57
Chapter 1
29
“What are we to think of a law that asserts itself only by periodical revolutions? It is just nothing
but a law of Nature, founded on the want of knowledge of those whose action is the subject of it.”
(Friedrich Engels: “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie,” in the “Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher,” edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx. Paris. 1844.)
30
Even Ricardo has his stories à la Robinson. “He makes the primitive hunter and the primitive fisher
straightway, as owners of commodities, exchange fish and game in the proportion in which labour
time is incorporated in these exchange values. On this occasion he commits the anachronism of
making these men apply to the calculation, so far as their implements have to be taken into account,
the annuity tables in current use on the London Exchange in the year 1817. The parallelograms of Mr.
Owen appear to be the only form of society, besides the bourgeois form, with which he was
acquainted.” (Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik, &c..” pp. 38, 39)
31
A ridiculous presumption has latterly got abroad that common property in its primitive form is
specifically a Slavonian, or even exclusively Russian form. It is the primitive form that we can prove
to have existed amongst Romans, Teutons, and Celts, and even to this day we find numerous
examples, ruins though they be, in India. A more exhaustive study of Asiatic, and especially of Indian
forms of common property, would show how from the different forms of primitive common property,
different forms of its dissolution have been developed. Thus, for instance, the various original types of
Roman and Teutonic private property are deducible from different forms of Indian common property.”
(Karl Marx, “Zur Kritik, &c.,” p. 10.)
32
The insufficiency of Ricardo’s analysis of the magnitude of value, and his analysis is by far the best,
will appear from the 3rd and 4th books of this work. As regards value in general, it is the weak point
of the classical school of Political Economy that it nowhere expressly and with full consciousness,
distinguishes between labour, as it appears in the value of a product, and the same labour, as it appears
in the use value of that product. Of course the distinction is practically made, since this school treats
labour, at one time under its quantitative aspect, at another under its qualitative aspect. But it has not
the least idea, that when the difference between various kinds of labour is treated as purely
quantitative, their qualitative unity or equality, and therefore their reduction to abstract human labour,
is implied. For instance, Ricardo declares that he agrees with Destutt de Tracy in this proposition: “As
it is certain that our physical and moral faculties are alone our original riches, the employment of
those faculties, labour of some kind, is our only original treasure, and it is always from this
employment that all those things are created which we call riches... It is certain, too, that all those
things only represent the labour which has created them, and if they have a value, or even two distinct
values, they can only derive them from that (the value) of the labour from which they emanate.”
(Ricardo, “The Principles of Pol. Econ.,” 3 Ed. Lond. 1821, p. 334.) We would here only point out,
that Ricardo puts his own more profound interpretation upon the words of Destutt. What the latter
really says is, that on the one hand all things which constitute wealth represent the labour that creates
them, but that on the other hand, they acquire their “two different values” (use value and exchange
value) from “the value of labour.” He thus falls into the commonplace error of the vulgar economists,
who assume the value of one commodity (in this case labour) in order to determine the values of the
rest. But Ricardo reads him as if he had said, that labour (not the value of labour) is embodied both in
use value and exchange value. Nevertheless, Ricardo himself pays so little attention to the two-fold
character of the labour which has a two-fold embodiment, that he devotes the whole of his chapter on
“Value and Riches, Their Distinctive Properties,” to a laborious examination of the trivialities of a J.B.
Say. And at the finish he is quite astonished to find that Destutt on the one hand agrees with him as to
labour being the source of value, and on the other hand with J. B. Say as to the notion of value.
33
It is one of the chief failings of classical economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its
analysis of commodities, and, in particular, of their value, in discovering that form under which value
becomes exchange value. Even Adam Smith and Ricardo, the best representatives of the school, treat
58
Chapter 1
the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the inherent nature of
commodities. The reason for this is not solely because their attention is entirely absorbed in the
analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value form of the product of labour is not only
the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production,
and stamps that production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special
historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by Nature for every
state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value form, and
consequently of the commodity form, and of its further developments, money form, capital form, &c.
We consequently find that economists, who are thoroughly agreed as to labour time being the measure
of the magnitude of value, have the most strange and contradictory ideas of money, the perfected form
of the general equivalent. This is seen in a striking manner when they treat of banking, where the
commonplace definitions of money will no longer hold water. This led to the rise of a restored
mercantile system (Ganilh, &c.), which sees in value nothing but a social form, or rather the
unsubstantial ghost of that form. Once for all I may here state, that by classical Political Economy, I
understand that economy which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated the real relations of
production in bourgeois society in contradistinction to vulgar economy, which deals with appearances
only, ruminates without ceasing on the materials long since provided by scientific economy, and there
seeks plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena, for bourgeois daily use, but for the
rest, confines itself to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the trite
ideas held by the self-complacent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of all
possible worlds.
34
“Les économistes ont une singulière manière de procéder. Il n’y a pour eux que deux sortes
d’institutions, celles de l’art et celles de la nature. Les institutions de la féodalité sont des institutions
artificielles celles de la bourgeoisie sont des institutions naturelles. Ils ressemblent en ceci aux
théologiens, qui eux aussi établissent deux sortes de religions. Toute religion qui n’est pas la leur, est
une invention des hommes tandis que leur propre religion est une émanation de Dieu
‒ Ainsi il y a eu
de l’histoire, mais il n’y en a plus.” [“Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only
two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial
institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who
likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men,
while their own is an emanation from God. ... Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any”]
(Karl Marx. Misère de la Philosophie. Réponse a la Philosophie de la Misère par M. Proudhon, 1847,
p. 113.) Truly comical is M. Bastiat, who imagines that the ancient Greeks and Romans lived by
plunder alone. But when people plunder for centuries, there must always be something at hand for
them to seize; the objects of plunder must be continually reproduced. It would thus appear that even
Greeks and Romans had some process of production, consequently, an economy, which just as much
constituted the material basis of their world, as bourgeois economy constitutes that of our modern
world. Or perhaps Bastiat means, that a mode of production based on slavery is based on a system of
plunder. In that case he treads on dangerous ground. If a giant thinker like Aristotle erred in his
appreciation of slave labour, why should a dwarf economist like Bastiat be right in his appreciation of
wage labour? I seize this opportunity of shortly answering an objection taken by a German paper in
America, to my work, “Zur Kritik der Pol. Oekonomie, 1859.” In the estimation of that paper, my
view that each special mode of production and the social relations corresponding to it, in short, that
the economic structure of society, is the real basis on which the juridical and political superstructure is
raised and to which definite social forms of thought correspond; that the mode of production
determines the character of the social, political, and intellectual life generally, all this is very true for
our own times, in which material interests preponderate, but not for the middle ages, in which
Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics, reigned supreme. In the first place it strikes