A division of atheneum publishers, inc

This time, however, the proposed change of traditional historical form of consciousness reaches further, and by an apparently reversionary movement the very "freedom" and "independence" which was the boast of bourgeois philosophy and science during the intervening epoch of its almost unchallenged
1 See Book I, 84.
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supremacy, is now called in question again. Not only are the theological and metaphysical creeds which had been re-accepted by the bourgeoisie in a remodelled form now utterly "debunked," but also the new philosophy of the bourgeois era, and the whole body of its new historical and social truths, are finally stripped of their imaginary independence and drawn into the flux of things and the torment of the battle. Unconditional "this-sidedness," and a distinct historical and class character, become essential attributes not only of the contents, but also of the form of knowledge. This applies even to the revolutionary theory itself. The Marxian theory, which deals with all ideas as being connected with a definite historical epoch and the specific form of society pertaining to that epoch, recognizes itself as being just as much an historical product as any other theory pertaining to a definite stage of social development and to a definite social class. Thus the new science of the proletariat breaks with the last "ideological" limitations which had still hampered the critical self-consciousness of social science, and by reason of which the bourgeois investigators had imagined that, because their science had been freed from the specific fetters of mediaeval dogma and metaphysics, it had become, once for all, a "free science," standing "above" the antagonisms of the new social order and of the pressure of vested interests.

The materialistic theory of the historical development of society is a particular form of the social consciousness of the present epoch and thus is itself a part of that historical development. The materialistic theory of the class struggle is itself class struggle. The materialistic theory of the social revolution of the proletarian class is at the same time a powerful lever in that same social revolution.

Thus amplified, all examples we have hitherto given to illustrate the critical and revolutionary functions of the materialistic theory, gain a new and enhanced significance.

If the materialistic science of society treats such subjects of

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social investigation as State and law, (seemingly "above class"), in their specific historical character, i.e., as a State for the bourgeoisie and a law against the proletariat, it does not enunciate a pure theoretical proposition which may incidentally furnish a suitable argument for the practical attacks of the proletariat against existing bourgeois institutions. There is a much closer connection between the theoretical contents and the practical implications of the Marxian statement, for the two are, in fact, but related aspects of one single whole. The same applies to Marx's specific description of social wealth as "bourgeois wealth," i.e., as a collection of "commodities," which are not produced because they are useful, but because of the value and surplus value they contain ; or again, as the wealth of the capitalist class from which the proletariat is excluded; or as capitalistic plenty and proletarian poverty; or, finally, as the capitalist's own property ("Eigentum") which for the proletariat (to use an apt expression of Lassalle's) is for ever but "the other man's property" ("Fremdtum"). It also applies to material production, now considered in its specific character as a "capitalistic commodity production," i.e., as an apparent activity of capital "breeding surplus value," behind which is hidden the real exploitation of the actual producers by the monopolistic owners of the social means of production: and so on, through the whole series of economic, political, legal, cultural, and other bourgeois categories.

It is also much more than a mere progress of theoretical knowledge when the materialistic theory, by its consistent application of the principle of change, immerses each and every social entity in the flux of an historical transition and thus reinterprets all static concepts of things in terms of so many dynamic processes and of an historical struggle between the social classes.

By this process of an historical specification of all bourgeois institutions, and by insistence on the constant working of change, materialistic science achieves in a theoretical way what is achieved in practice by the real historical movement of the
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proletariat. Thus Marx's materialistic social research though not for a moment abandoning its character of a strictly theoretical science, yet consciously assumes its particular function within the whole of a movement striving to transform existing society, and thus constitutes itself as a necessary part of the revolutionary action of the modern working class.

The ruling classes deny the scientific character of Marxism because of its class limitations. Marxism bases the wider and deeper truth of its propositions on its proletarian class character.
Marxian theory, viewed in its general character, is a new science of bourgeois society. It appears at a time when within bourgeois society itself, an independent movement of a new social class is opposing the ruling bourgeois class. In opposition to the bourgeois principles it represents the new views and claims of the class oppressed in bourgeois society. It is, so far, not a positive but a critical science. It "specifies" bourgeois society and investigates the tendencies visible in the present development of society, and the way to its imminent practical transformation. Thus it is not only a theory of bourgeois society but, at the same time, a theory of the proletarian revolution.
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PART TWO

POLITICAL ECONOMY

CHAPTER I

MARXISM AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
MARX'S materialistic investigation of bourgeois society is based from the very beginning on a recognition of the cardinal importance of Political Economy. While but a few weeks before, he had written to his bourgeois-democratic friend Ruge, the characteristic words that the critic of modern society may start from "any given form of theoretical and practical consciousness" and that more especially the "political State" expresses within its form all social struggles, needs, and truths sub specie rei publicae,1 he now definitely transcended that intermediate stage of his materialistic moulding process by the conclusion that "the anatomy of civil society must be sought for in Political Economy."2 Nor was this merely an advance toward a better method of scientific investigation. The theoretical transition to Political Economy coincided with a practical transition from the Jacobinic bourgeois revolution, which had aimed at solving the social problems and needs of the working classes sub specie rei publicae, to the independent action of the modern proletariat, which is resolved to seek for the specific roots of its oppression and for the specific path to its emancipation in Political Economy. "The economic emancipation of the working class," say the Rules of the Working Men's International
1 See Marx's letter to Ruge, dated "September 1843," as reproduced in the Correspondence of 1843, published in Deutsch-Franzoesische Jahrbuecher, 1844 (now reprinted MEGA I, 1, i, p. 574).

2 See above, p. 20. For the first expression of this new materialistic knowledge, still philosophical in form, refer to the concluding paragraphs of Marx's Introduction to a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law, written in December, 1843 (MEGA, I, 1, i, pp. 619 et seq.) and for its further development to Marx's Marginal Notes to Ruge's article "The King of Prussia and Social Reform," 1844, in which he finally confronted the political idealism of the most advanced wing of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, as represented by Ruge, with the economic and materialistic viewpoint of the proletarian class (MEGA, I, iii, pp. 5 et seq.)

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Association drawn up twenty years later by Marx, "is the great end to which every political movement is subordinated as a means."1

The theoretical programme of the youthful Marx, to "seek for the anatomy of civil society in Political Economy," does not, however, mean a simple acceptance of the accomplished results of the preceding period of economic science. Political Economy was, historically, the new science of the bourgeoisie, brought forth by the rising industrial class in its revolutionary fight against feudalism. Now, in a new historical epoch, that revolutionary struggle has come to an end. The bourgeois class rules, both politically and economically, in present-day society. Thus, Political Economy, dealing with the material foundation of the existing bourgeois State, is for the proletariat first and foremost an enemy country. Nor does it lose this character by the fact that parts of the ground held by its outposts are being occupied by the theoretical vanguard of the proletariat. The first task for the representatives of the new revolutionary class in this field is, therefore, to reconnoitre the enemy's position.

In striking contrast to the illusions cherished by many socialists in their time and up to the present day, Marx and Engels never accepted the idea that this same economic science which the proletarian class inherited from the bourgeoisie, could now, by a mere elimination of its inherent bourgeois bias and a consistent working out of its own premises, be transformed into a theoretical weapon for the proletarian revolution. Wherever such an opinion was expressed by the first socialist Ricardians of 1820-30, by the Owenists, or by Proudhon, Rodbertus, and Lassalle, they declared it an "economically false theory," an idealistic application of morality to economics and in its practical consequence a reactionary Utopia.2 They pointed out that
1 See Address and Provisional Rules of the Working Men's International Association, printed at the Beehive Newspaper Office, London, 1864.

2 See Engels, Preface to German ed. of La Misère de la Philosophie, 1884, pp. VI, ff., and Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, III, Pt. 3.

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the equality-idea resulting from the epoch of bourgeois "commodity-production" and expressed in the economic "law of value" is still bourgeois in its character. It is therefore only ideologically incompatible with the exploitation of the working class through capital, but not in actual practice. The socialist Ricardians imagined that they could attack the economists on their own ground and with their own weapons. On the basis of the economic principle that "it is Labour alone which bestows value," they wanted to transform all men into actual workers exchanging equal quantities of labour. To one of the best of them, Bray, Marx replied that "ce rapport égalitaire, cet, idéal correctif qu'il voudrait appliquer au monde, n'est lui-meme que le reflet du monde actuel, et qu'il est par conséquent totalément impossible de reconstituer la sociéte sur une base qui n'en est qu'une ombre embellie. A mesure que l'ombre redevient corps, on s'aperçoit que ce corps, loin d'en être la transfiguration rêvée, est le corps actuel de la société."1 Instead of deriving demands of socialism and communism, in an idealistic and Utopian manner, from the laws of bourgeois economics, Marx and Engels formulated the materialistic conclusion that "according to the laws of bourgeois economics, the larger part of the product does not belong to the workers who have produced it."2 In order to obviate this state of affairs one must not apply a different interpretation to bourgeois economics but rather, through a real change in society, bring about a practical situation in which those economic laws will cease to hold good and thus the science of economics will become void of contents and ultimately vanish altogether.

Political Economy then, according to Marx, is a bourgeois science. This applies even to Marx's own contributions to the further development of its main doctrines. Marx (ought to the end against the mistaken idea that his economic analysis of

1 See Misère de la Philosophie, 1847 (MEGA, I, vi, p. 157).

2 See Engels, Preface to German edition of La Misère de la Philosophie , 1884.

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Value applied to any other than bourgeois conditions.1 Even the Marxian doctrine of Value and Surplus Value is only the final outgrowth of a conceptual process which, in content, had been almost completed by the classical bourgeois economists.2 Friedrich Engels, immediately after Marx's death, made it quite clear,3 and the posthumous publications from Marx's papers4 exhaustively proved, that Marx at no time in his life countenanced the opinion that the new contents of his socialist and communist theory could be derived, as a mere logical consequence, from the utterly bourgeois theories of Quesnay, Smith, and Ricardo.

How then are we to understand the leading part which, in spite of all this, Political Economy played in the genesis of Marx's theory of society, and maintained through all its subsequent developments? This in itself shows again the superiority of the materialistic standpoint. Marx kept aloof from that superficiality by which many revolutionary theorists in his time and to-day imagined that by a mere theoretical effort, wishful thinking, or a simple "change of heart" they could ignore such objective facts as those investigated by economic science — the very fundamentals of all existing social relations. The modern working class in its independent social movement inevitably starts from the historical results of the bourgeois revolutionary movement. At the same time this bourgeoisie and the new mode of production it brought forth, its State and all its other institutions and ideas, are the very antagonist from whom the proletariat

1 See among other references: Misère de la Philosophie, 1847 (MEGA, I, vi, pp. 149-157); Critique of Politiml Economy, 1859; and Marx's notebook Oekonomisches en général, X, 1881-82, from which parts were published by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute as an Appendix to Capital, I, Berlin and Vienna, 1932, pp. 841 ff.

2 See Capital, III, ii, p. 366. See further, Marx's letters to Engels of 24.8.67, and 8.1.68 (MEGA, III, iii, p. 410; and III, iv, p. 6).

3 See Prefaces to German edition of Misère de la Philosophie, 1884; and to the second vol. of Capital, 1885.

4 See the 3 volumes of Theories of Surplus Value, edited by Kautsky from the unpublished MSS of Marx's Critique of Political Economy, 1904-10.

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must completely separate its own action and whom it must ultimately conquer in a decisive battle. So must the proletariat, in evolving its own revolutionary thought, start from the results achieved by bourgeois economic investigation. It cannot skip over, in its own materialistic theory, the definite forms of economic science existing historically in the present epoch any more than it can neglect, in its revolutionary practice, the existence of the modern capitalistic mode of production. Only by means of a practical and theoretical action persistently continued for a considerable time through several intermediate phases, can the proletariat carry through the necessary change in the existing conditions of material production and thereby ultimately surpass the social forms of consciousness which are at present bound up with those conditions.

Long before he applied this consequence of his materialistic principle to economic science, Marx had applied it to philosophical thought in the battles waged in the forties between the various groups of young Hegelians, on the question of the impact of "philosophy" (i.e., Hegelian philosophy) on the imminent political revolution. He had opposed the attitude of the philosophical party which derived the revolution immediately from the principles of philosophy just as much as he had opposed that of the anti-philosophical party which turned its back on philosophy. Just as he had done in his previous criticism of philosophy, so now in his criticism of Political Economy, Marx seemed to call out to the socialistic Ricardians, etc., who wished to derive socialism from bourgeois economics: "You cannot realize Political Economy (in practice) without doing away with it (by theoretical action);" and to the "pure" historians, "pure" sociologists, "pure" revolutionary activists, who ignored all economics, "You cannot do away with Political Economy (by practical action) without realizing it (in theory)."1

1 See Marx, Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law (MEGA, I, 1, i, p. 613), and the author's Marxism and Philosophy, second edition, 1930. P. 93.
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CHAPTER II

FROM POLITICAL ECONOMY TO "ECONOMICS"

CLASSICAL Political Economy, as distinct from the adulterations of the "vulgar" economists of the 19th century and from the more recent attempts at an entirely new start, originated historically as an integral part of the new science of civil society, created by the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary struggle to establish this very society. It formed a realistic complement to the great philosophical, political, juridical, moral, aesthetic, and psychological upheaval, through which during the period of the so-called "Enlightenment" the ideological representatives of the rising bourgeois class first expressed the new bourgeois consciousness which corresponded to the change in the real conditions. Even in its purely theoretical form, the new science of Political Economy during this early period, as well as in the first great systems of the Physiocrats, was bound up with the whole of the new bourgeois social science in a natural and ingenuous unity.1 It is true that Adam Smith separated his economic Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations from the "general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society," as discussed in his academical lectures,2 just as he had already split another part from that bulky whole in his earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments. Yet in his economic work he embraced once more, along with the fundamental economic relations, the whole of the new political and social conditions arising from the development of industry, exchange of commodities, and the division of labour within the new bourgeois
1 See, e.g., Quesnay, Le droit naturel (Daire, Paris, 1846), summed up from this point of view by Marx in Notes of 1845-46 (MEGA, I, vi, pp. 612-13).

2 See Editor's Introduction to E. Cannan's edition of Smith's Wealth of Nations, London, 1904.

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FROM POLITICAL ECONOMY TO "ECONOMICS"

order of society. Even in the work of Ricardo, in which the classical epoch of Political Economy reaches its close, this "organic" connection between Political Economy and the whole of society is preserved. At the same time, it can be said that the system of Ricardo which, as a true "anatomy" of civil society, formally restricts itself to an ingenious dissection of the material foundations — the skeleton, as it were, of the social body shows the first symptoms of an impending disintegration. Still more does the subsequent theoretical development of bourgeois economics reveal the inevitable results of the change which during the ensuing period was to strip the bourgeois "production-relations" more and more of their original positive functions as incomparable stimulators and encouragers of the productive forces inherent in the new, industrial society.

This historical process, through which the hitherto progressive forms of the bourgeois production-relations were finally transformed into so many fetters, has since, in spite of temporary interruptions, asserted itself with ever increasing strength. It finds its economic expression in those periodically recurring dislocations of all existing proportions of capitalist production which, since their earliest characteristic occurrence in the first modern economic crisis of the year 1825, have assumed ever greater dimensions and ever more acute forms during the whole of the following century, challenging at their culminating points the whole existence of bourgeois society. There is no need to deal in this connection with the manner in which the curve of "social unrest" during the last hundred years continuously reflected the course of economic development, if not exactly at each point yet in its entire movement. The only point to be discussed here is the difference which prevails between the repercussions on the labour movement of the periodic business cycle, and those more permanent alterations within the whole economic system of modern society which have been described by recent explorers as a "structural change." While the recurring phases

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of the "normal" industrial cycle are followed by corresponds ups-and-downs in class warfare, there is no such "cyclical" rhythm discoverable in the underlying secular movement. In spite of the intervening longer periods of an apparently undisturbed upswing and prosperity brought about by the temporary defeats, iron-handed oppression, and effective crushing of all existing workers' organizations, the proletarian struggle against the existing capitalist order of society has grown from its first elementary beginnings to embrace ever greater numbers, and to assume ever more efficient, more conscious, and more threatening forms. It has become a veritable war between the oppressing and the oppressed classes, a war conducted on many fronts simultaneously, which sometimes breaks out in open revolts. The first World War, 1914-18, and the first wave of the proletarian world revolution released by the war, challenged the very premises on which during the "restful" intervals of this restless development, the bourgeois economists, and in their wake the moderate socialists, had based their "historical refutation of the-Marxian prognoses." The first shock was followed by even stronger charges. The protracted economic crisis and the new series of wars and civil wars terminating the short-lived momentous upswing which had resulted during the 20's from the first apparent recovery of post-war capitalist equilibrum, reflected once more the utter absence of cohesive forces within the present economic system, and finally refuted the illusions by which the economic optimists had conjured up for themselves a complete abolition of crises in "organized capitalism," and of all class oppositions and class struggles in the "democratic" or, more recently, in the "totalitarian State." Even such things as machinery and money, formerly so undoubtedly good and useful, have been robbed of their virtue as forces productive of social wealth and turned into forces destructive of social existence. The political and intellectual superstructure of society follows the change in its material conditions. The democratic forms of
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the State, the liberal ideas of the ascending phase of capitalist commodity production, have everywhere begun to totter. One after another of the safety-valves of the economic and political system is suspended. Emergency and martial law are the rule of common law. War and civil war on a world-wide scale have become the "normal" form of existence of present-day society.

A minor consequence of this universal destruction of the positive social function of bourgeois production-relations manifests itself in the gradual decay of the encyclopaedic spirit which had been so conspicuous during that earlier period when Political Economy embraced the whole of the social progress of the community. It is only from a formal point of view that Ricardo's economic system can be regarded as an advance on that of Adam Smith. While Smith had worked out his ideas on an epic scale and, little troubled by logical contradictions, developed the subject matter of Political Economy to a vast totality, Ricardo logically subordinated the whole of the bourgeois system to a unique principle, tracing back all its economic laws to the definition of value in terms of labour-time. The theoretical satisfaction offered in Ricardo's Principles (and more especially in its first two chapters which, as is demonstrated by Marx, virtually contain the whole book) by then originality, unity of the basic view, simplicity, concentration, profundity, novelty, and pithiness,1 is purchased at the expense of a loss of substance foreshadowing an impending emaciation. The generality aimed at by Ricardo is only the generality of scientific form; there is nowhere in his work, as there had been in that of Smith, the urge of a wider political aim. Its historical function consisted in summing up the great positive achievements of the classical period of bourgeois economic science and in the formal conclusion of an actually completed epoch.