It is impossible to express oneself more clearly. On each occasion Marx calls attention to the fact that his surplus-value must not be confounded with profit or the earnings of capital; that this latter is rather a subform and frequently even only a fragment of surplus-value. And if in spite of this Herr D hring asserts that Marxian surplus-value, expressed in everyday language, is the earnings of capital ; and if it is an actual fact that the whole of Marx s book turns on surplus-value then there are only two possibilities: Either Herr D hring does not know any better, and then it is an unparalleled act of impudence to decry a book of whose main content he is ignorant; or he knows what it is all about, and in that case he has committed a deliberate act of falsification. To proceed: But competition is precisely what absolutely prevents Herr D hring from understanding the process. He cannot comprehend how the competing entrepreneurs are able constantly to realise the full product of labour, including the surplus-product, at prices so far above the natural outlays of production. Here again we find his customary strictness {D. C. 95} of expression, which in fact is simply slovenliness. In Marx, the surplus-product as such has absolutely no outlays of production; it is the part of the product which costs nothing to the capitalist. If therefore the competing entrepreneurs desired to realise the surplus-product at its natural outlays of production, they would have simply to give it away. But do not let us waste time on such micrological details {D. K. G. 507}. Are not the competing entrepreneurs every day selling the product of labour above its natural outlays of production? According to Herr D hring, the natural outlays of production consist From whatever side we approach D hringian economics, we do not get one step further. For every obnoxious phenomenon profit, land rent, starvation wages, the enslavement of the workers he has only one word of explanation: force, and ever again force, and Herr D hring's mightier wrath {501} finally resolves itself into wrath at force. We have seen, first, that this invocation of force is a lame subterfuge, a relegation of the problem from the sphere of economics to that of politics, which is unable to explain a single economic fact; and secondly, that it leaves unexplained the origin of force itself and very prudently so, for otherwise it would have to come to the conclusion that all social power and all political force have their source in economic preconditions, in the mode of production and exchange historically given for each society at each period. But let us see whether we cannot wrest from the inexorable builder of deeper foundations {see D. C. 11} of political economy some further disclosures about profit. Perhaps we shall meet with success if we apply ourselves to his treatment of wages. On page 158 we find: Surplus-labour, in any form, whether of slavery, serfdom or wage-labour, is recognised by Herr D hring as the source of the revenues of all ruling classes up to now; this is taken from the much-quoted passage in Capital, p. 227: Capital has not invented surplus-labour, and so on. And the net proceeds which constitute the income of the master what is that but the surplus of the labour product over and above the wages, which, even in Herr D hring, in spite of his quite superfluous disguise of it in the term hire , must assure, generally speaking, the labourer's maintenance and possibility of procreation? How can the appropriation of the most important part of the proceeds of labour-power {174} be carried out except by the capitalist, as Marx shows, extorting from the labourer more labour than is necessary for the reproduction of the means of subsistence consumed by the latter; that is to say, by the capitalist making the labourer work a longer time than is necessary for the replacement of the value of the wages paid to the labourer? Thus the prolongation of the working-day beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of the labourer s means of subsistence Marx s surplus-labour this, and nothing but this, is what is concealed behind Herr D hring's utilisation of labour-power ; and his net proceeds {158} falling to the master how can they manifest themselves otherwise than in the Marxian surplus-product and surplus-value? And what, apart from its inexact formulation, is there to distinguish the D hringian rent of possession from the Marxian surplus-value? For the rest, Herr D hring has taken the name rent of possession [ Besitzrente ] from Rodbertus, who included both the rent of land and the rent of capital, or earnings of capital, under the one term rent, so that Herr D hring had only to add "possession" to it. *6 And so that no doubt may be left of his plagiarism, Herr D hring sums up, in his own way, the laws of the changes of magnitude in the price of labour-power and in surplus-value which are developed by Marx in Chapter XV (page 539, et seqq., of Capital), and does it in such a manner that what falls to the rent of possession must be lost to wages, and vice versa, thereby reducing certain Marxian laws, so rich in content, to a tautology without content for it is self-evident that of a given magnitude falling into two parts, one part cannot increase unless the other decreases. And so Herr D hring has succeeded in appropriating the ideas of Marx in such a way that the "definitive and most strictly scientific treatment in the sense of the exact disciplines" {D. K. G. 498} which is certainly present in Marx's exposition is completely lost. We therefore cannot avoid the conclusion that the strange commotion which Herr D hring makes in the Kritische Geschichte over Capital, and the dust he raises with the famous question that comes up in connection with surplus-value (a question which he had better have left unasked, inasmuch as he cannot answer it himself) that all this is only a military ruse, a sly manoeuvre to cover up the gross plagiarism of Marx committed in the Cursus Herr D hring had in fact every reason for warning his readers not to occupy themselves with the intricate maze which Herr Marx calls Capital {D. K. G. 497}, with the bastards of historical and logical fantasy, the confused and hazy Hegelian notions and jugglery {498}, etc. The Venus against whom this faithful Eckart warns the German youth had been taken by him stealthily from the Marxian preserves and brought to a safe place for his own use. We must congratulate him on these net proceeds derived from the utilisation of Marx's labour-power, and on the peculiar light thrown by his annexation of Marxian surplus-value under the name of rent of possession on the motives for his obstinate (repeated in two editions) and false assertion that by the term surplus-value Marx meant only profit or earnings of capital. And so we have to portray Herr D hring's achievements in Herr D hring's own words as follows:
1877: Anti-Duhring - Capital and Surplus-Value (Conclusion)