution, social classes, etc., as now discussed in the three books of Capital, by an investigation of what may be called "economic questions of a higher order" such as the relation between town and country and the international relations of production.1 Only with these later researches would Marx's analysis have reached the point where the antagonism of landed property to capital, as well as that of trade and money-capital to industrial capital, survives in present-day society :—the latter as a characteristic difference in general structure and outlook between trading cities and factory towns, commercial and industrial States ; the former as a persisting conflict between the aims of the rural farmers and the industrial and commercial interests represented by the towns ; and, on an international scale, between primarily agricultural and definitely industrial countries. The principle of historical specification as illustrated by the preceding examples (landed property and the various forms of capital) is strictly adhered to by Marx. He deals with all categories of his economic and socio-historical research in that specific form and in that specific connection in which they appear in 1 See Introduction, 1857, pp. 778-79, and Capital, I, p. 317, where Marx expressly states that he cannot here go further into the cleavage between town and country, although "the whole economic history of society is summed up in the movement of this antagonism." For a more detailed discussion see the author's introduction to his edition of Marx's Capital, Berlin, 1932, pp. 8 et seq. 29 KARL MARX modern bourgeois society.1 He does not treat them as eternal categories. Nor does he, for that matter, transform himself into an historian. While fully aware of the different specific forms in which many economic categories of modern bourgeois society had occurred in earlier epochs, he does not go into the history of "money," of "exchange of commodities," of "wage-labour," or of that of "co-operation," "division of labour," etc. He discusses the different stages of the historical development of all these economic concepts, and of the political, juridical, and other ideological concepts bound up with them, only in so far as it is necessary for his main theme, i.e. the specific character assumed by them in modern bourgeois society. The contrast which exists in this respect between Marx and his forerunners comes out most strikingly upon comparison. While the work of the last representative of classical bourgeois economy, David Ricardo, is devoted to the "Principles of Political Economy," Marx restricted his economic research to "modern bourgeois production"2 and finally gave the work which contains his analysis and critique of the whole of traditional Political Economy the plain and definite name "Capital." Ricardo begins the exposition of his system with the general concept of "value" ; Marx commences the critical investigation of the theory and the facts underlying modern bourgeois economy with an external object, a palpable thing, "commodity." While Ricardo frees the economic concept of "value" from the last earthly impurities that were still attached to it by his predecessors, Marx regards even the more concrete term of "commodity" as still too abstract to serve as a starting point for his critical analysis of modern bourgeois production. He therefore excludes from his application of the term those cases in which an exchange of commodities has occurred as an isolated phenomenon, under entirely different historical conditions. He deals with 1 See Introduction, 1857, pp. 774 it seq. 2 Ibid, p. 712. 30 THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICATION “commodity" only as an offshoot of the "general commodity production" prevailing in modern industrial society. The single commodity, then, is not an independent entity. It is but one of the units into which that "immense collection of commodities," which had been defined by the classical economists as the “wealth of nations," is to be resolved for the purpose of scientific investigation. It is an element of that mass of exchangeable products which Marx, by a most significant alteration of the accepted Smithian term, called the "bourgeois wealth"1 or, more precisely, the "wealth of those societies in which the capitalistic mode of production prevails."2 Only thus specifically defined do "commodities" form the subject matter of Marx's economic analysis. Only as properties of a commodity so defined do the general concepts of "value in use" and "value in exchange," and the other terms of the classical economic system derived from those fundamental concepts, interest him. This applies even to the most general term of "value" which, according to Marx, must still be distinguished from "value in exchange" — the latter being only the external form in which the intrinsic "value" of a given commodity manifests itself in the ratio of exchange of such commodities.3 This most abstract term, which Marx adopted from the later classical economists, has been highly suspect to some well-meaning but superficial interpreters of Marx who found that the concept of an intrinsic "value," distinct from exchange-value, reeks of scholasticism, metaphysical realism, Hegelian idealism, and what not, and for this reason does no credit to a "materialistic" science. As a matter of fact, the somewhat "minute" Marxian analysis of the "form of value or value in exchange" as contained in a section of the first chapter of Capital, has not unjustly been indicted, as Marx himself anticipated it to be,4 on the count of difficulty. Never- 1 See Critique of Political Economy, 1859, opening sentence. 2 See Capital, I, 1867, opening sentence. 3 Ibid, pp. 2-5. < 4 See Preface to first edition of Capital, 1867. 31 KARL MARX theless, there is no point in accepting the term "exchange value," as taken by Marx from his forerunners, the founders of classical Political Economy, and rejecting that of an intrinsic "value" which was used by him only as a means to work out more clearly the true contents of the classical value concept, and to expose critically the "Fetishism" bound up with the term as used by his predecessors.1 The Marxian interpretation of "value" is far removed from that peculiar misconception by which some earlier writers had held it to be a physical property belonging to things along with those other physical properties which establish the utility of such things for human wants or their "use-value." Nor did he share the more refined mistake which at his time, in spite of several refutations, still lingered in the minds of the economists, and by which "value" was regarded as a metaphysical property belonging, not to the things themselves nor to their substance but, as it were, to "things in exchange." Value, according to Marx, is first of all no physical property. "So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or in a diamond."2 The value pertaining to useful things when they are exchanged as commodities may well be called a "meta-physical" quality, but only in that extremely unmetaphysical sense of being not a physical but a social quality, applying to the products of human labour or rather to the labour itself by which such useful things 1 It is interesting to note in this connection that Marx introduced the term of "value," as distinct from "value in exchange,” into the statement of his theory as late as 1867, while he had not used it in an otherwise identical exposition of his argument in 1859. He did so, in the writer's opinion, mainly for the sake of clarifying the more detailed critical exposure of the Fetishism of Commodities which was now added, in the first chapter of Capital, to the earlier statement of the theory, as contained in the Critique of Political Economy. In fact, as will be shown in Part II of this book, the mere theoretical contents of the Marxian argument can be expressed just as accurately, though perhaps not quite as definitely, without using the term of "value" at all. But it is different with the more important critical implications of the term. 2 See Capital, I, pp. 49-50.
THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICATION are produced and to the labourers producing them within a "commodity-producing society," i.e., under the conditions prevailing in present-day capitalistic society. Modern economists have tried to improve upon classical economic theory by pointing to the fact that "value" is not a property pertaining to a thing (or to the members of a class of things), but is rather a relation connecting two or more things, and Jevons has made much of that "discovery." In fact, there is nothing particularly new in this Jevonsian "relativism" as against those classical writers who had defined the value pertaining to "things of exchange" as a purely quantitative relation, and it altogether misses the point where the classical concept of “value” was indeed vulnerable. Marx was fully conscious of the fact that all concepts of "value" are strictly "relative" terms. They either denote an immediate relation between objects and man (which is realized by actual "use" or consumption), or a relation of a different order (realized by the "exchange" of such objects), viz., the quantitative relation in which use-values of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort whenever they are exchanged. The relations of the latter order had been regarded by the classical economists as the only "value" to be dealt with in a strictly economic science, and had been styled by them "value in exchange," as distinguished from mere utility or "value in use." Marx easily agreed with the classical writers when they established the difference in kind prevailing between "exchange-value" as a quantitative relation arising through the selling and buying of commodities on the market, i.e., by a social process; and "use-value" as a merely qualitative relation between external objects and man. But he did not agree with them in the ultimate location of the social relations manifesting themselves in the "value" relations of commodities as established by their exchange. For the purpose of bringing out the point which really interested him, he made use of the as yet vague distinction, made by the classicists, between "exchange- 33
KARL MARX value" as the apparent phenomenon and "value" as the hidden entity underlying its appearance. By an apparently notional development (in the best Hegelian style) of the various connotations of the classical term of "value," he in fact disclosed the real social nature of the fundamental human relations underlying the so-called "value" of the classicists. They do not arise between the commodities as exchanged on the market nor, for that matter, between the persons selling and buying such commodities, but rather they are previously established by the definite forms in which the workers producing such commodities cooperate in their production under the control of the capitalist. Thus, the relation manifested by the "value" of things is essentially a "social relation of production" arising between men and men. Indeed, as we shall see in a more detailed way in the second part of this book, the main result of Marx's "Critique" of the traditional theory of Political Economy consists in the discovery and description of these fundamental social relations of men — relations which, for a definite historical epoch, appear to the subjects concerned in the disguised and, as it were, perverted form of relations of things, viz., as "value-relations" of the commodities co-operatively produced by them and mutually exchanged on the market. "Value" then, in all its denominations, like other economic things or relations such as "commodity," "money," "labour-power," "capital," etc., means to Marx a socio-historical fact or something which though not described in physical terms is still empirically given in a strictly verifiable manner.1 "We must always keep in mind in dealing with economic theory, as indeed with all other socio-historical science, that the subject matter, here modern bourgeois society, is given in the mind of the observer just as it is in reality, and that its categories express, Yüklə 0,99 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|