Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844
by Karl Marx
Abridged and formatted by
Neil Jumonville, 2006
Thanks to
the archive of www.marxists.org
|
Economic and Philosophical by Karl Marx
Abridged and formatted by |
|
Estranged Labour
We have started out from the premises of political economy.
We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property;
the separation of labour, capital, and land, and likewise of wages, profit,
and capital; the division of labour; competition; the conception of exchange
value, etc. From political economy itself, using its own words, we have shown
that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched
commodity of all; that the misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to
the power and volume of his production; that the necessary consequence of competition
is the accumulation of capital in a few hands and hence the restoration of monopoly
in a more terrible form; and that, finally, the distinction between capitalist
and landlord, between agricultural worker and industrial worker, disappears
and the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners
and propertyless workers.
Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property. It does not explain
it. It grasps the material process of private property, the process through
which it actually passes, in general and abstract formulae which it then takes
as laws. It does not comprehend these laws – i.e., it does not show how
they arise from the nature of private property. Political economy fails to explain
the reason for the division between labour and capital. For example, when it
defines the relation of wages to profit, it takes the interests of the capitalists
as the basis of its analysis – i.e., it assumes what it is supposed to
explain. Similarly, competition is frequently brought into the argument and
explained in terms of external circumstances. Political economy teaches us nothing
about the extent to which these external and apparently accidental circumstances
are only the expression of a necessary development. We have seen how exchange
itself appears to political economy as an accidental fact. The only wheels which
political economy sets in motion are greed, and the war of the avaricious –
Competition.
Precisely because political economy fails to grasp the interconnections within
the movement, it was possible to oppose, for example, the doctrine of competition
to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of
the guild, and the doctrine of the division of landed property to the doctrine
of the great estate; for competition, craft freedom, and division of landed
property were developed and conceived only as accidental, deliberate, violent
consequences of monopoly, of the guilds, and of feudal property, and not as
their necessary, inevitable, and natural consequences.
We now have to grasp the essential connection between
private property, greed, the separation of labour, capital and landed property,
exchange and competition, value and the devaluation of man, monopoly, and competition,
etc. – the connection between this entire system of estrangement and the
money system.
We must avoid repeating the mistake of the political
economist, who bases his explanations on some imaginary primordial condition.
Such a primordial condition explains nothing. It simply pushes the question
into the grey and nebulous distance. It assumes as facts and events what it
is supposed to deduce – namely, the necessary relationships between two
things, between, for example, the division of labour and exchange. Similarly,
theology explains the origin of evil by the fall of Man – i.e., it assumes
as a fact in the form of history what it should explain.
We shall start out from a actual economic fact.
The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces,
the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an
ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces. The devaluation of
the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world
of things. Labour not only produces commodities; it also produces itself and
the workers as a commodity and it does so in the same proportion in which it
produces commodities in general.
This fact simply means that the object that labour produces, its product, stands
opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The
product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an object, it is the
objectification of labour. The realization of labour is its objectification.
In the sphere of political economy, this realization of labour appears as a
loss of reality for the worker[18], objectification as loss of and bondage to
the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.[19]
So much does the realization of labour appear as loss of reality that the worker
loses his reality to the point of dying of starvation. So much does objectification
appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects he needs
most not only for life but also for work. Work itself becomes an object which
he can only obtain through an enormous effort and with spasmodic interruptions.
So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the
more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls
under the domination of his product, of capital.
All these consequences are contained in this characteristic, that the worker
is related to the product of labour as to an alien object. For it is clear that,
according to this premise, the more the worker exerts himself in his work, the
more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being
over against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, and the less
they belong to him. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God,
the less he retains within himself. The worker places his life in the object;
but now it no longer belongs to him, but to the object. The greater his activity,
therefore, the fewer objects the worker possesses. What the product of his labour
is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself.
The externalisation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour
becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently
of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power;
that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and
alien.
Let us now take a closer look at objectification, at the production of the worker,
and the estrangement, the loss of the object, of his product, that this entails.
The workers can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external
world. It is the material in which his labour realizes itself, in which it is
active and from which, and by means of which, it produces.
But just as nature provides labour with the means of life, in the sense of labour
cannot live without objects on which to exercise itself, so also it provides
the means of life in the narrower sense, namely the means of physical subsistence
of the worker.
The more the worker appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, through
his labour, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in two respects:
firstly, the sensuous external world becomes less and less an object belonging
to his labour, a means of life of his labour; and, secondly, it becomes less
and less a means of life in the immediate sense, a means for the physical subsistence
of the worker.
In these two respects, then, the worker becomes a slave of his object; firstly,
in that he receives an object of labour, i.e., he receives work, and, secondly,
in that he receives means of subsistence. Firstly, then, so that he can exist
as a worker, and secondly as a physical subject. The culmination of this slavery
is that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject
and only as a physical subject that he is a worker.
(The estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed according to the
laws of political economy in the following way:
1. the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume;
2. the more value he creates, the more worthless he becomes;
3. the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker;
4. the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker;
5. the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker;
6. the more intelligent the work, the duller the worker and the more he becomes
a slave of nature.)
Political economy conceals the estrangement in the nature of labour by ignoring
the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production. It is true
that labour produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the
worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty,
but deformity for the worker. It replaces labour by machines, but it casts some
of the workers back into barbarous forms of labour and turns others into machines.
It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker.
The direct relationship of labour to its products is the relationship of the
worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the rich man to
the objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence of
this first relationship, and confirms it. Later, we shall consider this second
aspect. Therefore, when we ask what is the essential relationship of labour,
we are asking about the relationship of the worker to production.
Up to now, we have considered the estrangement, the alienation of the worker,
only from one aspect – i.e., the worker’s relationship to the products
of his labour. But estrangement manifests itself not only in the result, but
also in the act of production, within the activity of production itself. How
could the product of the worker’s activity confront him as something alien
if it were not for the fact that in the act of production he was estranging
himself from himself? After all, the product is simply the resumé of
the activity, of the production. So if the product of labour is alienation,
production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the
activity of alienation. The estrangement of the object of labour merely summarizes
the estrangement, the alienation in the activity of labour itself.
What constitutes the alienation of labour?
Firstly, the fact that labour is external to the worker – i.e., does not
belong to his essential being; that he, therefore, does not confirm himself
in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop
free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind.
Hence, the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working,
he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home
when he is working. His labour is, therefore, not voluntary but forced, it is
forced labour. It is, therefore, not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means
to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated
by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, it is shunned
like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is
a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character
of labour for the worker is demonstrated by the fact that it belongs not to
him but to another, and that in it he belongs not to himself but to another.
Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, the human
brain, and the human heart, detaches itself from the individual and reappears
as the alien activity of a god or of a devil, so the activity of the worker
is not his own spontaneous activity. It belongs to another, it is a loss of
his self.
The result is that man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his
animal functions – eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his
dwelling and adornment – while in his human functions, he is nothing more
than animal.
It is true that eating, drinking, and procreating, etc., are also genuine human
functions. However, when abstracted from other aspects of human activity, and
turned into final and exclusive ends, they are animal.
We have considered the act of estrangement of practical human activity, of labour,
from two aspects:
(1) the relationship of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object
that has power over him. The relationship is, at the same time, the relationship
to the sensuous external world, to natural objects, as an alien world confronting
him, in hostile opposition.
(2) The relationship of labour to the act of production within labour. This
relationship is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something
which is alien and does not belong to him, activity as passivity, power as impotence,
procreation as emasculation, the worker’s own physical and mental energy,
his personal life – for what is life but activity? – as an activity
directed against himself, which is independent of him and does not belong to
him. Self-estrangement, as compared with the estrangement of the object mentioned
above.
We now have to derive a third feature of estranged labour from the two we have
already examined.
Man is a species-being [20], not only because he practically and theoretically
makes the species – both his own and those of other things – his
object, but also – and this is simply another way of saying the same thing
– because he looks upon himself as the present, living species, because
he looks upon himself as a universal and therefore free being.
Species-life, both for man and for animals, consists physically in the fact
that man, like animals, lives from inorganic nature; and because man is more
universal than animals, so too is the area of inorganic nature from which he
lives more universal. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., theoretically
form a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of science and partly
as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, his spiritual means
of life, which he must first prepare before he can enjoy and digest them –
so, too, in practice they form a part of human life and human activity. In a
physical sense, man lives only from these natural products, whether in the form
of nourishment, heating, clothing, shelter, etc. The universality of man manifests
itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his
inorganic body, (1) as a direct means of life and (2) as the matter, the object,
and the tool of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body –
that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature
– i.e., nature is his body – and he must maintain a continuing dialogue
with it is he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life
is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is
a part of nature.
Estranged labour not only (1) estranges nature from man and (2) estranges man
from himself, from his own function, from his vital activity; because of this,
it also estranges man from his species. It turns his species-life into a means
for his individual life. Firstly, it estranges species-life and individual life,
and, secondly, it turns the latter, in its abstract form, into the purpose of
the former, also in its abstract and estranged form.
For in the first place labour, life activity, productive life itself, appears
to man only as a means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to preserve
physical existence. But productive life is species-life. It is life-producing
life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, resides in the
nature of its life activity, and free conscious activity constitutes the species-character
of man. Life appears only as a means of life.
The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from
that activity; it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object
of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination
with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes
man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a species-being. Or,
rather, he is a conscious being – i.e., his own life is an object for
him, only because he is a species-being. Only because of that is his activity
free activity. Estranged labour reverses the relationship so that man, just
because he is a conscious being, makes his life activity, his essential being,
a mere means for his existence.
The practical creation of an objective world, the fashioning of inorganic nature,
is proof that man is a conscious species-being – i.e., a being which treats
the species as its own essential being or itself as a species-being. It is true
that animals also produce. They build nests and dwellings, like the bee, the
beaver, the ant, etc. But they produce only their own immediate needs or those
of their young; they produce only when immediate physical need compels them
to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly
produces only in freedom from such need; they produce only themselves, while
man reproduces the whole of nature; their products belong immediately to their
physical bodies, while man freely confronts his own product. Animals produce
only according to the standards and needs of the species to which they belong,
while man is capable of producing according to the standards of every species
and of applying to each object its inherent standard; hence, man also produces
in accordance with the laws of beauty.
It is, therefore, in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves
himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through
it, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore,
the objectification of the species-life of man: for man produces himself not
only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he
can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created. In tearing
away the object of his production from man, estranged labour therefore tears
away from him his species-life, his true species-objectivity, and transforms
his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature,
is taken from him.
In the same way as estranged labour reduces spontaneous and free activity to
a means, it makes man’s species-life a means of his physical existence.
Consciousness, which man has from his species, is transformed through estrangement
so that species-life becomes a means for him.
(3) Estranged labour, therefore, turns man’s species-being – both
nature and his intellectual species-power – into a being alien to him
and a means of his individual existence. It estranges man from his own body,
from nature as it exists outside him, from his spiritual essence, his human
existence.
(4) An immediate consequence of man’s estrangement from the product of
his labour, his life activity, his species-being, is the estrangement of man
from man. When man confront himself, he also confronts other men. What is true
of man’s relationship to his labour, to the product of his labour, and
to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, and to the labour
and the object of the labour of other men.
In general, the proposition that man is estranged from his species-being means
that each man is estranged from the others and that all are estranged from man’s
essence.
Man’s estrangement, like all relationships of man to himself, is realized
and expressed only in man’s relationship to other men.
In the relationship of estranged labour, each man therefore regards the other
in accordance with the standard and the situation in which he as a worker finds
himself.
We started out from an economic fact, the estrangement of the worker and of
his production. We gave this fact conceptual form: estranged, alienated labour.
We have analyzed this concept, and in so doing merely analyzed an economic fact.
Let us now go on to see how the concept of estranged, alienated labour must
express and present itself in reality.
If the product of labour is alien to me, and confronts me as an alien power,
to whom does it then belong?
To a being other than me.
Who is this being?
The gods? It is true that in early times most production – e.g., temple
building, etc., in Egypt, India, and Mexico – was in the service of the
gods, just as the product belonged to the gods. But the gods alone were never
the masters of labour. The same is true of nature. And what a paradox it would
be if the more man subjugates nature through his labour and the more divine
miracles are made superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more he is forced
to forgo the joy or production and the enjoyment of the product out of deference
to these powers.
The alien being to whom labour and the product of labour belong, in whose service
labour is performed, and for whose enjoyment the product of labour is created,
can be none other than man himself.
If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, and if it confronts
him as an alien power, this is only possible because it belongs to a man other
than the worker. If his activity is a torment for him, it must provide pleasure
and enjoyment for someone else. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself
can be this alien power over men.
Consider the above proposition that the relationship of man to himself becomes
objective and real for him only through his relationship to other men. If, therefore,
he regards the product of his labour, his objectified labour, as an alien, hostile,
and powerful object which is independent of him, then his relationship to that
object is such that another man – alien, hostile, powerful, and independent
of him – is its master. If he relates to his own activity as unfree activity,
then he relates to it as activity in the service, under the rule, coercion,
and yoke of another man.
Every self-estrangement of man from himself and nature is manifested in the
relationship he sets up between other men and himself and nature. Thus, religious
self-estrangement is necessarily manifested in the relationship between layman
and priest, or, since we are dealing here with the spiritual world, between
layman and mediator, etc. In the practical, real world, self-estrangement can
manifest itself only in the practical, real relationship to other men. The medium
through which estrangement progresses is itself a practical one. So through
estranged labour man not only produces his relationship to the object and to
the act of production as to alien and hostile powers; he also produces the relationship
in which other men stand to his production and product, and the relationship
in which he stands to these other men. Just as he creates his own production
as a loss of reality, a punishment, and his own product as a loss, a product
which does not belong to him, so he creates the domination of the non-producer
over production and its product. Just as he estranges from himself his own activity,
so he confers upon the stranger and activity which does not belong to him.
Up to now, we have considered the relationship only from the side of the worker.
Later on, we shall consider it from the side of the non-worker.
Thus, through estranged, alienated labour, the worker creates the relationship
of another man, who is alien to labour and stands outside it, to that labour.
The relation of the worker to labour creates the relation of the capitalist
– or whatever other word one chooses for the master of labour –
to that labour. Private property is therefore the product, result, and necessary
consequence of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature
and to himself.
Private property thus derives from an analysis of the concept of alienated labour
– i.e., alienated man, estranged labour, estranged life, estranged man.
It is true that we took the concept of alienated labour (alienated life) from
political economy as a result of the movement of private property. But it is
clear from an analysis of this concept that, although private property appears
as the basis and cause of alienated labour, it is in fact its consequence, just
as the gods were originally not the cause but the effect of the confusion in
men’s minds. Later, however, this relationship becomes reciprocal.
It is only when the development of private property reaches its ultimate point
of culmination that this, its secret, re-emerges; namely, that is
(a) the product of alienated labour, and
(b) the means through which labour is alienated, the realization of this alienation.
This development throws light upon a number of hitherto unresolved controversies.
(1) Political economy starts out from labour as the real soul of production
and yet gives nothing to labour and everything to private property. Proudhon
has dealt with this contradiction by deciding for labour and against private
property[21]. But we have seen that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction
of estranged labour with itself and that political economy has merely formulated
laws of estranged labour.
It, therefore, follows for us that wages and private property are identical:
for there the product, the object of labour, pays for the labour itself, wages
are only a necessary consequence of the estrangement of labour; similarly, where
wages are concerned, labour appears not as an end in itself but as the servant
of wages. We intend to deal with this point in more detail later on: for the
present we shall merely draw a few conclusions.[22]
An enforced rise in wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the
fact that such an anomalous situation could only be prolonged by force) would
therefore be nothing more than better pay for slaves and would not mean an increase
in human significance or dignity for either the worker or the labour.
Even the equality of wages, which Proudhon demands, would merely transform the
relation of the present-day worker to his work into the relation of all men
to work. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist.
Wages are an immediate consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour
is the immediate cause of private property. If the one falls, then the other
must fall too.
(2) It further follows from the relation of estranged labour to private property
that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude,
is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers. This
is not because it is only a question of their emancipation, but because in their
emancipation is contained universal human emancipation. The reason for this
universality is that the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation
of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are nothing but
modifications and consequences of this relation.
Just as we have arrived at the concept of private property through an analysis
of the concept of estranged, alienated labour, so with the help of these two
factors it is possible to evolve all economic categories, and in each of these
categories – e.g., trade, competition, capital, money – we shall
identify only a particular and developed expression of these basic constituents.
But, before we go on to consider this configuration, let us try to solve two
further problems.
(1) We have to determine the general nature of private property, as it has arisen
out of estranged labour, in its relation to truly human and social property.
(2) We have taken the estrangement of labour, its alienation, as a fact and
we have analyzed that fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate his labour,
to estrange it? How is this estrangement founded in the nature of human development?
We have already gone a long way towards solving this problem by transforming
the question of the origin of private property into the question of the relationship
of alienated labour to the course of human development. For, in speaking of
private property, one imagines that one is dealing with something external to
man. In speaking of labour, one is dealing immediately with man himself. This
new way of formulating the problem already contains its solution.
ad (1): The general nature of private property and its relationship to truly
human property.
Alienated labour has resolved itself for us into two component parts, which
mutually condition one another, or which are merely different expressions of
one and the same relationship. Appropriation appears as estrangement, as alienation;
and alienation appears as appropriation, estrangement as true admission to citizenship.[23]
We have considered the one aspect – alienated labour in relation to the
worker himself – i.e., the relation of alienated labour to itself. And
as product, as necessary consequence of this relationship, we have found the
property relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labour. Private property
as the material, summarized expression of alienated labour embraces both relations
– the relation of the worker to labour and to the product of his labour
and the non-workers, and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to
the product of his labour.
We have already seen that, in relation to the worker who appropriates nature
through his labour, appropriation appears as estrangement, self-activity as
activity for another and of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, production
of an object as loss of that object to an alien power, to an alien man. Let
us now consider the relation between this man, who is alien to labour and to
the worker, and the worker, labour, and the object of labour.
The first thing to point out is that everything which appears for the worker
as an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears for the non-worker as
a situation of alienation, of estrangement.
Secondly, the real, practical attitude of the worker in production and to the
product (as a state of mind) appears for the non-worker who confronts him as
a theoretical attitude.
Thirdly, the non-worker does everything against the worker which the worker
does against himself, but he does not do against himself what he does against
the worker.
Let us take a closer look at these three relationships.
[ First Manuscript breaks off here. ]
Antithesis of Capital
and Labour.
Landed Property and Capital
... forms the interest on his capital. The worker is the subjective manifestation of the fact that capital is man wholly lost to himself, just as capital is the objective manifestation of the fact that labour is man lost to himself. But the worker has the misfortune to be a living capital, and therefore an indigent capital, one which loses its interest, and hence its livelihood, every moment it is not working. The value of the worker as capital rises according to demand and supply, and physically too his existence, his life, was and is looked upon as a supply of a commodity like any other. The worker produces capital, capital produces him — hence he produces himself, and man as worker, as a commodity, is the product of this entire cycle. To the man who is nothing more than a worker — and to him as a worker — his human qualities only exist insofar as they exist for capital alien to him. Because man and capital are alien, foreign to each other, however, and thus stand in an indifferent, external and accidental relationship to each other, it is inevitable that this foreignness should also appear as something real. As soon, therefore, as it occurs to capital (whether from necessity or caprice) no longer to be for the worker, he himself is no longer for himself: he has no work, hence no wages, and since he has no existence as a human being but only as a worker, he can go and bury himself, starve to death, etc. The worker exists as a worker only when he exists for himself as capital; and he exists as capital only when some capital exists for him. The existence of capital is his existence, his life; as it determines the tenor of his life in a manner indifferent to him.
Political economy, therefore, does not recognise the unemployed worker, the workingman, insofar as he happens to be outside this labour relationship. The rascal, swindler, beggar, the unemployed, the starving, wretched and criminal workingman — these are figures who do not exist for political economy but only for other eyes, those of the doctor, the judge, the grave-digger, and bum-bailiff, etc.; such figures are spectres outside its domain. For it, therefore, the worker's needs are but the one need — to maintain him whilst he is working and insofar as may be necessary to prevent the race of labourers from [dying] out. The wages of labour have thus exactly the same significance as the maintenance and servicing of any other productive instrument, or as the consumption of capital in general, required for its reproduction with interest, like the oil which is applied to wheels to keep them turning. Wages, therefore, belong to capital's and the capitalist's necessary costs, and must not exceed the bounds of this necessity. It was therefore quite logical for the English factory owners, before the Amendment Bill of 1834 to deduct from the wages of the worker the public charity which he was receiving out of the Poor Rate and to consider this to be an integral part of wages. [24]
Production does not simply produce man as a commodity, the human commodity, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping with this role as a mentally and physically dehumanised being. — Immorality, deformity, and dulling of the workers and the capitalists. — Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity ... the human commodity.... Great advance of Ricardo, Mill, etc., on Smith and Say, to declare the existence of the human being — the greater or lesser human productivity of the commodity — to be indifferent and even harmful. Not how many workers are maintained by a given capital, but rather how much interest it brings in, the sum-total of the annual savings, is said to be the true purpose of production.
It was likewise a great and consistent advance of modern English political economy, that, whilst elevating labour to the position of its sole principle, it should at the same time expound with complete clarity the inverse relation between wages and interest on capital, and the fact that the capitalist could normally only gain by pressing down wages, and vice versa. Not the defrauding of the consumer, but the capitalist and the worker taking advantage of each other, is shown to be the normal relationship.
The relations of private property contain latent within them the relation of private property as labour, the relation of private property as capital, and the mutual relation of these two to one another. There is the production of human activity as labour — that is, as an activity quite alien to itself, to man and to nature, and therefore to consciousness and the expression of life — the abstract existence of man as a mere workman who may therefore daily fall from his filled void into the absolute void — into his social, and therefore actual, non-existence. On the other hand, there is the production of the object of human activity as capital — in which all the natural and social characteristic of the object is extinguished; in which private property has lost its natural and social quality (and therefore every political and social illusion, and is not associated with any apparently human relations); in which the selfsame capital remains the same in the most diverse natural and social manifestations, totally indifferent to its real content. This contradiction, driven to the limit, is of necessity the limit, the culmination, and the downfall of the whole private-property relationship.
It is therefore another great achievement of modern English political economy to have declared rent of land to be the difference in the interest yielded by the worst and the best land under cultivation; to have [exposed] the landowner's romantic illusions — his alleged social importance and the identity of his interest with the interest of society, a view still maintained by Adam Smith after the Physiocrats; and to [have] anticipated and prepared the movement of the real world which will transform the landowner into an ordinary, prosaic capitalist, and thus simplify and sharpen the contradiction [between capital and labour] and. hasten its resolution. Land as land, and rent as rent, have lost their distinction of rank and become insignificant capital and interest — or rather, capital and interest that signify only money.
The distinction between capital and land, between profit and rent, and between both and wages, and industry, and agriculture, and immovable and movable private property — this distinction is not rooted in the nature of things, but is a historical distinction, a fixed historical moment in the formation and development of the contradiction between capital and labour. In industry, etc., as opposed to immovable landed property, is only expressed the way in which [industry] came into being and the contradiction to agriculture in which industry developed. This distinction only continues to exist as a special sort of work — as an essential, important and life-embracing distinction — so long as industry (town life) develops over and against landed property (aristocratic feudal life) and itself continues to bear the feudal character of its opposite in the form of monopoly, craft, guild, corporation, etc., within which labour still has a seemingly social significance, still the significance of the real community, and has not yet reached the stage of indifference to its content, of complete being-for-self[25], i. e., of abstraction from all other being, and hence has not yet become liberated capital.
But liberated industry, industry constituted for itself as such, and liberated capital, are the necessary development of labour. The power of industry over its opposite is at once revealed in the emergence of agriculture as a real industry, while previously it left most of the work to the soil and to the slave of the soil, through whom the land cultivated itself. With the transformation of the slave into a free worker — i.e., into a hireling — the landlord himself is transformed into a captain of industry, into a capitalist — a transformation which takes place at first through the intermediacy of the tenant farmer. The tenant farmer, however, is the landowner's representative — the landowner's revealed secret: it is only through him that the landowner has his economic existence — his existence as a private proprietor — for the rent of his land only exists due to the competition between the farmers.
Thus, in the person of the tenant farmer the landlord has already become in essence a common capitalist. And this must come to pass, too, in actual fact: the capitalist engaged in agriculture — the tenant — must become a landlord, or vice versa. The tenant's industrial hucksterism is the landowner's industrial hucksterism, for the being of the former postulates the being of the latter.
But mindful of their contrasting origin, of their line of descent, the landowner knows the capitalist as his insolent, liberated, enriched slave of yesterday and sees himself as a capitalist who is threatened by him. The capitalist knows the landowner as the idle, cruel, egotistical master of yesterday; he knows that he injures him as a capitalist, but that it is to industry that he owes all his present social significance, his possessions and his pleasures; he sees in him a contradiction to free industry and to free capital — to capital independent of every natural limitation. This contradiction is extremely bitter, and each side tells the truth about the other. One need only read the attacks of immovable on movable property and vice versa to obtain a clear picture of their respective worthlessness. The landowner lays stress on the noble lineage of his property, on feudal souvenirs or reminiscences, the poetry of recollection, on his romantic disposition, on his political importance, etc.; and when he talks economics, it is only agriculture that he holds to be productive. At the same time he depicts his adversary as a sly, hawking, carping, deceitful, greedy, mercenary, rebellious, heartless and spiritless person who is estranged from the community and freely trades it away, who breeds, nourishes and cherishes competition, and with it pauperism, crime, and the dissolution of all social bonds, an extorting, pimping, servile, smooth, flattering, fleecing, dried-up rogue without honour, principles, poetry, substance, or anything else. (Amongst others see the Physiocrat Bergasse, whom Camille Desmoulins flays in his journal, Révolutions de France et de Brabant [26]; see von Vincke, Lancizolle, Haller, Leo, Kosegarten and also Sismondi.)
[See on the other hand the garrulous, old-Hegelian theologian Funke who tells, after Herr Leo, with tears in his eyes how a slave had refused, when serfdom was abolished, to cease being the property of the gentry [27]. See also the patriotic visions of Justus Möser, which distinguish themselves by the fact that they never for a moment ... abandon the respectable, petty-bourgeois "home-baked", ordinary, narrow horizon of the philistine, and which nevertheless remain pure fancy. This contradiction has given them such an appeal to the German heart.- Note by Marx.]
Movable property, for its part, points to the miracles of industry and progress. It is the child of modern times, whose legitimate, native-born son it is. It pities its adversary as a simpleton, unenlightened about his own nature (and in this it is completely right), who wants to replace moral capital and free labour by brute, immoral violence and serfdom. It depicts him as a Don Quixote, who under the guise of bluntness, respectability, the general interest, and stability, conceals incapacity for progress, greedy self-indulgence, selfishness, sectional interest, and evil intent. It declares him an artful monopolist; it pours cold water on his reminiscences, his poetry, and his romanticism by a historical and sarcastic enumeration of the baseness, cruelty, degradation, prostitution, infamy, anarchy and rebellion, of which romantic castles were the workshops.
It claims to have obtained political freedom for everybody; to have loosed the chains which fettered civil society; to have linked together different worlds; to have created trade promoting friendship between the peoples; to have created pure morality and a pleasant culture; to have given the people civilised needs in place of their crude wants, and the means of satisfying them. Meanwhile, it claims, the landowner — this idle, parasitic grain-profiteer — raises the price of the people's basic necessities and so forces the capitalist to raise wages without being able to increase productivity, thus impeding [the growth of] the nation's annual income, the accumulation of capital, and therefore the possibility of providing work for the people and wealth for the country, eventually cancelling it, thus producing a general decline — whilst he parasitically exploits every advantage of modern civilisation without doing the least thing for it, and without even abating in the slightest his feudal prejudices. Finally, let him — for whom the cultivation of the land and the land itself exist only as a source of money, which comes to him as a present - let him just take a look at his tenant farmer and say whether he himself is not a downright, fantastic, sly scoundrel who in his heart and in actual fact has for a long time belonged to free industry and to lovely trade, however much he may protest and prattle about historical memories and ethical or political goals. Everything which he can really advance to justify himself is true only of the cultivator of the land (the capitalist and the labourers), of whom the landowner is rather the enemy. Thus he gives evidence against himself. [Movable property claims that] without capital landed property is dead, worthless matter; that its civilised victory has discovered and made human labour the source of wealth in place of the dead thing. (See Paul Louis Courier, Saint-Simon, Ganilh, Ricardo, Mill, McCulloch and Destutt de Tracy and Michel Chevalier.)
The real course of development (to be inserted at this point) results in the necessary victory of the capitalist over the landowner — that is to say, of developed over undeveloped, immature private property — just as in general, movement must triumph over immobility; open, self-conscious baseness over hidden, unconscious baseness; cupidity over self-indulgence; the avowedly restless, adroit self-interest of enlightenment over the parochial, worldly-wise, respectable, idle and fantastic self-interest of superstition; and money over the other forms of private property.
Those states which sense something of the danger
attaching to fully developed free industry, to fully developed pure morality
and to fully developed philanthropic trade, try, but in vain, to hold in check
the capitalisation of landed property.
Landed property in its distinction from capital is private property —
capital — still afflicted with local and political prejudices; it is capital
which has not yet extricated itself from its entanglement with the world and
found the form proper to itself — capital not yet fully developed. It
must achieve its abstract, that is, its pure, expression in the course of its
cosmogony.
The character of private property is expressed by labour, capital, and the relations
between these two. The movement through which these constituents have to pass
is:
First. Unmediated or mediated unity of the two.
Capital and labour are at first still united. Then, though separated and estranged,
they reciprocally develop and promote each other as positive conditions.
[Second.] The two in opposition, mutually excluding each other. The worker knows
the capitalist as his own non-existence, and vice versa: each tries to rob the
other of his existence.
[Third.] Opposition of each to itself. Capital = stored-up labour = labour.
As such it splits into capital itself and its interest, and this latter again
into interest and profit. The capitalist is completely sacrificed. He falls
into the working class, whilst the worker (but only exceptionally) becomes a
capitalist. Labour as a moment of capital — its costs. Thus the wages
of labour - a sacrifice of capital.
Splitting of labour into labour itself and the wages of labour. The worker himself
a capital, a commodity.
Clash of mutual contradictions.
FROM:
Human Requirements and
Division of Labour
Under the Rule of Private Property
Society, as it appears to the political economist, is civil society [39] in
which every individual is a totality of needs and only ||XXXV| exists for the
other person, as the other exists for him, insofar as each becomes a means for
the other. The political economist reduces everything (just as does politics
in its Rights of Man) to man, i.e., to the individual whom he strips of all
determinateness so as to class him as capitalist or worker.
The division of labour is the economic expression of the social character of
labour within the estrangement. Or, since labour is only an expression of human
activity within alienation, of the manifestation of life as the alienation of
life, the division of labour, too, is therefore nothing else but the estranged,
alienated positing of human activity as a real activity of the species or as
activity of man as a species-being.
As for the essence of the division of labour – and of course the division
of labour had to be conceived as a major driving force in the production of
wealth as soon as labour was recognised as the essence of private property –
i.e., as for the estranged and alienated form of human activity as an activity
of the species – the political economists are very vague and self-contradictory
about it.
[quotes from Adam Smith, J B Say, F Skarbek and J S Mill].||XXXVI-XXXVII|
The whole of modern political economy agrees, however, that division of labour
and wealth of production, division of labour and accumulation of capital, mutually
determine each other; just as it agrees that only private property which is
at liberty to follow its own course can produce the most useful and comprehensive
division of labour.
Adam Smith’s argument can be summarised as follows: Division of labour
bestows on labour infinite productive capacity. It stems from the propensity
to exchange and barter, a specifically human propensity which is probably not
accidental, but is conditioned by the use of reason and speech. The motive of
those who engage in exchange is not humanity but egoism. The diversity of human
talents is more the effect than the cause of the division of labour, i.e., of
exchange. Besides, it is only the latter which makes such diversity useful.
The particular attributes of the different breeds within a species of animal
are by nature much more marked than the degrees of difference in human aptitude
and activity. But because animals are unable to engage in exchange, no individual
animal benefits from the difference in the attributes of animals of the same
species but of different breeds. Animals are unable to combine the different
attributes of their species, and are unable to contribute anything to the common
advantage and comfort of the species. It is otherwise with men, amongst whom
the most dissimilar talents and forms of activity are of use to one another,
because they can bring their different products together into a common stock,
from which each can purchase. As the division of labour springs from the propensity
to exchange, so it grows and is limited by the extent of exchange – by
the extent of the market. In advanced conditions, every man is a merchant, and
society is a commercial society.
Say regards exchange as accidental and not fundamental. Society could exist
without it. It becomes indispensable in the advanced state of society. Yet production
cannot take place without it. Division of labour is a convenient, useful means
– a skilful deployment of human powers for social wealth; but it reduces
the ability of each person taken individually. The last remark is a step forward
on the part of Say.
Skarbek distinguishes the individual powers inherent in man – intelligence
and the physical capacity for work – from the powers derived from society
– exchange and division of labour, which mutually condition one another.
But the necessary premise of exchange is private property. Skarbek here expresses
in an objective form what Smith, Say, Ricardo, etc., say when they designate
egoism and self-interest as the basis of exchange, and buying and selling as
the essential and adequate form of exchange.
Mill presents trade as the consequence of the division of labour. With him human
activity is reduced to mechanical motion. Division of labour and use of machinery
promote wealth of production. Each person must be entrusted with as small a
sphere of operations as possible. Division of labour and use of machinery, in
their turn, imply large-scale production of wealth, and hence of products. This
is the reason for large manufactories.
||XXXVIII| The examination of division of labour and exchange is of extreme
interest, because these are perceptibly alienated expressions of human activity
and essential power as a species activity and species power.
To assert that division of labour and exchange rest on private property is nothing
but asserting that labour is the essence of private property – an assertion
which the political economist cannot prove and which we wish to prove for him.
Precisely in the fact that division of labour and exchange are aspects of private
property lies the twofold proof, on the one hand that human life required private
property for its realisation, and on the other hand that it now requires the
supersession of private property.
Division of labour and exchange are the two phenomena which lead the political
economist to boast of the social character of his science, while in the same
breath he gives unconscious expression to the contradiction in his science –
the motivation of society by unsocial, particular interests.
The factors we have to consider are: Firstly, the propensity to exchange –
the basis of which is found in egoism – is regarded as the cause or reciprocal
effect of the division of labour. Say regards exchange as not fundamental to
the nature of society. Wealth – production – is explained by division
of labour and exchange. The impoverishment of individual activity, and its loss
of character as a result of the division of labour, are admitted. Exchange and
division of labour are acknowledged as the sources of the great diversity of
human talents – a diversity which in its turn becomes useful as a result
of exchange. Skarbek divides man’s essential powers of production –
or productive powers – into two parts: (1) those which are individual
and inherent in him – his intelligence and his special disposition, or
capacity, for work; and (2) those derived from society and not from the actual
individual – division of labour and exchange.
Furthermore, the division of labour is limited by the market. Human labour is
simple mechanical motion: the main work is done by the material properties of
the objects. The fewest possible operations must be apportioned to any one individual.
Splitting-up of labour and concentration of capital; the insignificance of individual
production and the production of wealth in large quantities. Meaning of free
private property within the division of labour.|XXXVIII||