Routledge Library Editions karl marx



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The General Council was re-elected with its seat in London, and it was instructed to collect detailed statistics on the situation of the working classes all over the world and to issue reports as often as its means allowed on all matters of interest to the International. In order to provide it with the necessary funds the congress decided that every member of the International should be levied 30 centimes for the coming year, and it recommended that a regular annual subscription of one-halfpenny or one penny should be paid by all members in addition to the fee for the membership card.

The most imnortant programmatic announcements of the congress were its decisions concerning legislation for labour protection and the trade unions. It accepted the principle of a struggle for labour protection legislation and pointed out that “ by compelling the adoption of such laws the working class will not consolidate the ruling powers, but, on the contrary, it will be turning that power which is at present used against it into its own instrument ”. With general legislation it would be able to obtain what it would be useless to attempt to obtain by isolated and individual efforts. The congress recommended the shortening of the working day as a necessary condition without which all the other efforts of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation must fail. The shortening of the working day was necessary in order to restore the physical energy and health of the workers and to give them the possibility ofintellectual development, social intercourse and social and political activities. As the legal maximum working day the congress proposed eight hours, the working time to be arranged in such a way as to comprise only the actual working hours and reasonable pauses for meals. This maximum eight-hour day should apply to all adult workers, both men and women, adults being all persons having completed their eighteenth year. Night work was condemned on principle as dangerous to the health of the workers, unavoidable exceptions to be laid down by law. Women workers should be strictly excluded from night work and from all forms of work harmful to the female constitution or morally objectionable for the female sex.

The congress regarded the tendency of modern industry to draw children and young persons of both sexes into the process of social production as salutary and legitimate progress, although it condemned the form in which this took place in capitalist society as revolting. In any reasonable system of society, it declared, each child would become a productive worker from its ninth year on, whilst at the same time no adult person would be excepted from the general law of nature which prescribed that




in order to eat a man must first work, and furthermore all men should work not only with their brains, but also with their hands. In the prevailing system of society it was desirable to divide children and young people into three categories and treat them accordingly : children from 9 to 13 years old, children from 13 to 15 years, and young people from 15 to 17 years old. The working hours of the first category should not exceed two per day, whether in household or workshop, of the second category not more than four hours, and of the third category not more than six hours, whereby there must be a break of one hour in the working time for meals and recreation. However, productive labour on the part of children and young persons should be permitted only when combined with educational training, including mental, physical and technical training giving them instruction in the general scientific principles of all processes of production and at the same time acquainting them with the practical use of the simpler forms of tools.


With regard to the trade unions the congress decided that their activity was not only legitimate, but necessary. The trade unions were a means of using the only social power of the proletariat, namely its numbers, against the centralized social power of capitalism, and so long as the capitalist mode of production existed it would not be possible to do without trade unions. On the contrary, the trade unions would generalize their activities by establishing international connections. By consciously opposing the ceaseless excesses of capitalism they would Unconsciously become the organizational centre for the working class in the same way as the mediceval communes had become such a centre for the rising bourgeoisie. Conducting a ceaseless guerilla warfare in the everyday struggle between capital and labour, the trade unions would become still more important as a lever for the organized abolition of wage-labour. In the past the trade unions had concentrated their activities too exclusively on the immediate struggle against capital, but in the future they ought not to hold themselves aloof from the general political and social movement of their class. Their influence would grow stronger to the extent that the great masses of the workers realized that their aim was not narrow and selfish, but directed to securing the general emancipation of the downtrodden millions.

Shortly after the congress in Geneva and in the spirit of the above resolution Marx took a step from which he hoped great things. Writing to Kugelmann on the 13th of October 1866 he declared : “ The London Trades Council (its secretary is our President Odger) is now considering a proposal that it should




declare itself the English section of the International. Should it adopt this proposal then in a sense the control of the working class will come into our hands and we shall be able to drive the movement forward still more effectively.” However, the council did not adopt the proposal, and with
al its friendliness to the International it decided to maintain its organizational independence, and if the historians of the trade union movement are right it even refused to permit a representative of the International to attend its sessions in order to report al quickly al possible on all Continental strikes and labour troubles.

Even in the very first years of its existence the leaders of the International could see that great successes were ahead, but also that these successes had their definite limits. However, for the moment the movement was entitled to congratulate itself on its successes, and Marx notes with lively satisfaction in his great work, which he was then within an ace of completing, that a congress of American workers held in Baltimore at the same time as the Geneva congress had also proclaimed the eight-hour day as the first demand of the workers which must be fulfilled on the way to the complete emancipation of labour from the chains of capitalism.

White labour, he declared, could never emancipate itself so long al black labour was branded, but the firstfruit of the American Civil War for the abolition of slavery was the agitation for the eight-hour day, a movement which raced from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California with the seven- league boots of the modern locomotive.


CHAPTER TWELVE: “DAS

KAPITAL”

i . Birth Pangs

When Marx refused to be present at the Geneva congress on the ground that the completion of his main work—up to the moment he had done only minor things, he thought—seemed more important for the cause of the workers than anything he could do at the congress, he was engaged in polishing and putting the final touches to the first volume. At first this final work, which began on the 1st of January i366, proceeded quickly, for “ naturally it gave me pleasure to lick the club clean after so many birth pangs ”.

These birth pangs had lasted approximately twice as many years as Nature needs months for the production of a human being, and Marx was justified in saying that probably no work of the sort had ever been written under more difficult circumstances. Again and again he had fixed a time limit for its completion. In 185 I it was “ five weeks ”, and in 1859 it was “ six weeks ”, but always the time limit had been ignored owing to his merciless selfcriticism and the tremendous conscientiousness which continually drove him to make new investigations, neither of which could be shaken by even the most impatient exhortations of his best friend.

At the end of 1865 the work was finished, but only in the form of an enormous manuscript which could have been prepared for publication by no one apart from himself, not even by Engels. From January 1866 to March 1867 Marx turned out the first volume of Capital in the classic form in which we have it to-day, as an “ artistic whole ” out of this tremendous mass of material. It was a feat which bore eloquent witness to his magnificent working capacity, for the year and a quarter in which it was performed was troubled by chronic ill-health and even really dangerous illnesses, such as the one in February 1866, by an accumulation of debts which threatened to overwhelm him, and not least by the wearisome preparations for. the Geneva congress of the International.

In November 1866 the first bundle of manuscript was sent




off to Otto Meissner in Hamburg, a publisher of democratic literature who had previously issued a small work of Engels on the Prussian military question. In April 1867 Marx himself took the rest of the manuscript to Hamburg and found Meissner “ ‘ a decent fellow ”. Short negotiations proved sufficient to settle all the arrangements. Marx was anxious to remain in Germany until the first proofs arrived from Leipzig, where the book was to be printed, and in the meantime he visited his friend Kugel- mann in Hannover, where he was most hospitably received. He spent a number of pleasant weeks with Kugelmann and his family, and afterwards referred to this period as “ one of the happiest and most agreeable oases in the desert of life ”.


His good spirits were certainly heightened to some extent by the fact that he was treated with respect and sympathy in educated circles in HannoVer, treatment to which he was unaccustomed from such quarters, and on the 24th of April he wrote to Engels : “ You know, we two have a much better reputation amongst the ‘ educated bourgeoisie ’ than we thought.” And on the 27th of April Engels answered : “I have always felt that the damned book on which you have worked so long was the real reason for all your misfortunes and that you would never be able to overcome them as long as you had not shaken it off. Its incompletion dragged you down physically, intellectually and financially, and I can well understand that you feel a different fellow altogether now that you have finally got rid of it, particularly as you will find when you come back into the world that it is no longer quite so depressing as it was.” And for himself Engels expressed the hope that he would soon be able to emancipate himself from “ this damned business ”, because so long as he was in it up to his eyes he would be unable to do anything worth while, and now that he had become a partner in the firm the situation had grown worse owing to his increased responsibility.

On the 7th of May Marx wrote : “ I firmly hope and trust that by the end of the year I shall be a made man, at least in the sense that I hope to bl! able to reform my financial situation thoroughly and stand upon my own feet finally. Without you I could never have finished my work and I assure you that it has always been a weight on my conscience that you have had to waste your splendid abilities in commercial affairs and let them go rusty on my account, and that on top of that you have had to suffer all my miserable worries with me.” As a matter of fact, Marx did not become “ a made man ” by the end of the year or at any time, and Engels had to keep his nose to the grindstone for a few years more, but nevertheless the horizon did begin to clear up a little.




Whilst he was in Hannover Marx finally paid a long-postponed debt in the shape of a letter to one of his supporters, a mining engineer named Siegfried Meyer who had been living in Berlin but was about to emigrate to America. The way in which he did so offers us another striking example of his “ heartlessness ” : “ You must think very badly of me, and still more so when I tell you that your letters were not only a great pleasure to me but a real consolation in the troubled period in which I received them. The knowledge that a capable man of high principles was securely won for our party compensated me for much. In addition, your letters were always couched in such warm terms of friendship for me personally, and you will realize that a man who is constantly engaged in a bitter struggle with the world (the official world) does not underestimate such a thing. Well then, you will ask, why didn’t I answer you ? Because I was constantly hovering on the edge of the grave and was compelled to use every minute of the time in which I was fit to work to finish my book, to which I have sacrificed my health, my happiness and my family. I hope that this explanation requires no further enlargement. I have to laugh at the so-called ‘ practical' men and their wisdom. If one had a hide like an ox one could naturally turn one’s back on the sufferings of humanity and look after one’s own skin, but as it is I should have considered myself very unpractical
if I had died without completing my book, at least in manuscript form.”

In the buoyant spirits of his Hannover days Marx took it quite seriously when an advocate named Warnebold, a man quite unknown to him, approached him with the alleged information that Bismarck wished to win him and his great talents for the German people. Not that Marx was in the least way tempted by the proposal, and he certainly agreed with Engels who wrote : “ It is typical of the fellow’s intellectual horizon and of his way of thinking that he judges everybody by himself.” But in a sober everyday mood Marx would hardly have taken Warne- bold’s message at its face value, for the North German League was barely completed and war with France had been narrowly averted in connection with the Luxemburg affair, and Bismarck could not possibly have risked offending the bourgeoisie by taking the author of The Communist Manifesto into his service, for the bourgeoisie had only just come ove.r to his side and it looked askance even at such collaborators as Bucher and Wagener.

On his journey back to London Marx had an adventure, not with Bismarck, but with a relation of Bismarck, and he related the affair to Kugelmann with some gratification. On the boat a German girl, whom he had already noticed on account of her




upright almost military carriage, asked him for information concerning the railway connections in London. It turned out that she had a few hours to wait before her train left and Marx gallantly assisted her to pass the time by taking her for a walk in Hyde Park : “ It appeared that her name was Elisabeth von Puttkamer and that she was a niece of Bismarck, with whom she had been staying for a few weeks in Berlin. She had the whole Army List at her finger tips, for her family supplies our army liberally with gentlemen of honour and wasplike waists. She was a cheerful and well-educated girl, but aristocratic and black- white to the marrow.
1 She was not a little surprised when she learned that she had fallen into red hands.” However, the young lady did not lose her good spirits on that account, and in a neat little letter she expressed “ girlish respect ” and “ heartfelt thanks ” to her cavalier for all the trouble he had taken with “ such an inexperienced creature ”, and her parents also wrote a letter of thanks in which they informed him how happy they had been to learn that one could still meet good men on ajourney.

On his arrival on London Marx corrected the proof-sheets of his book, but even this time not without a certain amount of occasional abuse on account of the dilatoriness of the printer, and at two o’clock in the morning of the 16th of August 1867 he wrote to Engels informing him that the last printer’s sheet had just been corrected : “ So this volume is now finished. I must thank you alone that it was possible. Without your sacrifices for me I could never possibly have done the enormous amount of work for the three volumes. I embrace you with heartfelt thanks. Greetings, my dearly beloved friend.”

  1. The First Volume

The first chapter of Marx’s book summed up once again what he had already written in 1859 in his
Critique of Political Economy concerning the nature of commodities and money. This was done not merely for the sake of completeness, but because even intelligent readers had often failed to grasp his ideas thoroughly, so that he assumed that there must have been something wrong with his presentation of them and in particular with his analysis of the nature of a commodity.

The professorial luminaries of Germany could certainly not be counted amongst his intelligent readers and they execrated

1 Black and white are the Prussian colours.—Tr.




the first chapter in particular on account of its “ involved mysticism ”. “ At first glance a commodity seems a trivial,

easily understood thing. However, its analysis shows that it is a very eccentric thing, full of metaphysical subtleties and theological tricks. As far as it is a use-value there is nothing mysterious about it. ... The form of wood is changed when we make a table out of it. Nevertheless, the table remains wood, an ordinary perceptible thing. But as soon as it appears as a commodity it becomes transcendental as well as perceptible. It not only stands with its four feet firmly on the ground, but towards other commodities it stands upside down and its wooden head develops whimsicalities far stranger than if it began to dance without human agency.” This argument was taken amiss by all those blockheads who could produce metaphysical subtleties and theological quibbles ad lib.,
but not anything as material and ordinary as a simple wooden table.

Considered pul\ely from the literary point of view, the first chapter of Capital is one of the finest things Marx ever wrote. Aster dealing with commodities he then proceeded to show how money is transformed into capital. If equal values exchange against equal values in commodity circulation how can the moneyed man buy commodities at their value and sell them at their value and nevertheless receive greater value than he gave ? He can do this because under prevailing social relations he finds a commodity of such a peculiar nature on the commodity market that its consumption is a source of new value. That commodity is labour-power.

It exists in the shape of the living worker, who needs a certain quantity of foodstuffs for the maintenance of his life and that of his family, the latter guaranteeing the perpetuation of living labour-power after his death. The labour-time necessary to produce this quantity of foodstuffs, etc., represents the value of labour-power. However, this value, which is paid in the form of wages, is much less than the value which the purchaser of labour-power is able to extract from it. The surplus-labour of the worker over and above the labour-time necessary to replace the value represented by his wages is the source of surplus-value, the source of the ceaselessly growing accumulation of capital. This unpaid labour of the worker is distributed amongst all the non-labouring members of society, and the whole social system in which we live is based on it.

In itself unpaid labour is certainly not an exclusive characteristic of modern bourgeois society. As long as possessing and dispossessed classes have existed the latter have always had to perform unpaid labour. As long as one section of society pos




sesses a monopoly of the means of production then the worker, whether free or unfree, will have to work longer than the time necessary to maintain his own existence in order to provide foodstuffs, etc., for the owners of the means of production. Wage-labour is only a particular historical form of the system of unpaid labour, which has existed since the division of society into classes, and it must be examined as such if it is to be understood correctly.


In order to be able to transform his money into capital the moneyed man must find free workers on the market, free in the double sense that first of all they are free to dispose of their own labour-power as a commodity and that they have no other commodities to dispose of, and free in the sense that they possess none of the means necessary to apply their labour-power independently. This is a relation with no basis in the laws of Nature, for Nature does not produce on the one hand the owners of commodities, of money, and on the other hand those who own nothing but their labour-power. It is further not a social relation common to all periods of history, but the result of a long period of historical development, the product of many ecotlomic changes and of the decline and disappearance of a whole series of earlier forms of social production.

Commodity production is the starting-point of capital. Commodity production, commodity circulation and developed commodity circulation, trade, form the historical conditions under which capital develops. The history of modern capital dates from the creation of modern world trade and of the modern world market in the sixteenth century. The delusion of the vulgar economists that once upon a time there was an elite of industrious men who accumulated riches, and a mass of lazy good-for-nothings who finally had nothing left to sell but their own skins, is stuff and nonsense, and the semi-enlightened fashion in which bourgeois historians describe the dissolution of the feudal mode of production as the emancipation of the worker, but not at the same time as the development of the feudal into the capitalist mode of production, is no better. The worker ceased to belong to the category of the means of production like the slave and the serf, but he also ceased to possess the means of production like the peasant or artisan working on his own account.

The great mass of the people was deprived of land, food and the means of production by a series of violent and brutal measures, which Marx describes in detail on the basis of English history in the chapter on primary accumulation. In this way the free worker needed by the capitalistmode of production was created.




Capital came into the world oozing mud and blood from every pore, and as soon as it was able to stand on its own feet it not only maintained the separation of the worker from the means necessary to apply his labour-power, but it reproduced this separation on an ever-increasing scale.


Wage-labour differs from earlier forms of unpaid labour as a result of the fact that the movement of capital is boundless and its voracious appetite for surplus-labour insatiable. In societies in which the use-value of a commodity is more important than its exchange-value, surplus.:.labour is limited to a more or less wide circle of needs, but the nature of this form of production does not result in an unlimited demand for surplus labour; Where the exchange-value of a commodity is more important than its use-value the situation is different. As a producer with alien labour-power, as a sucker of surplus labour and an exploiter of labour-power, capital outdoes all previous modes of production based on direct forced labour in point of energy, recklessness and effectiveness. The main thing for capital is not the labour process, not the production of use-values, but the process of utilization, the production of exchange-values from which it can extract a greater value than it put in. The demand for surplus- value knows no satiety. The production of exchange-values knows no such limits as are drawn for the production of use- values by the satisfaction of immediate needs.

Just as a commodity is a combination of use and exchange values so the process of commodity production is a combination of the labour process and the value-creating process. The value- creating process lasts up to the point where the value of labour- power paid in wages is replaced by an equal amount of value, and beyond this point it develops into the process of producing surplus-value, the process of utilization. As a combination of the labour process and the process of utilization it becomes the process of capitalist production, the capitalist form of commodity production. In the labour process labour-power and the means of production work together. In the process of utilization the same capital components appear as constant and variable capital. Constant capital is transformed in the process of production into means of production, raw materials, auxiliary materials and tools of production, and does not change its value. Variable capital is transformed in the process of production into labour-power and its value changes : it reproduces its own value and then produces a surplus over and above that value, a surplus-value which may vary in volume and be larger or smaller according to circumstances. Marx thus clears the way for an examination of surplus-value, which appears in.. two forms, relative and




absolute surplus-value, which have played a different, but each a decisive role in the history of the capitalist mode of production.


Absolute surplus-value is produced when the capitalist causes the worker to work beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his labour-power. If the capitalist had his way the working day would comprise twenty-four hours, for the longer the working day the more surplus-value it produces. On the other hand, the worker has the justifiable feeling that every hour of labour-time which he is compelled to perform over and above that necessary to reproduce his wages is unfairly extracted from him and that he has to pay with his own health for excessive labour-time. The struggle between capitalist and worker concerning the length of the working day began with the first historical appearance of free workers on the market, and it has lasted down to the present day. The capitalist fights for profit, and, whether he is personally a good fellow or a blackguard, the competition of his fellow capitalists compels him to do everything possible to extend the working day to the limits of human endurance. The worker, on the other hand, fights to maintain his health and to secure a few free hours a day in which he can engage in other human activities apart from working, eating and sleeping. Marx describes powerfully the fifty years of civil war between the working class and the capitalist class in England from the birth of large-scale industry, which drove the capitalists to break down every limit placed on the exploitation of the proletariat by nature and custom, age and sex, and day and night, up to the passing of the Ten Hour Bill, won by the working class in the struggle against capital as a powerful social obstacle preventing the workers selling themselves and their kind into death and slavery by free contract with capital.

Relative surplus-value is produced when the labour-time necessary for the reproduction of labour-power is reduced to the benefit of surplus-labour. The value of labour-power is reduced by an increase in the productivity of labour-power in those industries whose products determine the value of labour-power, and to this end a constant revolutionization of the mode of production, of the technical and social conditions of the labour process is necessary. The historical, economic, technological and socio-psychological observations which Marx then makes in a series of chapters dealing with co-operation, the division of labour and manufacture, and machinery and large-scale industry have been recognized, even by the representatives of the bourgeoisie, as a rich mine of scientific facts.

Marx not only shows that machinery and large-scale industry have created greater misery than any previous mode of pro




duction known to history, but also that in their ceaseless revolu- tionization of capitalist society they are preparing the way for a higher social form. Factory legislation was the first conscious and methodical reaction of society to the unnatural form of its own process of production. When society regulates labour in factories and workshops it appears for the' moment only as an interference with the exploiting rights of capital.


However, the force of circumstances soon compels society to regulate household labour also and to interfere with parental authority, and with this it recognizes that large-scale industry liquidates the old family relations together with the economic basis of the old family system and the family labour which corresponded to it. “ However terrible and revolting the dissolution of the old family system within the capitalist system may appear, nevertheless, by granting a decisive role in the social process of production to women, young people and children beyond the sphere of the household, large-scale industry creates a new economic basis for a higher form of the family and for the relation of the sexes. Naturally, it isjust as stupid to regard the Christian- Germanic form of the family as absolute, as it would have been to regard the classical Roman form, or the classical Greek form, or the Oriental form as absolute, forms which by the way represent together a historical series of development. It is equally clear that the composition of the combined labour personnel out of individuals of both sexes and various ages must change into a source of humane progress under suitable conditions, although in its untrammelled and brutal capitalist form (in which the workers exist for the process of production and not the process of production for the workers) it is the foul source of corruption and slavery.” The machine which degrades the worker to its mere appendage creates at the same time the possibility of increasing the productive forces of society to such an extent that all members of society without exception could enjoy the same possibilities of a development worthy of human beings, a consummation for which all former societies were too poor.

After examining the production of absolute and relative surplus-value Marx then proceeds to develop the first rational theory of wages known to the history of political economy. The price of a commodity is its value expressed in money, and wages represent the price of labour-power. Labour itself does not appear in the commodity market, but the living worker who offers his labour-power for sale, and labour appears only in the consumption of the commodity labour-power. Labour is the substance and the immanent measure of values, but it has no value itself. However, labour appears to be paid for in wages




because the worker receives his wages only after he has performed his labour. The form in which wages are paid effectively conceals every trace of the division of the working day into paid and unpaid labour-time. With slaves it is exactly the opposite. The slave appears to be working for his master all the time even when he is working to reproduce the value of his own foodstuffs, and all his labour appears to be unpaid labour. With wage- labour, however, all the labour, including even the unpaid labour, seems to be paid. In the one case the property relation conceals the fact that the slave is working part of the time for himself, whilst in the other case the money relation conceals the fact that the wage-worker is working partof the time for nothing. We realize therefore, points out Marx, the decisive importance of the transformation of the value and price of labour-power into the form of wages, or into the value and price of labour itself. All the legal conceptions of both the capitalists and the workers, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all its illusions of freedom and all the extenuating humbug of vulgar political economy are based on this appearance, which conceals the real state of affairs and suggests exactly the contrary.


The two chief forms of wages are time-wages and piece-wages. On the basis of the laws governing time-wages Marx demonstrates the emptiness of the contentions that the shortening of the working day must lower wages, as put forward by people with an axe to grind, and shows that exactly the contrary is true : a temporary shortening of the working day lowers wages, but a permanent shortening raises wages. The longer the working day the lower the wage.

Piece-wages are nothing but a changed form of time-wages, and they are the form of wages best suited to the capitalist mode of production. This form of wages spread widely during the actual manufacturing period, and in the storm and stress period of English large-scale industry it served as a lever to lengthen the working day and lower wages. Piece-wages are very advantageous for the capitalist because they render supervision of the workers almost unnecessary and at the same time offer many opportunities for making deductions from wages, and practising other forms of cheating. On the other hand, this form of wages possesses many big disadvantages for the worker : physical

exhaustion as the result of excessive efforts to raise the level of wages, efforts which in fact tend rather to lower wages, increased competition amongst the workers with the resultant weakening of their solidarity, the appearance of parasitic elements between the capitalists and the workers, of middle-men who pocket a


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