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personal labour power. The tithe to be rendered to the priest is more matter of fact than his
blessing. No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people
themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their
labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the
shape of social relations between the products of labour.
For an example of labour in common or directly associated labour, we have no occasion to go
back to that spontaneously developed form which we find on the threshold of the history of all
civilised races.
31
We have one close at hand in the patriarchal industries of a peasant family, that
produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use. These different articles are, as
regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, they are not
commodities. The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, cattle tending, spinning, weaving and
making clothes, which result in the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are,
direct social functions, because functions of the family, which, just as much as a society based on
the production of commodities, possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of
labour. The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labour time of the
several members, depend as well upon differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions
varying with the seasons. The labour power of each individual, by its very nature, operates in this
case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour power of the family, and therefore, the
measure of the expenditure of individual labour power by its duration, appears here by its very
nature as a social character of their labour.
Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on
their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the
different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community. All
the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are
social, instead of individual. Everything produced by him was exclusively the result of his own
personal labour, and therefore simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our
community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains
social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence. A distribution
of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary. The mode of this distribution will vary
with the productive organisation of the community, and the degree of historical development
attained by the producers. We will assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the
production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence
is determined by his labour time. Labour time would, in that case, play a double part. Its
apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between
the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other
hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of the common labour borne by each individual,
and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social
relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labour and to its products, are in
this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but also to
distribution.
The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the
production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one
another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their
individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society,
Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments,
Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient Asiatic and other
ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and
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therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which,
however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to
their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its
interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish
society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society,
extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of
man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen
in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist
only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage,
and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man,
and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the
ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex
of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-
day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his
fellowmen and to Nature.
The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip
off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously
regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain
material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous
product of a long and painful process of development.
Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely,
32
value and its magnitude, and
has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why
labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value.
33
These formulæ, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a
state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being
controlled by him, such formulæ appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident
necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself. Hence forms of social production that
preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers
of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.
34
To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the
objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the
dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange value. Since
exchange value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an
object, Nature has no more to do with it, than it has in fixing the course of exchange.
The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced
directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois production. It
therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating
and characteristic manner as now-a-days. Hence its Fetish character is comparatively easy to be
seen through. But when we come to more concrete forms, even this appearance of simplicity
vanishes. Whence arose the illusions of the monetary system? To it gold and silver, when serving
as money, did not represent a social relation between producers, but were natural objects with
strange social properties. And modern economy, which looks down with such disdain on the
monetary system, does not its superstition come out as clear as noon-day, whenever it treats of
capital? How long is it since economy discarded the physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of
the soil and not out of society?
But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another example relating to the
commodity form. Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use value may be a