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Wage Labour and Capital
KARL MARX
Shortly after adumbrating the materialist conception of history in the 1844 manuscripts and formulating it comprehensively in Part I of The German Ideology, Marx turned to the economic studies that were going to preoccupy him in the ensuing years. This did not signify any change of interests or outlook but was the logical outgrowth of the position taken in his earlier writings. If the thesis on "a
Having first presented it in lectures to a German workers' society in Brussels in December, 1847, Marx printed the work in April, 1849, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, of which he was editor-in-chief. Several pamphlet editions appeared in later years. In editing it for the German edition of 1891 (the version that appears here), Engels made some changes in the text, mainly centering in the substitu
Despite this, it may be said that what Marx produced in the lectures of late 1847 was the future argument of Capital in embryo. The work appears here in condensed form.
I
From various quarters we have been reproached with not having presented the economic relations which constitute the material foundation of the present class struggles and national struggles. We have designedly touched upon these relations only where they directly forced themselves to the front in political conflicts.
* * *
Now, after our readers have seen the class struggle develop in colossal political forms in 1848, the time has come to deal more closely with the economic relations themselves on which the existence of the bourgeoisie and its class rule, as well as the slavery of the workers, are founded.
* * *
Now, therefore, for the first question: What are wages? How are they determined?
If workers were asked: "How much are your wages?" one would reply: "I get a mark a day from my employer"; another, "I get two marks," and so on. According to the different trades to which they belong, they would mention different sums of money which they receive from their respective employers for the performance of a particular piece of work, for example, weaving a yard of linen or typesetting a
The capitalist, it seems, therefore, buys their labour with money. They sell him their labour for money. But this is merely the appearance. In reality what they sell to the capitalist for money is their labour power. The capitalist buys this labour power for a day, a week, a month, etc. And after he has bought it, he uses it by having the workers work for the stipulated time. For the same sum with
* * *
Labour power is, therefore, a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to capital. Why does he sell it? In order to live.
But the exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker's own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life-activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labour as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his l
The serf belongs to the land and turns over to the owner of the land the fruits thereof. The free labourer, on the other hand, sells himself and, indeed, sells himself piecemeal. He sells at auction eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his life, day after day, to the highest bidder, to the owner of the raw materials, instruments of labour and means of subsistence, that is, to the capitalist. The w
* * *
Wages will rise and fall according to the relation of supply and demand, according to the turn taken by the competition between the buyers of labour power, the capitalists, and the sellers of labour power, the workers. The fluctuations in wages correspond in general to the fluctuations in prices of commodities. Within these fluctuations, however, the price of labour will be determined by the cost
What, then, is the cost of production of labour power?
It is the cost required for maintaining the worker as a worker and of developing him into a worker.
The less the period of training, therefore, that any work requires the smaller is the cost of production of the worker and the lower is the price of his labour, his wages. In those branches of industry in which hardly any period of apprenticeship is required and where the mere bodily existence of the worker suffices, the cost necessary for his production is almost confined to the commodities neces
Another consideration, however, also comes in. The manufacturer in calculating his cost of production and, accordingly, the price of the products takes into account the wear and tear of the instruments of labour. If, for example, a machine costs him 1,000 marks and wears out in ten years, he adds 100 marks annually to the price of the commodities so as to be able to replace the worn-out machine by
The cost of production of simple labour power, therefore, amounts to the cost of existence and reproduction of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and reproduction constitutes wages. Wages so determined are called the wage minimum. This wage minimum, like the determination of the price of commodities by the cost of production in general, does not hold good for the single individual but
Now that we have arrived at an understanding of the most general laws which regulate wages like the price of any other commodity, we can go into our subject more specifically.
III
Capital consists of raw materials, instruments of labour and means of subsistence of all kinds, which are utilised in order to produce new raw materials, new instruments of labour and new means of subsistence. All these component parts of capital are creations of labour, products of labour, accumulated labour. Accumulated labour which serves as a means of new production is capital.
So say the economists.
What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other.
A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton-spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is money or sugar the price of sugar.
In production, men not only act on nature but also on one another. They produce only by co-operating in a certain way and mutually exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations with one another and only within these social connections and relations does their action on nature, does production, take place.
These social relations into which the producers enter with one another, the conditions under which they exchange their activities and participate in the whole act of production, will naturally vary according to the character of the means of production. With the invention of a new instrument of warfare, firearms, the whole internal organisation of the army necessarily changed; the relationships wit
Thus the social relations within which individuals produce, the social relations of production, change, are transformed, with the change and development of the material means of production, the productive forces. The relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society, and, specifically, a society at a definite stage of historical development, a socie
Capital, also, is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois production relation, a production relation of bourgeois society. Are not the means of subsistence, the instruments of labour, the raw materials of which capital consists, produced and accumulated under given social conditions, in definite social relations? Are they not utilised for new production under given social conditions, in
Capital consists not only of means of subsistence, instruments of labour and raw materials, not only of material products; it consists just as much of exchange values. All the products of which it consists are commodities. Capital is, therefore, not only a sum of material products; it is a sum of commodities, of exchange values, of social magnitudes.
Capital remains the same, whether we put cotton in place of wool, rice in place of wheat or steamships in place of railways, provided only that the cotton, the rice, the steamships-the body of capital-have the same exchange value, the same price as the wool, the wheat, the railways in which it was previously incorporated. The body of capital can change continually without the capital suffering the
But while all capital is a sum of commodities, that is, of exchange values, not every sum of commodities, of exchange values, is capital.
Every sum of exchange values is an exchange value. Every separate exchange value is a sum of exchange values. For instance, a house that is worth 1,000 marks is an exchange value of 1,000 marks. A piece of paper worth a pfennig is a sum of exchange values of one-hundred hundredths of a pfennig . Products which are exchangeable for others are commodities. The particular ratio in which they are exch
How, then, does any amount of commodities, of exchange value, become capital?
By maintaining and multiplying itself as an independent social power, that is, as the power of a portion of society, by means of its exchange for direct, living labour power. The existence of a class which possesses nothing but its capacity to labour is a necessary prerequisite of capital.
It is only the domination of accumulated, past, materialised labour over direct, living labour that turns accumulated labour into capital.
Capital does not consist in accumulated labour serving living labour as a means for new production. It consists in living labour serving accumulated labour as a means of maintaining and multiplying the exchange value of the latter.
What takes place in the exchange between capitalist and wageworker?
The worker receives means of subsistence in exchange for his labour power, but the capitalist receives in exchange for his means of subsistence labour, the productive activity of the worker, the creative power whereby the worker not only replaces what he consumes but gives to the accumulated labour a greater value than it previously possessed. The worker receives a part of the available means of s
Let us take an example: a tenant farmer gives his day labourer five silver groschen a day. For these five silver groschen the labourer works all day on the farmer's field and thus secures him a return of ten silver groschen. The farmer not only gets the value replaced that he has to give the day labourer; he doubles it. He has therefore employed, consumed, the five silver groschen that he gave to
Does a worker in a cotton factory produce merely cotton textiles? No, he produces capital. He produces values which serve afresh to command his labour and by means of it to create new values.
Capital can only increase by exchanging itself for labour power, by calling wage labour to life. The labour power of the wage-worker can only be exchanged for capital by increasing capital, by strengthening the power whose slave it is. Hence, increase of capital is increase of the proletariat, that is, of the working class.
The interests of the capitalist and those of the worker are, therefore, one and the same, assert the bourgeois and their economists. Indeed! The worker perishes if capital does not employ him. Capital perishes if it does not exploit labour power, and in order to exploit it, it must buy it. The faster capital intended far production, productive capital, increases, the more, therefore, industry pros
The indispensable condition for a tolerable situation of the worker is, therefore, the fastest possible growth of productive capital.
But what is the growth of productive capital? Growth of the power of accumulated labour over living labour. Growth of the domination of the bourgeoisie over the working class. If wage labour produces the wealth of others that rules over it, the power that is hostile to it, capital, then the means of employment, the means of subsistence, flow back to it from this hostile power, on condition that it
To say that the interests of capital and those of the workers are one and the same is only to say that capital and wage labour are two sides of one and the same relation. The one conditions the other, just as usurer and squanderer condition each other.
As long as the wage-worker is a wage-worker his lot depends up on capital. That is the much-vaunted community of interests between worker and capitalist.
IV
If capital grows, the mass of wage labour grows, the number of wage-workers grows; in a ward, the domination of capital extends over a greater number of individuals.
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To say that the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital is only to say that the more rapidly the worker increases the wealth of others, the richer will be the crumbs that fall to him, the greater is the number of workers that can be employed and called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent on capital be increased.
We have thus seen that:
Even the most favourable situation for the working class, the most rapid possible growth of capital, however much it may improve the material existence of the worker, does not remove the antagonism between his interests and the interests of the bourgeoisie, the interests of the capitalists. Profit and wages remain as before in inverse porportion.
If capital is growing rapidly, wages may rise; the profit of capital rises incomparably more rapidly. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social gulf that divides him from the capitalist has widened.
Finally :
To say that the most favourable condition for wage labour is the most rapid possible growth of productive capital is only to say that the more rapidly the working class increases and enlarges the power that is hostile to it, the wealth that does not belong to it and that rules over it, the more favourable will be the conditions under which it is allowed to labour anew at increasing bourgeois wealt
V
Are growth of productive capital and rise of wages really so inseparably connected as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not take their word for it. We must not even believe them when they say that the fatter capital is, the better will its slave be fed. The bourgeoisie is too enlightened, it calculates too well, to share the prejudices of the feudal lord who makes a display by the brillia
We must, therefore, examine more closely:
How does the growth of productive capital affect wages?
If, on the whole, the productive capital of bourgeois society grows, a more manifold accumulation of labour takes place. The capitals increase in number and extent. The numerical increase of the capitals increases the competition between the capitalists. The increasing extent of the capitals provides the means for bringing more powerful labour armies with more gigantic instruments of war into the
One capitalist can drive another from the field and capture his capital only by selling more cheaply. In order to be able to sell more cheaply without ruining himself, he must produce more cheaply, that is, raise the productive power of labour as much as possible. But the productive power of labour is raised, above all, by a greater division of labour, by a more universal introduction and continua
If, now, by a greater division of labour, by the utilisation of new machines and their improvement, by more profitable and extensive exploitation of natural forces, one capitalist has found the means of producing with the same amount of labour or of accumulated labour a greater amount of products, of commodities, than his competitors, if he can, for example, produce a whole yard of linen in the sa
He could continue to sell half a yard of linen at the old market price; this would, however, be no means of driving his opponents from the field and of enlarging his own sales. But in the same measure in which his production has expanded, his need to sell has also increased. The more powerful and costly means of production that he has called into life enable him, indeed, to sell his commodities mo
The capitalist will not, however, sell a whole yard as cheaply as his competitors sell half a yard, although the production of the whole yard does not cost him more than the half yard costs the others. Otherwise he would not gain anything extra but only get back the cost of production by the exchange. His possibly greater income would be derived from the fact of having set a larger capital into mo
However, the privileged position of our capitalist is not of long duration; other competing capitalists introduce the same machines, the same division of labour, introduce them on the same or on a larger scale, and this introduction will become so general that the price of linen is reduced not only below its old, but below its new cost of production.
The capitalists find themselves, therefore, in the same position relative to one another as before the introduction of the new means of production, and if they are able to supply by these means double the production at the same price, they are now forced to supply the double product below the old price. On the basis of this new cost of production, the same game begins again. More division of labou
We see how in this way the mode of production and the means of production are continually transformed, revolutionised, how the division of labour is necessarily followed by greater division of labour, the application of machinery by still greater application of machinery, work on a large scale by work on a still larger scale.
That is the law which again and again throws bourgeois production out of its old course and which compels capital to intensify the productive forces of labour, because it has intensified them, it, the law which gives capital no rest and continually whispers in its ear:
"Go on! Go on! "
This law is none other than that which, within the fluctuations of trade periods, necessarily levels out the price of a commodity to its cost of production.
However powerful the means of production which a capitalist brings into the field, competition will make these means of production universal and from the moment when it has made them universal, the only result of the greater fruitfulness of his capital is that he must now supply for the same price ten, twenty, a hundred times as much as before. But, as he must sell perhaps a thousand times as much
Whatever the power of the means of production employed may be, competition seeks to rob capital of the golden fruits of this power by bringing the price of the commodities back to the cost of production, by thus making cheaper production-the supply of ever greater amounts of products for the same total price-an imperative law to the same extent as production can be cheapened, that is, as more can
If now we picture to ourselves this feverish simultaneous agitation on the whole world market, it will be comprehensible how the growth, accumulation and concentration of capital results in an uninterrupted division of labour, and in the application of new and the perfecting of old machinery precipitately and on an ever more gigantic scale.
But how do these circumstances, which are inseparable from the growth of productive capital, affect the determination of wages?
The greater division of labour enables one worker to do the work of five, ten or twenty; it therefore multiplies competition among the workers fivefold, tenfold and twentyfold. The workers do not only compete by one selling himself cheaper than another; they compete by one doing the work of five, ten, twenty; and the division of labour, introduced by capital and continually increased, compels the
Further, as the division of labour increases, labour is simplified. The special skill of the worker becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple, monotonous productive force that does not have to use intense bodily or intellectual faculties. His labour becomes a labour that anyone can perform. Hence, competitors crowd upon him on all sides, and besides we remind the reader that the more
Therefore, as labour becomes more unsatisfying, more repulsive, competition increases and wages decrease. The worker tries to keep up the amount of his wages by working more, whether by working longer hours or by producing more in one hour. Driven by want, therefore, he still further increases the evil effects of the division of labour. The result is that the more he works the less wages he receiv
Machinery brings about the same results on a much greater scale, by replacing skilled workers by unskilled, men by women, adults by children. It brings about the same results, where it is newly introduced, by throwing the hand workers on to the streets in masses, and, where it is developed, improved and replaced by more productive machinery, by discharging workers in smaller batches. We have portr
The economists tell us, it is true, that the workers rendered superfluous by machinery find new branches of employment.
They dare not assert directly that the same workers who are discharged find places in the new branches of labour. The facts cry out too loudly against this lie. They really only assert that new means of employment will open up for other component sections of the working class, for instance, for the portion of the young generation of workers that was ready to enter the branch of industry which has
Let us suppose, however, that those directly driven out of their jobs by machinery, and the entire section of the new generation that was already on the watch for this employment, find a new occupation. Does any one imagine that it will be as highly paid as that which has been lost? That would contradict all the laws of economics. We have seen how modern industry always brings with it the substitu
How, then, could a mass of workers who have been thrown out of one branch of industry owing to machinery find refuge in another, unless the latter is lower, worse paid?
The workers who work in the manufacture of machinery itself have been cited as an exception. As soon as more machinery is demanded and used in industry, it is said, there must necessarily be an increase of machines, consequently of the manufacture of machines, and consequently of the employment of workers in the manufacture of machines; and the workers engaged in this branch of industry are claime
Since the year 1840 this assertion, which even before was only half true, has lost all semblance of truth because ever more versatile machines have been employed in the manufacture of machinery, no more and no less than in the manufacture of cotton yarn, and the workers employed in the machine factories, confronted by highly elaborate machines, can only play the part of highly unelaborate machines
But in place of the man who has been discharged owing to the machine, the factory employs maybe three children and one woman. And did not the man's wages have to suffice for the three children and a woman? Did not the minimum of wages have to suffice to maintain and to propagate the race? What, then, does this favourite bourgeois phrase prove? Nothing more than that now four times as many workers'
Let us sum up: The more productive capital grows, the more the division of labour and the application of machinery expands. The more the division of labour and the application of machinery expands, the more competition among the workers expands and the more their wages contract.
In addition, the working class gains recruits from the higher strata of society also; a mass of petty industrialists and small rentiers are hurled down into its ranks and have nothing better to do than urgently stretch out their arms alongside those of the workers. Thus the forest of uplifted arms demanding work becomes ever thicker, while the arms themselves become ever thinner.
That the small industrialist cannot survive in a contest one of the first conditions of which is to produce on an ever greater scale, that is, precisely to be a large and not a small industrialist, is self-evident.
That the interest on capital decreases in the same measure as the mass and number of capitals increase, as capital grows; that, therefore, the small rentier can no longer live on his interest but must throw himself into industry, and, consequently, help to swell the ranks of the small industrialists and thereby of candidates for the proletariat-all this surely requires no further explanation.
Finally, as the capitalists are compelled, by the movement described above, to exploit the already existing gigantic means of production on a larger scale and to set in motion all the mainsprings of credit to this end, there is a corresponding increase in industrial earthquakes, in which the trading world can only maintain itself by sacrificing a part of wealth, of products and even of productive
The Coming Upheaval
KARL MARX
This concluding passage from Marx's anti-Proudhon tract The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) closes a discussion which takes England as the representative case of a revolution-bent country. It gives a vivid preview of the revolutionary upheaval towards which Marx believed that the class struggle in all capitalist countries was irresistibly moving. It was, in a way, Capital's conclusion stated in advan
* * *
Economic conditions first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The intere
An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society. For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social reIations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of
Does this mean that after the fall of the old society there will be a new class domination culminating in a new political power? No.
The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class, just as the condition for the liberation of the third estate, of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates and all orders.
The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.
Meanwhile the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of classes should culminate in brutal "contradiction," the shock of body against body, as its final dénouement?
Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social.
It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that "social evolutions" will cease to be "political revolutions." Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: Combat or death : bloody struggle or extinction. It is thus that the question is inexorably put.1
1. George Sand, Jean Ziska. A Historical Novel.
Class Struggle and Mode of Production
KARL MARX
A brief but notable statement by Marx of what he considered most innovative in his analysis of the human historical process occurs in a letter of March 5, 1852, to his friend Joseph Weydemeyer, then living in New York.
* * *
And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular
The Grundrisse
KARL MARX
Comprising seven notebooks written in 1857-58, this preparatory effort by Marx to put together the results of his economic studies was first published by the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin in. Moscow in 1939-41 as Foundations (Grundrisse) of the Critique of Political Economy. In recent years it has attracted growing attention because of the intrinsic interest of various parts, because it forms an
The Introduction, besides stating Marx's view of the method of political economy, develops his thesis on production as the basic category; shows (in the final paragraph of its third section) that the work on which he was embarked, and which later came to fruition in Capital, was no more than one part of a more ambitious total project; and concludes with a discussion of the timeless character of gr
The translation and footnotes are by Martin Nicolaus. The capitalized letters and section headings following the Introduction have been added by the editor of this reader.
*This last point is made compellingly by Martin Nicolaus in his informative Foreword to Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 7. The same point could be made with reference to the 1844 manuscripts.
** Some have interpreted these passages as heralding the end of manual labour under capitalism. Nicolaus (Foreword, p. 52) objects that "neither here nor anywhere else in Marx's work is there a prediction that manual industrial labour will be abolished in industrial society
. . . . "
A. Introduction
(1) PRODUCTION
Independent Individuals. Eighteenth-Century Ideas
The object before us, to begin with, material production.
Individuals producing in society-hence socially determined individual production-is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades,1 which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural lif
1. Utopias on the lines of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
2. Sir James Steuart (1712-80), "the rational exponent of the Monetary and Mercantile System" (Marx), an adherent of the Stuart cause who went into exile in 1745 and pursued economic studies on the Continent. Author of An lnquiry into the Principles of Political Economy ( London, 1767, 2 vols.; Dublin, 1770, 3 vols.-the edition used by Marx).
The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clans. Only in the eighteenth century, i
confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of
the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a INSERT TEXT,3 not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society-a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dyn
is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language with out individuals living together and talking to each other. There is no point in dwelling on this any longer. The point could go entirely unmentioned if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for the eighteenth-century characters, had not been earnestly pulled back into the centre of the most modern economics by Bastiat,4 Carey,5 P
3. A political animal.
4. Frederic Bastiat (1801-50), French economist, and "modern bagman of Free Trade" (Marx). A believer in Laissez-faire and the natural harmony of interests between labour and capital; a fierce opponent of socialism in theory and in practice (as deputy in the Constituent and Legislative assemblies of 1848 to 1851).
5. Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879), American economist, opponent of Ricardian pessimism ("Carey, who does not understand Ricardo"-Marx), believed in state intervention to establish harmony between the interests of labour and of capital, and in the tendency of real wages to rise.
6. Of a commonplace (mind). Marx refers here to Bastiat's Harmonies économiques (Paris, 1851), pp. 16-19, and Carey's Principles of Political Economy, Pt. I (Philadelphia, 1837), pp. 7-8.
Eternalization of historic relations of production. -Production and distribution in general. -Property
Whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development-production by social individuals. It might seem, therefore, that in order to talk about production at all we must either pursue the process of historic development through its different phases, or declare beforehand that we a re dealing with a specific historic epoch such as e.g. mod
If there is no production in general, then there is also no general production. Production is always a particular branch of production-e.g., agriculture, cattle-raising, manufactures etc.-or it is a totality. Butt political economy is not technology. The relation of the general characteristics of production at a given stage of social development to the particular forms of production to be develope
It is the fashion to preface a work of economics with a general part-and precisely this part figures under the title "production" ( see for example J. S. Mill )7 -treating of the general preconditions of all production. This general part consists or is alleged to consist of ( 1) the conditions without which production is not possible. I.e., in fact, to indicate nothing more than the essential mome
But none of all this is the economists' real concern in this general part. The aim is, rather, to present production-see e.g. Mill-as distinct from distribution etc., as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded. This is the more or less con
to 1. All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society. In this sense it is a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a precondition of production. But it is altogether ridiculous to leap from that to a specific form of property, e.g. private property. (Which further and equally presupposes an antithetical form, non-prop
to 2. Protection of acquisitions etc. When these trivialities are reduced to their real content, they tell more than their preachers know. Namely that every form of production creates its own legal relations, form of government, etc. In bringing things which are organically related into an accidental relation, into a merely reflective connection, they display their crudity and lack of conceptual u
7. John Stuart Mill (1806-73), English political theorist and economist; radical in politics, confusedly and eclectically Ricardian in economics. His Principles of Political Economy (London, 1948), begin in Bk. I, Ch. 1, with the analysis of production.
When the social conditions corresponding to a specific stage of production are only just arising, or when they are already dying out, there are, naturally, disturbances in production, although to different degrees and with different effects.
To summarize: There are characteristics which all stages of production have in common, and which are established as general ones by the mind; but the so-called general preconditions of all production are nothing mote than these abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped.
(2) THE GENERAL RELATION OF PRODUCTION TO DISTRIBUTION, EXCHANGE, CONSUMPTION
Before going further in the analysis of production, it is necessary to focus on the various categories which the economists line up next to it.
The obvious, trite notion: in production the members of society appropriate (create, shape) the products of nature in accord with human needs; distribution determines the proportion in which the individual shares in the product; exchange delivers the particular products into which the individual desires to convert the portion which distribution has assigned to him; and finally, in consumption, the
Distribution determines the relation in which products fall to individuals (the amount); exchange determines the production in which the individual demands the portion allotted to him by distribution.
Thus production, distribution, exchange and consumption form a regular syllogism; production is the generality, distribution and exchange the particularity, and consumption the singularity in which the whole is joined together. This is admittedly a coherence, but a shallow one. Production is determined by general natural laws, distribution by social accident, and the latter may therefore promote p
The opponents of the political economists-whether inside or outside its realm-who accuse them of barbarically tearing apart things which belong together, stand either on the same ground as they, or beneath them. Nothing is more common than the reproach that the political economists view production too much as an end in itself, that distribution is just as important. This accusation is based precis
Consumption and Production
(a1) Production is also immediately consumption. Twofold consumption, subjective and objective: the individual not only develops his abilities in production, but also expends them, uses them up in the act of production, just as natural procreation is a consumption of life forces. Secondly: consumption of the means of production, which become worn out through use, and are partly (e.g. in combustion
8. "Determination is negation," i.e., given the undifferentiated self-identity of the universal world substance, to attempt to introduce particular determinations is to negate this self-identity (Spinoza, Letters. No. 50. to J. Jelles, 2 June 1674).
But this definition of productive consumption is advanced only for the purpose of separating consumption as identical with production from consumption proper, which is conceived rather as the destructive antithesis to production. Let us therefore examine consumption proper.
Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant. It is clear that in taking in food, for example, which is a form of consumption, the human being produces his own body. But this is also true of every kind of consumption which in one way or another produces human beings in some particular aspect. Co
Production, then, is also immediately consumption, consumption is also immediately production. Each is immediately its opposite. But at the same time a mediating movement takes place between the two. Production mediates consumption; it creates the latter's material; without it, consumption would lack an object. But consumption also mediates production, in that it alone creates for the products the
9. In English in the original.
1. "Potentially." Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. VIII, Ch. 6, p. 2 .
2. The manuscript has: "for the product is production not only as . . . ."
3. The manuscript has “for production.”
Production, for its part, correspondingly (1) furnishes the material and the object for consumption.3 Consumption without an object is not consumption; therefore, in this respect, production creates, produces consumption. (2) But the object is not the only thing which production creates for consumption . Production also gives consumption its specificity, its character, its finish. Just as consumpt
The identities between consumption and production thus appear threefold:
(1) Immediate identity: Production is consumption, consumption is production. Consumptive production. Productive consumption. The political economists call both productive consumption. But then make a further distinction. The first figures as reproduction, the second as productive consumption. All investigations into the first concern productive or unproductive labour; investigations into the seco
(2) [In the sense] that one appears as a means for the other, is mediated by the other: this is expressed as their mutual dependence; a movement which relates them to one another, makes them appear indispensable to one another, but still leaves them external to each other. Production creates the material, as external object, for consumption; consumption creates the need, as internal object, as aim
(3) Not only is production immediately consumption and consumption immediately production, not only is production a means for consumption and consumption the aim of production, i. e. each supplies the other with its object (production supplying the external object of consumption, consumption the conceived object of production); but also, each of them, apart from being immediately the other, and ap
Thereupon, nothing simpler for a Hegelian than to posit production and consumption as identical. And this has been done not only by socialist belletrists but by prosaic economists themselves, e.g. Say4; in the form that when one looks at an entire people, its production is its consumption. Or, indeed, at humanity in the abstract. Storch5 demonstrated Say's error, namely that e .g. a people does no
4. Jean-Baptiste Say (1767 - 1832) , "the inane Say," who "superficially condensed political economy into a textbook" (Marx), a businessman who popularized and vulgarized the doctrines of Adam Smith in his Traite d'économie politique (Paris, 1803) .
5. Henrich Friedr ich Storch (1766 - 1835), Professor of Political Economy in the Russian Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg. Say issued Storch's work Cours d'economie politique with critical notes in 1823; he attacked Say's interpretation of his views in Considérations sur l a nature du revenu national (Paris, 1824), pp. 144 - 59.
In society, however, the producer's relation to the product, once the latter is finished, is an external one, and its return to the subject depends on his relations to other individuals. He does not come into possession of it directly. Nor is its immediate appropriation his purpose when he produces in society. Distribution steps between the producers and the products, hence between production and
Now, does distribution stand at the side of and outside production as an autonomous sphere?
Distribution and Production
When one examines the usual works of economics, it is immediately striking that everything in them is posited doubly. For example, ground rent, wages, interest and profit figure under distribution, while land, labour and capital figure under production as agents of production. In the case of capital, now, it is evident from the outset that it is posited doubly, (1) as agent of production, (2) as s
The category of wages, similarly, is the same as that which is examined under a different heading as wage labour: the characteristic which labour here possesses as an agent of production appears as a characteristic of distribution. If labour were not specified as wage labour, then the manner in which it shares in the products would not appear as wages; as, for example, under slavery. Finally, to t
Thus, economists such as Ricardo, who are the most frequently accused of focusing on production alone, have defined distribution as the exclusive object of economics, because they instinctively conceived the forms of distribution as the most specific expression into which the agents of production of a given society are cast. To the single individual, of course, distribution appears as a social law
As regards whole societies, distribution seems to precede production and to determine it in yet another respect, almost as if it were a pre-economic fact. A conquering people divides the land among the conquerors, thus imposes a certain distribution and form of property in land, and thus determines production. Or it enslaves the conquered and so makes slave labour the foundation of production. Or
In the shallowest conception, distribution appears as the distribution of products, and hence as further removed from and quasi-independent of production. But before distribution can be the distribution of products, it is: (1) the distribution of the instruments of production, and (2), which is a further specification of the same relation, the distribution of the members of the society among the d
6. David Ricardo, On the Principles of ed. (London, 1821), preface, p. v. Political Economy and Taxation. 3rd
The question of the relation between this production-determining distribution, and production, belongs evidently within production itself. If it is said that, since production must begin with a certain distribution of the instruments of production, it follows that distribution at least in this sense precedes and forms the presupposition of production, then the reply must be that production does in
The questions raised above all reduce themselves in the last instance to the role played by general-historical relations in production, and their relation to the movement of history generally. The question evidently belongs within the treatment and investigation of production itself.
Still, in the trivial form in which they are raised above, they can be dealt with equally briefly. In all cases of conquest, three things are possible. The conquering people subjugates the conquered under its own mode of production (e.g. the English in Ireland in this century, and partly in India); or it leaves the old mode intact and contents itself with a tribute (e.g. Turks and Romans); or a re
The Mongols, with their devastations in Russia, e.g., were acting in accordance with their production, cattle-raising, for which vast uninhabited spaces are a chief precondition. The Germanic barbarians, who lived in isolation on the land and for whom agriculture with bondsmen was the traditional production, could impose these conditions on the Roman provinces all the more easily as the concentrat
It is a received opinion that in certain periods people lived from pillage alone. But, for pillage to be possible, there must be something to be pillaged, hence production. And the mode of pillage is itself in turn determined by the mode of production. A stock-jobbing nation, for example, cannot be pillaged in the same manner as a nation of cow-herds.
To steal a slave is to steal the instrument of production directly. But then the production of the country for which the slave is stolen must be structured to allow of slave labour, or ( as in South America etc.) a mode of production corresponding to the slave must be created.
Laws may perpetuate an instrument of production, e.g. land, in certain families. These Iaws achieve economic significance only when large-scale landed property is in harmony with the society's production, as e.g. in England. In France, small-scale agriculture survived despite the great landed estates, hence the latter were smashed by the revolution. But can laws perpetuate the small-scale allotmen
Exchange, Finally, and Circulation
Exchange and Production
Circulation itself [is] merely a specific moment of exchange, or [it is] also exchange regarded in its totality.
In so far as exchange is merely a moment mediating between production with its production-determined distribution on one side and consumption on the other, but in so far as the latter itself appears as a moment of production, to that extent is exchange obviously also included as a moment within the latter.
It is clear, firstly, that the exchange of activities and abilities which takes place within production itself belongs directly to production and essentially constitutes it. The same holds, secondly, for the exchange of products, in so far as that exchange is the means of finishing the product and making it fit for direct consumption. To that extent, exchange is an act comprised within production
The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production predominates not only over itself, in the antithetical definition of production, but over the other moments as well. The process always returns to production to begin anew. That exchange and consumption canno
(3) THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
When we consider a given country politico-economically, we begin with its population, its distribution among classes, town, country, the coast, the different branches of production, export and import, annual production and consumption, commodity prices etc.
It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn ar
But do not these simpler categories also have an independent historical or natural existence predating the more concrete ones? That depends. Hegel, for example, correctly begins the Philosophy of Right with possession, this being the subject's simplest juridical relation. But thereis no possession preceding the family or master-servant relations, which are far more concrete relations. However, it
It may be said on the other hand that there are very developed but nevertheless historically less mature forms of society, in which the highest forms of economy, e.g. cooperation, a developed division of labour, etc., are found, even though there is no kind of money, e.g. Peru. Among the Slav communities also, money and the exchange which determines it play little or no role within the individual
Labour seems a quite simple category. The conception of labour in this general form-as labour as such-is also immeasurably old. Nevertheless, when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, "labour" is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction . The Monetary System,7 for example, still locates wealth altogether objectively, as an external thing, in money.
7. Marx considered that the Monetary System, as defined here, covered economists from the sixteenth century to the Physiocrats. However, within the Monetary System there arose what he calls here the "commercial, or manufacture system" but elsewhere the Mercantile System (known to economics textbooks as Mercantilism). He distinguishes between the two systems later in this work, but his normal pract
It was an immense step forward for Adam Smith to throw out every limiting specification of wealth-creating activity-not only manufacturing, or commercial or agricultural labour, but one as well as the others, labour in general. With the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity we now have the universality of the object defined as wealth, the product as such or again labour as such, but la
This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity-precisely because of their abstractness-for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations.
Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried
8. See p. 229, note 1.
In the succession of the economic categories, as in any other historical, social science, it must not be forgotten that their subjecthere, modern bourgeois society-is always what is given, in the head as well as in reality, and that these categories therefore express the forms of being, the characteristics of existence, and often only individual sides of this specific society, this subject, and th
It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. The point
9. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Système des contradictions èconomiques ou philosophie de la misère (Paris, 1846), Vol. I. p. 146.
The purity (abstract specificity) in which the trading peoples -Phoenicians, Carthaginians-appear in the old world is determined precisely by the predominance of the agricultural peoples. Capital, as trading capital or as money capital, appears in this abstraction precisely where capital is not yet the predominant element of societies. Lombards, Jews take up the same position towards the agricultu
As a further example of the divergent positions which the same category can occupy in different social stages: one of the latest forms of bourgeois society, joint-stock companies. These also appear, however, at its beginning, in the great, privileged monopoly trading companies.
The concept of national wealth creeps into the work of the economists of the seventeenth century-continuing partly with those of the eighteenth-in the form of the notion that wealth is created only to enrich the state, and that its power is proportionate to this wealth. This was the still unconsciously hypocritical form in which wealth and the production of wealth proclaimed themselves as the purp
The order obviously has to be (1) the general, abstract determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of society, but in the above-explained sense. (2) The categories which make up the inner structure of bourgeois society and on which the fundamental classes rest. Capital, wage labour, landed property. Their interrelation. Town and country. The three great social classes. Exchange between th
(4) PRODUCTION. MEANS OF PRODUCTION AND RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION. RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION AND RELATIONS OF CIRCULATION. FORMS OF THE STATE AND FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN RELATION TO RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION AND CIRCULATION. LEGAL RELATIONS. FAMILY RELATIONS.
Notabene in regard to points to be mentioned here and not to be forgotten:
(1) War developed earlier than peace; the way in which certain economic relations such as wage labour, machinery etc. develop earlier, owing to war and in the armies etc., than in the interior of bourgeois society. The relation of productive force and relations of exchange also especially vivid in the army.
(2) Relation of previous ideal historiography to the real. Namely of the so-called cultural histories, which are only histories of religions and of state. (On that occasion something can also be said about the various kinds of previous historiography. The so-called objective. Subjective (moral among others). The philosophical.)
(3) Secondary and tertiary matters; in general, derivative, inherited, not original relations of production. Influence here of international relations.
(4) Accusations about the materialism of this conception. Relation to naturalistic materialism.
(5) Dialectic of the concepts productive force (means of production) and relation of production, a dialectic whose boundaries are to be determined, and which does not suspend the real difference.
(6) The uneven development of material production relative to e.g. artistic development. In general, the concept of progress not to be conceived in the usual abstractness. Modern art etc. This disproportion not as important or so difficult to grasp as within practical-social relations themselves. E.g. the relation of education. Relation of the United States to Europe. But the really difficult poin
(7) This conception appears as necessary development. But legitimation of chance. How. (Of freedom also, among other things.) (Influence of means of communication. World history has not always existed; history as world history a result.)
(8) The point of departure obviously from the natural characteristic; subjectively and objectively. Tribes, races etc.
(1) In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its organization. For example, the Greeks compared to the moderns or also Shakespeare. It is even recognized that certain forms of art, e.g. the epic, can no longer be prod
Let us take e.g. the relation of Greek art and then of Shakespeare to the present time. It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? Wh
From a nother side, is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?
But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.
A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child's naivete, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic child hood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm
B. Society and the Individual
Product and capital. Value and capital. Proudhon
(Nothing is more erroneous than the manner in which economists as well as socialists regard society in relation to economic conditions. Proudhon, for example, replies to Bastiat by saying (XVI, 29): "For society, the difference between capital and product does not exist. This difference is entirely subjective, and related to individuals.1 Thus he calls subjective precisely what is social; and he c
1. Bastiat et Proudhon, Gratuite du credit (Paris, 1850), p. 250.
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C. The Dynamics of Capitalism
Surplus value. Surplus labour time.-Bastiat on wages. Value of labour. How determined? –Self-realization is self•preservation of capital. Capitalist may not live merely from his labour etc. Conditions for the self-realization of capital. Surplus labour time etc. –To the extent that capital is productive (as creator of surplus labour etc.), this only historic-transistory. –The free blacks in Jamaic
* * *
What the worker exchanges with capital is his labour itself (the capacity o f disposing over it); he divests himself of it [entaussert sie]. What he obtains as price is the value of this divestiture [Entaussenmg]. He exchanges value-positing activity for a pre-determined value, regardless of the result of his activity. Now how is its value determined? By the objectified labour contained in his com
If one day's work were necessary in order to keep one worker alive for one day, then capital would not exist, because the working day would then exchange for its own product, so that capital could not realize itself and hence could not maintain itself as capital. The self-preservation of capital is its self-realization. If capital also had to work in order to live, then it would not maintain itsel
Surplus value in general is value in excess of the equivalent. The equivalent, by definition, is only the identity of value with itself. Hence surplus value can never sprout out of the equivalent; nor can it do so originally out of circulation; it has to arise from the production process of capital itself. The matter can also be expressed in this way: if the worker needs only half a working day in
The Times of November 1857 contains an utterly delightful cry of outrage on the part of a West-Indian plantation owner. This advocate analyses with great moral indignation-as a plea for the re-introduction of Negro slavery-how the Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and, alongside this "use value," regar
2. The Times. London, Saturday, 21 November 1857, No. 22, 844, p. 9. "Negroes and the Slave Trade. To the Editor of The Times. By Expertus." Marx's English in this sentence has been changed to conform to modern usage.
D. The Development of Exchange and of Capital
Original accumulation of capital. (The real accumulation). -Once developed historically, capital itself creates the conditions of its existence (not as conditions for its arising, but as results of its being). -(Performance of personal services, as opposed to wage labour.) -Inversion of the law of appropriation. Real alien relation [Fremdheit] of the worker to his product. Division of labour. Mach
Once production founded on capital is presupposed-money has become transformed into capital actually only at the end of the first production process, which resulted in its reproduction and in the new production of surplus capital I; surplus capital I, however, is itself posited, realized as surplus capital, only when it has produced surplus capital II, i.e. as soon as those presuppositions o f mon
3. Having themselves become = having themselves undergone the process of becoming, as indicated above.
4. On 22 February 1858, Marx wrote to Lassalle that he was planning three works: (1) a critique of the economic categories or the system of bourgeois economy critically presented, (2) a critique and history o f political economy and socialism, and (3) a short historical sketch of the development of economic relations or categories (Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence, Moscow, n.d., p. 125) . Marx
Now, if we initially examine the relation such as it has become, value having become capital, and living labour confronting it as mere use value, so that living labour appears as a mere means to realize objectified, dead labour, to penetrate it with an animating soul while losing its own soul to it-and having produced, as the end-product, alien wealth on one side and [, on the other,] the penury w
However, if we consider the original relation, before the entry of money into the self-realization process, then various conditions appear which have to have arisen, or been given historically, for money to become capital and labour to become capital-positing, capital-creating labour, wage labour. (Wage labour, here, in the strict economic sense in which we use it here, and no other-and we will la
So long as both sides exchange their laboour with one another in the form of objectified labour, the relation is impossible; it is likewise impossible if living labour capacity itself appears as the property of the other side, hence as not engaged in exchange. (The fact that slavery is possible at individual points within the bourgeois system of production does not contradict this. However, slaver
The conditions under which the relation appears at the origin, or which appear as the historic presuppositions of its becoming, reveal at first glance a two-sided character-on one side, dissolution of lower forms of living labour; on the other, dissolution of happier forms of the same.
The first presupposition, to begin with, is that the relation of slavery or serfdom has been suspended. Living labour capacity belongs to itself, and has disposition over the expenditure of its forces, through exchange. Both sides confront each other as persons. Formally, their relation has the equality and freedom of exchange as such. As far as concerns the legal relation, the fact that this form
The exchange of objectified labour for living labour does not yet constitute either capital on one side or wage labour on the other. The entire class of so-called services from the bootblack up to the king falls into this category. Likewise the free day-labourer, whom we encounter sporadically in all places where either the oriental community [Gemeinwesen] or the western commune [Gemeinde] consist
(1) within the relation of simple circulation. Both in fact exchange only use values with one another; one exchanges necessaries, the other labour, a service which the other wants to consume, either directly-personal service-or he furnishes him the material etc. from which, with his labour, with the objectification of his labour, he makes a use value, a use value designed for A's consumption. For
A and, instead of producing the necessaries himself, produces an article of clothing, in exchange for which he obtains them from A. In both cases he can take possession of the use value possessed by A only by giving him an equivalent for it; which, in the last analysis, always resolves itself into his own living labour, regardless of the objective form it may adopt, whether before the exchange is
sees his money not realized but devalued in its transposition from the form of value into that of use value. Labour is here exchanged not as use value for value, but as itself a particular use value, as value for use. The more frequently A repeats the exchange, the poorer does he become. This exchange is not an act of wealth-getting for him, not an act of value creation, but of devaluation of the
"free hands," as Steuart calls them.7 There is nothing of wage labour in this relation, but it can stand in opposition to slavery and serfdom, though need not do so, for it always repeats itself under various forms of the overall organization of labour. To the extent that money mediates this exchange the determination of prices will become important on both sides, but it will do so for A only in s
5. Do ut facias: I give you that you may do; facio ut des: I do that you may give; do ut des: I give that you may give (Roman law).
6. That is with the free workers in manufactures (hand crafts).
7. Steuart, An Inquiry, Vol. 1, p. 40.
In the bourgeois society itself, all exchange of personal services for revenue-including labour for personal consumption, cooking, sewing etc., garden work etc., up to and including all of the unproductive classes, civil servants, physicians, lawyers, scholars etc.-belongs under this rubric, within this category. All menial servants etc. By means of their services-often coerced-all these workers,
As we have already mentioned in the section on money,8 it is here rather the performer of the service who actually posits value; who transposes a use value-a certain kind of labour, service etc. into value, money. Hence in the Middle Ages, those who are oriented towards the production and accumulation of money proceed partly not from the side of the consuming landed nobility, but quite the opposit
8. Marx did not in fact mention this in the Chapter on Money
It thus does not depend on the general relation, but rather on the natural, particular quality of the service performed, whether the recipient of payment receives it as day-wages, or as an honorarium, or as a sinecure-and whether he appears as superior or inferior in rank to the person paying for the service. However, with the presupposition of capital as the dominant power, all these relations be
It is not, then, simply the exchange of objectified labour for living labour-which appear, from this standpoint, as two different aspects, as use values in different forms, the one objective, the other subjective-which constitutes capital and hence wage labour, but rather, the exchange of objectified labour as value, as self-sufficient value, for living labour as its use value, as use value not fo
In the exchange of money for labour or service, with the aim of direct consumption, a real exchange always takes place; the fact that amounts of labour are exchanged on both sides is of merely formal interest for measuring the particular forms of the utility of labour by comparing them with each other. This concerns only the form of the exchange; but does not form its content. In the exchange of c
(2) In periods of the dissolution of pre-bourgeois relations, there sporadically occur free workers whose services are bought for purposes not of consumption, but of production; but, firstly, even if on a large scale, for the production only of direct use values, not of values; and secondly, if a nobleman e.g. brings the free worker together with his serfs, even if he re-sells a part of the worker
In order to express the relations into which capital and wage labour enter as property relations or laws, we need do no more than express the conduct of both sides in the realization process as an appropriation process. For example, the fact that surplus labour is posited as surplus value of capital means that the worker does not appropriate the product of his own labour; that it appears to him as
9. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, pp. 104-5
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E. Pre-Capitalist Property and Production
The original unity between a particular form of community (clan) and the corresponding property in nature, or relation to the objective conditions of production as a natural being, as an objective being of the individual mediated by the commune-this unity, which appears in one respect as the particular form of property-has its living reality in a specific mode of production itself, a mode which ap
In the last anaysis, their community, as well as the property based on it, resolves itself into a specific stage in the development of the productive forces of working subjects-to which correspond their specific relations amongst one another and towards nature. Until a certain point, reproduction. Then turns into dissolution.
Property, then, originally means-in its Asiatic, Slavonic, ancient classical, Germanic form-the relation of the working (producing or self-reproducing) subject to the conditions of his production or reproduction as his own. It will therefore have different forms depending on the conditions of this production. Production itself aims at the reproduction of the producer within and together with these
1. Political animal; literally, city-dweller.
All forms (more or less naturally arisen, spontaneous, all at the same time however results of a historic process) in which the community presupposes its subjects in a specific objective unity with their conditions of production, or in which a specific subjective mode of being presupposes the communities themselves as conditions of production, necessarily correspond to a development of the forces
In so far as classical landed property reappears in modern small-parcel land ownership, it itself belongs to political economy and we shall come to it in the section on landed property.
(All this is to be returned to at greater depth and length.)
What we are here concerned with is this: the relation of labour to capital, or to the objective conditions of labour as capital, presupposes a process of history which dissolves the various forms in which the worker is a proprietor, or in which the proprietor works. Thus above all (1) Dissolution of the relation to the earth-land and soil-as natural condition of production-to which he relates as t
These are, now, on one side, historic presuppositions needed before the worker can be found as a free worker, as objectless, purely subjective labour capacity confronting the objective conditions of production as his not-property, as alien property, as value for-itself, as capital. But the question arises, on the other side, which conditions are required so that he finds himself up against a capit
working individual to the conditions of production and hence of existence; it can therefore only be the relation of a member of the original community based on land ownership who has lost his landed property and not yet proceeded to variety No. II of property, such as the
Roman plebs at the time of the bread and circuses.> master-servant relation [Herrschaftsverhältnis] as essential element of appropriation. Basically the appropriation of animals, land etc. cannot take place in a master-servant relation, although the animal provides service. The presupposition of the master-servant relation is the appropriation of an alien will. Whatever has no will, e.g. the anima
development and the decline and fall of all original relations of property and of production, just as it also expresses their limited nature. Still, it is reproduced-in mediated form-in capital, and
thus likewise forms a ferment of its dissolution and is an emblem of its limitation. >
* * *
On one side, historic processes are presupposed which place a mass of individuals in a nation etc. in the position, if not at first of real free workers, nevertheless of such who are so INSERT TEXT, whose only property is their labour capacity and the possibility of exchanging it for values then present; individuals who confront all objective conditions of production as alien property, as their ow
2. The dissolution of the still earlier forms of communal property and real community goes without saying. [Marx]
What concerns us here for the moment is this: the process of dissolution, which transforms a mass of individuals of a nation etc. into free wage labourers INSERT TEXT-individuals forced solely by their lack of property to labour and to sell their labour-presupposes on the other side not that these individuals' previous sources of income and in part conditions of property have disappeared, but the
If the relation of capital and wage labour is regarded not as already commanding and predominant over the whole of production,3 but as arising historically-i.e. if we regard the original transformation of money into capital, the process of exchange between capital, still only existing INSERT TEXT on one side and the free workers existing INSERT TEXT on the other-then of course one cannot help maki
3. For in that case the capital presupposed as condition of wage labour is wage labour's own product, and is presupposed by it as its own presupposition, created by it as its own presupposition. [Marx]
4. Once capital and wage labour are posited as their own presupposition, as the basis presupposed to production itself, then what appears initially is that the capitalist possesses, in addition to the fund of raw materials and necessaries required for the labourer to reproduce himself, to create the required means of subsistence, i.e. to realize necessary labour, a fund of raw material and means o
Wealth present in the form of money can be exchanged for the objective conditions of labour only because and if these are separated from labour itself. We saw that money can be piled up in part by way of the sheer exchange of equivalents; but this forms so insignificant a source that it is not worth mentioning historically-if it is presupposed that this money is gained through the exchange of one'
It is inherent in the concept of capital, as we have seen-in its origin-that it begins with money and hence with wealth existing in the form of money. It is likewise inherent in it that it appears as coming out of circulation, as the product of circulation. The formation of capital thus does not emerge from landed property (here at most from the tenant [Pächter] in so far as he is a dealer in agri
encounter, on one side, with free workers; and on the other side, with the necessaries and materials etc., which previously were in one way or another the property of the masses who have now become object-less, and are also free and purchasable. The other condition of labour, however-a certain level of skill, instrument as means of labour etc.-is already available to it in this preliminary or firs
may develop sporadically, locally, in a framework which still belongs to a quite different period, as e.g. in the Italian cities alongside the guilds. But as the sole predominant forms of an epoch, the conditions for capital have to be developed not only locally but on a grand scale. (Nothwithstanding this, individual guild masters may develop into capitalists with the dissolution of the guilds; b
It goes without saying-and shows itself if we go more deeply into the historic epoch under discussion here-that in truth the period of the dissolution of their earlier modes of production and modes of the worker's relation to the objective conditions of labour is at the same time a period in which monetary wealth on the one side has already developed to a certain extent, and on the other side grow
spinning wheel and the loom. But, once unbound from their land and soil, spinner and weaver with their stools and wheels came under the command of money wealth. Capital proper does nothing but bring together the mass of hands and instruments which it finds on hand. It agglomerates them under its command. That is its real stockpiling; the stockpiling of workers, along with their instruments, at par
closely in the so-called stockpiling of capital. Monetary wealth-as merchant wealth-had admittedly helped to speed up and to dissolve the old relations of production, and made it possible for the proprietor of land for example, as A. Smith already nicely develops,6 to exchange his grain and cattle etc. for use values brought from afar, instead of squandering the use values he himself produced, alo
making of the labour market (certainly to be distinguished from the slave market). However, even this action of money is only possible given the presupposition of an urban artisanate resting not on capital, but on the organization of labour in guilds etc. Urban labour itself had created means of production for which the guilds became just as confining as were the old relations of landownership to
struggles internally-as in England in the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centuries-is there a golden age for labour in the process of becoming emancipated. In order for labour to relate to its objective conditions as its property again, another system must take the place of the system of private exchange, which, as we saw, posits the exchange of objectified labour for labour capacity,
which money transforms itself into capital often shows itself quite tangibly in history; e.g. when the merchant induces a number of weavers and spinners, who until then wove and spun as a rural, secondary occupation, to work for him, making their secondary into their chief occupation; but then has them in his power and has brought them under his command as wage labourers. To draw them away from th
5. The first glance shows what a nonsensical circle it would be if on the one hand the workers whom capital has to put to work in order to posit itself as capital had first to be created, to be brought to life through its stockpiling if they waited for its command, Let There Be Workers!; while at the same time it were itself incapable of stockpiling without alien labour, could at most stockpile it
6. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. III, Bk. III, Ch. 4.
While, as we have seen, the transformation of money into capital presupposes a historic process which divorces the objective conditions of labour from toe worker and makes them independent of him, it is at the same time the effect of capital and of its process, once arisen, to conquer all of production and to develop and complete the divorce between labour and property, between labour and the obje
The only stockpiling presupposed at the origin of capital is that of monetary wealth, which, regarded in and for itself, is altogether unproductive, as it only springs up out of circulation and belongs exclusively to it. Capital rapidly forms an internal market for itself by destroying all rural secondary occupations, so that it spins, weaves for everyone, clothes everyone etc., in short, brings t
With the urban crafts, although they rest essentially on exchange and on the creation of exchange values, the direct and chief aim of this production is subsistence as craftsmen, as master-journeymen, hence use value; not wealth, not exchange value as exchange value. Production is therefore always subordinated to a given consumption, supply to demand, and expands only slowly.
The production of capitalists and wage labourers is thus a chief product of capital's realization process. Ordinary economics, which looks only at the things produced, forgets this completely. When objectified labour is, in this process, at the same time posited as the worker's non-objectivity, as the objectivity of a subjectivity antithetical to the worker, as property of a will alien to him, the
* * *
F. Population, Overpopulation, and Malthus
* * *
Malthus's theory, which incidentally was not his invention, but whose fame he appropriated through the clerical fanaticism with which he propounded it-actually only through the weight he placed on it-is significant in two respects: (1) because he gives brutal expression to the brutal viewpoint of capital; (2) because he asserted the fact, of overpopulation in all forms of society. Proved it he has
series, the former geometric and the latter arithmetic in progression. In this way he transforms the historically distinct relations into an abstract numerical relation, which he has fished purely out of thin air, and which rests neither on natural nor on historical laws. There is allegedly a natural difference between the reproduction of mankind and e.g. grain. This baboon thereby implies that th
(2) He stupidly relates a specific quantity of people to a specific quantity of necessaries.7 Ricardo immediately and correctly confronted him with the fact that the quantity of grain available is completely irrelevant to the worker if he has no employment; that it is therefore the means of employment and not of subsistence which put him into the category of surplus population.8 But this should be
7. T. R. Malthus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent, London, 1815, p. 7.
8. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, p. 493.
* * *
G. Capitalism, Machinery and Automation
The labour process. -Fixed capital. Means of labour. Machine. -Fixed capital. Transposition of powers of labour into powers of capital both in fixed and in circulating capital. -To what extent fixed capital (machine) creates value .-Lauderdale. Machine presupposes
a mass of workers.
* * *
As long as the means of labour remains a means of labour in the proper sense of the term, such as it is directly, historically, adopted by capital and included in its realization process, it undergoes a merely formal modification, by appearing now as a means of labour not only in regard to its material side, but also at the same time as a particular mode of the presence of capital, determined by i
Further, in so far as machinery develops with the accumulation of society's science, of productive force generally, general social labour presents itself not in labour but in capital. The productive force of society is measured in fixed capital, exists there in its objective form; and, inversely, the productive force of capital grows with this general progress, which capital appropriates free of c
The full development of capital, therefore, takes place-or capital has posited the mode of production corresponding to it-only when the means of labour has not only taken the economic form of fixed capital, but has also been suspended in its immediate form, and when fixed capital appears as a machine within the production process, opposite labour; and the entire production process appears as not s
Thus the quantitative extent and the effectiveness (intensity) to which capital is developed as fixed capital indicate the general degree to which capital is developed as capital, as power over living labour, and to which it has conquered the production process as such. Also, in the sense that it expresses the accumulation of objectified productive forces, and likewise of objectified labour. Howev
To the degree that labour time-the mere quantity of labour-is posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that degree does direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production-of the creation of use values-and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to gene
* * *
Fixed capital and circulating capital as two particular kinds of capital. Fixed capital and continuity of the production process. Machinery and living labour. (Business of inventing)
While, up to now, fixed capital and circulating capital appeared merely as different passing aspects of capital, they have now hardened into two particular modes of its existence, and fixed capital appears separately alongside circulating capital. They are now two particular kinds of capital. In so far as a capital is examined in a particular branch of production, it appears as divided into these
The division within the production process, originally between means of labour and material of labour, and finally product of labour, now appears as circulating capital (the last two) and fixed capital [the first.] 9 The split within capital as regards its merely physical aspect has now entered into its form itself, and appears as differentiating it.
9. The manuscript has: ". . . now appears as circulating capital (the first two) and fixed capital."
From a viewpoint such as Lauderdale's etc., who would like to have capital as such, separately from labour, create value and hence also surplus value (or profit) , fixed capital-namely that whose physical presence or use value is machinery-is the form which gives their superficial fallacies still the greatest semblance of validity. The answer to them, e.g. in Labour Defended, [is] that the road-bu
1. Hodgskin, Labour Defended, p. 16.
Circulating capital-presupposing that it really passes through its different phases-brings about the decrease or increase, the brevity or length of circulation time, the easier or more troublesome completion of the different stages of circulation, a decrease of the surplus value which could be created in a given period of time without these interruptions-either because the number of reproductions
continuity of the production process or the constant flow of reproduction become an externally compelling condition for the mode of production founded on capital.
In machinery, the appropriation of living labour by capital achieves a direct reality in this respect as well: It is, firstly, the analysis and application of mechanical and chemical laws, arising directly out of science, which enables the machine to perform the same labour as that previously performed by the worker. However, the development of machinery along this path occurs only when large indu
2. “Als hätt’ es Lieb im Leibe,” Goethe, Faust, Part I, Act 5, Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig.
Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development. Machines etc.
The exchange of living labour for objectified labour-i.e. the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour-is the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting on value. Its presupposition is-and remains -the mass of direct labour time, the quantity of labour employed, as the determinant factor in the production of wealth. But to the
Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degre
Significance of the development of fixed capital (for the development of capital generally). Relation between the creation of fixed capital and circulating capital. Disposable time. To create it, chief role of capital. Contradictory form of the same in capital. -Productivity of labour and production of fixed capital. (The Source and Remedy.) -Use and consume: Economist. Durability of fixed capital
The development of fixed capital indicates in still another respect the degree of development of wealth generally, or of capital. The aim of production oriented directly towards use value, as well as of that directly oriented towards exchange value, is the product itself, destined for consumption. The part of production which is oriented towards the production of fixed capital does not produce dir
"If the entire labour of a country were sufficient only to raise the support of the whole population, there would be no surplus labour, consequently nothing that could be allowed to accumulate as capital. If in one year the people raises enough for the support of two years, one year's consumption must perish, or for one year men must cease from productive labour. But the possessors of [the] surplu
The labour time employed in the production of fixed capital relates to that employed in the production of circulating capital, within the production process of capital itself, as does surplus labour time to necessary labour time. To the degree that production aimed at the satisfaction of immediate need becomes more productive, a greater part of production can be directed towards the need of produc
"The number of workers depends as much on circulating capital as it depends on the quantity of products of co-existing labour, which labourers are allowed to consume." (Labour Defended, p. 20.)
In all the excerpts cited above from various economists fixed capital is regarded as the part of capital which is locked into the production process. "Floating capital is consumed; fixed capital is merely used in the great process of production." (Economist, VI, 1.) This wrong, and holds only for the part of circulating capital which is itself consumed by the fixed capital, the matieres instrument
"Since the general introduction of soulless mechanism in British manufactures, people have with rare exceptions been treated as a secondary and subordinate machine, and far more attention has been given to the perfection of the raw materials of wood and metals than to those of body and spirit." (p. 31. Robert Owen: Essays on the Formation of the Human Character, 1840, London.)
Real saving-economy- = saving of labour time = development of productive force. Suspension of the contradiction between free time and labour time. -True conception of the process of social production.
< Real economy-saving-consists of the saving of labour time (minimum (and minimization) of production costs); but this saving identical with development of the productive force. Hence in no way abstinence from consumption, but rather the development of power, of capabilities of production, and hence both of the capabilities as well as the means of consumption. The capability to consume is a condit
itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself. It goes without saying, by the way, that direct labour time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy. Labour cannot become play, as Fo
3. Fourier, Le Nouveau Monde industriel et socifitaire, Vol. VI, pp. 242 - 52.
As the system of bourgeois economy has developed for us only by degrees, so too its negation, which is its ultimate result. We are still concerned now with the direct production process. When we consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relatio
H. The End of Capitalism
* * *
Beyond a certain point, the development of the powers of production becomes a barrier for capital; hence the capital relation a barrier for the development of the productive powers of labour. When it has reached this point, capital, i.e. wage labour, enters into the same relation towards the development of social wealth and of the forces of production as the guild system, serfdom, slavery, and is
4. The sentence preceding this one was inserted by Marx, above the line, in English; thus the apparent virtual repetition. (The sentence following also appears in English in the original
* * *
I. Capitalism, Alienation, and Communism
Alienation of the conditions of labour with the development of capital. (Inversion). The inversion is the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, not only of its distribution.
The fact that in the development of the productive powers of labour the objective conditions of labour, objectified labour, must grow relative to living labour-this is actually a tautological statement, for what else does growing productive power of labour mean than that less immediate labour is required to create a greater product, and that therefore social wealth expresses itself more and more i
The worker's propertylessness, and the ownership of living labour by objectified labour, or the appropriation of alien labour by capital -both merely expressions of the same relation from opposite poles -are fundamental conditions of the bourgeois mode of production, in no way accidents irrelevant to it. These modes of distribution are the relations of production themselves, but sub specie distrib
It requires no great penetration to grasp that, where e.g. free labour or wage labour arising out of the dissolution of bondage is the point of departure, there machines can only arise in antithesis to living labour, as property alien to it, and as power hostile to it; i.e. that they must confront it as capital . But it is just as easy to perceive that machines will not cease to be agencies of soc
Capital, Volume One
KARL MARX
Capital (Das Kapital) was Marx's magnum opus, Volume One, published in 1867, is the book generally referred to simply as Capital and is relatively complete in itself.
The following selections from it, together with Marx's Preface to the first German edition, Afterword to the second, and Preface to the French edition, are taken from the text of the English edition of 1 887, as translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Engels. An attempt has been made here to provide those sections of the book that collectively conv
Preface to the First German Edition
The work, the first volume of which I now submit to the public, forms the continuation of my "Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie" (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) published in 1859. The long pa use between the first part and the continuation is due to an illness of many years' duration that again and again interrupted my work.
The substance of that earlier work is summarized in the first three chapters of this volume. This is done not merely for the sake of connation and completeness. The presentation of the subject-matter is improved. As far as circumstances any way permit, many points only hinted at in the earlier book are here worked out more fully, whilst, conversely, points worked out fully there are only touched u
That beginning is difficult holds in all sciences. To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty. That which concerns more especially the analysis of the substance of value and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it was possible, popularized. The value-form, whose fully developed shape is t
With the exception of the section on value-form, therefore, this volume cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty. I presuppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.
The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence, or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality. In this work I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up
1. This is the more necessary, as even the section of Ferdinand Lassalle's work against Schulze Delitzsch, in which he professes to give “the intellectual Quintessence" of my explanations on these subjects, contains important mistakes. If Ferdinand Lassalle has borrowed almost literally from my Writings, and without any acknowledgement, all the general theoretical propositions in his economic work
"De te fabula narratur!"
Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher o r lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural law of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of the tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed the image of its own future.
But apart from this, Where capitalist production is fully naturalized among the Germans (for instance, in the factories proper) the condition of things is much worse than in England, because the counterpoise of the Factory Acts is wanting. In all other spheres, we, like all the rest of Continental Western Europe, suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the inco
The social statistics of Germany and the rest of Continental Western Europe are, in comparison with those of England, wretchedly compiled. But they raise the veil just enough to let us catch a glimpse of the Medusa head behind it. We should be appalled at the state of things at home, if, as in England, our governments and parliaments appointed periodically commissions of inquiry into economic cond
Let us not deceive ourselves on this, As in the 18th century, the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle-class, so in the 19th century, the American Civil War sounded it for the European working-class. In England the progress of social disintegration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must re-act on the Continent. There it will take a form more br
2. This story is about you. 3. The dead man seizes the living one.
To prevent possible misunderstanding a word, I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural hist
In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest. The English Established Church, e.g., will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 a
4. Marx was inaccurate here, although for an easily understandable reason. The vice presidency became vacant when Vice President Andrew Johnson succeeded to the presidency upon Lincoln's assassination in 1865. In 1867 Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio was elected president pro tem of the Senate. He thereby became first in line of succession to the presidency during the Johnson administration and in
The second volume of this work will treat of the process of the circulation of capital (Book II.), and of the varied forms assumed by capital in the course of its development (Book III.), the third and last volume (Book IV.), the history of the theory.
Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. As to the prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now as aforetime the maxim of the great Florentine is mine:
"Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti."
London, July 25, 1867 Karl Marx
Preface to the French Edition
To the citizen Maurice LacMtre
Dear Citizen,
I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of "Das Kapital" as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working-class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.
That is the good side of y our suggestion, but here is the reverse of the medal: the method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous, and it is to be feared that the French public, always impatient to come to a conclusion, eager to know the connation between general principles and the i
That is a disadvantage I am powerless to overcome, unless it be by forewarning and forearming those readers who zealously seek the truth. There is no royal to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
5. "Follow your own course, no matter what people say."
Believe me,
Dear citizen
You’re devoted,
London, March 18, 1872 Karl Marx
From the Afterword to the Second German Edition
That the method employed in "Das Kapital" has been little understood is shown by the various conceptions, contradictory one to another, that have been formed of it.
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 receipts (Comtist ones ?) for the cook-shops of the future. In answer to the reproach in re metaphysics, Professor Sieber has it: "In so far as it deals with actual theory, the meth
6. "With this work Marx takes his place among the most eminent analytic minds."
After a quotation from the preface to my "Criticism of Political Economy, "Berlin, 1859, pp. IV-VI I, where I discuss the materialistic basis of my method, the writer goes on: "The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a defi
Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?
Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyze its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process o f thinking, which, under the name of "the Idea," he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurges of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of "the Idea." With me, on the contrary, the ideal is
The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of "Das Kapital," it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre epigones who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in the same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, i.e., as
In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation o
The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modem industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of it
London, January 24, 1873 Karl Marx
Part I. Commodities and Money
CHAPTER I. COMMODITIES
Section 1. The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value (The Substance of Value and the Magnitude of Value)
The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities," its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.
A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of produc
Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history. So also is the establishment of socially recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these m
The utility of a thing makes it a use-value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a us e-value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to ap
1. Karl Marx, "Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie." Berlin, 1859, p. 3. [Marx]
2. "Desire implies want; it is the appetite of the mind, and as natural as hunger to the body. . . . The greatest numbers (of things) have their value from supplying the wants o f the mind." Nicholas Barbon: "A Discourse Concerning Coining the New Money Lighter, In Answer to Mr. Locke's Considerations," &c., London, 1696, pp. 2, 3. [Marx]
3. "Things have an intrinsick vertue" (this is Barbon's special term for value in use) "which in all places have the same virtue; as the loadstone to attract iron" (I. c., p. 6). The property which the magnet possesses of attracting iron became of use only after by means of that property the polarity of the magnet had been discovered. [Marx]
4. "The natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the conveniences of human life." (John Locke, "Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, 1691, "in Works Edit. Lond, 1777, Vol. II., p. 28.) In English writers o f the 17th century we frequently find "worth" in the sense of value in use, and "value" in the sense of exchange-valu
5. In bourgeois societies the economic fictio juris prevails, that every one, as a buyer, possesses an encyclopaedic knowledge of commodities. [Marx]
Exchange-value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange-value that is inseparably connected with, inhe
A given commodity, e.g., a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c.-in short, for other commodities in the most different proportions. Instead of one exchange-value, the wheat has, therefore, a great many. But since x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c., each represent the exchange-value of one quarter of wheat, x blacking, y silk, z gold, &c., must, as exchange-values, be
Let us take two commodities, e.g., corn and iron, The proportions in which they are exchangeable, whatever those proportions may be, can always b e represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron: e.g., I quarter corn = x cwt. iron. What does this equation tell us? It tells us that in two different things-in I quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, the
A simple geometrical illustration will make this clear. In order to calculate and compare the areas of rectilinear figures, we decompose them into triangles. But the area of the triangle itself is expressed by something totally different from its visible figure, namely, by half the product of the base into the altitude. In the same way the exchange-values of commodities must be capable of being ex
6. "La valeur consiste dans Ie rapport d'echange qui se trouve entre telle chose et telle autre, entre telle mesure d'une production, et telle mesure d'une autre." (Le Trosne: "De l'Interet Social." Physiocrates, Ed. Daire. Paris.1846. P. 889.) [Marx]
7. "Nothing can have an intrinsic value." (N. Barbon, 1. c., p. 6); or as Butler says-
"The value of a thing is just as much as it will bring." [Marx]
This common "something" cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use-values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use-value. Then one use-value is just as good as another, provided onl
If then we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use-value; we see in it no longer a tabl
Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour-power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour-power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals
We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use-value. But if we abstract from their use-value, there remains their Value as defined above. Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange-value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value. The progress of our investigation wil
A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Painly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance the labour contained in the article. The quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour-time in its turn finds its standard in w
Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskillful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour-power. The total labour-power o
We see then tha t that which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production. Each individual commodity, in this connexion, is to be considered as an average sample of its class, Commodities, therefore, in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time
8. "The value of them (the necessaries of life), when they are exchanged the one for another, is regulated by the quantity of labour necessarily required and commonly taken in producing them.” ("Some Thoughts on the Interest of Money in General, and Particularly in the Publick Funds, &c" Lond., p. 36.) This remarkable anonymous work, written in the last century, bears no date. It is clear, however
9. "Toutes les productions d'un me me genre ne forment proprement qu'une masse, dont Ie prix se determine en general et sans egard aux circonstances particulieres." (Le Trosne, 1. c., p. 893.) [Marx]
"As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed
labour-time."
The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if the labour-time required for its production also remained constant. But the latter changes with every variation in the productiveness of labour. This productiveness is determined by various circumstances, amongst others, by the average amount of skill of the workmen, the state of science, and the degree of its practical application, the
A thing ca n be a use-value, without having value. This is the case whenever it’s utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use-values, but no commodities. In order to produce the latt
Section 2. The Two-fold Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities
At first sight a commodity presented itself to us as a complex of two things-use-value and exchange-value. Later on, we saw also that labour, too, possesses the same two-fold nature; for, so far as it finds expression in value, it does not possess the same characteristics that belong to it as a creator of use-values. I was the first to point out and to examine critically this two-fold nature of th
Let us take two commodities such as a coat and 10 yards of linen, and let the former be double the value of the latter, so that, if 10 yards of linen = W, the coat = 2W.
The coat is a use-value that satisfies a particular want. Its existence is the result of a special sort of productive activity, the nature of which is determined by its aim, mode of operation, subject, means, and result. The labour, whose utility is thus represented by the value in use of its product, or which manifests itself by making its product a use-value, we call useful labour. In this conne
As the coat and the linen are two qualitatively different usevalues, so also are the two forms of labour that produce them, tailoring and weaving. Were these two objects not qualitatively differrent, not produced respectively by labour of different quality, they could not stand to each other in the relation of commodities. Coats are not exchanged for coats one use-value is not exchanged for anothe
To all the different varieties of values in use there correspond as many different kinds of useful labour, classified according to the order, genus, species, and variety to which they belong in the social division of labour. This division of labour is a necessary condition for the production of commodities, but it does not follow, conversely, that the production of commodities is a necessary condi
1. I am inserting the parenthesis because its omission has often given rise to the misunderstanding that every product that is consumed by some one other than its producer is considered in Marx a commodity. [Engels, 4th German edition]
To resume, then: In the use-value of each commodity there is contained useful labour, i.e., productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim. Use-values cannot confront each other as commodities, unless the useful labour embodied in them is qualitatively different in each of them. In a community, the produce of which in general takes the form of commodities, i.e., in a comm
Anyhow, whether the coat be worn by the tailor or by his customer, in either case it operates as a use-value. Nor is the relation between the coat and the labour that produced it altered by the circumstance that tailoring may have become a special trade, an independent branch of the social division of labour. Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousand
The use-values, coat, linen, &c., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements-matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter. Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is cons
Let us, now pass from the commodity considered as a use-value to the value of commodities.
By our assumption, the coat is worth twice as much as the linen. But this is a mere quantitative difference, which for the present does not concern us. We bear in mind, however, that if the value of the coat is double that of 10 yds. of linen, 20 yds. of linen must have the same value as one coat. So far as they are values, the coat and the linen are things of a like substance, objective expressio
Productive activity, if we leave out of sight its special form, viz., the useful character of the labour, is nothing but the expenditure of human labour-power. Tailoring and weaving, though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour. They are but two different modes of expending human lab
2. Compo. Hegel, "Philosophie des Rechts." Berlin, 1 840. P. 250, § 190. [Marx]
Just as, therefore, in viewing the coat and linen as values, we abstract from their different use-values, so it is with the labour represented by those values: we disregard the difference between its useful forms, weaving and tailoring. As the use-values, coat and linen, are combinations of special productive activities with cloth and yarn, while the values, coat and linen, are, on the other hand,
Coats and linen, however, are not merely values, but values of definite magnitude, and according to our assumption, the coat is worth twice as much as the ten yards of linen. Whence this difference in their values? It is owing to the fact that the linen contains only half as much labour as the coat, and consequently, that in the production of the latter, labour-power must have been expended during
While, therefore, with reference to use-value, the labour contained in a commodity counts only qualitatively, with reference to value it counts only quantitatively, and must first be reduced to human labour pure and simple. In the former case, it is a question of How and what, in the latter of How much? How long a time? Since the magnitude of the value of a commodity represents only the quantity o
If the productive power of all the different sorts of useful labour required for the production of a coat remains unchanged, the sumof the values of the coats produced increases with their number. If one coat represents x days' labour, two coats represent 2 x days' labour, and so on. But assume that the duration of the labour necessary for the production of a coat becomes doubled or halved. In the
3. The reader must note that we are not speaking here of the wages or value that the labourer gets f or a given labour-time, but of the value of the commodity in which that labour-time is materialised. Wages is a category that, as yet, has no existence at the present stage of our investigation. [Marx]
An increase in the quantity of use-values is an increase of material wealth. With two coats two men can be clothed, with one coat only one man. Nevertheless, an increased quantity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. This antagonistic movement has its origin in the two-fold character of labour. Productive power has reference, of course, only to la
On the one hand all labour is, speaking physioiogically, an expenditure o f human labour-power, and in its character of identical abstract human labour, it creates and forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is the expenditure of human labour-power in a special form and with a definite aim, and in this, its character of concrete useful labour, it produces use values.
Section 3. The Form of Value or Exchange-Value
Commodities come into the world in the shape of use-values, articles, or goods, such as iron, linen, corn, &c. This is their plain, homely, bodily form. They are, however, commodities, only because they are something two-fold, both objects of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value. They manifest themselves therefore as commodities, or have the form of commodities, only in so far as
The reality of the value of commodities differs in this respect from Dame Quickly, that we don't know "where to have it." The value of commodities .is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will, vet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to gra
Every one knows, if he knows nothing else, that commodities have a value-form common to them all, and presenting a marked contrast with the varied bodily forms of their use-values. I mean their money-form. Here, however, a task is set us, the performance of which has never yet even been attempted by bourgeois economy, the task of tracing the genesis of this money-form, of developing the expression
The simplest value-relation is evidently that of one commodity to some one other commodity of a different kind. Hence the relation between the values of two commodities supplies us with the simplest expression of the value of a single commodity.
A. ELEMENTARY OR ACCIDENTAL FORM OF VALUE
x commodity A = y commodity B, or
x commodity A is worth y commodity B.
20 yards o f linen = 1 coat, or
20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat.
1. The Two Poles of the Expression of Value: Relative Form and Equivalent Form
The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this elementary form. Its analysis, therefore, is our real difficulty.
Here two different kinds of commodities (in our example the linen and the coat), evidently play two different parts. The linen expresses its value in the coat; the coat serves as the material in which that value is expressed. The former plays an active, the latter a passive, part. The value of the linen is represented as relative value, or appears in relative form. The coat officiates as equivalen
The relative form and the equivalent form are two intimately connected, mutually dependent and inseparable elements of. The expression of value; but, at the same time, are mutually exclusive, antagonistic extremes-i.e., poles of the same expression. They are allotted respectively to the two different commodities brought into relation by that expression. It is not possible to express the value of l
No doubt, the expression 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or 20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat, implies the opposite relation: 1 coat = 20 yards of linen, or 1 coat is worth 20 yards of linen. But, in that case, I must reverse the equation, in order to express the value of the coat relatively; and, so soon as I do that, the linen becomes the equivalent instead of the coat. A single commodity cannot, t
Whether, then, a commodity assumes the relative form, or the opposite equivalent form, depends entirely upon its accidental position in the expression of value-that is, upon whether it is the commodity whose value is being expressed or the commodity in which value is being expressed.
2. The Relative Form of Value
a. The Nature and Import of This Form
In order to discover how the elementary expression of the value of a commodity lies hidden in the value-relation of two commodities, we must, in the first place, consider the latter entirely apart from its quantitative aspect. The usual mode of procedure is generally the reverse, and in the value-relation nothing is seen but the proportion between definite quantities of two different sorts of comm
Whether 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 20 coats o r = x coats-that is, whether a given quantity of linen is worth few or in any coats, every such statement implies that the linen and coats, as magnitudes of value, are expressions o f the same unit, things of the same kind. Linen = coat is the basis of the equation.
But the two commodities, whose identity of quality is thus assumed, do not play the same part. It is only the value of the linen that is expressed, and how? By its reference to the coat as its equivalent, as something that can be exchanged for it. In this relation the coat is the mode of existence of value, is value embodied, for only as such is it the same as the linen. On the other hand, the lin
If we say that, as values, commodities are mere congelations of human labour, we reduce them by our analysis, it is true, to the abstraction, value; but we ascribe to this value no form apart from their bodily form. It is otherwise in the value-relation of one commodity to another. Here, the one stands forth in its character of value by reason o f its relation to the other.
By making the coat the equivalent of the linen, we equate the labour embodied in the former to that in the latter. Now, it is hue that the tailoring, which makes the coat, is concrete labour of a different sort from the weaving which makes the linen. But the act of equating it to the weaving, reduces the tailoring to that which i s really equal in the two kinds of labour, to their common character
There is, however, something else required beyond the expression of the specific character of the labour of which the value of the linen consists. Human labour-power in motion, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value only in its congealed state, when embodied in the form of some object. In order to express the value of the linen as a congelation of human labour, t
When occupying the position of equivalent in the equation of value, the coat ranks qualitatively as the equal of the linen, as something of the same kind, because it is value. In this position it is a thing in which we see nothing but value, or whose palpable bodily form represents value. Yet the coat itself, the body of the commodity, coat, is a mere use-value. A coat as such no more tells us it
In the production of the coat, human labour-power, in the shape of tailoring, must have been actually expended. Human labour is therefore accumulated in it. In this aspect the coat is a depository of value, but though worn to a thread, it does not let this fact show through. And as equivalent of the linen in the value equation, it exists under this aspect alone, counts therefore as embodied value,
4. The celebrated Franklin, one of the first economists, after Wm. Petty, who saw through the nature of value, says: "Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labour for labour, the value of all things is . . . most justly measured by labour." ("The works of B. Franklin, &c.," edited by Sparks. Boston, 1836, Vol. II., p. 267.) Franklin is unconscious that by estimating the value of
Hence, in the value equation, in which the coat is the equivalent of the linen, the coat officiates as the form of value. The value of the commodity linen is expressed by the bodily form of the commodity coat, the value of one by the use-value of the other. As a use-value, the linen is something palpably different from the coat; as value, it is the same as the coat, and now has the appearance of a
We see, then, all that our analysis o f the value o f commodities has already told us, is told us by the linen itself, so soon as it comes into communication with another commodity, the coat. Only it betrays its thoughts in that language with which alone it is familiar, the language of commodities. In order to tell us that its own value is created by labour in its abstract character of human labou
By means, therefore, of the value-relation expressed in our equation, the bodily form of commodity B becomes the value-form of commodity A, or the body of commodity B acts as a mirror to the value of commodity A. By putting itself in relation with commodity B, as value in propria persona, as the matter of which human labour is made up, the commodity A converts the value in use, B, into the substan
5. In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtian philosopher, to whom "I am I” is sufficient, man first sees and recognizes himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Paul
b. Quantitative Determination of Relative Value
Every commodity, whose value it is intended to express, is a useful object of given quantity, as 15 bushels of corn, or 100 lbs. of coffee. And a given quantity of any commodity contains a definite quantity of human labour. The value-form must therefore not only express value generally, but also value in definite quantity. Therefore, in the value-relation of commodity A to commodity B, of the line
The equation, 20 yards of linen=l coat, or 20 yards of linen are worth one coat, implies that the same quantity of value-substance (congealed labour) is embodied in both; that the two commodities have each cost the same a mount of labour of the same quantity of labour-time. But the labour-time necessary for the production of 20 yards of linen or 1 coat varies with every change in the productivenes
I. Let the value of the linen vary, that of the coat remaining constant. If, say in consequence of the exhaustion of flax-growing soil, the labour-time necessary for the production of the linen be doubled, the value of the linen will also be doubled. Instead of the equation, 20 yards of linen= 1 coat, we should have 20 yards of linen=2 coats, since 1 coat would now contain only half the labour-tim
II. Let the value of the linen remain constant, while the value of the coat varies. If, under these circumstances, in consequence, for instance, of a poor crop of wool, the labour-time necessary for the production of a coat becomes doubled, we have instead of 20 yards of linen= 1 coat, 20 yards o f linen= Yz coat. I f, on the other hand, the value o f the coat sinks by one-half, then 20 yards of l
6. Value is here, as occasionally in the preceding pages, used in sense of value determined as to quantity, or of value. [Marx]
If we compare the different cases in I. and II, we see that the same change of magnitude in relative value may arise from totally opposite causes. Thus, the equation, 20 yards of linen=l coat, becomes 20 yards of linen= 2 coats, either, because the value of the linen has doubled, or because the value of the coat has fallen by one-half; and it becomes 20 yards of linen=Y2 coat, either, because the
III. Let the quantities of labour-time respectively necessary for the production of the linen and the coat vary simultaneously in the same direction and in the same proportion. In this case 20 yards of linen continue equal to 1 coat, however much their values may have altered. Their change of value is seen as soon as they are compared with a third commodity, whose value has remained constant. If t
IV. The labour-time respectively necessary for the production of the linen and the coat, and therefore the value o f these commodities may simultaneously vary in the same direction, but a t unequal rates, or in opposite directions, or in other ways. The effect of all these possible different variations, on the relative value of a commodity, may be deduced from the results of I, II, and III. Thus r
Section 4. The Fetishism of Commodities and
the Secret Thereof
A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the
The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use-value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value, For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions o f the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its
Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour-power by the duration o f that expenditure, takes the form o f the quantity of value o f the prod
7. Among the ancient Germans the unit for measuring land was what could be harvested in a day, and was called Tagwerk, Tagwanne (jurnale, or terra jurnalis, or diornalis), Mannsmaad. &c. (See G. L. von Maurer. "Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-, &c. Verfassung," MUnchen, 1854, p. 129 sq) [Marx]
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to t h e m 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. This is the reason
This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.
As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their p
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 thi
What, first of all, practically concerns producers when they make an exchange, is the question, how much of some other product they get for their own? in what proportions the products are exchangeable? When these proportions have, b y custom, attained a certain stability, they appear to result from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and two ounces of gold appear as
8. "What are we to think of a law that asserts itself only by periodical revolutions? It is just nothing but a law of Nature founded on the want of knowledge of those whose action is the subject of it." (Friedrich Engels: "Umrisse zu einer Kritik de Nationalokon-omie," in the "Deutsch-Franziisische Jahrbiicher," edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx. Paris, 1844.) [MaTx]
The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms o f thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities vanish
Since Robinson Crusoe's experiences are a favorite theme with political economists, let us take a look at him on his island. Moderate though he be, yet some few wants he h a s to satisfy, and must therefore do a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats, fishing and hunting . Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source of plea
Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson's island bathed in light to the European middle ages shrouded in darkness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterises the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organised on the basis of that
For an example of labour in common or directly associated labour, we have no occasion to go back to that spontaneously developed form which we find on the threshold of the history of all civilized races. We have one close at hand in the patriarchal industries of a peasant family that produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use. These different articles are, as regards the family,
Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community. All the characteristics of Robinson's labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of i
The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour-for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of ab
The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan . This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product
Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour-time by the magnitude of that value. These formulae, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which
To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour, are shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange-value. Since exchange-value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon object, Nature h
The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois product ion. It therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating and characteristic manner as now-a-days. Hence its Fetish character is comparatively easy to be seen through. But whe
But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another example relating to the commodity-form. Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchang
Part II. The Transformation of Money into Capital
CHAPTER IV. THE GENERAL FORMULA FOR CAPITAL
The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital. The production of commodities, their circulation, and that more developed form of their circulation called commerce, these form the historical ground-work from which it rises. The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.
If we abstract from the material substance of the circulation of commodities, that is, from the exchange of the various use-values, and consider only the economic forms produced by this process of circulation, we find its final result to be money: this final product of the circulation of commodities is the first form in which capital appears.
As a matter of history, capital, as opposed to landed property invariably takes the form at first of money; it appears as moneyed wealth, as the capital of the merchant and of the usurer. But we have no need to refer to the origin of capital in order to discover that the first form of appearance of capital is money. We can see it daily under our very eyes. All new capital, to commence with, comes
The first distinction we notice between money that is money only, and money that is capital, is nothing more than a difference in their form of circulation.
The simplest form of the circulation of commodities is C-M-C, the transformation of commodities into money, and the change of the money back again into commodities; or selling in order to buy. But alongside of this form we find another specifically different form: M-C-M, the transformation of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back again into money; or buying in order to sell. M
Now let us examine the circuit M-C-M a little closer. It consists, like the other, of two antithetical phases. In the first phase, M-C, or the purchase, the money is changed into a commodity. In the second phase, C-M, o r the sale, the commodity is changed back again into money. The combination of these two phases constitutes the single movement whereby money is exchanged for a commodity, and the
Now it is evident that the circuit M-C-M would be absurd and without meaning if the intention were to ' exchange by this means two equal sums of money, £ 100 for £ 100. The miser's plan would be far simpler and surer; he sticks to his £ 100 instead of exposing it to the dangers of circulation. And yet, whether the merchant who has paid £ 100 for his cotton sells it for £ 110, or lets it go for £ 1
Let us see, in the first place, what the two forms have in common.
Both circuits are resolvable into the same two antithetical phases, C-M, a sale, and M-C, a purchase. In each of these phases the same material elements-a commodity, and money, and the same economic dramatis personal, a buyer and a seller-confront one another. Each circuit is the unity of the same two antithetical phases, and in each case this unity is brought about by the intervention of three co
What, however, first and foremost distinguishes the circuit C-M-C from the circuit M-C-M, is the inverted order of succession of the two phases. The simple circulation of commodities begins with a sale and ends with a purchase, while the circulation of money as capital begins with a purchase and ends with a sale. In the one case both the starting-point and the goal are commodities, in the other th
In the circulation C-M-C, the money is in the end converted into a commodity that serves as a use-value; it is spent once for all. In the inverted form, M-C-M, on the contrary, the buyer lays out money in order that, as a seller, he may recover money. By the purchase of his commodity he throws money into circulation, in order to withdraw it again by the sale of the same commodity. He lets the mone
In the circuit C-M-C, the same piece of money changes its place twice. The seller gets it from the buyer and pays it away to another seller. The complete circulation, which begins with the receipt, concludes with the payment, of money for commodities. It is the very contrary in the circuit M-C-M. Here it is not the piece of money that changes its place twice, but the commodity. The buyer takes it
Such reflux is not dependent on the commodity being sold for more than was paid for it. This circumstance influences only the amount of the money that comes back. The reflux itself takes place, so soon as the purchased commodity is resold, in other words, so soon as the circuit M-C-M is completed. We have here, therefore, a palpable difference between the circulation of money as capital, and its c
The circuit C-M-C comes completely to an end, as soon as the money brought in by the sale of one commodity is abstracted again by the purchase of another.
If, nevertheless, there follows a reflux of money to its starting point, this can only happen through a renewal or repetition of the operation. If I sell a quarter of corn of £3, and with this £3 buy clothes, the money, so far as I am concerned, is spent and done with. It belongs to the clothes merchant. If I now sell a second quarter of corn, money indeed flows back to me, not however as a, seque
The circuit C-M-C starts with one commodity, and finishes with another, which falls out of circulation and into consumption. Consumption, this satisfaction of wants, in one word, use-value, is its end and aim. The circuit M-C-M, on the contrary, commences with money and ends with money. Its leading motive, and the goal that attracts it, is therefore mere exchange-value.
In the simple circulation of commodities, the two extremes of the cirr.uit have the same economic form. They are both commodities, and commodities of equal value. But they are also use-values differing in their qualities, as, for example, corn and clothes. The exchange of products, of the different materials in which the labour of society is embodied, forms here the basis of the movement. It is ot
Of course, it is also possible, that in C-M-C, the two extremes C-C, say corn and clothes, may represent different quantities of value. The farmer may sell his corn above its value, or may buy the clothes at less than their value. He may, on the other hand, "be done" by the clothes merchant. Yet, in the form of circulation now under consideration, such differences in value are purely accidental. T
The repetition or renewal of the act of selling in order to buy is kept within bounds by the very object it aims at, namely, consumption o r the satisfaction of definite wants, an aim that lays altogether outside the sphere of circulation. But when we buy in order to sell, we, on the contrary, begin and end with the same thing, money, and exchange-value; and thereby the movement becomes interminab
9. "Capital is divisible . . . into the original capital and the profit, the increment to the capital . . . although in practice this profit is immediately turned into capital, and set in motion with the original." (F. Engels, " Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalokonomie, in the "Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiich er," edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx." Paris, 1844, p. 99.) [Marx]
1. Aristotle opposes Oeconomic to Chrematistic. He starts from the former. So far as it is the art of gaining a livelihood, it is limited to procuring those articles that are necessary to existence and useful either to a household or the state. "True wealth consists of such values in use; for the quantity of possessions of this kind, capable of making life pleasant, is not unlimited. There is, how
As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M-C-M, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the a
The independent form, i.e., the money-form, which the value of commodities assumes in the case of simple circulation, serves only one purpose, namely, their exchange, and vanishes in the final result of the movement. On the other hand, in the circulation M-C-M, both the money and the commodity represent only different modes of existence of value itself, the money its general mode, and the commodit
pursue means to an end, are not boundless, since the goal itself imposes a limit upon them, so with Chrematistic, there are no bounds to its aims, these aims being absolute wealth. Oeconomic not Chrematistic has a limit . . . the object of the former is something different from money, of the latter the augmentation of money. . . . By confounding these two forms, which overlap each other, some peop
Value, therefore, being the active factor in such a process, and assuming at one time the form o f money, at another that of commodities, but through all these changes preserving itself and expanding, it requires some independent form, by means of which its identity may at any time be established. And this form it possesses only in the shape of money. It is under the form of money that value begin
In simple circulation, C-M-C, the value of commodities attained at the most a form independent of their use-values, i.e., the form of money; but that same value now in the circulation M-C-M, or the circulation of capital, suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms w
Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process; and, as such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within its circuit, comes back out of it with expanded bulk, and begins the same round ever afresh M-M, money which begets money, such is the description of Capital from the mouths of its first interpreters, the Mercantilists.
Buying in order to sell, or, more accurately, buying in order to sell dearer, M-C-M', appears certainly to be a form peculiar to one kind of capital alone, namely merchants' capital. But industrial capital too is money that is changed into commodities and by the sale of these commodities is re-converted into more money.
The events that take place outside the sphere of circulation, in the interval between the buying and selling, do not affect the form of this movement. Lastly, in the case of interest-bearing capital, the circulation M-C-M' appears abridged. We have its result without the intermediate stage, in the form M-M', "en style lapidaire" so to say, money that is worth more money, value that is greater than
M-C-M' is therefore in reality the general formula of capital as it appears prima facie within the sphere of circulation. * * *
CHAPTER VI. THE BUYING AND SELLING
OF LABOUR-POWER
The change of value that occurs in the case of money intended to be converted into capital, cannot take place in the money itself, since in its function of means of purchase and of payment, it does no more than realize the price of the commodity it buys or pays for; and, as hard cash, it is value petrified, never varying. Just as little can it originate in the second act of circulation, the re-sal
By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description.
But in order that our owner of money may be able to find labour-power offered for sale as a commodity, various conditions must first be fulfilled. The exchange of commodities of itself implies no other relations of dependence than those which result from its own nature. On this assumption, labour-power can appear upon the market as a commodity, only if, and so far as, its possessor, the individual
The second essential condition to the owner of money finding labour-power in the market as a commodity is this-that the labourer instead of being in the position to sell commodities in which his labour is incorporated, must be obliged to offer for sale as a commodity that very labour-power, which exists only in h is living self.
In order that a man may be able to sell commodities other than labour-power, he must of course have the means of production, as raw material, implements, &C. No boots can be made without leather. He requires also the means of subsistence. Nobody-not even "a musician of the future" -can live upon future products, or upon use-values in an unfinished state; and ever since the first moment of his appe
2. In encyclopaedias of classical antiquities we find such nonsense as this that in the ancient world capital was fully developed, "except that the free labourer and a system of credit were wanting." Mommsen also, in his "History of Rome," commits, in this respect, one blunder after another. [MaTx]
3. Hence legislation in various countries fixes a maximum for labour-contracts. Wherever free labour is the rule, the laws regulate the mode of terminating this contract. In some States, particularly in Mexico (before the American Civil War, also in the territories taken from Mexico, and also, as a matter of fact, in the Danubian provinces till the revolution effected by Kusa), slavery is hidden u
Rechts, Berlin, 1840, p. 104, § 67.) [Marx]
For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power.
The question why this free labourer confronts him in the market has no interest for the owner of money, who regards the labour-market as a branch of the general market for commodities. And for the present it interests us just as little. We cling to the fact theoretically, as he does practically. One thing, however, is clear-Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, an
So, too, the economic categories, already discussed by us, bear the stamp of history. Definite historical conditions are necessary that a product may become a commodity. It must not be produced as the immediate means of subsistence of the producer himself. Had we gone further, and inquired under what circumstances all or even the majority of products take the form of commodities, we should have fo
We must now examine more closely this peculiar commodity, labour-power. Like all others it has a value. How is that value determined?
The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this special article. So far as it has value, it represents no more than a definite quantity of the average labour of society incorporated in it. Labour-power exists only as a capacity, or power of the living individual. Its p
4. The capitalist epoch is therefore characterised by this, that labour power takes in the eyes o f the labourer himself the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently becomes wage-labour. On the other hand, it is only from this moment that the produce of labour universally becomes a commodity. [Marx]
5. "The value or worth of a man, is as of all other things his price-that is to say, so much as would b e given for the use of his power." (Thomas. Hobbes, Leviathan, in Works, ed. Molesworth, London, 1 8 3 9-44, Vol. III, p. 7 6 . ) [Marx}
6. Hence the Roman Villicus, as overlooker of the agricultural slaves, received "more meagre fare than working slaves, because his work was lighter." (Theodor Mommsen, Riimisches Geschichte, 1856, p. 810.) [Marx]
The owner of labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, and the continuous conversion of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labour-power must pepetuate himself, "in the way that every living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation." The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear and death, must be continually replaced by, at th
In order to modify the human organism, so that it may acquire skill and handiness in a given branch of industry, and become labour-power of a special kind, a special education or training is requisite, and this, on its part, costs an equivalent in commodities of a greater or less amount. This amount varies according to the more or less complicated character of the labour-power. The expenses of thi
The value of labour-power resolves itself into the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence. It therefore varies with the value of these means or with the quantity of labour requisite for their production.
7. Compare W. T. Thornton, OverPopulation and Its Remedy, London, 1846. [Marx]
8. Petty. [Marx]
9. "Its [ labour's] natural price . . , consists in such a quantity of necessaries and conforts of life, as, from the nature of the climate, and the habits of the country, are necessary to support the labourer, and to enable him to rear such a family as may preserve, in the market, an undiminished supply of labour." (R. Torrens, an Essay on the External Corn TTade, London, 1815, p. 62.) The word l
Some of the means of subsistence, such as food and fuel, are consumed daily, and a fresh supply must be provided daily. Other such as clothes and furniture last for longer periods and require to be replaced only at longer intervals. One article must be bought or paid for daily, another weekly, another quarterly, and so on. But in whatever w a y the sum total of these outlays may be spread over the
The minimum limit of the value of labour-power is determined by the value of the commodities, without the daily supply of which the labourer cannot renew his vital energy, consequently by the value of those means of subsistence that are physically indispensable. If the price of labour-power falls to this minimum, it falls below its value, since under such circumstances it can be maintained and dev
It is a very cheap sort of sentimentality which declares this method of determining the value of labour-power, a method prescribed by the very nature of the case, to be a brutal method, and which wails with Rossi that, "To comprehend capacity for labour (puissance de travail) at the same time that we make abstraction from the means of subsistence of the labourers during the process of production,
One consequence of the peculiar nature of labour-power as a commodity is, that its use-value does not, on the conclusion of the contract between the buyer and seller, immediately pass into the hands of the former. Its Value, like that of every other commodity, is already fixed before it goes into circulation, since a definite quantity of social labour has been spent upon it; but its use-value cons
1. Rossi, Cours d'Econ. Polit., Bru-,xelles, 1842, p. 370. [Marx]
2. Sismondi, Nouv. Prine. etc., Vol. I, p. 112. [Marx]
We now know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor of the peculiar commodity, labour-power, is determined. The use-value which the former gets in exchange manifests itself only in the actual usufruct, in the consumption of the labour-power. The money-owner buys everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the market, and pays for i t at its full value. The consumpt
This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom because both buyer and seller of a commodity say of labour-power are constrained only by their own free will, They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is bu
On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the "Free-trader Vulgaris" with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personal. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist the possessor of labour-po
Part III. The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value
CHAPTER VI I. THE LABO UR-PROCESS A N D THE
PROCESS OF PROD UCING SURPLUS-VALUE
Section 1. The Labour-Process or the Production of Use-Values
The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and labourpower in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes actually, what before he only was potentially, labour-power in action, a labourer. In order that his labour may re-appear in a commodity, he must, before all things, expend it on something useful,
Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted
The elementary factors of the labour-process are ( 1 ) , the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, ( 2 ) , the subject of that work, and ( 3 ) , its instruments.
The soil ( and this, economically speaking, includes water) in the virgin state in which it supplies man with necessaries or the means of subsistence ready to hand, exists independently of him, and is the universal subject of human labour. All those things which labour merely separates from immediate connexion with their environment are subjects of labour spontaneously provided by Nature. Such are
3. "Reason is just as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity, which, by causing objects to act and re-act on each other in accordance with their own nature, i n this way, without any direct interference in the process carries out reason's intentions." (Hegel: "Enzyklopadie, Erster Theil, Die Logik," Berlin, 1840, p. 3 82.) [Mar%]
An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of .things, which the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour, and which serves as the conductor of his activity. He makes use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of some substances in order to make other substances subservient to his aims. Leaving out of consideration such ready-made means of subsistence a
In a wider sense we m a y include among the instruments of labour, in addition to those things that are used for directly transferring labour to its subject, and which therefore, in one way or another, serve as conductors of activity, all such objects as are necessary for carrying on the labour-process. These do not enter directly into the process, but without them it is either impossible for it t
In the labour-process, therefore, man's activity, with the help of the instruments of labour, effects an alteration, designed from the commencement, in the material worked upon. The process disappears in the product; the latter is a use-value, Nature's material; adapted by a change of form to the wants of man. Labour has incorporated itself with its subject: the former is materialised, the latter
If we examine the whole process from the point of view o f its result, the product, it is plain that both the instruments and the subject of labour, are means of production, and that the labour itself is productive labour.
Though a use-value, in the form of a product, issues from the labour-process, yet other use-values, products of previous labour, enter into it as means of production. The same use-value is both the product of a previous process and a means of production in a later process. Products are therefore not only results, but also essential conditions of labour.
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