Correspondence Among Marxists

I have been (re?-)transcribing various letters in which various points of Marxism are elaborated. This post is an index of what I have so far. I do not know that I will go on much.

• Marx to Engels, 2 April 1958, describes six books he intends to write.
• Marx to Engels, 2 August 1862, sets out the transformation problem and Marx's solution.
• Marx to Engels, 18 June 1867, on the order of presentation in Capital.
• Marx to Engels, 24 August 1867, on the two best points in volume 1 of Capital.
• Marx to Engels, 8 January 1868, on three original points in volume 1 of Capital.
• Marx to Engels, 30 April 1868, outlines the three volumes of Capital, especially the transformation problem.
• Marx to Vera Zasulich, 8 March 1881, on how Russia might not go through the same modes of production as western Europe.
• Engels to J. Bloch, 21 September, 1890, about historical materialism and the relation of the superstructure to the base.
• Engels to Conrad Schmidt, 27 October, 1890, about historical materialism and the relation of the superstructure to the base.
• Engels to Franz Mehring, 14 July 1893, which initiates the concept of false consciousness.
• Engels to Werner Sombart, 11 Marx 1895, on the law of value.
• Antonio Labriola to Georges Sorel, 14 May 1897, in which he describes historical materialism as the philosophy of praxis.

You can see that I am interested in the political economy, and a bit in historical materialism.

Engels To Conrad Schmidt In 1890

This is another example of Engels explaining the theory of historical materialism. I know of this letter from Mills and Goldstick (1989). They also point out this letter from Engels. Here we see the metaphor of ideas "standing on their head", not in relation to Hegel's idealism, but as real economic relations reflected in finance. I like the emphasis on the interdependence of industries that could be expressed in Leontief matrices. Does this letter express a deterministic, strict dependence of the superstructure on the base? Or does Engels explain historical materialism as a mutual interaction of base and superstructure?

London, 27 October 1890

Dear Schmidt,

I am taking advantage of this, the first free time I have had, to answer you letter. I think you would be very well advised to accept the post in Zurich. At any rate you'll be able to learn a good deal about economics there, especially if you bear in mind that Zurich is, after all, only a third-rate financial and speculative market and hence that the impressions to be gained there will be dulled, if not deliberately distorted, these being but reflections seen at second or third remove. But you will learn how the machinery works in practice and will be obliged to follow at first hand the stock market reports from London, New York, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, and thus the world market - in its reflection as a money and stock market - will be revealed to you. Economics, politics, etc., are reflected as objects are in the human eye - they pass through a converging lens and are therefore seen the wrong way up, standing on their heads. Except that there is no nervous apparatus to set them on their feet again for the benefit of the imagination. Your money market man sees the trend of industry and of the world market merely in the inverted reflection of the money and stock markets and thus for him effect becomes cause. I observed this back in the 40s in Manchester; as a guide to industrial progress and its periodical peaks and troughs, the London stock market reports were absolutely useless, since the gentlemen sought to explain everything in terms of money market crises, though these were themselves for the most part little more than symptoms. At that time they were concerned to explain away industrial crises by attributing them to temporary overproduction and thus the thing also had a tendentious aspect which invited distortion. This is a point which has now ceased to apply - once and for all, at any rate so far as we are concerned, and it is, moreover, a fact that the money market may also have its own crises in which actual industrial disturbances play only a subordinate role, if any at all, and in this sphere there is much to be ascertained and investigated, particularly in regard to the history of the last 20 years.

Where there is division of labour on a social scale, the various sections become mutually independent. Production is, in the final analysis, the decisive factor. But as soon as trade in products becomes independent of actual production, the former follows a trend of its own which is, by and large, undoubtedly dictated by production but, in specific cases and within the framework of that general dependence, does in turn obey laws of its own, laws inherent in the nature of this new factor; it is a trend having its own phases and reacting in turn on the trend of production. The discovery of America was due to the gold famine which had already driven the Portuguese to Africa (cf. Soetbeer's Edelmetall-Produktion), because the vast expansion of European industry and the corresponding growth in trade in the 14th and 15th centuries called for more means of exchange than Germany - the main source of silver from 1450 to 1550 - was able to provide. The conquest of India by the Portuguese, Dutch and British between 1500 and 1800 had as its aim import from India and no one thought of sending exports there. And yet how tremendous were the repercussions upon industry of these discoveries and conquests carried out solely in the interests of trade - it was only the need to export to those countries which created and developed large-scale industry.

It is the same with the money market. Once trade in money becomes divorced from trade in commodities, it will - under certain circumstances determined by production and by the trade in commodities and within those limits — develop in its own way subject to the special laws and distinctive phases determined by its own nature. If, in addition and in the course of this further development, the trade in money expands to comprise trade in securities, the said securities being not simply government paper, but also the shares of industrial and commercial concerns, i.e. if the trade in money gains direct control of a section of the production by which it is largely dominated, then the reaction of the trade in money on production will be even stronger and more complex. The traders in money own railways, mines, foundries, etc. These means of production assume a twofold aspect: They must be run, now in accordance with the immediate interests of production, now in accordance with the needs of the shareholders in so far as these are traders in money. The most striking example of this is the North American railroads, the running of which is entirely dependent on the day-to-day stock market operations of a Jay Gould, Vanderbilt, etc., which have nothing whatever to do with any particular railroad or its interests quaa means of transport. And even here in England the railway companies have for decades been fighting over the boundary areas separating this concern or that - struggles in which a vast amount of money has been squandered, not in the interests of production and transport, but solely out of a rivalry which for the most part had but one purpose, namely to facilitate the stock market operations of the traders in money who held the shares.

With these few remarks about my view of the relationship of production to the trade in commodities and of both to the trade in money, I have already dealt in the main with your questions about historical materialism generally. The subject is best approached from the standpoint of the division of labour. Society engenders certain common functions which it cannot do without. Those nominated for this purpose form a new branch of the division of labour within society. They thereby acquire interests of their own vis-à-vis, amongst others, their mandatories and become independent of them - and so you have the state. From then on the process is much the same as in the trade in commodities and, later, the trade in money - while the new independent power must, it is true, generally follow the trend of production, it will also, by virtue of its inherent independence, i.e. a relative independence formerly conferred upon it and which it has gradually enlarged, react in turn upon the conditions and the course of production. It is the interaction of two unequal forces, of the economic trend on the one hand and the new political power which is striving for the greatest possible independence and which, having once been installed, assumes a trend of its own, on the other. By and large, the economic trend will predominate but it must also be reacted upon by the political trend which it has itself induced and which has been endowed with relative independence - the trend of, on the one hand, state power and, on the other, of the simultaneously engendered opposition. Just as the trend of the industrial market is largely reflected in the money market, given the provisos set out above, but, of course, the wrong way up, the struggle between the already extant and warring classes is reflected in the struggle between government and opposition, and again the wrong way up; it is no longer reflected directly but indirectly, not as a class struggle but as a struggle over political principles, and in so distorted a form that it has taken us a thousand years to sort it out again.

The government may react to economic developments in three ways: it can take the same direction, in which case things go faster; it may take a contrary one, in which case, as conditions are today and in any of the larger nations, it will eventually come to grief, or it may block certain lines of economic development and lay down others - which will ultimately amount to the same as one of the two foregoing instances. But it is obvious that, in instances 2 and 3, political power can wreak havoc with economic development and cause energy and materials to be squandered on a vast scale.

Then again there is the instance of the seizure and brutal destruction of economic resources which, in earlier days and in certain circumstances, could ruin economic development both locally and nationally. Today, this would mostly have the opposite effect, at least where the larger nations are concerned. In the long run the vanquished may have more to gain economically, politically and morally than, on occasion, the victor.

It is much the same in the case of the law: As soon as the new division of labour becomes necessary and creates professional lawyers, yet another new, independent field is opened up which, for all its general dependence on production and trade, is nevertheless capable of reacting in its own way to those spheres. In a modern state not only must the law correspond to the general economic situation and be its expression, it must of itself constitute a coherent expression that does not, by reason of internal contradictions, give itself the lie. And to achieve this, the fidelity with which economic conditions are reflected is increasingly thrown to the winds. All the more so for the rarity with which a statute book is the harsh, unmitigated, unadulterated expression of the domination of one class: this of itself would be contrary to the 'concept of law'. The pure, logical concept of law of the revolutionary bourgeoisie of 1792-96 had already been adulterated in many respects even in the Code Napoléon and, in so far as it was embodied therein, has had to be constantly subjected to all manner of modifications as a result of the growing power of the proletariat. Not that this has prevented the Code Napoléon from being the statute book on which all new codifications in every part of the world are based. Thus the course of the 'law's development' has largely consisted simply in this: Firstly, the attempt to eliminate the contradictions arising from the direct translation of economic conditions into legal principles and to establish an harmonious legal system and, secondly, the fact that the influence and pressure of further economic developments repeatedly disrupt that system, involving it in fresh contradictions (at this stage I am speaking only of civil law).

The reflection of economic conditions as legal principles is likewise necessarily one that presents the image the wrong way up; it does so without the beholder being aware of it; the lawyer imagines he is dealing in a priori principles whereas they are, in fact, no more than economic reflections - and thus the whole thing is the wrong way up. And it seems to me self-evident that this inversion which, in as much as it is not recognised, constitutes what we call an ideological view, reacts in its turn on the economic base and may, within certain limits, modify the same. The basis of the law of inheritance, assuming the family to have attained the same stage of development, is an economic one. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to prove that, for instance, absolute testamentary freedom in England and the strict limits imposed thereon in France are in every respect of economic origin. But both, in a very significant way, react on the economy in that they influence the distribution of wealth.

Now as regards the more rarefied ideological fields such as religion, philosophy, etc.; these have a prehistorical fund of what today would be termed rubbish which was taken over lock, stock and barrel by the historical period. In so far as these various false conceptions of nature, of the nature of man, of spirits, magic forces, etc., are economically based, it is only in a negative sense; false conceptions of nature are the corollary of the low level of economic development in the prehistorical period, but also on occasion its precondition if not its actual cause. And even if economic necessity may have provided the main incentive for progress in natural science and done so to an increasing extent, it would be pedantic to seek economic causes for all this primitive rubbish. The history of science is the history of the gradual elimination of that rubbish and/or its replacement by new, if progressively less ridiculous, rubbish. The people responsible for this in turn belong to special spheres of the division of labour and see themselves as working in an independent field. And to the extent that they constitute an independent group within the social division of labour, what they produce, including their errors, exerts a reciprocal influence on social development as a whole and even on economic development. But for all that, they are themselves in their turn subject to the dominant influence of economic development. In philosophy, for example, this is most easily demonstrated in respect of the bourgeois period. Hobbes was the first modern materialist (in the 18th-century sense), but an absolutist at a time when, throughout Europe, absolute monarchy was in its heyday and, in England, was embarking on a struggle with the populace. In religion as in politics, Locke was the product of the class compromise of 1688. The English deists and their more logical successors, the French materialists, were the true philosophers of the bourgeoisie - and, in the case of the French, even of the bourgeois revolution. German philosophy, from Kant to Hegel, is permeated by the German philistine - now in a positive, now in a negative, sense. But in every epoch philosophy, as a definite sphere of the division of labour, presupposes a definite fund of ideas inherited from its predecessors and from which it takes its departure. And that is why economically backward countries can nevertheless play first fiddle where philosophy is concerned - France in the 18th century as compared with England, upon whose philosophy the French based themselves and, later on, Germany as compared with both. But in France as in Germany, philosophy, like the general flowering of literature at that time, was also the result of growing economic prosperity. I am in no doubt about the ultimate supremacy of economic development over these fields also, but it will come about within the terms laid down by each individual field; in philosophy, for instance, by the operation of economic influences (which again for the most part operate only in their political, etc., guise) on extant philosophical material handed down by predecessors. Here, political economy creates nothing a novo [from scratch], but determines the way in which the existing fund of ideas changes and develops, and this too is done for the most part indirectly, since it is its political, legal and moral reflections which exert the greatest immediate influence on philosophy.

As for religion, I have said all that is necessary in the last chapter of Feuerbach.

So if Barth opines that we deny that the political, etc., reflections of the economic trend have any effect whatsoever on that trend itself, he is simply tilting at windmills. After all, he only has to look at Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire which is devoted almost exclusively to the particular role played by political struggles and events - needless to say within the framework of their general dependence on economic conditions. Or again at Capital, e. g. the section on the working day where legislation, which is, after all, a political act, appears in such an uncompromising light. Or at the section on the history of the bourgeoisie (Chapter 24). Otherwise why should we be fighting for the political dictatorship of the proletariat if political power is economically powerless? Might (i.e. state power) is also an economic force!

But I have no time at present to criticise the book. The third volume has got to come out first and in any case I believe that e.g. Bernstein is also perfectly capable of attending to it.

What all these gentlemen lack is dialectics. All they ever see is cause on the one hand and effect on the other. But what they fail to see is that this is an empty abstraction, that in the real world such metaphysically polar opposites exist only in a crisis, that instead the whole great process takes place solely and entirely in the form of interplay - if of very unequal forces of which the economic trend is by far the strongest, the oldest and the most vital - and that here nothing is absolute and everything relative. So far as they are concerned, Hegel might never have existed.

As regards the rumpus in the party, I was forcibly dragged into it by the gentlemen of the opposition and thus had no choice. Mr Ernst's conduct vis-à-vis myself is quite indescribable unless I call it that of a schoolboy. I am sorry if he's a sick man and forced to write for his living. But if someone has an imagination so vivid that he can't read a line without inferring the opposite of what it says, he should apply his imagination to spheres other than socialism which is no figment. He should write novels, plays, art criticism and the like, when all he will harm is bourgeois culture, benefiting us in the process. He might then acquire sufficient maturity to be able to achieve something in our field also. Never before have I seen such a rigmarole of half-baked material and utter rubbish as has been dished out by the said opposition. And these callow lads, who are blind to everything but their own boundless egotism, propose to dictate party tactics. I have learnt more from a single one of Bebel's articles in the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung than from all the rigmarole these chaps have produced. And they imagine they are worth more than that clear-sighted man who has such an admirably correct grasp of circumstances and depicts them so graphically and succinctly. They are all of them failed belletrists, and even a successful belletrist is a pretty obnoxious animal.

I should be sorry were the Volks-Tribüne to succumb. Under your editorship it has shown that something might well be achieved by a weekly which devotes more space to theory than to news - and I am well aware what sort of contributors you have! But I must say that, now that the Neue Zeit has become a weekly, it's somewhat doubtful whether yours can be kept going. At all events, you will be glad to cast off the joys and sorrows of editorship and have time for something other than purely journalistic tasks. And even in Berlin the immediate future will be dominated by all the various reverberations of the late rumpus, and there'll be nothing to gain for anyone by being mixed up in it.

Your printing the passage from my letter did no harm, but that sort of thing is best avoided. In a letter, one writes from memory and at speed, without looking anything up, etc., and is thus always liable to let slip some expression which may well be seized on by one of those people we Rhinelanders describe as a Korinthenscheisser [someone who trivializes everything], and God knows what rubbish might not come of it.

Many thanks for your anticipatory congratulations on my 70th birthday which is still a month ahead. So far I am still very well except that I still have to spare my eyes and am not allowed to write by gaslight. Let's hope I remain so.

Now I must close.

With warm regards,

Yours,

F. Engels

Reference

• Charles W. Mills and Danny Goldstick. 1989. A new old meaning of 'ideology'. Dialogue 28: 417-432.

A Letter From Marx To Engels In 1862 On The Transformation Problem

Here Marx sets out the transformation problem in a letter to Engels. The first volume of Capital was published in 1967. So this is another instance of Marx distinguishing labor values and prices of production before publication of Capital. This post is the second in a series I am working on in which he sets out critical parts of the (critique of) political economy in Capital in letters to Engels. As I understand it, the concept of absolute rent was original with Marx.

Marx criticizes Ricardo for not distinguishing the labor embodied in inputs in production from their cost price. Is the distinction between cost price and prices of production clear in this letter? Maybe not. He goes on here about rent. He assumes that the organic composition of capital is lower in agriculture than in industry. Hence, for Marx, more surplus value is generated in agriculture, for a given expenditure of capital, than in industry.

2 August 1862

Dear Frederick,

Best thanks for the 10 pounds.

I very much dislike your being in financial difficulties on my account, but que faire? Who is capable of withstanding such a crisis as the American one? Not to mention my peculiar bad luck in having a rotten rag like the Vienna Presse to deal with. OTHERWISE, the fellows might, at least, have been able to make up for the loss of the Tribune TO SOME EXTENT. Do you suppose, perhaps, that the time has now come for me to approach, say, the Evening Post (THE ABOLITIONIST PAPER in New York) about my contributing to it?

All things considered, it's a real miracle that I have been able to get on with my theoretical writing to such an extent. I now propose after all to include in this volume an extra chapter on the theory of rent, i.e., by way of 'illustration' to an earlier thesis of mine. Let me say a word or two about what will, in the text, be a lengthy and complex affair, so that you may let me have your opinion on it.

As you know, I distinguish 2 parts in capital: constant capital (raw material, matières instrumentales, machinery, etc.), whose value only reappears in the value of the product, and secondly variable capital, i.e., the capital laid out in wages, which contains less materialised labour than is given by the worker in return for it. E.g. if the daily wage = 10 hours and the worker works 12, he replaces the variable capital + 1/5 of the same (2 hours). This latter surplus I call SURPLUS VALUE.

Let us assume that the rate of surplus value (that is the length of the working day and the surplus labour in excess of the necessary labour performed by the worker to reproduce his pay) is given, e.g. = 50 p.c. In this case, in a 12 hour working day the worker would work e.g. 8 hours for himself, and 4 hours (8/2) for the EMPLOYER. And indeed, let us assume this to apply to all TRADES SO that any variations there may be in the AVERAGE WORKING TIME simply allow for the greater or lesser difficulty of the work, etc.

In these circumstances, given equal exploitation of the worker in different TRADES, different capitals in different spheres of production will, given equal size, yield very different AMOUNTS OF SURPLUS VALUE and hence very different rates of profit, SINCE PROFIT IS NOTHING BUT THE PROPORTION OF THE SURPLUS VALUE TO THE TOTAL CAPITAL ADVANCED. This will depend on the organic composition of the capital, i.e., on its division into constant and variable capital.

Let us assume, as above, that the surplus labour = 50 p.c. If, therefore, e.g. 1 pound = 1 working day (no matter whether you think in terms of a day or a week, etc.), the working day = 12 hours, and the necessary labour (i.e. reproductive of the pay) = 8 hours, then the wage of 30 workers (or working days) = 20 pounds and the value of their labour = 30 pounds, the variable capital per worker (daily or weekly) = 2/3 pounds and the value he creates = 1 pound. The AMOUNT of SURPLUS VALUE produced by a capital of 100 pounds in DIFFERENT TRADES will vary greatly according to the proportion in which the capital of 100 pounds is divided into constant and variable capital. Let us call CONSTANT CAPITAL C, and VARIABLE CAPITAL V. If, e.g. in the COTTON industry, the composition was C 80, V 20, the value of the product would = 110 (given 50 p.c. surplus value or SURPLUS LABOUR). The amount of the surplus value = 10 and the profit rate = 10 p.c., since the profit = the proportion of 10 (the SURPLUS VALUE): 100 (the total value OF THE CAPITAL EXPENDED). Let us suppose that, in a large tailoring shop, the composition is C 50, V 50, so that the product = 125, the surplus value (at a rate of 50 p.c. as above) = 25 and the profit rate = 25 p.c. Let us take another industry where the proportion is C 70, V 30, hence the product = 115, the profit rate = 15 p.c. Finally, an industry where the composition = C 90, V 10, hence the product = 105 and the profit rate = 5 p.c.

Here, given equal exploitation of labour, we have IN DIFFÉRENT TRADES very DIFFERENT AMOUNTS OF SURPLUS VALUE AND HENCE VERY DIFFERENT' RATES OF PROFIT for capitals of equal size.

If, however, the above 4 capitals are taken together, we get

1.	C 80	V 20	110	profit rate = 10 p.c.	Rate of surplpus value in all cases = 50 p.c.
2.	C 50	V 50	125	profit rate = 25 p.c.
3.	C 70	V 30	115	profit rate = 15 p.c.
4.	C 90	V 10	105	profit rate = 5 p.c.
Capital			400	Profit = 55

On 100, this makes a PROFIT RATE of 13 3/4 p.c.

If the total capital (400) of the class be considered, the profit rate would = 13 3/4 p.c. And capitalists are brothers. As a result of competition (TRANSFER OF CAPITAL OR WITHDRAWAL OF CAPITAL FROM ONE TRADE TO THE OTHER), capitals of equal size in DIFFERENT TRADES, DESPITE THEIR DIFFERENT OGRANIC COMPOSITIONS, YIELD THE SAME AVERAGE RATE OF PROFIT. In other words, the AVERAGE profit, which F.I. A CAPITAL OF 100 pounds yields IN A CERTAIN TRADE, it yields, not as a capital specifically applied to the same nor, therefore, in the proportion in which it of itself produces SURPLUS VALUE, but as an aliquot part of the total capital of the capitalist class. It is a SHARE the dividend on which will be paid in proportion to its size out of the total amount of the SURPLUS VALUE (or unpaid labour) produced by the total variable (laid out in wages) capital of the class.

If then 1, 2, 3, 4 in the above illustration are to make the same AVERAGE PROFIT, each category must sell its goods at 113 1/3 pounds. 1 and 4 will sell them at more than their value, 2 and 3 at less.

The price so regulated = THE EXPENSES OF CAPITAL + THE AVERAGE PROFIT (F.I. 10 p.c.), is what Smith called the NATURAL PRICE, COST PRICE, etc. It is the AVERAGE PRICE to which competition between DIFFERENT TRADES (by TRANSFER OF CAPITAL or WITHDRAWAL OF CAPITAL) reduces the prices in DIFFERENT TRADES. Hence, competition reduces commodities not to their value, but to the cost price, which, depending on the organic composition of the respective capitals, is either above, below or = to their values.

Ricardo confuses value and cost price. He therefore believes that, if there were such a thing as absolute rent (i.e., rent independent of variations in the fertility of the soil), AGRICULTURAL PRODUCE, etc., would be constantly sold for more than its value, because at more than cost price (THE ADVANCED CAPITAL + THE AVERAGE PROFIT). That would demolish the fundamental law. Hence he denies absolute rent and assumes only differential rent.

But his identification of VALUES OF COMMODITIES and COST PRICES OF COMMODITIES is totally wrong and has traditionally been taken over from A. Smith.

The facts are as follows:

If we assume that the AVERAGE COMPOSITION of all NOT AGRICULTURAL CAPITAL is C 80, V 20, then the product (assuming that the rate of surplus value is 50 p.c.) = 110 and the profit rate = 10 p.c.

If we further assume that the AVERAGE COMPOSITION of AGRICULTURAL CAPITAL is C 60, V 40 (in England, this figure is statistically fairly correct; rent for pasture, etc., has no bearing on this question, being determined not by itself, but by the CORN RENT), then the product, given equal exploitation of labour as above = 120 and profit rate = 20 p.c. Hence, if the farmer sells his AGRICULTURAL PRODUCE for what it is worth, he is selling it at 120 and not at 110, its cost price. But landed property prevents the farmer, like his BROTHER CAPITALISTS, from equalising the value of the product to the cost price. Competition between capitals cannot enforce this. The landowner intervenes and pockets the difference between value and cost price. A low proportion of constant to variable capital is in general an expression of the poor (or relatively poor) development of the productive power of labour in a particular sphere of production. Hence, if the AVERAGE COMPOSITION of AGRICULTURAL CAPITAL is e.g. C 60, V 40, while that of NOT AGRICULTURAL CAPITAL is C 80, V 20, this proves that agriculture has not yet reached the same stage of development as industry. (Which is easily explicable since, apart from anything else, a prerequisite for industry is the older science of mechanics, while the prerequisites for agriculture are the completely new sciences of chemistry, geology and physiology.) If the proportion in agriculture becomes C 80, V 20 (in the above premise), then absolute rent disappears. All that remains is differential rent, which I shall also expound in such a way as to make Ricardo's assumption of the constant DETERIORATION OF AGRICULTURE appear MOST RIDICULOUS AND ARBITRARY.

Having regard to the foregoing definition of COST PRICE as distinct from VALUE, it should further be noted that, besides the distinction between constant capital and variable capital, which arises out of the immediate production process of capital, there is the further distinction between fixed and circulating capital, which arises out of the circulation process of capital. However, the formula would become too involved if I were to seek to incorporate this in the above as well.

There you have - ROUGHLY, for the thing's fairly complicated - the critique of Ricardo's theory. This much you will admit - that by taking into account the ORGANIC COMPOSITION OF CAPITAL, one disposes of a mass of what have so far seemed to be contradictions and problems.

Apropos. There are certain reasons, of which I shall inform you in my next letter, why I should be very glad if you would write me a detailed military critique (I shall deal with the political aspect) of Lassalle-Rüstow's liberation nonsense.

Your

K. M.

Regards to the ladies.

Imandt has announced himself. Izzy leaves on Monday.

It will be evident to you that, given my view of 'absolute rent', landed property (UNDER CERTAIN HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES) does INDEED put up the prices of raw materials. Very important, communistically speaking.

Assuming the correctness of the above view, it is by no means essential for absolute rent to be paid under all circumstances or in respect of every type of soil (even if the composition of AGRICULTURAL CAPITAL is as assumed above). It is not paid when landed property does not exist, either factually or legally. In such a case, AGRICULTURE offers NO PECULIAR RESISTANCE TO THE APPLICATION OF CAPITAL, which then moves as easily in this element as in the other. The agricultural produce is then sold, as masses of industrial products always are, at cost price for less than its value. In practice, landed property may disappear, even when capitalist and landowner are one and the same person, etc.

But it would be otiose to go into these details here.

Differential rent as such - which does not arise from the circumstance that CAPITAL is employed ON LAND INSTEAD OF ANY OTHER FIELD OF EMPLOYMENT - presents no difficulty in theory. It is nothing other than SURPLUS PROFIT which also exists in every sphere of industrial production wherever capital operates under better than AVERAGE CONDITIONS. It is firmly ensconced in agriculture only because founded on a basis as solid and (relatively) stable as the DIFFERENT DEGREES OF NATURAL FERTILITY of various types of soil.

Marx and Engels Collected Works

Several editions have been published of the works of Marx and Engels. One can also look in the Marxists Internet Archive. Many individual works have been published in various translations in various places. Marx's manuscripts ended up in the Institute of Social History (ISH), in Amsterdam.

A first attempt was started in 1927, the first Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), in which the works were to be published in their original languages. This project was never completed. David Riazanov, the first editor, was shot in 1938, after the usual show trial. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) sponsored a Russian edition, published from 1928 through 1947. A second Russian edition was begun in 1955. It contains 47 books, with some volumes published across more than one book.

Activity by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Socialist Unity Party (SUP), that is, the communist party of the German Democratic Republic, in Berlin, led to the publication of the Marx-Engels Werke (MEW). The MEW contains 44 books, and its publication began in 1956.

Progress Publishers, in Moscow, issued English translations of at least some of the work of Marx and Engels. Some, but not all, translations were based on the MEW. For example, Volume 1 of Capital in this series is the English edition of 1887, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Engels.

The Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW) consists of 50 volumes, in an english translation. It was published from 1975 to 2004. It is published by Lawrence & Wishart in London and International Publishers Company in New York. The MECW was the result of collaboration among the communist parties of Great Britain and the United States, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CPSU and of Progress Publishers. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the SUP assisted. Lawrence & Wishart made an online version available in 2010. See also here.

The second Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) is planned to contain 114 volumes. The works are in their original languages, show variations among various editions, and include commentary. The second MEGA edition was begun in 1975 by the SUP, in Berlin, and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CPSU, in Moscow. The Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung, in Amsterdam took over sponsorship after 1989.

Tables 1, 2, and 3 list works in the MECW by Marx, by Marx and Engels, and by Engels, respectively. I do not list newspaper articles, letters, and speeches that were not published separately. Some of the unlisted newspaper articles, such as coverage of a trial of communists in Cologne, are as lengthy as some of the listed works. And Marx's work on the First International are important to a history of socialism. Furthermore, there are manuscripts by Marx, such as an essay on calculus, which are of interest to a consideration of the full range of his work and are not included in the MECW. Nevertheless, these tables contain the most widely discussed works by Marx and Engels, even though some were not published until well into the twentieth century.

Table 1: Selected Works by Marx

Title	Written	Published	Translated	MECW
Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean philosophy of nature (doctoral dissertation)	1840-1841	1902	1946	1
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law	1843	1927	1970	3
On the Jewish Question	1843	1843	1926	3
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (The Paris Manuscripts)	1844	1932	1959	3
Theses on Feuerbach	1845	1888	1938	5
The Poverty of Philosophy	1847	1847	1900	6
Wage-Labour and Capital	1849	1849	1891	9
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte	1852	1852	1897	11
Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy)	1858	1939-1941	1973	28-29
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Part One	1859	1859	1904	29
Herr Vogt	1860	1860		17
Theories of Surplus Value, Part 1	1861-1863	1905-1910		30, 31, 34
Theories of Surplus Value, Part 2	1861-1863	1905-1910		31
Theories of Surplus Value, Part 3	1861-1863	1905-1910		32, 33
Economic Manuscript of 1861-1863	1861-1863			30-34
Value, Price and Profit	1865	1898	1898	20
Capital, V. 1	1863-1867	1867	1887	35
Capital, V. 2	1865-1881	1885	1907	36
Capital, V. 3	1864-1866	1894	1909	37
The Civil War in France	1871	1871	1871	22
Critique of the Gotha Programme	1875	1891	1891	24

Table 2: Selected Works by Marx and Engels

Title	Written	Published	Translated	MECW
The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Company	1844	1845	1956	4
The German Ideology	1846	1932	1964	5
The Communist Manifesto	1848	1848	1850	6

Table 2: Selected Works by Engels

Title	Written	Published	Translated	MECW
Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy	1843	1843	1959	3
The Condition of the Working Class in England	1845	1845	1887	4
The Peasant War in Germany	1850	1850	1870?, 1875?	10
Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany	1852	1852	1852	11
Herr Duhring's Revolution in Science (Anti-Duhring)	1878	1878	1907	25
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific	1880	1880	1891	24
Dialectics of Nature	1882	1925	1985?	25
The Origin of the Family	1884	1884	1902	26
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy	1886	1886	1903	26

These editions of the collected works produced some surprises. The 1844 manuscripts inspired an anti-Stalinist literature, based on a young Marx. Under this reading, Marx was at first a humanist, concerned with overcoming alienation. On the other hand, Althusser agreed that a break existed in Marx's thought, but preferred the later Marx. The Grundrisse seems like a challenge to these views. I had not previously known that Theories of Surplus Value was part of a larger manuscript. The second MEGA, as Heinrich (2021) notes, reveals surprising changes in the opening chapters of Capital, destabilizing established readings. Interpretations in the twentieth century are entangled with political struggles among socialists, communists, and others.

Why Did Marx Advocate Socialism?

1.0 Introduction

I find the question in the title of this post hard to answer. I should probably say something about secondary literature, which I do not consider myself well-informed on. For purposes of this post, I ignore distinctions between socialism and communism.

2.0 Marx Wanted To Implement An Utopian Vision Of A Post-Capitalist Society

You will sometimes find reactionaries assert that wherever Marxism was implemented, the government killed tens of millions. They are too ignorant to know that the phrase ‘implement Marxism’ might be meaningless. It is like saying, ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.’

Marx never drew up a plan for a post-capitalist society. In the afterword to the second German edition of volume 1 of Capital, he mocks the very idea:

"Thus the Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that, on the one hand, I treat economics metaphysically, and on the other hand - imagine! - confine myself to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing recipes (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future." -- Karl Marx

The Engels 1880 pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which was taken from three chapters in Herr Duhring’s Revolution in Science, can also be cited here. Robert Owens, Charles Fourier, Saint Simon exemplify utopian socialism. According to Engels, they make up a program for future society out of their own heads and think it can be implemented by convincing others by reason and by demonstrating the success of a few voluntary communities. Unlike scientific socialism, they do not look at current trends in society and find a class base for the trends they look to continue.

I suppose one might introduce a few caveats about a short run program in the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto, a paragraph in the unpublished 1846 manuscript The German Ideology, the 1871 Marx pamphlet The Civil War in France, and the 1875 letter Critique of the Gotha Programme.

3.0 To Correct an Injustice Under Capitalism

In volume 1 of Capital, Marx describes how surplus value results from the exploitation of the workers. He defines the rate of exploitation, which is an algebraic quantity that can be approximated, at least, from the data in national income and product accounts.

Marx explicitly says that exploitation is not an injury to the worker:

"The circumstance, that on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour power costs only half a day's labour, while on the other hand the very same labour power can work during a whole day, that consequently the value which its use creates, is double what he pays for that use, this circumstance is, without doubt, a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injury to the seller." -- Karl Marx, Capital, chapter VII, Section 2

One might also look at a passage about the rights of man, Bentham, and so on towards the end of chapter VI of Capital, chapter VI. Also see the end of section 1 of chapter VII of Capital. All of this is in volume 1.

Engels, in the preface to the first German edition of The Poverty of Philosophy, re-iterates Marx's position:

"According to the laws of bourgeois economics, the greatest part of the product does not belong to the workers who have produced it. If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has nothing to do with economics. We are merely saying that this economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality. Marx, therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever greater degree; he says only that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact." -- Friedrich Engels

I have gone on about this before.

4.0 To Complete a Historical Trend

Marx provides a summary statement of the theory of historical materialism in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and a more detailed treatment in The German Ideology. In Capital, he writes:

"As soon as the process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or the expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. The integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation. This does re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.

The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people." -- Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Chapter XXXII

The above is more than usually quoted. I wanted to include the passage about the 'negation of the negation', where in the first negation one historical system is replaced by another. For example, the October revolution was one negation. You can see why Stalin left this dialectical principle out of Dialectical and Historical Materialism.

Marx has some empirical claims. Capitalism is to bring about greater interdependence among workers. Marx foresees the development of monopoly capitalism and globalism. Is his claim that misery of workers increases absolutely, not just relatively, with increased inequality? He does not foresee the aristocracy of labor in industrialized countries. If you look at the third world, perhaps the growth of capitalism is, indeed, accompanied by increased poverty of the masses. Anyways, perhaps the existence of a threatening alternative in the U.S.S.R. has a lot to do with the history of Europe and the U.S.A. in the last century. This existence certainly complicates any expectation that his predictions would come about in western Europe and the U.S.A.

Elsewhere, Marx writes about business cycles and the reproduction of the reserve army of the unemployed. Some have read Marx as saying that socialism will emerge as the result of increasingly more violent business cycles. The supposed tendency of the rate of profits to fall is in volume 3.

One might wonder how this analysis of historical trends is an advocacy of anything. Those trying to change the world might take comfort in being on the right side of history. On the other hand, maximalists did not feel obligated to participate in many day-to-day struggles since the revolution is inevitable.

5.0 As A Solution to the Alienation of the Worker

Alienation is a prosaic concept. Marx, in the Theories of Surplus Value, quotes James Stuart writing about the 'profit upon alienation'. When one sells a good one owns, one has alienated it from oneself.

The workers do not own the commodities they produce in a capitalist society. They have alienated their labor when they sell their labor power, and thus capitalists own commodities when they have been produced by others. These commodities are related to one another in various ways. Workers will use some commodities, such as semi-finished goods and fuel, to continue production, after they are bought and sold among the capitalists. Workers will use other commodities to (re)produce the machinery and plant with which they work. Still other commodities are consumption goods, which, typically, must also be sold among capitalists before they are available for retail purchase.

Workers produce more than this alien world of commodities, in which social relations among workers are expressed. They also reproduce the employer-employee relationship since, mostly, they continue to have nothing to sell but their labor-power. They need income to buy consumption goods, and the capital goods remain in the hands of others. And it is the capitalists that have the time and income to participate in the enjoyments of luxuries, including activities that decide on the government of society.

Marx writes about the fetishism of commodities in the first volume of Capital, and Lukacs writes about reification. In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels argue that communism will eliminate this division between this alien world and the workers outside it who have produced it. They think of the proletariat as a universal class, with an end to class conflict arriving with the proletarian revolution.

Is this justification for a communist revolution considerably diminished by mass suffrage and an increase in the absolute income of the working class? Even with these developments, money, prices, and buying and selling still continue. But they also continued in the Soviet Union and China after their communist revolutions. Maybe Marx should have outlined a blueprint for a post-capitalist society.

Engels To Mehring On False Consciousness

The following is from Friedrich Engels' letter to Franz Mehring of 14 July 1893:

London, 14 July 1893

Dear Mr. Mehring,

It has taken me until today to get round to thank you for the Lessing-Legende you were so kind as to send me. I did not wish merely to send you a formal note acknowledging receipt of the book, but also and at the same time to say something about it - its contents. Hence the delay.

Let me begin at the end - with the appendix, 'II ber den historischen Materialismus' in which you have brilliantly collated the essentials in a manner that must convince any impartial reader. If I have any criticism to make, it is that you accord me more merit than I deserve, even if one takes account of what I may, perhaps, have found out for myself - in course of time - but which Marx, with his swifter coup d'oeil and greater discernment, discovered much more quickly. If one has been fortunate enough to spend forty years collaborating with a man like Marx, one tends, during one's lifetime, to receive less recognition than one feels is due to one; when the greater man dies, however, the lesser may easily come to be overrated - and that is exactly what seems to have happened in my case; all this will eventually be put right by history, and by then one will be safely out of the way and know nothing at all about it.

Otherwise only one point has been omitted, a point which, however, was never given sufficient weight by Marx and myself in our work, and in regard to which we are all equally at fault. For we all of us began, as we were bound to do, by placing the main emphasis on the derivation of political, legal and other ideological conceptions, as of the actions induced by those conceptions, from economic fundamentals. In so doing we neglected the formal in favour of the substantial aspect, i.e. the manner in which the said conceptions, etc., arise. This provided our opponents with a welcome pretext for misinterpretation, not to say distortion, Paul Barth being a notable case in point.

Ideology is a process which is, it is true, carried out consciously by what we call a thinker, but with a consciousness that is spurious. The actual motives by which he is impelled remain hidden from him, for otherwise it would not be an ideological process. Hence the motives he supposes himself to have are either spurious or illusory. Because it is a mental process, he sees both its substance and its form as deriving solely from thought - either his own or that of his predecessors. He works solely with conceptual material which he automatically assumes to have been engendered by thought without inquiring whether it might not have some more remote origin unconnected therewith; indeed, he takes this for granted since, to him, all action is induced by thought, and therefore appears in the final analysis, to be motivated, by thought.

The historical ideologist (here historical is used as an omnibus term for political, legal, philosophical, theological, in short, for all spheres appertaining to society and not merely to nature) - the historical ideologist, then, possesses in every sphere of science a material which has originated independently in the thought of previous generations and has undergone an independent course of development of its own in the brains of these successive generations. True, external facts appertaining to one sphere or another may also have helped to determine that development but according to what has been tacitly assumed, those facts, themselves are merely the fruits of a mental process, and thus we still find ourselves in the realm of pure thought which would appear to have succeeded in assimilating even the most recalcitrant facts.

What has above all deluded the majority of people is this semblance of an independent history of political constitutions, legal systems and ideological conceptions in each individual sphere. When Luther and Calvin ‘overcome' the official Catholic faith, when Hegel 'overcomes' Fichte and Kant, or when, with his republican Contrat social, Rousseau indirectly 'overcomes' the constitutionalist Montesquieu, the process is one which remains within the confines of theology, philosophy and political science, which represents a stage in the history of these spheres of thought and never emerges from the sphere of thought. And since the advent of the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and ultimacy of capitalist production, even the overcoming of the Mercantilists by the Physiocrats and Adam Smith has come to be regarded merely as a victory of the concept, not as the conceptual reflection of changed economic facts, but as the correct perception, now at last achieved, of actual conditions as they have always and everywhere existed. If Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Philip Augustus had introduced free trade instead of becoming involved in the Crusades, we should have been spared five hundred years of misery and folly.

We have all, I believe, neglected this aspect of the matter, which I can only touch on here, to a greater extent than it deserves. It's the same old story - initially, form is always neglected in favour of substance. As I have said, I, too, have done this, never realising my mistake until after the event. Far be it from me, therefore, to reproach you on that score - as the senior culprit I am in no way entitled to do so, quite the contrary - but rather I would draw your attention to this point with a view to future occasions.

Hand in hand with this goes the ideologists' fatuous conception that, because we deny independent historical development to the various ideological spheres which play a role in history, we also deny them any historical efficacy. Underlying this is the ordinary, undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, quite regardless of any interaction. The gentlemen forget, often almost deliberately, that an historical element, once it is ushered into the world by other, ultimately economic, causes, will react in its turn, and may exert a reciprocal influence on its environment and even upon its own causes. Cf. Barth, for example, on the priestly caste and religion, your p. 475. 1 was delighted by the way you dismissed this quite incredibly superficial Johnnie. And they go and make the chap professor of history at Leipzig! Old Wachsmuth used also to be there; he too was not a little shallow-pated but he had a tremendous feeling for facts - a very different sort of chap.

For the rest I can only remark of this book what I said more than once about the articles when they appeared in the Neue Zeit, namely that it is by far the best account of the genesis of the Prussian state that exists, indeed I might even say the only good one, being in most cases an accurate and minutely detailed exposition of correlations. One can only regret that, while you were about it, you did not feel able to include the whole course of events up till Bismarck; nor can one help hoping that you may some day do so and present the whole picture, from the Elector Frederick William to old William, in context. You have, after all, already done the preliminary studies which you have all but completed at any rate so far as the essentials are concerned. And, after all, it has got to be done some time, before the rickety contraption collapses. The exploding of the monarchist-patriotic myths, if not exactly a necessary prerequisite for the elimination of that bulwark of class rule, the monarchy (a purely bourgeois republic in Germany having already become an anachronism before it has ever existed) is nevertheless one of the most effective means to that end.

You would then also be better off as regards space and opportunity when you come to depict local Prussian history as part of the whole German misère. This is a matter upon which my views differ here and there from your own, notably as regards the conditions responsible for the dismemberment of Germany and the failure of the German bourgeois revolution in the 16th century. If I get round to revising the introduction to my Peasant War, as I hope to do next winter, I shall be able to enlarge on the points in question. Not that I consider those you adduce to be incorrect, but I should include some others and marshal them rather differently.

I have always found, when studying German history - which is one long, continuous misère - that a true perspective can only be obtained by comparing it with the same periods in France, because what happens there is the exact opposite of what happens in Germany. There we have the establishment of the national state from the disjecta of the feudal state at the very time of our worst decline. There, a rare kind of objective logic permeates the whole course of events; in our case, a barren and ever more barren haphazardness. There, the English conqueror of the Middle Ages, who intervenes in favour of the Provençal nationality as opposed to North French nationality, represents foreign intervention; the English wars are, as it were, the equivalent of the Thirty Years' War which, however, ended with the ejection of foreign intervention and the subjection of the South by the North. Next comes the struggle between the central power and its Burgundian vassal, supported by his foreign possessions and playing the part of Brandenburg-Prussia, a struggle which, however, ends in victory for the central power and puts the seal on the establishment of the national state. And at the selfsame time in Germany, the national state (in so far as the 'German Kingdom' within the Holy Roman Empire can be called a national state) collapses completely, and the wholesale plundering of German territory begins. It is a comparison that is exceedingly humiliating to Germans, but all the more instructive for that, and now that our working men have again placed Germany in the van of the historical movement, it may be somewhat easier for us to swallow the ignominy of the past.

But what is of particular significance so far as developments in Germany are concerned is the fact that the two member states, which eventually partitioned the whole of the country between them, were neither of them purely German but were colonies on captured Slav territory - Austria a Bavarian, and Brandenburg a Saxon, colony; also the fact that they acquired power in Germany only with the support of foreign, non-German possessions - Austria with that of Hungary (not to mention Bohemia), Brandenburg with that of Prussia. Nothing of the kind happened on the western frontier, more at risk than anywhere else; on the northern frontier it was left to the Danes to protect Germany against the Danes, while in the South there was so little to protect that the frontier guards, the Swiss, were actually able to detach themselves from Germany!

But I am divagating - my loquacity can, at any rate, serve you as proof of the extent to which your book has stimulated me.

Once again, many thanks and warm regards from

Yours,

F. Engels

Three Quotations: Rousseau, Adam Smith, Engels

Here is Jean Jacques Rousseau:

"...whether those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and if strength of body or of mind, wisdom or virtue are always found in particular individuals, in proportion to their power or wealth: a question fit perhaps to be discussed by slaves in the hearing of their masters, but highly unbecoming to reasonable and free men in search of the truth." -- Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1755).

Early developers of political economy were not slavish. Here is Adam Smith explaining that returns to capital and land are the result of value added by labor not paid out in wages.

"In the early and rude state of society... the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer; and the quantity of labour commonly employed in acquiring or producing any commodity, is the only circumstance which can regulate the quantity of labour which it ought commonly to purchase, command, or exchange for.

As soon as stock has accumulated in the hands of particular persons, some of them will naturally employ it in setting to work industrious people, whom they will supply with materials and subsistence, in order to make a profit by the sale of their work, or by what their labour adds to the value of the materials. In exchanging the complete manufacture either for money, for labour, or for other goods, over and above what may be sufficient to pay the price of the materials, and the wages of the workmen, something must be given for the profits of the undertaker of the work, who hazards his stock in this adventure. The value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of their employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced. He could have no interest to employ them, unless he expected from the sale of their work something more than what was sufficient to replace his stock to him; and he could have no interest to employ a great stock rather than a small one, unless his profits were to bear some proportion to the extent of his stock...

...As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them, and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities, makes a third component part." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter VI (1776).

Many read the above as an account of how labor is exploited under capitalism. I find something similar in an essay a young Engels wrote before his life-long partnership with Marx:

"We have seen that capital and labour are initially identical; we see further from the explanations of the economist himself that, in the process of production, capital, the result of labour, is immediately transformed again into the substratum, into the material of labour; and that therefore the momentarily postulated separation of capital from labour is immediately superseded hy the unity of both. And yet the economist separates capital from labour, and yet clings to the division without giving any other recognition to their unity than by his definition of capital as "stored-up labour". The split between capital and labour resulting from private property is nothing but the inner dichotomy of labour corresponding to this divided condition and arising out of it. And after this separation is accomplished, capital is divided once more into the original capital and profit-the increment of capital, which it receives in the process of production; although in practice profit is immediately lumped together with capital and set into motion with it. Indeed, even profit is in its turn split into interest and profit proper. In the case of interest, the absurdity of these splits is carried to the extreme. The immorality of lending at interest, of receiving without working, merely for making a loan, though already implied in private property, is only too obvious, and has long ago been recognised for what it is by unprejudiced popular consciousness, which in such matters is usually right. All these subtle splits and divisions stem from the original separation of capital from labour and from the culmination of this separation- the division of mankind into capitalists and workers-a division which daily becomes ever more acute, and which, as we shall see, is bound to deepen. This separation, however, like the separation already considered of land from capital and labour, is in the final analysis an impossible separation. What share land, capital and labour each have in any particular product cannot be determined. The three magnitudes are incommensurable. The land produces the raw material, but not without capital and labour. Capital presupposes land and labour. And labour presupposes at least land, and usually also capital. The functions of these three elements are completely different, and are not to be measured by a fourth common standard. Therefore, when it comes to dividing the proceeds among the three elements under existing conditions, there is no inherent standard; it is an entirely alien and with regard to them fortuitous standard that decides— competition, the cunning right of the stronger. Rent implies competition; profit on capital is solely determined by competition; and the position with regard to wages we shall see presently." -- Friedrich Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844).

I think one can discard the conjectural history and moral overtones of the above and freely play in the mathematics of Leontief matrices. But many academic economists nowadays are imposing mind-forged manacles onto another generation.

Engels To Bloch in 1890

Engels had a lot to do with formulating orthodox interpretations of Marx in the period after Marx's death. So it is interesting to see what he says. I have transcribed another letter before, about the law of value. The following is about historical materialism and the relation of the superstructure to the economic base:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas - also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.

We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one. The Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic, causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations - which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power). Without making oneself ridiculous it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin of the High German consonant permutations, which widened the geographic partition wall formed by the mountains from the Sudetic range to the Taunus to form a regular fissure across all Germany.

In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant - the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals - each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) - do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.

I would furthermore ask you to study this theory from its original sources and not at second-hand; it is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote anything in which it did not play a part. But especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a most excellent example of its application. There are also many allusions to it in Capital. Then may I also direct you to my writings: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in which I have given the most detailed account of historical materialism which, as far as I know, exists.

Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-a-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly. And I cannot exempt many of the more recent "Marxists" from this reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too.... -- Engels to J. Bloch, 21 September 1890

I expected to see the phrase, "In the last instance" here. I guess that is how Lenin phrased the idea that the material base ultimately explains or determines the course of history. If you read Lenin as not so determinist, is Engels' letter consistent with Gramsci's ideas? One can see that Engels is almost quoting the second paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce...

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living..."

As I understand it, Engels' Anti-Dhüring was easier to obtain than even most of Marx's published writings during the period of the Second International and the founding of German social democracy. Engels has something to say about the application of dialectics to natural sciences in this book, an idea I find questionable. He does say that he needs to address a broad range of topics because "Herr Dhüring ... dealt with all things under the sun and then a few more." What should one make of Engels' mechanical analogy about about a parallelogram of forces? I like the idea that the result is not something anybody is necessary conscious of willing.

I also like the first three chapters of the last part of Anti-Dhüring, in which Engels (I gather with Marx's help) writes about the distinction between utopian and scientific socialism. These chapters were published as a stand-alone pamphlet. My take is that the experience of the Soviet Union, of no-longer-actually existing socialism, cannot discredit Marx's plans for a post-capitalist society, not because it was not "true communism", but because he refused on principle to draw up such plans. I suppose I ought to have a caveat about The Civil War in France and Critique of the Gotha Program. You might think those who want to abolish or transcend capitalism should draw up such plans, especially after these terrible experiences. And Marx and Engels do have somewhere, I guess, some naive comments about all that is needed for successful economic planning is widespread knowledge among the workers of arithmetic and accounting, and these comments should be criticized. I do not necessarily take issue with some criticisms. But, still, the position of Marx and Engels was not to draw up such plans.

Engels to Sombart in 1895

This transcription is taken from here.

Dear Sir:

Replying to your note of the 14th of last month, may I thank you for your kindness in sending me your work on Marx; I had already read it with great interest in the issue of the Archiv which Dr. H. Braun was good enough to send me, and was pleased for once to find such understanding of Capital at a German University. Naturally I can't altogether agree with the wording in which you render Marx’s exposition. Especially the definitions of the concept of value which you give on pages 576 and 577 seem to me to be rather all-embracing: I would first limit them historically by explicitly restricting them to the economic phase in which alone value has up to now been known, and could only have been known, namely, the forms of society in which commodity exchange, or commodity production, exists; in primitive communism value was unknown. And secondly it seems to me that the concept could also be defined in a narrower sense. But this would lead too far, in the main you are quite right.

Then, however, on page 586, you appeal directly to me, and the jovial manner with which you hold a pistol to my head made me laugh. But you need not worry, I shall "not assure you of the contrary." The logical sequence by which Marx deduces the general and equal rate of profit from the different values of s/C = s/(c + v) produced in various capitalist enterprises is completely foreign to the mind of the individual capitalist. Inasmuch as it has a historical parallel, that is to say, as far as it exists in reality outside our heads, it manifests itself for instance in the fact that certain parts of the surplus value produced by capitalist A over and above the rate of profit, or above his share of the total surplus value, are transferred to the pocket of capitalist B whose output of surplus value remains as a rule below the customary dividend. But this process takes place objectively, in the things, unconsciously, and we can only now estimate how much work was required in order to achieve a proper understanding of these matters. If the conscious co-operation of the individual capitalists had been necessary to establish the average rate of profit, if the individual capitalist had known that he produces surplus value and how much of it, and that frequently he has to hand over part of his surplus value, then the relationship between surplus value and profit would have been fairly obvious from the outset and would presumably have already been described by Adam Smith, if not Petty.

According to Marx's views all history up to now, in the case of big events, has come about unconsciously, that is, the events and their further consequences have not been intended; the ordinary actors in history have either wanted to achieve something different, or else what they achieved has led to quite different unforeseeable consequences. Applied to the economic sphere: the individual capitalists, each on his own, chase after the biggest profit. Bourgeois economy discovers that this race in which every one chases after the bigger profit results in the general and equal rate of profit, the approximately equal ratio of profit for each one. Neither the capitalists nor the bourgeois economists, however, realise that the goal of this race is the uniform proportional distribution of the total surplus value calculated on the total capital.

But how has the equalisation been brought about in reality? This is a very interesting point, about which Marx himself does not say much. But his way of viewing things is not a doctrine but a method. It does not provide ready-made dogmas, but criteria for further research and the method for this research. Here therefore a certain amount of work has to be carried out, since Marx did not elaborate it himself in his first draft. First of all we have here the statements on pages 153-156, III, I, which are also important for your rendering of the concept of value and which prove that the concept has or had more reality than you ascribe to it. When commodity exchange began, when products gradually turned into commodities, they were exchanged approximately according to their value. It was the amount of labour expended on two objects which provided the only standard for their quantitative comparison. Thus value had a direct and real existence at that time. We know that this direct realisation of value in exchange ceased and that now it no longer happens. And I believe that it won’t be particularly difficult for you to trace the intermediate links, at least in general outline, that lead from directly real value to the value of the capitalist mode of production, which is so thoroughly hidden that our economists can calmly deny its existence. A genuinely historical exposition of these processes, which does indeed require thorough research but in return promises amply rewarding results, would be a very valuable supplement to Capital.

Finally, I must also thank you for the high opinion which you have formed of me if you consider that I could have made something better of volume III. I cannot share your opinion, and believe I have done my duty by presenting Marx in Marx's words, even at the risk of requiring the reader to do a bit more thinking for himself. ...

If I knew more, I think I might not agree with Sombart's take on Marx.

If somebody started going on about a theory of value, without context, you might expect them to talk about what people do or should want, about what things are or should be worth in some moral sense. Maybe such a discussion should draw on the philosophical branches of aesthtics or ethics. Or one might expect to see an exposition of some substantial sociological theory explaining the tastes of people, perhaps drawing on history and where they are in society. Or maybe you might expect a formal characterization of utility functions and revealed preferences.

None of the above, though, have anything to do with Marx's law of value. I think he is clear that he does not expect people in a capitalist economy to be conscious of the labor value embodied in commodities. He says such in the section on commodity fetishism:

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour... the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things...

...Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. -- K. Marx, Capital, vol. 1.

The law of value is about a process in a capitalist economy that takes place behind people's backs. You might find somebody telling you that when they go shopping, they do not make decisions on the basis of the relative time it takes to make the commodities which they are choosing between. Nor do businessmen make investment decisions on the basis of the labor embodied in produced commodities, including the labor embodied in the means of production needed to manufacture these commodities. If somebody points out these facts to you, they are agreeing with Marx, not refuting him.

I read Engels as re-iterating these points when he says that the law of value, more or less, is "completely foreign to the mind of the individual capitalist". I also see Engels here echoing what has become known as the historical transformation problem.

Marx And Commentators On Marx On The Justice Of Capitalism (Part 3 Of 3)

In part 1, I quoted Marx arguing against criticizing capitalism on the basis that it is unfair. In part 2, I showed some current scholars are well aware of this reading of Marx. Here I look back at Engels and the golden age of the Second International. Lenin, of course, had a world-wide impact on history. He wrote a lot, but the pamphlet from which the following quotation is taken is one of his more well-known works:

"In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx goes into some detail to disprove the Lassallean idea of the workers' receiving under Socialism the 'undiminished' or 'full product of their labour.' Marx shows that out of the whole of the social labour of society, it is necessary to deduct a reserve fund, a fund for the expansion of production, for the replacement of worn-out machinery, and so on; then, also, out of the means of consumption must be deducted a fund for the expenses of management, for schools, hospitals, homes for the aged, and so on..." -- V. I. Lenin (1932), Chapter V., Sect. 3

I stumbled upon a book by Boudin in some used bookstore. I don't know much about him. I think he was an American. Here we see that even a less celebrated commentator on Marx gets my point in this series of posts:

"In his great work on capital and interest, where more than one hundred pages are devoted to the criticism of this theory, Böhm-Bawerk starts out his examination of the theory by characterizing it as the 'theory of exploitation' and the whole trend of his argument is directed towards one objective point: to prove that the supposedly main thesis of this theory, that the income of the capitalists is the result of exploitation, is untrue; that in reality the workingman is getting all that is due to him under the present system. And the whole of his argument is colored by his conception of the discussion as a controversy relative to the ethical merits or demerits of the capitalist system... We therefore advisedly stated in the last chapter that in employing the adjectives 'necessary' and 'surplus' in connection with labor or value, it is not intended to convey any meaning of praise or justification in the case of the one, nor of condemnation or derogation in the case of the other. As a matter of fact, Marx repeatedly stated that the capitalist was paying to the workingman all that was due him when he paid him the fair market value of his labor power. In describing the process of capitalist production, Marx used the words, 'necessary' and 'surplus' in characterizing the amounts of labor which are necessarily employed in reproducing what society already possesses and that employed in producing new commodities or values. He intended to merely state the facts as he saw them, and not to hold a brief for anybody." -- Louis Boudin (1907).

Engels had a lot to do with how Marx is interpreted and understood. Some question whether some of Engels' interpretations were misleading and too oversimplified. But here I think Engels is correct in his overall point about what Marx wrote:

"The above application of the Ricardian theory, that the entire social product belongs to the workers as their product, because they are the sole real producers, leads directly to communism. But, as Marx indicates too in the above-quoted passage, formally it is economically incorrect, for it is simply an application of morality to economics. According to the laws of bourgeois economics, the greatest part of the product does not belong to the workers who have produced it. If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has nothing immediately to do with economics. We are merely saying that this economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality. Marx, therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever greater degree; he says only that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact. But what formally may be economically incorrect, may all the same be correct from the view of world history. If the moral consciousness of the mass declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it has done in the case of slavery or serf labour, that is a proof that the fact itself has been outlived, that other economic facts have made their appearance, owing to which the former has become unbearable and untenable. Therefore, a very true economic content may be concealed behind the formal economic incorrectness." -- Frederick Engels, Preface to the First German Edition of Marx (1975)

• Boudin, Louis B. (1907). The Theoretical System of Karl Marx In The Light of Recent Criticism, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co.
• Lenin, V. I. (1932). State and Revolution, New York: International Publishers
• Marx, Karl (1975). The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow: Progress Publishers