A division of atheneum publishers, inc
Yüklə 0,99 Mb.
|
|
1 See Marx's letter to Engels 2.4.58, in which he says that this concept of value "although an abstraction, is an historical abstraction which, therefore, could only be made on the basis of a determinate economic development of society." (MEGA, III. ii, p. 309.) 34 THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICATION therefore, forms of being, modes of existence, and often only single aspects of this definite society or subject matter."1 We shall later study the far-reaching theoretical and practical implications of the difference between this Marxian principle of historical specification and the abstract concepts of classical Political Economy. We here confine ourselves to one most important result. The concept of "commodity" in the specific form and context in which it appears under the conditions of the present system of "capitalistic commodity production," includes from the very beginning a commodity of a peculiar nature, incorporating the flesh and blood in the hands and heads wage-labourers — the commodity labour-power. "These labourers who have to sell themselves piecemeal are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market."2 Furthermore, the sellers of that peculiar commodity, under the very condition of its sale, are never in the position of free agents,3 for they "live only so long as they find work, and find work only so long as their labour increases captial.”4 Thus the term of "commodity" as used by Marx presupposes the transformation of labour power into a commodity, and “commodity production" is equivalent to present-day capitalistic commodity production.5 Only by bearing this in mind can we understand the importance of that general analysis of "Commodity" which in Marx's book precedes all further analysis and critique of the economic conditions prevailing in present society.
2 See Communist Manifesto, 1848 (MEGA, I, vi, p. 532). 3 See the Report of the Inspectors of Factories of the six months ending April 30th, 1850; p. 45 — quoted by Marx in Capital, I, p. 310. 4 See Communist Manifesto, 1848 (MEGA, I, vi, p. 532). 5 See Capital, I, p. 133, footnote 41 ; see also II, pp. 9, 11 et seq.,B8, etc.
KARL MARX It is only thus that the distinctive historical conditions of the present epoch of a fully developed capitalistic mode of production can be brought out in full relief without cutting them off from their more general, but equally historical, background. Commodity, according to Marx, means capital; but capital, both historically and theoretically, means a lot more than a mere exchange of commodities. Marx is aware of the "definite historical conditions" which are necessary that a product may become a "commodity" and that, in the further development, "money" may appear as the general commodity, for the purpose of exchange. "The appearance of products as commodities presupposed such a development of the social division of labour, that the separation of use-value from exchange-value, a separation which first began with barter, must already have been completed." Again, "the particular functions of money which it performs, either as the mere equivalent of commodities, or as means of circulation, or means of payment, as hoard, or as universal money, point to very different stages in the process of social production."1 Yet we know by experience that a relatively primitive development of society suffices for the production of all these forms. It is otherwise with capital. "The historical conditions of its existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It can spring into life only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with the free labourer selling his labour-power. And this one historical condition comprises a world's history. Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production."2 Only at this stage are we able to grasp the full importance of industrial capital as the only form which adequately represents the nature of modern capitalistic production. "Industrial capital," according to an express assertion of Marx which we may safely take to be his final and most complete statement on 1 See Capital, I, pp. 32. 2 Ibid.; see also II, p. 13. 36 THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICATION this matter, "gives to production its capitalistic character. Its existence includes that of class antagonism between capitalists labourers. To the extent that it assumes control over social production, the technique and social organization of the labour process are revolutionized and with them the economic and historical type of society. The other kinds of capital, which appear before the industrial capital amid past or declining conditions of social production, are not only subordinated to it and suffer changes in the mechanism of their functions corresponding with it, but move on it as a basis ; they live and die, stand and fall, as this, their basis, lives and dies, stands and falls."1 1 See Capital, II, p. 29. 37 CHAPTER III THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICATION (continued)
The first objection raised by the bourgeoisie is that the Communists want to abolish property. To this, the Manifesto replies: The abolition of existing property relations is not a peculiar feature of Communism. All property relations in the past have been continually subject to historical change. The French revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property. 1 See MEGA, I, vi, pp. 538-44 ; also p. 528. 38 THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICATION The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of all property, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed Up in the single sentence : abolition of private property.
KARL MARX By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production : free trade, free selling and free buying. But if haggling disappears, free haggling disappears also. This talk about free haggling, and all other braggadoccio of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, has a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted haggling, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but has no meaning when opposed to the Communist abolition of haggling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself. The bourgeois calls it an "abolition of property" when private property is abolished. But this property exists in the hands of his class only by being cut off from the vast majority of society. From the moment when labour can no more be transformed into capital, money, rent, in one word, into a social power, capable of being monopolized, he complains that "individuality is being destroyed." He confesses, therefore, that by "individuality" he means none other than that of the bourgeois, i.e., the capitalistic owner of property. "This individuality must, indeed, be destroyed." In the same way, the bourgeoisie confuses the general concept of work, and activity, with the specific bourgeois form of wage-labour, the forced labour of the property-less labourer for the benefit of the non-labouring owners of capital. If the bourgeoisie is afraid lest "with the abolition of private property all activity will cease and universal laziness overtake us," the Manifesto rejoins: According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have been wrecked through sheer idleness ; for those of its members who work acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology : There can no longer be any wage-labour where there is no longer any capital. Next, the bourgeoisie laments the threatened loss of culture through the advent of Communism. To this complaint also, Marx has a specific reply : 40 THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICATION Just as to the bourgeois the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture. That culture the loss of which he laments is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine. The same lack of discernment as in the case of individuality, freedom, and culture, is shown in the sweeping indictment brought against communism on account of its professed hostility to the State and the law. The so-called "subversive tendencies" of the communists are, in fact, not directed against those general functions of unifying the elements of society into a living and developing whole, which, in the past, have been fulfilled, though in an increasingly defective manner, by State compulsion and coercive law. The real target of the communistic attack is the present State which has dropped those historical functions one after another until it has become a mere "executive committee managing the common affairs of the bourgeois class as a whole" — and the present law which, by a similar process, has become nothing but "the will of the bourgeoisie made into a law for all” - a will whose contents are determined by the material conditions of existence of the bourgeois class." Abolition of the family ! "Even the most radical," says the Communist Manifesto, "flare up at this infamous purpose of the Communists." Once more the Marxist replies specifically : On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based ? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form it exists only for the bourgeoisie. But it finds its complement in the forcible absence of the family among the proletarians and in public prostitution. The communists admit that they want to "abolish the exploitation of children by their parents." They retort to that ever-recurring, stupid assumption of the professional red-baiter that "Communists want to introduce a 41 KARL MARX community of wives," that, on the contrary, "the present system of bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common."1 Besides, it is obvious that "the abolition of the present system of production must involve the abolition of the community of women arising out of that system, that is, of prostitution both official and unofficial." To the further charge made by nationalists that communism is going to "abolish the Fatherland,"the Manifesto replies that, in present-day bourgeois society, "the workers have no Fatherland." "One cannot take from them what they do not have."2 The attitude of the proletariat of each country regarding so-called "national interests" depends on the specific stage reached by the workers' movement in its historical development on a national and an international scale: To the extent that exploitation of one individual by another is abolished the exploitation of one nation by another is also abolished. With the disappearance of the antagonism between classes within the nation, the hostility of one nation to another will disappear.
2 The conclusion that the general idea of "Fatherland" loses all meaning for the vast majority of the people because "without property, they have no Fatherland, without Fatherland, everybody is against them, and themselves must be up in arms against everybody," had already been brought forward by Brissot in his Observations d'un répuplicain sur les différents systèmes d'administration provinciales, 1787 (Sec Marx's excerpts in MEGA, I, vi, pp. 616-17). Thus it was a bourgeois revolutionist who first enunciated that most "odious" of all the socialist doctrines which later was expressed in the "incendiary" statement of the Communist Manifesto : "The workers have no Fatherland." Yet it was just the bourgeois revolution represented by Brissot that finally destroyed the last historical remnants of what had been, according to a later statement of Engels, "for all free men, a real Fatherland, i.e., an inherited free communal property in land" (See Engels" article on The Mark, first published as an Appendix to the first German edition of Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 1883). 42 THE PRINCIPLE OF HISTORICAL SPECIFICATION In reply to "the indictment levelled against Communism from a religious, philosophical and from an ideological standpoint generally," the Manifesto summarily points to the specific historical character of all human ideas : What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes its character as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of an age have ever been only the ideas of the ruling class. When the ancient world was in decline, the ancient religions were conquered by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to the ideas of enlightenment, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely expressed the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.
KARL MARX completely vanish, except with the total disappearance of class antagonism. The communistic revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations. No wonder, then, that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. 44 CHAPTER IV THE PRINCIPLE OF CHANGE
The classical phase of bourgeois social theory, continuing into the first decades of the 19th century, is characterized by an unconscious generalization of the new bourgeois principles. Later, in the hands of the "vulgar" economists of the 19th century, that unsophisticated attitude became a more or less conscious tendency to represent the economic system of bourgeois society in contrast to its politics—or at least its basic: part, i.e., production as distinguished from distribution — as a general and unchangeable form of all social life. Finally, the founders of modern "Economics," and the corresponding schools of “general" or "formal" Sociology, have even raised the "un-specific" treatment of their subject matter to the very principle criterion of their new and assumedly "disinterested" scientism. A more detailed analysis will be necessary to point out the special manner in which the a priori of definite premises evolving out of the historical and class-conditioned position of all bourgeois science, penetrates into the methods and results of each school and into the concepts and propositions set up by the single investigator. A further complication is added by the fact that, in dealing 45
KARL MARX with contemporary bourgeois social theory, we can often no longer exactly determine how far it represents a reaction to the attack of the proletarian class. Not a few among the most important of its later developments can be directly traced to the Marxian theory. We mention particularly, from the last two generations of German sociologists, jurists, historians, and philosophers, Toennies and Stammler, Max Weber and Troeltsch, Scheler and Mannheim; and among the economists, as not the most important but, perhaps, the most typical representative of this whole group — Werner Sombart. The manifold broken and distorted forms assumed by the controversy with Marxism under the particular conditions of German academic science, appear most strikingly in the last-named savant, whose many and extensive writings on modern capitalism and socialism testify by their contents, even more clearly than by the apparent acknowledgment of the author, to the fact that "all that is good in this work is due to the spirit of Marx."1 Werner Sombart began his career in the early 90's as what he himself recently, at a conference of the Sociological Society in Zurich, called a "convinced Marxist;" but later, with the changing political and social conditions leading up to the present regime of a so-called "National Socialism" in Germany, he changed heart and from a disguised Marxist became an altogether undisguised and outright anti-Marxist.2 Notwithstanding all these subsequent disfigurations, the irresistible influence origin- 1 See Sombart, Modern Capitalism, vol. Ill (1927), p. xix. 2 We mention from the writings of Sombart in which this development is reflected, the following: 1894 et seq. Review articles and books, Marxist in tendency; among them the first scientific appreciation of the third volume of Capital in Archiv für soziale Bewegung VII. 1897 First edition of the book Socialism and Social Movement in the 19th Century. 1900 Pamphlet Nevertheless! Theoretical and Historical Notes on the Labour Trade Union Movement. 1924 Tenth and "entirely revised" edition of the book Socialism and Social movement under the changed title Proletarian Socialism (Marxism). Subsequent to Hitler's accession to power a new book on German Socialism, etc. Refer also to the article on Sombart's future career by Rosa Luxemburg in Neue Zeit, XVIII, ii (1899/1900), pp. 740 et seq.,and an article by the author in Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus and der Arbeiterbewegung XVI. 46 THE PRINCIPLE OF CHANGE ally exercised by Marx's theory on all present-day bourgeois social science is clearly evident even in the later career of Sombart. As late as 1928, at the afore-mentioned Conference of the Sociologists, he claimed to have been the first to enunciate the principle of the so-called "non-evaluative character of a genuine sociological science" and, incidentally, traced back that well-known doctrine of contemporary social research to the "contradiction" which forty years before had arisen within himself, that is, between his internal "conviction," and his worldly position as a "Royal Prussian University Professor."1 For all these reasons, in confronting the general principles of the Marxian theory with bourgeois science we shall not so much refer to the more recent displays of contemporary social thought in which their persisting difference has already been modified to a certain extent by mutual interaction. We shall rather try to bring out the contrast in the pure form in which it originally appeared in the classical and post-classical bourgeois writers of the 18th and early 19th centuries on the one hand, and in the writings of Marx and Engels on the other. Yüklə 0,99 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|