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MALLAM AI 2

Having now investigated, somewhat in detail, the conditions under which the English working-class lives, it is time to draw some further inferences from the facts presented, and then to compare our inferences with the actual state of things. Let us see what the workers themselves have become under the given circumstances, what sort of people they are, what their physical, mental, and moral status. When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains. I have now to prove that society in England daily and hourly commits what the working-men's organs, with perfect correctness, characterise as social murder, that it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time. I have further to prove that society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the workers, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. That it knows the consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter, but murder, I shall have proved, when I cite official documents, reports of Parliament and of the Government, in substantiation of my charge. That a class which lives under the conditions already sketched and is so ill-provided with the most necessary means of subsistence, cannot be healthy and can reach no advanced age, is self-evident. Let us review the circumstances once more with especial reference to the health of the workers. The centralisation of population in great cities exercises of itself an unfavourable influence; the atmosphere of London can never be so pure, so rich in oxygen, as the air of the country; two and a half million pairs of lungs, two hundred and fifty thousand fires, crowded upon an area three to four miles square, consume an enormous amount of oxygen, which is replaced with difficulty, because the method of building cities in itself impedes ventilation. The carbonic acid gas, engendered by respiration and fire, remains in the streets by reason of its specific gravity, and the chief air current passes over the roofs of the city. The lungs of the inhabitants fail to receive the due supply of oxygen, and the consequence is mental and physical lassitude and low vitality. For this reason, the dwellers in cities are far less exposed to acute, and especially to inflammatory, affections than rural populations, who live in a free, normal atmosphere; but they suffer the more from chronic affections. And if life in large cities is, in itself, injurious to health, how great must be the harmful influence of an abnormal atmosphere in the working-people's quarters, where, as we have seen, everything combines to poison the air. In the country, it may, perhaps, be comparatively innoxious to keep a dung-heap adjoining one's dwelling, because the air has free ingress from all sides; but in the midst of a large town, among closely built lanes and courts that shut out all movement of the atmosphere, the case is different. All putrefying vegetable and animal substances give off gases decidedly injurious to health, and if these gases have no free way of escape, they inevitably poison the atmosphere. The filth and stagnant pools of the working-people's quarters in the great cities have, therefore, the worst effect upon the public health, because they produce precisely those gases which engender disease; so, too, the exhalations from contaminated streams. But this is by no means all. The manner in which the great multitude of the poor is treated by society today is revolting. They are drawn into the large cities where they breathe a poorer atmosphere than in the country; they are relegated to districts which, by reason of the method of construction, are worse ventilated than any others; they are deprived of all means of cleanliness, of water itself, since pipes are laid only when paid for, and the rivers so polluted that they are useless for such purposes; they are obliged to throw all offal and garbage, all dirty water, often all disgusting drainage and excrement into the streets, being without other means of disposing of them; they are thus compelled to infect the region of their own dwellings. Nor is this enough. All conceivable evils are heaped upon the heads of the poor. If the population of great cities is too dense in general, it is they in particular who are packed into the least space. As though the vitiated atmosphere of the streets were not enough, they are penned in dozens into single rooms, so that the air which they breathe at night is enough in itself to stifle them. They are given damp dwellings, cellar dens that are not waterproof from below or garrets that leak from above. Their houses are so built that the clammy air cannot escape. They are supplied bad, tattered, or rotten clothing, adulterated and indigestible food. They are exposed to the most exciting changes of mental condition, the most violent vibrations between hope and fear; they are hunted like game, and not permitted to attain peace of mind and quiet enjoyment of life. They are deprived of all enjoyments except that of sexual indulgence and drunkenness, are worked every day to the point of complete exhaustion of their mental and physical energies, and are thus constantly spurred on to the maddest excess in the only two enjoyments at their command. And if they surmount all this, they fall victims to want of work in a crisis when all the little is taken from them that had hitherto been vouchsafed them. How is it possible, under such conditions, for the lower class to be healthy and long lived? What else can be expected than an excessive mortality, an unbroken series of epidemics, a progressive deterioration in the physique of the working population? Let us see how the facts stand. That the dwellings of the workers in the worst portions of the cities, together with the other conditions of life of this class, engender numerous diseases, is attested on all sides. The article already quoted from the Artisan asserts with perfect truth, that lung diseases must be the inevitable consequence of such conditions, and that, indeed, cases of this kind are disproportionately frequent in this class. That the bad air of London, and especially of the working-people's districts, is in the highest degree favourable to the development of consumption, the hectic appearance of great numbers of persons sufficiently indicates. If one roams the streets a little in the early morning, when the multitudes are on their way to their work, one is amazed at the number of persons who look wholly or half-consumptive. Even in Manchester the people have not the same appearance; these pale, lank, narrow- chested, hollow-eyed ghosts, whom one passes at every step, these languid, flabby faces, incapable of the slightest energetic expression, I have seen in such startling numbers only in London, though consumption carries off a horde of victims annually in the factory towns of the North. In competition with consumption stands typhus, to say nothing of scarlet fever, a disease which brings most frightful devastation into the ranks of the working- class. Typhus, that universally diffused affliction, is attributed by the official report on the sanitary condition of the working- class, directly to the bad state of the dwellings in the matters of ventilation, drainage, and cleanliness. This report compiled, it must not be forgotten, by the leading physicians of England from the testimony of other physicians, asserts that a single ill-ventilated court, a single blind alley without drainage, is enough to engender fever, and usually does engender it especially if the inhabitants are greatly crowded. This fever has the same character almost everywhere, and develops in nearly every case into specific typhus. It is to be found in the working-people's quarters of all great towns and cities, and in single ill-built, ill-kept streets of smaller places, though it naturally seeks out single victims in better districts also. In London it has now prevailed for a considerable time; its extraordinary violence in the year 1837 gave rise to the report already referred to. According to the annual report of Dr. Southwood Smith on the London Fever Hospital, the number of patients in 1843 was 1,462, or 418 more than in any previous year. In the damp, dirty regions of the north, south, and east districts of London, this disease raged with extraordinary violence. Many of the patients were working-people from the country, who had endured the severest privation while migrating, and, after their arrival, had slept hungry and half-naked in the streets, and so fallen victims to the fever. These people were brought into the hospital in such a state of weakness, that unusual quantities of wine, cognac, and preparations of ammonia and other stimulants were required for their treatment; 16 per cent of all patients died. This malignant fever is to be found in Manchester; in the worst quarters of the Old Town, Ancoats, Little Ireland, etc., it is rarely extinct; though here, as in the English towns generally, it prevails to a less extent than might be expected. In Scotland and Ireland, on the other hand, it rages with a violence that surpasses all conception. In Edinburgh and Glasgow it broke out in 1817, after the famine, and in 1826 and 1837 with especial violence, after the commercial crisis, subsiding somewhat each time after having raged about three years. In Edinburgh about 6,000 persons were attacked by the fever during the epidemic of 1817, and about 10,000 in that of 1837, and not only the number of persons attacked but the violence of the disease increased with each repetition. But the fury of the epidemic in all former periods seems to have been child's play in comparison with its ravages after the crisis of 1842. One-sixth of the whole indigent population of Scotland was seized by the fever, and the infection was carried by wandering beggars with fearful rapidity from one locality to another. It did not reach the middle and upper classes of the population, yet in two months there were more fever cases than in twelve years before. In Glasgow, twelve per cent of the population were seized in the year 1843; 52,000 persons, of whom thirty-two per cent perished, while this mortality in Manchester and Liverpool does not ordinarily exceed eight per cent. The illness reached a crisis on the seventh and fifteenth days; on the latter, the patient usually became yellow, which our authority regards as an indication that the cause of the malady was to be sought in mental excitement and anxiety. In Ireland, too, these fever epidemics have become domesticated. During twenty-one months of the years 1817-1818, 39,000 fever patients passed through the Dublin hospital; and in a more recent year, according to Sheriff Alison, 60,000. In Cork the fever hospital received one-seventh of the population in 1817-1818, in Limerick in the same time one-fourth, and in the bad quarter of Waterford, nineteen- twentieths of the whole population were ill of the fever at one time. > When one remembers under what conditions the working- people live, when one thinks how crowded their dwellings are, how every nook and corner swarms with human beings, how sick and well sleep in the same room, in the same bed, the only wonder is that a contagious disease like this fever does not spread yet farther. And when one reflects how little medical assistance the sick have at command, how many are without any medical advice whatsoever, and ignorant of the most ordinary precautionary measures, the mortality seems actually small. Dr. Alison, who has made a careful study of this disease, attributes it directly to the want and the wretched condition of the poor, as in the report already quoted. He asserts that privations and the insufficient satisfaction of vital needs are what prepare the frame for contagion and make the epidemic widespread and terrible. He proves that a period of privation, a commercial crisis or a bad harvest, has each time produced the typhus epidemic in Ireland as in Scotland, and that the fury of the plague has fallen almost exclusively on the working-class. It is a noteworthy fact, that according to his testimony, the majority of persons who perish by typhus are fathers of families, precisely the persons who can least be spared by those dependent upon them; and several Irish physicians whom he quotes bear the same testimony. Another category of diseases arises directly from the food rather than the dwellings of the workers. The food of the labourer, indigestible enough in itself, is utterly unfit for young children, and he has neither means nor time to get his children more suitable food. Moreover, the custom of giving children spirits, and even opium, is very general; and these two influences, with the rest of the conditions of life prejudicial to bodily development, give rise to the most diverse affections of the digestive organs, leaving life-long traces behind them. Nearly all workers have stomachs more or less weak, and are yet forced to adhere to the diet which is the root of the evil. How should they know what is to blame for it? And if they knew, how could they obtain a more suitable regimen so long as they cannot adopt a different way of living and are not better educated? But new disease arises during childhood from impaired digestion. Scrofula is almost universal among the working-class, and scrofulous parents have scrofulous children, especially when the original influences continue in full force to operate upon the inherited tendency of the children. A second consequence of this insufficient bodily nourishment, during the years of growth and development, is rachitis, which is extremely common among the children of the working-class. The hardening of the bones is delayed, the development of the skeleton in general is restricted, and deformities of the legs and spinal column are frequent, in addition to the usual rachitic affections. How greatly all these evils are increased by the changes to which the workers are subject in consequence of fluctuations in trade, want of work, and the scanty wages in time of crisis, it is not necessary to dwell upon. Temporary want of sufficient food, to which almost every working-man is exposed at least once in the course of his life, only contributes to intensify the effects of his usually sufficient but bad diet. Children who are half-starved, just when they most need ample and nutritious food and how many such there are during every crisis and even when trade is at its best must inevitably become weak, scrofulous and rachitic in a high degree. And that they do become so, their appearance amply shows. The neglect to which the great mass of working-men's children are condemned leaves ineradicable traces and brings the enfeeblement of the whole race of workers with it. Add to this the unsuitable clothing of this class, the impossibility of precautions against colds, the necessity of toiling so long as health permits, want made more dire when sickness appears, and the only too common lack of all medical assistance; and we have a rough idea of the sanitary condition of the English working-class. The injurious effects peculiar to single employments as now conducted, I shall not deal with here. Besides these, there are other influences which enfeeble the health of a great number of workers, intemperance most of all. All possible temptations, all allurements combine to bring the workers to drunkenness. Liquor is almost their only source of pleasure, and all things conspire to make it accessible to them. The working-man comes from his work tired, exhausted, finds his home comfortless, damp, dirty, repulsive; he has urgent need of recreation, he must have something to make work worth his trouble, to make the prospect of the next day endurable. His unnerved, uncomfortable, hypochondriac state of mind and body arising from his unhealthy condition, and especially from indigestion, is aggravated beyond endurance by the general conditions of his life, the uncertainty of his existence, his dependence upon all possible accidents and chances, and his inability to do anything towards gaining an assured position. His enfeebled frame, weakened by bad air and bad food, violently demands some external stimulus; his social need can be gratified only in the public-house, he has absolutely no other place where he can meet his friends. How can he be expected to resist the temptation? It is morally and physically inevitable that, under such circumstances, a very large number of working-men should fall into intemperance. And apart from the chiefly physical influences which drive the working-man into drunkenness, there is the example of the great mass, the neglected education, the impossibility of protecting the young from temptation, in many cases the direct influence of intemperate parents, who give their own children liquor, the certainty of forgetting for an hour or two the wretchedness and burden of life, and a hundred other circumstances so mighty that the workers can, in truth, hardly be blamed for yielding to such overwhelming pressure. Drunkenness has here ceased to be a vice, for which the vicious can be held responsible; it becomes a phenomenon, the necessary, inevitable effect of certain conditions upon an object possessed of no volition in relation to those conditions. They who have degraded the working-man to a mere object have the responsibility to bear. But as inevitably as a great number of working-men fall a prey to drink, just so inevitably does it manifest its ruinous influence upon the body and mind of its victims. All the tendencies to disease arising from the conditions of life of the workers are promoted by it, it stimulates in the highest degree the development of lung and digestive troubles, the rise and spread of typhus epidemics. Another source of physical mischief to the working-class lies in the impossibility of employing skilled physicians in cases of illness. It is true that a number of charitable institutions strive to supply this want, that the infirmary in Manchester, for instance, receives or gives advice and medicine to 22,000 patients annually. But what is that in a city in which, according to Gaskell's calculation, three-fourths of the population need medical aid every year? English doctors charge high fees, and working-men are not in a position to pay them. They can therefore do nothing, or are compelled to call in cheap charlatans, and use quack remedies, which do more harm than good. An immense number of such quacks thrive in every English town, securing their clientele among the poor by means of advertisements, posters, and other such devices. Besides these, vast quantities of patent medicines are sold, for all conceivable ailments: Morrison's Pills, Parr's Life Pills, Dr. Mainwaring's Pills, and a thousand other pills, essences, and balsams, all of which have the property of curing all the ills that flesh is heir to. These medicines rarely contain actually injurious substances, but, when taken freely and often, they affect the system prejudicially; and as the unwary purchasers are always recommended to take as much as possible, it is not to be wondered at that they swallow them wholesale whether wanted or not. It is by no means unusual for the manufacturer of Parr's Life Pills to sell twenty to twenty-five thousand boxes of these salutary pills in a week, and they are taken for constipation by this one, for diarrhoea by that one, for fever, weakness, and all possible ailments. As our German peasants are cupped or bled at certain seasons, so do the English working-people now consume patent medicines to their own injury and the great profit of the manufacturer. One of the most injurious of these patent medicines is a drink prepared with opiates, chiefly laudanum, under the name Godfrey's Cordial. Women who work at home, and have their own and other people's children to take care of, give them this drink to keep them quiet, and, as many believe, to strengthen them. They often begin to give this medicine to newly born children, and continue, without knowing the effects of this "heart's-ease", until the children die. The less susceptible the child's system to the action of the opium, the greater the quantities administered. When the cordial ceases to act, laudanum alone is given, often to the extent of fifteen to twenty drops at a dose. The Coroner of Nottingham testified before a Parliamentary Commission that one apothecary had, according to his own statement, used thirteen hundredweight of treacle in one year in the preparation of Godfrey's Cordial. The effects upon the children so treated may be readily imagined. They are pale, feeble, wilted, and usually die before completing the second year. The use of this cordial is very extensive in all great towns and industrial districts in the kingdom. The result of all these influences is a general enfeeblement of the frame in the working-class. There are few vigorous, well-built, healthy persons among the workers, i.e. among the factory operatives, who are employed in confined rooms, and we are here discussing these only. They are almost all weakly, of angular but not powerful build, lean, pale, and of relaxed fibre, with the exception of the muscles especially exercised in their work. Nearly all suffer from indigestion, and consequently from a more or less hypochondriac, melancholy, irritable, nervous condition. Their enfeebled constitutions are unable to resist disease, and are therefore seized by it on every occasion. Hence they age prematurely, and die early. On this point the mortality statistics supply unquestionable testimony. According to the Report of Registrar-General Graham, the annual death-rate of all England and Wales is something less than 2 1/2 per cent. That is to say, out of forty-five persons, one dies every year. This was the average for the year 1839-40. In 1840-41 the mortality diminished somewhat, and the death-rate was but one in forty-six. But in the great cities the proportion is wholly different. I have before me official tables of mortality (Manchester Guardian, July 31st, 1844), according to which the death-rate of several large towns is as follows: In Manchester, including Chorlton and Salford, one in 32.72; and excluding Chorlton and Salford, one in 50.75. In Liverpool, including West Derby (suburb), 31.90, and excluding West Derby, 29.90; while the average of all the districts of Cheshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire cited, including a number of wholly or partially rural districts and many small towns, with a total population of 2,172,506 for the whole, is one death in 39.80 persons. How unfavourably the workers are placed in the great cities, the mortality for Prescott in Lancashire shows: a district inhabited by miners, and showing a lower sanitary condition than that of the agricultural districts, mining being by no means a healthful occupation. But these miners live in the country, and the death-rate among them is but one in 47.54, or nearly two-and-a-half per cent better than that for all England. All these statements are based upon the mortality tables for 1843. Still higher is the death-rate in the Scotch cities; in Edinburgh, in 1838-39, one in 29; in 1831, in the Old Town alone, one in 22. In Glasgow, according to Dr. Cowan, the average has been, since 1830, one in 90; and in single years, one in 22 to 24. That this enormous shortening of life falls chiefly upon the working-class, that the general average is improved by the smaller mortality of the upper and middle-classes, is attested upon all sides. One of the most recent depositions is that of a physician, Dr. P. H. Holland in Manchester, who investigated Chorlton-on-Medlock, a suburb of Manchester, under official commission. He divided the houses and streets into three classes each, and ascertained the following variations in the death-rate: It is clear from other tables given by Holland that the mortality in the streets of the second class is 18 per cent greater, and in the streets of the third class 68 per cent greater than in those of the first class; that the mortality in the houses of the second class is 31 per cent greater, and in the third class 78 per cent greater than in those of the first class; that the mortality in those bad streets which were improved, decreased 25 per cent. He closes with the remark, very frank for an English bourgeois: The death-rate is kept so high chiefly by the heavy mortality among young children in the working-class. The tender frame of a child is least able to withstand the unfavourable influences of an inferior lot in life; the neglect to which they are often subjected, when both parents work or one is dead, avenges itself promptly, and no one need wonder that in Manchester, according to the report last quoted, more than fifty-seven per cent of the children of the working-class perish before the fifth year, while but twenty per cent of the children of the higher classes, and not quite. thirty-two per cent of the children of all classes in the country die under five years of age. The article of the Artisan, already several times referred to, furnishes exacter information on this point, by comparing the city death-rate in single diseases of children with the country death-rate, thus demonstrating that, in general, epidemics in Manchester and Liverpool are three times more fatal than in country districts; that affections of the nervous system are quintupled, and stomach troubles trebled, while deaths from affections of the lungs in cities are to those in the country as 2 1/2 to 1. Fatal cases of small-pox, measles, scarlet fever, and whooping cough, among small children, are four times more frequent; those of water on the brain are trebled, and convulsions ten times more frequent. To quote another acknowledged authority, I append the following table. Out of 10,000 persons there die Apart from the diverse diseases which are the necessary consequence of the present neglect and oppression of the poorer classes, there are other influences which contribute to increase the mortality among small children. In many families the wife, like the husband, has to work away from home, and the consequence is the total neglect of the children, who are either locked up or given out to be taken care of. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at if hundreds of them perish through all manner of accidents. Nowhere are so many children run over, nowhere are so many killed by falling, drowning, or burning, as in the great cities and towns of England. Deaths from burns and scalds are especially frequent, such a case occurring nearly every week during the winter months in Manchester, and very frequently in London, though little mention is made of them in the papers. I have at hand a copy of the Weekly Dispatch of December 15th, 1844, according to which, in the week from December 1st to December 7th inclusive, six such cases occurred. These unhappy children, perishing in this terrible way, are victims of our social disorder, and of the property-holding classes interested in maintaining and prolonging this disorder. Yet one is left in doubt whether even this terribly torturing death is not a blessing for the children in rescuing them from a long life of toil and wretchedness, rich in suffering and poor in enjoyment. So far has it gone in England; and the bourgeoisie reads these things every day in the newspapers and takes no further trouble in the matter. But it cannot complain if, after the official and non-official testimony here cited which must be known to it, I broadly accuse it of social murder. Let the ruling class see to it that these frightful conditions are ameliorated, or let it surrender the administration of the common interests to the labouring-class. To the latter course it is by no means inclined; for the former task, so long as it remains the bourgeoisie crippled by bourgeois prejudice, it has not the needed power. For if, at last, after hundreds of thousands of victims have perished, it manifests some little anxiety for the future, passing a "Metropolitan Buildings Act", under which the most unscrupulous overcrowding of dwellings is to be, at least in some slight degree, restricted; if it points with pride to measures which, far from attacking the root of the evil, do not by any means meet the demands of the commonest sanitary police, it cannot thus vindicate itself from the accusation. The English bourgeoisie has but one choice, either to continue its rule under the unanswerable charge of murder and in spite of this charge, or to abdicate in favour of the labouring-class. Hitherto it has chosen the former course. Let us turn from the physical to the mental state of the workers. Since the bourgeoisie vouchsafes them only so much of life as is absolutely necessary, we need not wonder that it bestows upon them only so much education as lies in the interest of the bourgeoisie; and that, in truth, is not much. The means of education in England are restricted out of all proportion to the population. The few day schools at the command of the working-class are available only for the smallest minority, and are bad besides. The teachers, worn-out workers, and other unsuitable persons who only turn to teaching in order to live, are usually without the indispensable elementary knowledge, without the moral discipline so needful for the teacher, and relieved of all public supervision. Here, too, free competition rules, and, as usual, the rich profit by it, and the poor, for whom competition is not free, who have not the knowledge needed to enable them to form a correct judgment, have the evil consequences to bear. Compulsory school attendance does not exist. In the mills it is, as we shall see, purely nominal; and when in the session of 1843 the Ministry was disposed to make this nominal compulsion effective, the manufacturing bourgeoisie opposed the measure with all its might, though the working-class was outspokenly in favour of compulsory school attendance. Moreover, a mass of children work the whole week through in the mills or at home, and therefore cannot attend school. The evening schools, supposed to be attended by children who are employed during the day, are almost abandoned or attended without benefit. It is asking too much, that young workers, who have been using themselves up twelve hours in the day, should go to school from eight to ten at night. And those who try it usually fall asleep, as is testified by hundreds of witnesses in the Children's Employment Commission's Report. Sunday schools have been founded, it is true, but they, too, are most scantily supplied with teachers, and can be of use to those only who have already learnt something in the day schools. The interval from one Sunday to the next is too long for an ignorant child to remember in the second sitting what it learned in the first, a week before. The Children's Employment Commission's Report furnishes a hundred proofs, and the Commission itself most emphatically expresses the opinion, that neither the week-day nor the Sunday schools, in the least degree, meet the needs of the nation. This Report gives evidence of ignorance in the working-class of England, such as could hardly be expected in Spain or Italy. It cannot be otherwise; the bourgeoisie has little to hope, and much to fear, from the education of the working-class. The Ministry, in its whole enormous budget of 55,000,000, has only the single trifling item of 40,000 for public education, and, but for the fanaticism of the religious sects which does at least as much harm as good, the means of education would be yet more scanty. As it is, the State Church manages its national schools and the various sects their sectarian schools for the sole purpose of keeping the children of the brethren of the faith within the congregation, and of winning away a poor childish soul here and there from some other sect. The consequence is that religion, and precisely the most unprofitable side of religion, polemical discussion, is made the principal subject of instruction, and the memory of the children overburdened with incomprehensible dogmas and theological distinctions; that sectarian hatred and bigotry are awakened as early as possible, and all rational mental and moral training shamefully neglected. The working-class has repeatedly demanded of Parliament a system of strictly secular public education, leaving religion to the ministers of the sects; but, thus far, no Ministry has been induced to grant it. The Minister is the obedient servant of the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie is divided into countless sects; but each would gladly grant the workers the otherwise dangerous education on the sole condition of their accepting, as an antidote, the dogmas peculiar to the especial sect in question. And as these sects are still quarrelling among themselves for supremacy, the workers remain for the present without education. It is true that the manufacturers boast of having enabled the majority to read, but the quality of the reading is appropriate to the source of the instruction, as the Children's Employment Commission proves. According to this report, he who knows his letters can read enough to satisfy the conscience of the manufacturers. And when one reflects upon the confused orthography of the English language which makes reading one of the arts, learned only under long instruction, this ignorance is readily understood. Very few working-people write readily; and writing orthographically is beyond the powers even of many "educated" persons. The Sunday schools of the State Church, of the Quakers, and, I think, of several other sects, do not teach writing, "because it is too worldly an employment for Sunday". The quality of the instruction offered the workers in other directions may be judged from a specimen or two, taken from the Children's Employment Commission's Report, which unfortunately does not embrace mill-work proper: It is sufficiently clear that the instruction in morals can have no better effect than the religious teaching, with which in all English schools it is mixed up. The simple principles which, for plain human beings, regulate the relations of man to man, brought into the direst confusion by our social state, our war of each against all, necessarily remain confused and foreign to the working-man when mixed with incomprehensible dogmas, and preached in the religious form of an arbitrary and dogmatic commandment. The schools contribute, according to the confession of all authorities, and especially of the Children's Employment Commission, almost nothing to the morality of the working-class. So short-sighted, so stupidly narrow-minded is the English bourgeoisie in its egotism, that it does not even take the trouble to impress upon the workers the morality of the day, which the bourgeoisie has patched together in its own interest for its own protection! Even this precautionary measure is too great an effort for the enfeebled and sluggish bourgeoisie. A time must come when it will repent its neglect, too late. But it has no right to complain that the workers know nothing of its system of morals, and do not act in accordance with it. Thus are the workers cast out and ignored by the class in power, morally as well as physically and mentally. The only provision made for them is the law, which fastens upon them when they become obnoxious to the bourgeoisie. Like the dullest of the brutes, they are treated to but one form of education, the whip, in the shape of force, not convincing but intimidating. There is, therefore, no cause for surprise if the workers, treated as brutes, actually become such; or if they can maintain their consciousness of manhood only by cherishing the most glowing hatred, the most unbroken inward rebellion against the bourgeoisie in power. They are men so long only as they burn with wrath against the reigning class. They become brutes the moment they bend in patience under the yoke, and merely strive to make life endurable while abandoning the effort to break the yoke. This, then, is all that the bourgeoisie has done for the education of the proletariat and when we take into consideration all the circumstances in which this class lives, we shall not think the worse of it for the resentment which it cherishes against the ruling class. The moral training which is not given to the worker in school is not supplied by the other conditions of his life; that moral training, at least, which alone has worth in the eyes of the bourgeoisie; his whole position and environment involves the strongest temptation to immorality. He is poor, life offers him no charm, almost every enjoyment is denied him, the penalties of the law have no further terrors for him; why should he restrain his desires, why leave to the rich the enjoyment of his birthright, why not seize a part of it for himself? What inducement has the proletarian not to steal? It is all very pretty and very agreeable to the ear of the bourgeois to hear the "sacredness of property" asserted; but for him who has none, the sacredness of property dies out of itself. Money is the God of this world; the bourgeois takes the proletarian's money from him and so makes a practical atheist of him. No wonder, then, if the proletarian retains his atheism and no longer respects the sacredness and power of the earthly God. And when the poverty of the proletarian is intensified to the point of actual lack of the barest necessaries of life, to want and hunger, the temptation to disregard all social order does but gain power. This the bourgeoisie for the most part recognises. Symons observes that poverty exercises the same ruinous influence upon the mind which drunkenness exercises upon the body; and Dr. Alison explains to property-holding readers, with the greatest exactness, what the consequences of social oppression must be for the working-class. Want leaves the working-man the choice between starving slowly, killing himself speedily, or taking what he needs where he finds it in plain English, stealing. And there is no cause for surprise that most of them prefer stealing to starvation and suicide. True, there are, within the working-class, numbers too moral to steal even when reduced to the utmost extremity, and these starve or commit suicide. For suicide, formerly the enviable privilege of the upper classes, has become fashionable among the English workers, and numbers of the poor kill themselves to avoid the misery from which they see no other means of escape. But far more demoralising than his poverty in its influence upon the English working-man is the insecurity of his position, the necessity of living upon wages from hand to mouth, that in short which makes a proletarian of him. The smaller peasants in Germany are usually poor, and often suffer want, but they are less at the mercy of accident, they have at least something secure. The proletarian, who has nothing but his two hands, who consumes today what he earned yesterday, who is subject to every possible chance, and has not the slightest guarantee for being able to earn the barest necessities of life, whom every crisis, every whim of his employer may deprive of bread, this proletarian is placed in the most revolting, inhuman position conceivable for a human being. The slave is assured of a bare livelihood by the self-interest of his master, the serf has at least a scrap of land on which to live; each has at worst a guarantee for life itself. But the proletarian must depend upon himself alone, and is yet prevented from so applying his abilities as to be able to rely upon them. Everything that the proletarian can do to improve his position is but a drop in the ocean compared with the floods of varying chances to which he is exposed, over which he has not the slightest control. He is the passive subject of all possible combinations of circumstances, and must count himself fortunate when he has saved his life even for a short time; and his character and way of living are naturally shaped by these conditions. Either he seeks to keep his head above water in this whirlpool, to rescue his manhood, and this he can do solely in rebellion against the class which plunders him so mercilessly and then abandons him to his fate, which strives to hold him in this position so demoralising to a human being; or he gives up the struggle against his fate as hopeless, and strives to profit, so far as he can, by the most favourable moment. To save is unavailing, for at the utmost he cannot save more than suffices to sustain life for a short time, while if he falls out of work, it is for no brief period. To accumulate lasting property for himself is impossible; and if it were not, he would only cease to be a working-man and another would take his place. What better thing can he do, then, when he gets high wages, than live well upon them? The English bourgeoisie is violently scandalised at the extravagant living of the workers when wages are high; yet it is not only very natural but very sensible of them to enjoy life when they can, instead of laying up treasures which are of no lasting use to them, and which in the end moth and rust (i.e., the bourgeoisie) get possession of. Yet such a life is demoralising beyond all others. What Carlyle says of the cotton spinners is true of all English industrial workers: Another source of demoralisation among the workers is their being condemned to work. As voluntary, productive activity is the highest enjoyment known to us, so is compulsory toil the most cruel, degrading punishment. Nothing is more terrible than being constrained to do some one thing every day from morning until night against one's will. And the more a man the worker feels himself, the more hateful must his work be to him, because he feels the constraint, the aimlessness of it for himself. Why does he work? For love of work? From a natural impulse? Not at all! He works for money, for a thing which has nothing whatsoever to do with the work itself; and he works so long, moreover, and in such unbroken monotony, that this alone must make his work a torture in the first weeks if he has the least human feeling left. The division of labour has multiplied the brutalising influences of forced work. In most branches the worker's activity is reduced to some paltry, purely mechanical manipulation, repeated minute after minute, unchanged year after year. How much human feeling, what abilities can a man retain in his thirtieth year, who has made needle points or filed toothed wheels twelve hours every day from his early childhood, living all the time under the conditions forced upon the English proletarian? It is still the same thing since the introduction of steam. The worker's activity is made easy, muscular effort is saved, but the work itself becomes unmeaning and monotonous to the last degree. It offers no field for mental activity, and claims just enough of his attention to keep him from thinking of anything else. And a sentence to such work, to work which takes his whole time for itself, leaving him scarcely time to eat and sleep, none for physical exercise in the open air, or the enjoyment of Nature, much less for mental activity, how can such a sentence help degrading a human being to the level of a brute? Once more the worker must choose, must either surrender himself to his fate, become a "good" workman, heed "faithfully" the interest of the bourgeoisie, in which case he most certainly becomes a brute, or else he must rebel, fight for his manhood to the last, and this he can only do in the fight against the bourgeoisie. And when all these conditions have engendered vast demoralisation among the workers, a new influence is added to the old, to spread this degradation more widely and carry it to the extremest point. This influence is the centralisation of the population. The writers of the English bourgeoisie are crying murder at the demoralising tendency of the great cities; like perverted Jeremiahs, they sing dirges, not over the destruction, but the growth of the cities. Sheriff Alison attributes almost everything, and Dr. Vaughan, author of The Age of Great Cities, still more to this influence. And this is natural, for the propertied class has too direct an interest in the other conditions which tend to destroy the worker body and soul. If they should admit that poverty, insecurity, overwork, forced work, are the chief ruinous influences, they would have to draw the conclusion, then let us give the poor property, guarantee their subsistence, make laws against overwork, and this the bourgeoisie dare not formulate. But the great cities have grown up so spontaneously, the population has moved into them so wholly of its own motion, and the inference that manufacture and the middle-class which profits from it alone have created the cities is so remote, that it is extremely convenient for the ruling class to ascribe all the evil to this apparently unavoidable source; whereas the great cities really only secure a more rapid and certain development for evils already existing in the germ. Alison is humane enough to admit this; he is no thoroughbred Liberal manufacturer, but only a half developed Tory bourgeois, and he has, therefore, an open eye, now and then, where the full-fledged bourgeois is still stone blind. Let us hear him. Another influence of great moment in forming the character of the English workers is the Irish immigration already referred to. On the one hand it has, as we have seen, degraded the English workers, removed them from civilisation, and aggravated the hardship of their lot; but, on the other hand, it has thereby deepened the chasm between workers and bourgeoisie, and hastened the approaching crisis. For the course of the social disease from which England is suffering is the same as the course of a physical disease; it develops according to certain laws, has its own crises, the last and most violent of which determines the fate of the patient. And as the English nation cannot succumb under the final crisis, but must go forth from it, born again, rejuvenated, we can but rejoice over everything which accelerates the course of the disease. And to this the Irish immigration further contributes by reason of the passionate, mercurial Irish temperament, which it imports into England and into the English working-class. The Irish and English are to each other much as the French and the Germans; and the mixing of the more facile, excitable, fiery Irish temperament with the stable, reasoning, persevering English must, in the long run, be productive only of good for both. The rough egotism of the English bourgeoisie would have kept its hold upon the working-class much more firmly if the Irish nature, generous to a fault, and ruled primarily by sentiment, had not intervened, and softened the cold, rational English character in part by a mixture of the races, and in part by the ordinary contact of life. In view of all this, it is not surprising that the working-class has gradually become a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie has more in common with every other nation of the earth than with the workers in whose midst it lives. The workers speak other dialects, have other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie. Thus they are two radically dissimilar nations, as unlike as difference of race could make them, of whom we on the Continent have known but one, the bourgeoisie. Yet it is precisely the other, the people, the proletariat, which is by far the more important for the future of England. Of the public character of the English working-man, as it finds expression in associations and political principles, we shall have occasion to speak later; let us here consider the results of the influences cited above, as they affect the private character of the worker. The workman is far more humane in ordinary life than the bourgeois. I have already mentioned the fact that the beggars are accustomed to turn almost exclusively to the workers, and that, in general, more is done by the workers than by the bourgeoisie for the maintenance of the poor. This fact, which any one may prove for himself any day, is confirmed, among others, by Dr. Parkinson, Canon of Manchester, who says: All this, together with the correspondent public action of the workers, with which we shall deal later, forms the favourable side of the character of this class; the unfavourable one may be quite as briefly summed up, and follows quite as naturally out of the given causes. Drunkenness, sexual irregularities, brutality, and disregard for the rights of property are the chief points with which the bourgeois charges them. That they drink heavily is to be expected. Sheriff Alison asserts that in Glasgow some thirty thousand working-men get drunk every Saturday night, and the estimate is certainly not exaggerated; and that in that city in 1830, one house in twelve, and in 1840, one house in ten, was a public-house; that in Scotland, in 1823, excise was paid upon 2,300,000 gallons; in 1837, upon 6,620,000 gallons; in England, in 1823, upon 1,976,000 gallons, and in 1837, upon 7,875,000 gallons of spirits. The Beer Act of 1830, which facilitated the opening of beerhouses (jerry-shops), whose keepers are licensed to sell beer to be drunk on the premises, facilitated the spread of intemperance by bringing a beerhouse, so to say, to everybody's door. In nearly every street there are several such beerhouses, and among two or three neighbouring houses in the country one is sure to be a jerry-shop. Besides these, there are hush-shops in multitudes, i.e., secret drinking-places which are not licensed, and quite as many secret distilleries which product great quantities of spirits in retired spots, rarely visited by the police, in the great cities. Gaskell estimates these secret distilleries in Manchester alone at more than a hundred, and their product at 156,000 gallons at the least. In Manchester there are, besides, more than a thousand public houses selling all sorts of alcoholic drinks, or quite as many in proportion to the number of inhabitants as in Glasgow. In all other great towns, the state of things is the same. And when one considers, apart from the usual consequences of intemperance, that men and women, even children, often mothers with babies in their arms, come into contact in these places with the most degraded victims of the bourgeois regime, with thieves, swindlers, and prostitutes; when one reflects that many a mother gives the baby on her arm gin to drink, the demoralising effects of frequenting such places cannot be denied. On Saturday evenings, especially when wages are paid and work stops somewhat earlier than usual, when the whole working-class pours from its own poor quarters into the main thoroughfares, intemperance may be seen in all its brutality. I have rarely come out of Manchester on such an evening without meeting numbers of people staggering and seeing others lying in the gutter. On Sunday evening the same scene is usually repeated, only less noisily. And when their money is spent, the drunkards go to the nearest pawnshop, of which there are plenty in every city over sixty in Manchester, and ten or twelve in a single street of Salford, Chapel Street and pawn whatever they possess. Furniture, Sunday clothes where such exist, kitchen utensils in masses are fetched from the pawnbrokers on Saturday night only to wander back, almost without fail, before the next Wednesday, until at last some accident makes the final redemption impossible, and one article after another falls into the clutches of the usurer, or until he refuses to give a single farthing more upon the battered, used up pledge. When one has seen the extent of intemperance among the workers in England, one readily believes Lord Ashley's statement that this class annually expends something like twenty-five million pounds sterling upon intoxicating liquor; and the deterioration in external conditions, the frightful shattering of mental and physical health, the ruin of all domestic relations which follow may readily be imagined. True, the temperance societies have done much, but what are a few thousand teetotallers among the millions of workers? When Father Mathew, the Irish apostle of temperance, passes through the English cities, from thirty to sixty thousand workers take the pledge; but most of them break it again within a month. If one counts up the immense numbers who have taken the pledge in the last three or four years in Manchester, the total is greater than the whole population of the town and still it is by no means evident that intemperance is diminishing. Next to intemperance in the enjoyment of intoxicating liquors, one of the principal faults of English working-men is sexual licence. But this, too, follows with relentless logic, with inevitable necessity out of the position of a class left to itself, with no means of making fitting use of its freedom. The bourgeoisie has left the working-class only these two pleasures, while imposing upon it a multitude of labours and hardships, and the consequence is that the working-men, in order to get something from life, concentrate their whole energy upon these two enjoyments, carry them to excess, surrender to them in the most unbridled manner. When people are placed under conditions which appeal to the brute only, what remains to them but to rebel or to succumb to utter brutality? And when, moreover, the bourgeoisie does its full share in maintaining prostitution and how many of the 40,000 prostitutes who fill the streets of London every evening live upon the virtuous bourgeoisie! How many of them owe it to the seduction of a bourgeois, that they must offer their bodies to the passers-by in order to live? surely it has least of all a right to reproach the workers with their sexual brutality. The failings of the workers in general may be traced to an unbridled thirst for pleasure, to want of providence, and of flexibility in fitting into the social order, to the general inability to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment to a remoter advantage. But is that to be wondered at? When a class can purchase few and only the most sensual pleasures by its wearying toil, must it not give itself over blindly and madly to those pleasures? A class about whose education no one troubles himself, which is a playball to a thousand chances, knows no security in life what incentives has such a class to providence, to "respectability", to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment for a remoter enjoyment, most uncertain precisely by reason of the perpetually varying, shifting conditions under which the proletariat lives? A class which bears all the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its advantages, one to which the social system appears in purely hostile aspects who can demand that such a class respect this social order? Verily that is asking much! But the working-man cannot escape the present arrangement of society so long as it exists, and when the individual worker resists it, the greatest injury falls upon himself. Thus the social order makes family life almost impossible for the worker. In a comfortless, filthy house, hardly good enough for mere nightly shelter, ill-furnished, often neither rain-tight nor warm, a foul atmosphere filling rooms overcrowded with human beings, no domestic comfort is possible. The husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife also and the elder children, all in different places; they meet night and morning only, all under perpetual temptation to drink; what family life is possible under such conditions? Yet the working-man cannot escape from the family, must live in the family, and the consequence is a perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic quarrels, most demoralising for parents and children alike. Neglect of all domestic duties, neglect of the children, especially, is only too common among the English working-people, and only too vigorously fostered by the existing institutions of society. And children growing up in this savage way, amidst these demoralising influences, are expected to turn out goody-goody and moral in the end! Verily the requirements are naive, which the self-satisfied bourgeois makes upon the working-man! The contempt for the existing social order is most conspicuous in its extreme form that of offences against the law. If the influences demoralising to the working-man act more powerfully, more concentratedly than usual, he becomes an offender as certainly as water abandons the fluid for the vaporous state at 80 degrees, R aumur. Under the brutal and brutalising treatment of the bourgeoisie, the working-man becomes precisely as much a thing without volition as water, and is subject to the laws of Nature with precisely the same necessity; at a certain point all freedom ceases. Hence with the extension of the proletariat, crime has increased in England, and the British nation has become the most criminal in the world. From the annual criminal tables of the Home Secretary, it is evident that the increase of crime in England has proceeded with incomprehensible rapidity. The numbers of arrests for criminal offences reached in the years: 1805, 4,605, 1810, 5,146; 1815, 7,818; 1820, 13,710; 1825, 14,457; 1830, 18,107; 1835, 20,731; 1840, 27,187; 1841, 27,760; 1842, 31,309 in England and Wales alone. That is to say, they increased sevenfold in thirty-seven years. Of these arrests, in 1842, 4,497 were made in Lancashire alone, or more than 14 per cent of the whole; and 4,094 in Middlesex, including London, or more than 13 per cent. So that two districts which include great cities with large proletarian populations, produced one-fourth of the total amount of crime, though their population is far from forming one-fourth of the whole. Moreover, the criminal tables prove directly that nearly all crime arises within the proletariat; for, in 1842, taking the average, out of 100 criminals, 32.35 could neither read nor write; 58.32 read and wrote imperfectly; 6.77 could read and write well; 0.22 had enjoyed a higher education, while the degree of education of 2.34 could not be ascertained. In Scotland, crime has increased yet more rapidly. There were but 89 arrests for criminal offences in 1819, and as early as 1837 the number had risen to 3,126, and in 1842 to 4,189. In Lanarkshire, where Sheriff Alison himself made out the official report, population has doubled once in thirty years, and crime once in five and a half, or six times more rapidly than the population. The offences, as in all civilised countries, are, in the great majority of cases, against property, and have, therefore, arisen from want in some form; for what a man has, he does not steal. The proportion of offences against property to the population, which in the Netherlands is as 1:7,140 and in France, as 1:1,804, was in England, when Gaskell wrote as 1:799. The proportion of offences against persons to the population is, in the Netherlands, 1:28,904; in France, 1:17,573; in England, 1:23,395; that of crimes in general to the population in the agricultural districts, as 1:1,043; in the manufacturing district as 1:840. In the whole of England today the proportion is 1:660; though it is scarcely ten years since Gaskell's book appeared! These facts are certainly more than sufficient to bring any one, even a bourgeois, to pause and reflect upon the consequences of such a state of things. If demoralisation and crime multiply twenty years longer in this proportion (and if English manufacture in these twenty years should be less prosperous than heretofore, the progressive multiplication of crime can only continue the more rapidly), what will the result be? Society is already in a state of visible dissolution; it is impossible to pick up a newspaper without seeing the most striking evidence of the giving way of all social ties. I look at random into a heap of English journals lying before me; there is the Manchester Guardian for October 30, 1844, which reports for three days. It no longer takes the trouble to give exact details as to Manchester, and merely relates the most interesting cases: that the workers in a mill have struck for higher wages without giving notice, and been condemned by a Justice of the Peace to resume work; that in Salford a couple of boys had been caught stealing, and a bankrupt tradesman tried to cheat his creditors. From the neighbouring towns the reports are more detailed: in Ashton, two thefts, one burglary, one suicide; in Bury one theft; in Bolton, two thefts, one revenue fraud; in Leigh, one theft; in Oldham, one strike for wages, one theft, one fight between Irish women, one non-Union hatter assaulted by Union men, one mother beaten by her son, one attack upon the police, one robbery of a church; in Stockport, discontent of working-men with wages, one theft, one fraud, one fight, one wife beaten by her husband; in Warrington, one theft, one fight; in Wigan, one theft, and one robbery of a church. The reports of the London papers are much worse; frauds, thefts, assaults, family quarrels crowd one another. A Times of September 12, 1844, falls into my hand, which gives a report of a single day, including a theft, an attack upon the police, a sentence upon a father requiring him to support his illegitimate son, the abandonment of a child by its parents, and the poisoning of a man by his wife. Similar reports are to be found in all the English papers. In this country, social war is under full headway, every one stands for himself, and fights for himself against all comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes, depends upon a cynical calculation as to what is most advantageous for himself. It no longer occurs to any one to come to a peaceful understanding with his fellow-man; all differences are settled by threats, violence, or in a law-court. In short, every one sees in his neighbour an enemy to be got out of the way, or, at best, a tool to be used for his own advantage. And this war grows from year to year, as the criminal tables show, more violent, passionate, irreconcilable. The enemies are dividing gradually into two great camps the bourgeoisie on the one hand, the workers on the other. This war of each against all, of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, need cause us no surprise, for it is only the logical sequel of the principle involved in free competition. But it may very well surprise us that the bourgeoisie remains so quiet and composed in the face of the rapidly gathering storm-clouds, that it can read all these things daily in the papers without, we will not say indignation at such a social condition, but fear of its consequences, of a universal outburst of that which manifests itself symptomatically from day to day in the form of crime. But then it is the bourgeoisie, and from its standpoint cannot even see the facts, much less perceive their consequences. One thing only is astounding, that class prejudice and preconceived opinions can hold a whole class of human beings in such perfect, I might almost say, such mad blindness. Meanwhile, the development of the nation goes its way whether the bourgeoisie has eyes for it or not, and will surprise the property- holding class one day with things not dreamed of in its philosophy. 1. When as here and elsewhere I speak of society as a responsible whole, having rights and duties, I mean, of course, the ruling power of society, the class which at present holds social and political control, and bears, therefore, the responsibility for the condition of those to whom it grants no share in such control. This ruling class in England, as in all other civilised countries, is the bourgeoisie. But that this society, and especially the bourgeoisie, is charged with the duty of protecting every member of society, at least, in his life, to see to it, for example, that no one starves, I need not now prove to my German readers. If I were writing for the English bourgeoisie, the case would be different. Note by Engels to the German edition of 1845. And so it is now in Germany. Our German capitalists are fully up to the English level, in this respect at least, in the year of grace, 1886. Added by Engels to the American edition of 1887. (1892) How things have changed in the last fifty years! Today there are members of the English middle-classes who recognise that society has duties to the individual citizen but as for the German middle-classes?!? Added by Engels to the German edition of 1892. Return to Text 2. Dr. Alison, Management of the Poor in Scotland. Note by Engels. Return to Text 3. Dr. Alison in an article read before the British Association for the Advancement of Science. October, 1844, in York. Note by Engels. Return to Text 4. Alison, Principles of Population, vol. ii. Note by Engels to the American edition of 1887. Return to Text 5. Dr. Alison, Management of the Poor in Scotland. Note by Engels. Return to Text 6. The Manufacturing Population of England, ch. 8. Note by Engels. Return to Text 7. Report of Commission of Inquiry into the Employment of Children and Young Persons in Mines and Collieries and in the Trades and Manufactures in which numbers of them work together, not being included under the terms of the Factories' Regulation Act. First and Second Reports, Grainger's Report. Second Report, usually cited as Children's Employment Commission's Report, is one of the best official reports of its kind and contains an immense quantity of evidence which is both valuable and horrifying. First Report, 1841; Second Report, 1843. Note by Engels. Return to Text 8.Fifth Annual Report of the Reg. Gen. of Births, Deaths, and Marriages. Note by Engels. Return to Text 9. Dr. Cowan, Vital Statistics of Glasgow. Note by Engels to the American edition of 1887. Return to Text 10. Report of Commission of Inquiry into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts. First Report, 1844. Appendix. Note by Engels. Return to Text 11. Factories' Inquiry Commission's Reports, 3rd vol. Report of Dr. Hawkins on Lancashire, in which Dr. Roberton is cited the "Chief Authority for Statistics in Manchester" Note by Engels. Return to Text 12. Quoted by Dr. Wade from the Report of the Parliamentary Factories' Commission of 1832, in his History of the Middle and Working-Classes, London, 1835, 3rd ed. Note by Engels to the American edition of 1887 Return to Text 13. Children's Employment Commission's Report. App. Part II. Q. 18, Nos. 216, 217, 226, 235, etc. Horne. Note by Engels to the American edition of 1887. Return to Text 14. Ibid., evidence, pp. 9, 59; 155. Note by Engels to the American edition of 1887 Return to Text 15. Ibid., pp. 9, 56; 146. Note by Engels to the American edition of 1887. Return to Text 16. Ibid., pp. 54; 158. Note by Engels to the American edition of 1887. Return to Text 17. Symons' Rep. App. Part I, pp. E,22, et seq. Note by Engels to the American edition of 1887. Return to Text 18. Arts and Artisans. Note by Engels. Return to Text 19. Principles of Population, vol. ii, pp. 196, 197. Note by Engels. Return to Text 20. We shall see later how the rebellion of the working-class against the bourgeoisie in England is legalised by the right of coalition. Note by Engels. Return to Text 21. Chartism, p. 54, et seq. Note by Engels. Return to Text 22. Ibid., p. 40. Note by Engels to the American edition of 1887. Return to Text 23. Shall I call bourgeois witnesses to bear testimony for me here, too? I select one only, whom every one may read, namely, Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (McCulloch's four volume edition), vol. iii, book 5, chap. l, p. 297. Note by Engels. Return to Text 24. Principles of Population, vol. ii, p. 76, et seq., p. 82, p. 155. Note by Engels Return to Text 25. Pure-blooded. Ed. Return to Text 26. Philosophv of Manufactures, London, 1855, p. 406, et seq. We shall have occasion to refer further to this reputable work. Note by Engels. Return to Text 28. (1892) The idea that large-scale industry has split the English into two different nations has, as is well known, been carried out about the same time also by Disraeli in his novel, Sybil, or the two Nations. Note by Engels to the German edition of 1892. Return to Text 29. On the Present Condition of the Labouring Poor in Manchester, etc. By the Rev. Rd. Parkinson, Canon of Manchester, 3rd ed., London and Manchester, 1841. Pamphlet. Note by Engels. Return to Text 30. Principles of Population, passim. Note by Engels. Return to Text 31. Sitting of the Lower House on Feb. 28, 1845. Note by Engels. 32. The Manufacturing Population of England, chap. 10. Note by Engels. Return to Text 33. The total of population, about fifteen millions, divided by the number of convicted criminals (22,733). Note by Engels. Return to Text

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In dealing now with the more important branches of the English manufacturing proletariat, we shall begin, according to the principle already laid down, with the factory-workers, i.e., those who are comprised under the Factory Act. This law regulates the length of the working-day in mills in which wool, silk, cotton, and flax are spun or woven by means of water or steam-power, and embraces, therefore, the more important branches of English manufacture. The class employed by them is the most intelligent and energetic of all the English workers, and, therefore, the most restless and most hated by the bourgeoisie. It stands as a whole, and the cotton-workers pre-eminently stand, at the head of the labour movement, as their masters the manufacturers, especially those of Lancashire, take the lead of the bourgeois agitation. We have already seen in the introduction how the population employed in working up the textile materials were first torn from their former way of life. It is, therefore, not surprising that the progress of mechanical invention in later years also affected precisely these workers most deeply and permanently. The history of cotton manufacture as related by Ure, Baines, and others is the story of improvements in every direction, most of which have become domesticated in the other branches of industry as well. Hand-work is superseded by machine-work almost universally, nearly all manipulations are conducted by the aid of steam or water, and every year is bringing further improvements. In a well-ordered state of society, such improvements could only be a source of rejoicing; in a war of all against all, individuals seize the benefit for themselves, and so deprive the majority of the means of subsistence. Every improvement in machinery throws workers out of employment, and the greater the advance, the more numerous the unemployed; each great improvement produces, therefore, upon a number of workers the effect of a commercial crisis, creates want, wretchedness, and crime. Take a few examples. The very first invention, the jenny, worked by one man, produced at least sixfold what the spinning-wheel had yielded in the same time; thus every new jenny threw five spinners out of employment. The throstle, which, in turn, produced much more than the jenny, and, like it, was worked by one man, threw still more people out of employment. The mule, which required yet fewer hands in proportion to the product, had the same effect, and every improvement in the mule, every multiplication of its spindles, diminished still further the number of workers employed. But this increase of the number of spindles in the mule is so great that whole armies of workers have been thrown out of employment by it. For, whereas one spinner, with a couple of children for piecers, formerly set six hundred spindles in motion, he could now manage fourteen hundred to two thousand spindles upon two mules, so that two adult spinners and a part of the piecers whom they employed were thrown out. And since self- acting mules have been introduced into a very large number of spinning-mills, the spinners work is wholly performed by the machine. There lies before me a book from the pen of James Leach, one of the recognised leaders of the Chartists in Manchester. The author has worked for years in various branches of industry, in mills and coal-mines, and is known to me personally as an honest, trustworthy, and capable man. In consequence of his political position, he had at command extensive detailed information as to the different factories, collected by the workers themselves, and he publishes tables from which it is clear that in 1841, in 35 factories, 1,083 fewer mule spinners were employed than in 1829, though the number of spindles in these 35 factories had increased by 99,429. He cites five factories in which no spinners whatever are employed, self-actors only being used. While the number of spindles increased by 10 per cent, the number of spinners diminished more than 60 per cent. And Leach adds that since 1841, so many improvements have been introduced by double-decking and other means, that in some of the factories named, half the operatives have been discharged. In one factory alone, where eighty spinners were employed a short time ago, there are now but twenty left; the others having been discharged or set at children s work for children s wages. Of Stockport Leach tells a similar story, that in 1835, 800 spinners were employed, and in 1843 but 140, though the manufacture of Stockport has greatly increased during the last eight or nine years. Similar improvements have now been made in carding-frames, by which one-half the operatives have been thrown out of employment. In one factory improved frames have been set up, which have thrown four hands out of eight out of work, besides which the employer reduced the wages of the four retained from eight shillings to seven. The same process has gone on in the weaving industry; the power-loom has taken possession of one branch of hand-weaving after another, and since it produces much more than the hand-loom, while one weaver can work two looms, it has superseded a multitude of working-people. And in all sorts of manufacture, in flax and wool-spinning, in silk-twisting, the case is the same. The power-loom, too, is beginning to appropriate one branch after another of wool and linen-weaving; in Rochdale alone, there are more power than hand-looms in flannel and other wool-weaving branches. The bourgeoisie usually replies to this, that improvements in machinery, by decreasing the cost of production, supply finished goods at lower prices, and that these reduced prices cause such an increase in consumption that the unemployed operatives soon find full employment in newly founded factories. The bourgeoisie is so far correct that under certain conditions favourable for the general development of manufacture, every reduction in price of goods in which the raw material is cheap, greatly increases consumption, and gives rise to the building of new factories; but every further word of the assertion is a lie. The bourgeoisie ignores the fact that it takes years for these results of the decrease in price to follow and for new factories to be built; it is silent upon the point that every improvement in machinery throws the real work, the expenditure of force, more and more upon the machine, and so transforms the work of full-grown men into mere supervision, which a feeble woman or even a child can do quite as well, and does for half or two-thirds wages; that, therefore, grown men are constantly more and more supplanted and not re-employed by the increase in manufacture; it conceals the fact that whole branches of industry fall away, or are so changed that they must be learned afresh; and it takes good care not to confess what it usually harps upon, whenever the question of forbidding the work of children is broached, that factory-work must be learned in earliest youth in order to be learned properly. It does not mention the fact that the process of improvement goes steadily on, and that as soon as the operative has succeeded in making himself at home in a new branch, if he actually does succeed in so doing, this, too, is taken from him, and with it the last remnant of security which remained to him for winning his bread. But the bourgeoisie gets the benefit of the improvements in machinery; it has a capital opportunity for piling up money during the first years while many old machines are still in use, and the improvement not yet universally introduced; and it would be too much to ask that it should have an open eye for the disadvantages inseparable from these improvements. The fact that improved machinery reduces wages has also been as violently disputed by the bourgeoisie, as it is constantly reiterated by the working-men. The bourgeoisie insists that although the price of piece-work has been reduced, yet the total of wages for the week s work has rather risen than fallen, and the condition of the operatives rather improved than deteriorated. It is hard to get to the bottom of the matter, for the operatives usually dwell upon the price of piece-work. But it is certain that the weekly wage, also, has, in many branches of work, been reduced by the improvement of machinery. The so-called fine spinners (who spin fine mule yarn), for instance, do receive high wages, thirty to forty shillings a week, because they have a powerful association for keeping wages up, and their craft requires long training; but the coarse spinners who have to compete against self-actors (which are not as yet adapted for fine spinning), and whose association was broken down by the introduction of these machines, receive very low wages. A mule spinner told me that he does not earn more than fourteen shillings a week, and his statement agrees with that of Leach, that in various factories the coarse spinners earn less than sixteen shillings and sixpence a week, and that a spinner, who years ago earned thirty shillings, can now hardly scrape up twelve and a half, and had not earned more on an average in the past year. The wages of women and children may perhaps have fallen less, but only because they were not high from the beginning. I know several women, widows with children, who have trouble enough to earn eight to nine shillings a week; and that they and their families cannot live decently upon that sum, every one must admit who knows the price of the barest necessaries of life in England. That wages in general have been reduced by the improvement of machinery is the unanimous testimony of the operatives. The bourgeois assertion that the condition of the working-class has been improved by machinery is most vigorously proclaimed a falsehood in every meeting of working-men in the factory districts. And even if it were true that the relative wage, the price of piece-work only, has fallen, while the absolute wage, the sum to be earned in the week, remained unchanged, what would follow? That the operatives have had quietly to look on while the manufacturers filled their purses from every improvement without giving the hands the smallest share in the gain. The bourgeois forgets, in fighting the working-man, the most ordinary principles of his own Political Economy. He who at other times swears by Malthus, cries out in his anxiety before the workers: Where could the millions by which the population of England has increased find work, without the improvements in machinery? As though the bourgeois did not know well enough that without machinery and the expansion of industry which it produced, these millions would never have been brought into the world and grown up! The service which machinery has rendered the workers is simply this: that it has brought home to their minds the necessity of a social reform by means of which machinery shall no longer work against but for them. Let the wise bourgeois ask the people who sweep the streets in Manchester and elsewhere (though even this is past now, since machines for the purpose have been invented and introduced), or sell salt, matches, oranges, and shoe-strings on the streets, or even beg, what they were formerly, and he will see how many will answer: Mill-hands thrown out of work by machinery. The consequences of improvement in machinery under our present social conditions are, for the working-man, solely injurious, and often in the highest degree oppressive. Every new advance brings with it loss of employment, want, and suffering, and in a country like England where, without that, there is usually a surplus population", to be discharged from work is the worst that can befall the operative. And what a dispiriting, unnerving influence this uncertainty of his position in life, consequent upon the unceasing progress of machinery, must exercise upon the worker, whose lot is precarious enough without it! To escape despair, there are but two ways open to him; either inward and outward revolt against the bourgeoisie or drunkenness and general demoralisation. And the English operatives are accustomed to take refuge in both. The history of the English proletariat relates hundreds of uprisings against machinery and the bourgeoisie; we have already spoken of the moral dissolution which, in itself, is only another form of despair. The worst situation is that of those workers who have to compete against a machine that is making its way. The price of the goods which they produce adapts itself to the price of the kindred product of the machine, and as the latter works more cheaply, its human competitor has but the lowest wages. The same thing happens to every operative employed upon an old machine in competition with later improvements. And who else is there to bear the hardship? The manufacturer will not throw out his old apparatus, nor will he sustain the loss upon it; out of the dead mechanism he can make nothing, so he fastens upon the living worker, the universal scapegoat of society. Of all the workers in competition with machinery, the most ill-used are the hand-loom cotton weavers. They receive the most trifling wages, and, with full work, are not in a position to earn more than ten shillings a week. One class of woven goods after another is annexed by the power-loom, and hand-weaving is the last refuge of workers thrown out of employment in other branches, so that the trade is always overcrowded. Hence it comes that, in average seasons, the hand-weaver counts himself fortunate if he can earn six or seven shillings a week, while to reach this sum he must sit at his loom fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Most woven goods require moreover a damp weaving-room, to keep the weft from snapping, and in part for this reason, in part because of their poverty, which prevents them from paying for better dwellings, the work-rooms of these weavers are usually without wooden or paved floors. I have been in many dwellings of such weavers, in remote, vile courts and alleys, usually in cellars. Often half-a-dozen of these hand-loom weavers, several of them married, live together in a cottage with one or two work-rooms, and one large sleeping-room. Their food consists almost exclusively of potatoes, with perhaps oatmeal porridge, rarely milk, and scarcely ever meat. Great numbers of them are Irish or of Irish descent. And these poor hand-loom weavers, first to suffer from every crisis, and last to be relieved from it, must serve the bourgeoisie as a handle in meeting attacks upon the factory system. See, cries the bourgeois, triumphantly, see how these poor creatures must famish, while the mill operatives are thriving, and then judge the factory system! As though it were not precisely the factory system and the machinery belonging to it which had so shamefully crushed the hand-loom weavers, and as though the bourgeoisie did not know this quite as well as ourselves! But the bourgeoisie has interests at stake, and so a falsehood or two and a bit of hypocrisy won t matter much. Let us examine somewhat more closely the fact that machinery more and more supersedes the work of men. The human labour, involved in both spinning and weaving, consists chiefly in piecing broken threads, as the machine does all the rest. This work requires no muscular strength, but only flexibility of finger. Men are, therefore, not only not needed for it, but actually, by reason of the greater muscular development of the hand, less fit for it than women and children, and are, therefore, naturally almost superseded by them. Hence, the more the use of the arms, the expenditure of strength, can be transferred to steam or waterpower, the fewer men need be employed; and as women and children work more cheaply, and in these branches better than men, they take their places. In the spinning-mills women and girls are to be found in almost exclusive possession of the throstles; among the mules one man, an adult spinner (with self-actors, he, too, becomes superfluous), and several piecers for tying the threads, usually children or women, sometimes young men of from eighteen to twenty years, here and there an old spinner thrown out of other employment. At the power-looms women, from fifteen to twenty years, are chiefly employed, and a few men; these, however, rarely remain at this trade after their twenty-first year. Among the preparatory machinery, too, women alone are to be found, with here and there a man to clean and sharpen the carding-frames. Besides all these, the factories employ numbers of children doffers for mounting and taking down bobbins, and a few men as overlookers, a mechanic and an engineer for the steam- engines, carpenters, porters, etc.; but the actual work of the mills is done by women and children. This the manufacturers deny. They published last year elaborate tables to prove that machinery does not supersede adult male operatives. According to these tables, rather more than half of all the factory-workers employed, viz., 52 per cent, were females and 48 per cent males, and of these operatives more than half were over eighteen years old. So far, so good. But the manufacturers are very careful not to tell us, how many of the adults were men and how many women. And this is just the point. Besides this, they have evidently counted the mechanics, engineers, carpenters, all the men employed in any way in the factories, perhaps even the clerks, and still they have not the courage to tell the whole truth. These publications teem generally with falsehoods, perversions, crooked statements, with calculations of averages, that prove a great deal for the uninitiated reader and nothing for the initiated, and with suppressions of facts bearing on the most important points; and they prove only the selfish blindness and want of uprightness of the manufacturers concerned. Let us take some of the statements of a speech with which Lord Ashley introduced the Ten Hours Bill, March 15th, 1844, into the House of Commons. Here he gives some data as to the relations of sex and age of the operatives, not yet refuted by the manufacturers, whose statements, as quoted above, cover moreover only a part of the manufacturing industry of England. Of 419,590 factory operatives of the British Empire in 1839, 192,887, or nearly half, were under eighteen years of age, and 242,296 of the female sex, of whom 112,192 were less than eighteen years old. There remain, therefore, 80,695 male operatives under eighteen years, and 96,599 adult male operatives, or not one full quarter of the whole number. In the cotton factories, 56 per cent; in the woolen mills, 69 per cent; in the silk mills, 70 per cent; in the flax-spinning mills, 70 per cent of all operatives are of the female sex. These numbers suffice to prove the crowding out of adult males. But you have only to go into the nearest mill to see the fact confirmed. Hence follows of necessity that inversion of the existing social order which, being forced upon them, has the most ruinous consequences for the workers. The employment of women at once breaks up the family; for when the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill, and the husband works the same length of time there or elsewhere, what becomes of the children? They grow up like wild weeds; they are put out to nurse for a shilling or eighteenpence a week, and how they are treated may be imagined. Hence the accidents to which little children fall victims multiply in the factory districts to a terrible extent. The lists of the Coroner of Manchester showed for nine months: 69 deaths from burning, 56 from drowning, 23 from falling, 67 from other causes, or a total of 215 deaths from accidents, while in non-manufacturing Liverpool during twelve months there were but 146 fatal accidents. The mining accidents are excluded in both cases; and since the Coroner of Manchester has no authority in Salford, the population of both places mentioned in the comparison is about the same. The Manchester Guardian reports one or more deaths by burning in almost every number. That the general mortality among young children must be increased by the employment of the mothers is self-evident, and is placed beyond all doubt by notorious facts. Women often return to the mill three or four days after confinement, leaving the baby, of course; in the dinner-hour they must hurry home to feed the child and eat something, and what sort of suckling that can be is also evident. Lord Ashley repeats the testimony of several workwomen: In many cases the family is not wholly dissolved by the employment of the wife, but turned upside down. The wife supports the family, the husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks. This case happens very frequently; in Manchester alone, many hundred such men could be cited, condemned to domestic occupations. It is easy to imagine the wrath aroused among the working-men by this reversal of all relations within the family, while the other social conditions remain unchanged. There lies before me a letter from an English working-man, Robert Pounder, Baron s Buildings, Woodhouse, Moorside, in Leeds (the bourgeoisie may hunt him up there; I give the exact address for the purpose), written by him to Oastler. He relates how another working-man, being on tramp, came to St. Helens, in Lancashire, and there looked up an old friend. He found him in a miserable, damp cellar, scarcely furnished. The unmarried women, who have grown up in mills, are no better off than the married ones. It is self-evident that a girl who has worked in a mill from her ninth year is in no position to understand domestic work, whence it follows that female operatives prove wholly inexperienced and unfit as housekeepers. They cannot knit or sew, cook or wash, are unacquainted with the most ordinary duties of a housekeeper, and when they have young children to take care of, have not the vaguest idea how to set about it. The Factories Inquiry Commission s Report gives dozens of examples of this, and Dr. Hawkins, Commissioner for Lancashire expresses his opinion as follows: To form a correct judgment of the influence of factory-work upon the health of the female sex, it is necessary first to consider the work of children, and then the nature of the work itself. From the beginning of manufacturing industry, children have been employed in mills, at first almost exclusively by reason of the smallness of the machines, which were later enlarged. Even children from the workhouses were employed in multitudes, being rented out for a number of years to the manufacturers as apprentices. They were lodged, fed, and clothed in common, and were, of course, completely the slaves of their masters, by whom they were treated with the utmost recklessness and barbarity. As early as 1796, the public objection to this revolting system found such vigorous expression through Dr. Percival and Sir Robert Peel (father of the Cabinet Minister, and himself a cotton manufacturer), that in 1802 Parliament passed an Apprentices Bill, by which the most crying evils were removed. Gradually the increasing competition of free workpeople crowded out the whole apprentice system; factories were built in cities, machinery was constructed on a larger scale, and work-rooms were made more airy and wholesome; gradually, too, more work was found for adults and young persons. The number of children in the mills diminished somewhat, and the age at which they began to work rose a little; few children under eight or nine years were now employed. Later, as we shall see, the power of the state intervened several times to protect them from the money-greed of the bourgeoisie. The great mortality among children of the working-class, and especially among those of the factory operatives, is proof enough of the unwholesome conditions under which they pass their first years. These influences are at work, of course, among the children who survive, but not quite so powerfully as upon those who succumb. The result in the most favourable case is a tendency to disease, or some check in development, and consequent less than normal vigour of the constitution. A nine years old child of a factory operative that has grown up in want, privation, and changing conditions, in cold and damp, with insufficient clothing and unwholesome dwellings, is far from having the working force of a child brought up under healthier conditions. At nine years of age it is sent into the mill to work 6 hours (formerly 8, earlier still, 12 to 14, even 16 hours) daily, until the thirteenth year; then twelve hours until the eighteenth year. The old enfeebling influences continue, while the work is added to them. It is not to be denied that a child of nine years, even an operative s child, can hold out through 6 hours daily work, without any one being able to trace visible bad results in its development directly to this cause; but in no case can its presence in the damp, heavy air of the factory, often at once warm and wet, contribute to good health; and, in any case, it is unpardonable to sacrifice to the greed of an unfeeling bourgeoisie the time of children which should be devoted solely to their physical and mental development, withdraw them from school and the fresh air, in order to wear them for the benefit of the manufacturers. The bourgeoisie says: If we do not employ the children in the mills, they only remain under conditions unfavourable to their development; and this is true on the whole. But what does this mean if it is not a confession that the bourgeoisie first places the children of the working-class under unfavourable conditions, and then exploits these bad conditions for its own benefit, appeals to that which is as much its own fault as the factory system, excuses the sin of today with the sin of yesterday? And if the Factory Act did not in some measure fetter their hands, how this humane", this benevolent bourgeoisie, which has built its factories solely for the good of the working-class, would take care of the interests of these workers! Let us hear how they acted before the factory inspector was at their heels. Their own admitted testimony shall convict them in the Report of the Factories Inquiry Commission of 1833. The report of the Central Commission relates that the manufacturers began to employ children rarely of five years, often of six, very often of seven, usually of eight to nine years; that the working-day often lasted fourteen to sixteen hours, exclusive of meals and intervals; that the manufacturers permitted overlookers to flog and maltreat children, and often took an active part in so doing themselves. One case is related of a Scotch manufacturer, who rode after a sixteen years old runaway, forced him to return, running after the employer as fast as the master s horse trotted, and beat him the whole way with a long whip. In the large towns where the operatives resisted more vigorously, such things naturally happened less often. But even this long working-day failed to satisfy the greed of the capitalists. Their aim was to make the capital invested in the building and machinery produce the highest return, by every available means, to make it work as actively as possible. Hence the manufacturers introduced the shameful system of night-work. Some of them employed two sets of operatives, each numerous enough to fill the whole mill, and let one set work the twelve hours of the day, and the other the twelve hours of the night. It is needless to picture the effect upon the frames of young children, and even upon the health of young persons and adults, produced by permanent loss of sleep at night, which cannot be made good by any amount of sleep during the day. Irritation of the whole nervous system, with general lassitude and enfeeblement of the entire frame, were the inevitable results, with the fostering of temptation to drunkenness and unbridled sexual indulgence. One manufacturer testifies that during the two years in which night-work was carried on in his factory, the number of illegitimate children born was doubled, and such general demoralisation prevailed that he was obliged to give up night-work. Other manufacturers were yet more barbarous, requiring many hands to work thirty to forty hours at a stretch, several times a week, letting them get a couple of hours sleep only, because the night-shift was not complete, but calculated to replace a part of the operatives only. The reports of the Commission touching this barbarism surpass everything that is known to me in this line. Such infamies, as are here related, are nowhere else to be found yet we shall see that the bourgeoisie constantly appeals to the testimony of the Commission as being in its own favour. The consequences of these cruelties became evident quickly enough. The Commissioners mention a crowd of cripples who appeared before them, who clearly owed their distortion to the long working-hours. This distortion usually consists of a curving of the spinal column and legs, and is described as follows by Francis Sharp, M.R.C.S., of Leeds: Other deformities also have proceeded from this overwork, especially flattening of the foot, which Sir D. Barry frequently observed, as did the physicians and surgeons in Leeds. In cases, in which a stronger constitution, better food, and other more favourable circumstances enabled the young operative to resist this effect of a barbarous exploitation, we find, at least, pain in the back, hips, and legs, swollen joints, varicose veins, and large, persistent ulcers in the thighs and calves. These affections are almost universal among the operatives. The reports of Stuart, Mackintosh, and Sir D. Barry contain hundreds of examples; indeed, they know almost no operative who did not suffer from some of these affections; and in the remaining reports, the occurrence of the same phenomena is attested by many physicians. All these affections are easily explained by the nature of factory-work, which is, as the manufacturers say, very light", and precisely by reason of its lightness, more enervating than any other. The operatives have little to do, but must stand the whole time. Any one who sits down, say upon a window-ledge or a basket, is fined, and this perpetual upright position, this constant mechanical pressure of the upper portions of the body upon spinal column, hips, and legs, inevitably produces the results mentioned. This standing is not required by the work itself, and at Nottingham chairs have been introduced, with the result that these affections disappeared, and the operatives ceased to object to the length of the working-day. But in a factory where the operative works solely for the bourgeois, and has small interest in doing his work well, he would probably use the seats more than would be agreeable and profitable to the manufacturer; and in order that somewhat less raw material may be spoiled for the bourgeois, the operative must sacrifice health and strength. This long protracted upright position, with the bad atmosphere prevalent in the mills, entails, besides the deformities mentioned, a marked relaxation of all vital energies, and, in consequence, all sorts of other affections general rather than local. The atmosphere of the factories is, as a rule, at once damp and warm, usually warmer than is necessary, and, when the ventilation is not very good, impure, heavy, deficient in oxygen, filled with dust and the smell of the machine oil, which almost everywhere smears the floor, sinks into it, and becomes rancid. The operatives are lightly clad by reason of the warmth, and would readily take cold in case of irregularity of the temperature; a draught is distasteful to them, the general enervation which gradually takes possession of all the physical functions diminishes the animal warmth: this must be replaced from without, and nothing is therefore more agreeable to the operative than to have all the doors and windows closed, and to stay in his warm factory air. Then comes the sudden change of temperature on going out into the cold and wet or frosty atmosphere, without the means of protection from the rain, or of changing wet clothing for dry, a circumstance which perpetually produces colds. And when one reflects that, with all this, not one single muscle of the body is really exercised, really called into activity, except perhaps those of the legs; that nothing whatsoever counteracts the enervating, relaxing tendency of all these conditions; that every influence is wanting which might give the muscles strength, the fibres elasticity and consistency; that from youth up, the operative is deprived of all fresh-air recreation, it is impossible to wonder at the almost unanimous testimony of the physicians in the Factories Report, that they find a great lack of ability to resist disease, a general depression in vital activity, a constant relaxation of the mental and physical powers. Let us hear Sir D. Barry first: The men wear out very early in consequence of the conditions under which they live and work. Most of them are unfit for work at forty years, a few hold out to forty-five, almost none to fifty years of age. This is caused not only by the general enfeeblement of the frame, but also very often by a failure of the sight, which is a result of mule-spinning, in which the operative is obliged to fix his gaze upon a long row of fine, parallel threads, and so greatly to, strain the sight. Of 1,600 operatives employed in several factories in Harpur and Lanark, but 10 were over 45 years of age; of 22,094 operatives in diverse factories in Stockport and Manchester, but 145 were over 45 years old. Of these 143, 16 were retained as a special favour, and one was doing the work of a child. A list of 131 spinners contained but seven over 45 years, and yet the whole 131 were rejected by the manufacturers, to whom they applied for work, as too old", and were without means of support by reason of old age! Mr. Ashworth, a large manufacturer, admits in a letter to Lord Ashley, that, towards the fortieth year, the spinners can no longer prepare the required quantity of yarn, and are therefore sometimes discharged; he calls operatives forty years of age old people"! Commissioner Mackintosh expresses himself in the same way in the report of 1833: The influence of factory-work upon the female physique also is marked and peculiar. The deformities entailed by long hours of work are much more serious among women. Protracted work frequently causes deformities of the pelvis, partly in the shape of abnormal position and development of the hip bones, partly of malformation of the lower portion of the spinal column, And so it goes on in almost all the factories. The employment of young girls produces all sorts of irregularities during the period of development. In some, especially those who are better fed, the heat of the factories hastens this process, so that in single cases, girls of thirteen and fourteen are wholly mature. Roberton, whom I have already cited (mentioned in the Factories Inquiry Commission s Report as the eminent gynaecologist of Manchester), relates in the North of England Medical and Surgical Journal, that he had seen a girl of eleven years who was not only a wholly developed woman, but pregnant, and that it was by no means rare in Manchester for women to be confined at fifteen years of age). In such cases, the influence of the warmth of the factories is the same as that of a tropical climate, and, as in such climates, the abnormally early development revenges itself by correspondingly premature age and debility. On the other hand, retarded development of the female constitution occurs, the breasts mature late or not at all. Menstruation first appears in the seventeenth or eighteenth, sometimes in the twentieth year, and is often wholly wanting. Irregular menstruation, coupled with great pain and numerous affections, especially with anaemia, is very frequent, as the medical reports unanimously state. Children of such mothers, particularly of those who are obliged to work during pregnancy, cannot be vigorous. They are, on the contrary, described in the report, especially in Manchester, as very feeble; and Barry alone asserts that they are healthy, but says further, that in Scotland, where his inspection lay, almost no married women worked in factories. Moreover, most of the factories there are in the country (with the exception of Glasgow), a circumstance which contributes greatly to the invigoration of the children. The operatives children in the neighbourhood of Manchester are nearly all thriving and rosy, while those within the city look pale and scrofulous; but with the ninth year the colour vanishes suddenly, because all are then sent into the factories, when it soon becomes impossible to distinguish the country from the city children. But besides all this, there are some branches of factory-work which have an especially injurious effect. In many rooms of the cotton and flax-spinning mills, the air is filled with fibrous dust, which produces chest affections, especially among workers in the carding and combing-rooms. Some constitutions can bear it, some cannot; but the operative has no choice. He must take the room in which he finds work, whether his chest is sound or not. The most common effects of this breathing of dust are blood-spitting, hard, noisy breathing, pains in the chest, coughs, sleeplessness in short, all the symptoms of asthma ending in the worst cases in consumption. Especially unwholesome is the wet spinning of linen-yarn which is carried on by young girls and boys. The water spurts over them from the spindle, so that the front of their clothing is constantly wet through to the skin; and there is always water standing on the floor. This is the case to a less degree in the doubling-rooms of the cotton mills, and the result is a constant succession of colds and affections of the chest. A hoarse, rough voice is common to all operatives, but especially to wet spinners and doublers. Stuart, Mackintosh, and Sir D. Barry express themselves in the most vigorous terms as to the unwholesomeness of this work, and the small consideration shown by most of the manufacturers for the health of the girls who do it. Another effect of flax-spinning is a peculiar deformity of the shoulder, especially a projection of the right shoulder-blade, consequent upon the nature of the work. This sort of spinning and the throstle-spinning of cotton frequently produce diseases of the knee-pan, which is used to check the spindle during the joining of broken threads. The frequent stooping and the bending to the low machines common to both these branches of work have, in general, a stunting effect upon the growth of the operative. In the throstle-room of the cotton mill at Manchester, in which I was employed, I do not remember to have seen one single tall, well-built girl; they were all short, dumpy, and badly-formed, decidedly ugly in the whole development of the figure. But apart from all these diseases and malformations, the limbs of the operatives suffer in still another way. The work between the machinery gives rise to multitudes of accidents of more or less serious nature, which have for the operative the secondary effect of unfitting him for his work more or less completely. The most common accident is the squeezing off of a single joint of a finger, somewhat less common the loss of the whole finger, half or a whole hand, an arm, etc., in the machinery. Lockjaw very often follows, even upon the lesser among these injuries, and brings death with it. Besides the deformed persons, a great number of maimed ones may be seen going about in Manchester; this one has lost an arm or a part of one, that one a foot, the third half a leg; it is like living in the midst of an army just returned from a campaign. But the most dangerous portion of the machinery is the strapping which conveys motive power from the shaft to the separate machines, especially if it contains buckles, which, however, are rarely used now. Whoever is seized by the strap is carried up with lightning speed, thrown against the ceiling above and floor below with such force that there is rarely a whole bone left in the body, and death follows instantly. Between June 12th and August 3rd, 1844, the Manchester Guardian reported the following serious accidents (the trifling ones it does not notice): June 12th, a boy died in Manchester of lockjaw, caused by his hand being crushed between wheels. June 15th, a youth in Saddleworth seized by a wheel and carried away with it; died, utterly mangled. June 29th, a young man at Green Acres Moor, near Manchester, at work in a machine shop, fell under the grindstone, which broke two of his ribs and lacerated him terribly. July 24th, a girl in Oldham died, carried around fifty times by a strap; no bone unbroken. July 27th, a girl in Manchester seized by the blower (the first machine that receives the raw cotton), and died of injuries received. August 3rd, a bobbins turner died in Dukenfield, caught in a strap, every rib broken. In the year 1842, the Manchester Infirmary treated 962 cases of wounds and mutilations caused by machinery, while the number of all other accidents within the district of the hospital was 2,426, so that for five accidents from all other causes, two were caused by machinery. The accidents which happened in Salford are not included here, nor those treated by surgeons in private practice. In such cases, whether or not the accident unfits the victim for further work, the employer, at best, pays the doctor, or, in very exceptional cases, he may pay wages during treatment; what becomes of the operative afterwards, in case he cannot work, is no concern of the employer. The Factory Report says on this subject, that employers must be made responsible for all cases, since children cannot take care, and adults will take care in their own interest. But the gentlemen who write the report are bourgeois, and so they must contradict themselves and bring up later all sorts of bosh on the subject of the culpable temerity of the operatives. The state of the case is this: If children cannot take care, the employment of children must be forbidden. If adults are reckless, they must be mere overgrown children on a plane of intelligence which does not enable them to appreciate the danger in its full scope; and who is to blame for this but the bourgeoisie which keeps them in a condition in which their intelligence cannot develop? Or the machinery is ill-arranged, and must be surrounded with fencing, to supply which falls to the share of the bourgeoisie. Or the operative is under inducements which outweigh the threatened danger; he must work rapidly to earn his wages, has no time to take care, and for this, too, the bourgeoisie is to blame. Many accidents happen, for instance, while the operatives are cleaning machinery in motion. Why? Because the bourgeois would otherwise oblige the worker to clean the machinery during the free hours while it is not going, and the worker naturally is not disposed to sacrifice any part of his free time. Every free hour is so precious to the worker that he often risks his life twice a week rather than sacrifice one of them to the bourgeois. Let the employer take from working-hours the time required for cleaning the machinery, and it will never again occur to an operative to clean machinery in motion. In short, from whatever point of view, the blame falls ultimately on the manufacturer, and of him should be required, at the very least, life-long support of the incapacitated operative, and support of the victim s family in case death follows the accident. In the earliest period of manufacture, the accidents were much more numerous in proportion than now, for the machinery was inferior, smaller, more crowded, and almost never fenced. But the number is still large enough, as the foregoing cases prove, to arouse the grave question as to a state of things which permits so many deformities and mutilations for the benefit of a single class, and plunges so many industrious working-people into want and starvation by reason of injuries undergone in the service and through the fault of the bourgeoisie. A pretty list of diseases engendered purely by the hateful money-greed of the manufacturers! Women made unfit for child-bearing, children deformed, men enfeebled, limbs crushed, whole generations wrecked, afflicted with disease and infirmity, purely to fill the purses of the bourgeoisie. And when one reads of the barbarism of single cases, how children are seized naked in bed by the overlookers, and driven with blows and kicks to the factory, their clothing over their arms, how their sleepiness is driven off with blows, how they fall asleep over their work nevertheless, how one poor child sprang up, still asleep, at the call of the overlooker, and mechanically went through the operations of its work after its machine was stopped; when one reads how children, too tired to go home, hide away in the wool in the drying-room to sleep there, and could only be driven out of the factory with straps; how many hundreds came home so tired every night, that they could eat no supper for sleepiness and want of appetite, that their parents found them kneeling by the bedside, where they had fallen asleep during their prayers; when one reads all this and a hundred other villainies and infamies in this one report, all testified to on oath, confirmed by several witnesses, deposed by men whom the commissioners themselves declare trustworthy; when one reflects that this is a Liberal report, a bourgeois report, made for the purpose of reversing the previous Tory report, and rehabilitating the pureness of heart of the manufacturers, that the commissioners themselves are on the side of the bourgeoisie, and report all these things against their own will, how can one be otherwise than filled with wrath and resentment against a class which boasts of philanthropy and self-sacrifice, while its one object is to fill its purse a tout prix? Meanwhile, let us listen to the bourgeoisie speaking through the mouth of its chosen apostle, Dr. Ure, who relates in his Philosophy of Manufactures that the workers have been told that their wages bore no proportion to their sacrifices, the good understanding between masters and men being thus disturbed. Instead of this, the working-men should have striven to recommend themselves by attention and industry, and should have rejoiced in the prosperity of their masters. They would then become overseers, superintendents, and finally partners, and would thus (Oh! Wisdom, thou speakest as the dove!) have increased at the same time the demand for their companions labour in the market!" The ruinous influence of the factory system began at an early day to attract general attention. We have already alluded to the Apprentices Act of 1802. Later, towards 1817, Robert Owen, then a manufacturer in New Lanark, in Scotland, afterwards founder of English Socialism, began to call the attention of the Government, by memorials and petitions, to the necessity of legislative guarantees for the health of the operatives, and especially of children. The late Sir Robert Peel and other philanthropists united with him, and gradually secured the Factory Acts of 1819, 1825, and 1831, of which the first two were never enforced, and the last only here and there. This law of 1831, based upon the motion of Sir J. C. Hobhouse, provided that in cotton mills no one under twenty-one should be employed between half-past seven at night and half-past five in the morning; and that in all factories young persons under eighteen should work no longer than twelve hours daily, and nine hours on Saturday. But since operatives could not testify against their masters without being discharged, this law helped matters very little. In the great cities, where the operatives were more restive, the larger manufacturers came to an agreement among themselves to obey the law; but even there, there were many who, like the employers in the country, did not trouble themselves about it. Meanwhile, the demand for a ten hours law had become lively among the operatives; that is, for a law which should forbid all operatives under eighteen years of age to work longer than ten hours daily; the Trades Unions, by their agitation, made this demand general throughout the manufacturing population; the philanthropic section of the Tory party, then led by Michael Sadler, seized upon the plan, and brought it before Parliament. Sadler obtained a parliamentary committee for the investigation of the factory system, and this committee reported in 1832. Its report was emphatically partisan, composed by strong enemies of the factory system, for party ends. Sadler permitted himself to be betrayed by his noble enthusiasm into the most distorted and erroneous statements, drew from his witnesses by the very form of his questions, answers which contained the truth, but truth in a perverted form. The manufacturers themselves, incensed at a report which represented them as monsters, now demanded an official investigation; they knew that an exact report must, in this case, be advantageous to them; they knew that Whigs, genuine bourgeois, were at the helm, with whom they were upon good terms, whose principles were opposed to any restriction upon manufacture. They obtained a commission, in due order, composed of Liberal bourgeois, whose report I have so often cited. This comes somewhat nearer the truth than Sadler s, but its deviations therefrom are in the opposite direction. On every page it betrays sympathy with the manufacturers, distrust of the Sadler report, repugnance to the working-men agitating independently and the supporters of the Ten Hours Bill. It nowhere recognises the right of the working-man to a life worthy of a human being, to independent activity, and opinions of his own. It reproaches the operatives that in sustaining the Ten Hours Bill they thought, not of the children only, but of themselves as well; it calls the working-men engaged in the agitation demagogues, ill-intentioned, malicious, etc., is written, in short, on the side of the bourgeoisie; and still it cannot whitewash the manufacturers, and still it leaves such a mass of infamies upon the shoulders of the employers, that even after this report, the agitation for the Ten Hours Bill, the hatred against the manufacturers, and the committee s severest epithets applied to them are all fully justified. But there was the one difference, that whereas the Sadler report accuses the manufacturers of open, undisguised brutality, it now became evident that this brutality was chiefly carried on under the mask of civilisation and humanity. Yet Dr. Hawkins, the medical commissioner for Lancashire, expresses himself decidedly in favour of the Ten Hours Bill in the opening lines of his report, and Commissioner Mackintosh explains that his own report does not contain the whole truth, because it is very difficult to induce the operatives to testify against their employers, and because the manufacturers, besides being forced into greater concessions towards their operatives by the excitement among the latter, are often prepared for the inspection of the factories, have them swept, the speed of the machinery reduced, etc. In Lancashire especially they resorted to the device of bringing the overlookers of work-rooms before the commissioners, and letting them testify as working-men to the humanity of the employers, the wholesome effects of the work, and the indifference, if not the hostility of the operatives, towards the Ten Hours Bill. But these are not genuine working-men; they are deserters from their class, who have entered the service of the bourgeoisie for better pay, and fight in the interests of the capitalists against the workers. Their interest is that of the capitalists, and they are, therefore, almost more hated by the workers than the manufacturers themselves. And yet this report suffices wholly to exhibit the most shameful recklessness of the manufacturing bourgeoisie towards its employees, the whole infamy of the industrial exploiting system in its full inhumanity. Nothing is more revolting than to compare the long register of diseases and deformities engendered by overwork, in this report, with the cold, calculating political economy of the manufacturers, by which they try to prove that they, and with them all England, must go to ruin, if they should be forbidden to cripple so and so many children every year. The language of Dr. Ure alone, which I have quoted, would be yet more revolting if it were not so preposterous. The result of this report was the Factory Act of 1833, which forbade the employment of children under nine years of age (except in silk mills), limited the working-hours of children between 9-13 years to 48 per week, or 9 hours in any one day at the utmost; that of young persons from 14-18 years of age to 69 per week, or 12 on any one day as the maximum, provided for an hour and a half as the minimum interval for meals, and repeated the total prohibition of night-work for persons under eighteen years of age. Compulsory school attendance two hours daily was prescribed for all children under fourteen years, and the manufacturer declared punishable in case of employing children without a certificate of age from the factory surgeon, and a certificate of school attendance from the teacher. As recompense, the employer was permitted to withdraw one penny from the child s weekly earnings to pay the teacher. Further, surgeons and inspectors were appointed to visit the factories at all times, take testimony of operatives on oath, and enforce the law by prosecution before a Justice of the Peace. This is the law against which Dr. Ure inveighs in such unmeasured terms! The consequence of this law, and especially of the appointment of inspectors, was the reduction of working-hours to an average of twelve to thirteen, and the superseding of children as far as possible. Hereupon some of the most crying evils disappeared almost wholly. Deformities arose now only in cases of weak constitution, and the effects of overwork became much less conspicuous. Nevertheless, enough testimony remains to be found in the Factory Report, that the lesser evils, swelling of the ankles, weakness and pain in the legs, hips, and back, varicose veins, ulcers on the lower extremities, general weakness, especially of the pelvic region, nausea, want of appetite alternating with unnatural hunger, indigestion, hypochondria, affections of the chest in consequence of the dust and foul atmosphere of the factories, etc., etc., all occur among employees subject to the provisions of Sir J. C. Hobhouse s Law (of 1831), which prescribes twelve to thirteen hours as the maximum. The reports from Glasgow and Manchester are especially worthy of attention in this respect. These evils remained too, after the law of 1833, and continue to undermine the health of the working-class to this day. Care has been taken to give the brutal profit-greed of the bourgeoisie a hypocritical, civilised form, to restrain the manufacturers through the arm of the law from too conspicuous villainies, and thus to give them a pretext for self-complacently parading their sham philanthropy. That is all. If a new commission were appointed today, it would find things pretty much as before. As to the extemporised compulsory attendance at school, it remained wholly a dead letter, since the Government failed to provide good schools. The manufacturers employed as teachers worn-out operatives, to whom they sent the children two hours daily, thus complying with the letter of the law; but the children learned nothing. And even the reports of the factory inspectors, which are limited to the scope of the inspector s duties, i.e., the enforcement of the Factory Act, give data enough to justify the conclusion that the old evils inevitably remain. Inspectors Horner and Saunders, in their reports for October and December, 1843, state that, in a number of branches in which the employment of children can be dispensed with or superseded by that of adults, the working-day is still fourteen to sixteen hours, or even longer. Among the operatives in these branches they found numbers of young people who had just outgrown the provisions of the law. Many employers disregard the law, shorten the meal times, work children longer than is permitted, and risk prosecution, knowing that the possible fines are trifling in comparison with the certain profits derivable from the offence. Just at present especially, while business is exceptionally brisk, they are under great temptation in this respect. Meanwhile the agitation for the Ten Hours Bill by no means died out among the operatives; in 1839 it was under full headway once more, and Sadler s place, he having died, was filled in the House of Commons by Lord Ashley and Richard Oastler, both Tories. Oastler especially, who carried on a constant agitation in the factory districts, and had been active in the same way during Sadler s life, was the particular favourite of the working-men. They called him their good old king", the king of the factory children", and there is not a child in the factory districts that does not know and revere him, that does not join the procession which moves to welcome him when he enters a town. Oastler vigorously opposed the New Poor Law also, and was therefore imprisoned for debt by a Mr. Thornhill, on whose estate he was employed as agent, and to whom he owed money. The Whigs offered repeatedly to pay his debt and confer other favours upon him if he would only give up his agitation against the Poor Law. But in vain; he remained in prison, whence he published his Fleet Papers against the factory system and the Poor Law. The Tory Government of 1841 turned its attention once more to the Factory Acts. The Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, proposed, in 1845, a bill restricting the working-hours of children to six and one-half, and making the enactments for compulsory school attendance more effective, the principal point in this connection being a provision for better schools. This bill was, however, wrecked by the jealousy of the dissenters; for, although compulsory religious instruction was not extended to the children of dissenters, the schools provided for were to be placed under the general supervision of the Established Church, and the Bible made the general reading-book, religion being thus made the foundation of all instruction, whence the dissenters felt themselves threatened. The manufacturers and the Liberals generally united with them, the working-men were divided by the Church question, and therefore inactive. The opponents of the bill, though outweighed in the great manufacturing towns, such as Salford and Stockport, and able in others, such as Manchester, to attack certain of its points only, for fear of the working-men, collected nevertheless nearly two million signatures for a petition against it, and Graham allowed himself to be so far intimidated as to withdraw the whole bill. The next year he omitted the school clauses, and proposed that, instead of the previous provisions, children between eight and thirteen years should be restricted to six and one-half hours, and so employed as to have either the whole morning or the whole afternoon free; that young people between thirteen and eighteen years, and all females, should be limited to twelve hours; and that the hitherto frequent evasions of the law should be prevented. Hardly had he proposed this bill, when the ten hours agitation was begun again more vigorously than ever. Oastler had just then regained his liberty; a number of his friends and a collection among the workers had paid his debt, and he threw himself into the movement with all his might. The defenders of the Ten Hours Bill in the House of Commons had increased in numbers, the masses of petitions supporting it which poured in from all sides brought them allies, and on March 19th, 1844, Lord Ashley carried, with a majority of 179 to 170, a resolution that the word Night in the Factory Act should express the time from six at night to six in the morning, whereby the prohibition of night-work came to mean the limitation of working-hours to twelve, including free hours, or ten hours of actual work a day. But the Ministry did not agree to this. Sir James Graham began to threaten resignation from the Cabinet, and at the next vote on the bill the House rejected by a small majority both ten and twelve hours. Graham and Peel now announced that they should introduce a new bill, and that if this failed to pass they should resign. The new bill was exactly the old Twelve Hours Bill with some changes of form, and the same House of Commons which had rejected the principal points of this bill in March, now swallowed it whole. The reason of this was that most of the supporters of the Ten Hours Bill were Tories who let fall the bill rather than the Ministry; but be the motives what they may, the House of Commons by its votes upon this subject, each vote reversing the last, has brought itself into the greatest contempt among all the workers, and proved most brilliantly the Chartists assertion of the necessity of its reform. Three members, who had formerly voted against the Ministry, afterwards voted for it and rescued it. In all the divisions, the bulk of the opposition voted for and the bulk of its own party against the Ministry. The foregoing propositions of Graham touching the employment of children six and one-half and of all other operatives twelve hours are now legislative provisions, and by them and by the limitation of overwork for making up time lost through breakdown of machinery or insufficient water-power by reason of frost or drought, a working-day of more than twelve hours has been made well-nigh impossible. There remains, however, no doubt that, in a very short time, the Ten Hours Bill will really be adopted. The manufacturers are naturally all against it; there are perhaps not ten who are for it; they have used every honourable and dishonourable means against this dreaded measure, but with no other result than that of drawing down upon them the ever-deepening hatred of the working-men. The bill will pass. What the working-men will do they can do, and that they will have this bill they proved last spring. The economic arguments of the manufacturers that a Ten Hours Bill would increase the cost of production and incapacitate the English producers for competition in foreign markets, and that wages must fall, are all half true; but they prove nothing except this, that the industrial greatness of England can be maintained only through the barbarous treatment of the operatives, the destruction of their health, the social, physical, and mental decay of whole generations. Naturally, if the Ten Hours Bill were a final measure, it must ruin England; but since it must inevitably bring with it other measures which must draw England into a path wholly different from that hitherto followed, it can only prove an advance. Let us turn to another side of the factory system which cannot be remedied by legislative provisions so easily as the diseases now engendered by it. We have already alluded in a general way to the nature of the employment, and enough in detail to be able to draw certain inferences from the facts given. The supervision of machinery, the joining of broken threads, is no activity which claims the operative s thinking powers, yet it is of a sort which prevents him from occupying his mind with other things. We have seen, too, that this work affords the muscles no opportunity for physical activity. Thus it is, properly speaking, not work, but tedium, the most deadening, wearing process conceivable. The operative is condemned to let his physical and mental powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission to be bored every day and all day long from his eighth year. Moreover, he must not take a moment s rest; the engine moves unceasingly; the wheels, the straps, the spindles hum and rattle in his ears without a pause, and if he tries to snatch one instant, there is the overlooker at his back with the book of fines. This condemnation to be buried alive in the mill, to give constant attention to the tireless machine is felt as the keenest torture by the operatives, and its action upon mind and body is in the long run stunting in the highest degree. There is no better means of inducing stupefaction than a period of factory-work, and if the operatives have, nevertheless, not only rescued their intelligence, but cultivated and sharpened it more than other working-men, they have found this possible only in rebellion against their fate and against the bourgeoisie, the sole subject on which under all circumstances they can think and feel while at work. Or, if this indignation against the bourgeoisie does not become the supreme passion of the working-man, the inevitable consequence is drunkenness and all that is generally called demoralisation. The physical enervation and the sickness, universal in consequence of the factory system, were enough to induce Commissioner Hawkins to attribute this demoralisation thereto as inevitable; how much more when mental lassitude is added to them, and when the influences already mentioned which tempt every working-man to demoralisation, make themselves felt here too! There is no cause for surprise, therefore, that in the manufacturing towns especially, drunkenness and sexual excesses have reached the pitch which I have already described. Further, the slavery in which the bourgeoisie holds the proletariat chained, is nowhere more conspicuous than in the factory system. Here ends all freedom in law and in fact. The operative must be in the mill at half-past five in the morning; if he comes a couple of minutes too late, he is fined; if he comes ten minutes too late, he is not let in until breakfast is over, and a quarter of the day s wages is withheld, though he loses only two and one-half hours work out of twelve. He must eat, drink, and sleep at command. For satisfying the most imperative needs, he is vouchsafed the least possible time absolutely required by them. Whether his dwelling is a half-hour or a whole one removed from the factory does not concern his employer. The despotic bell calls him from his bed, his breakfast, his dinner. What a time he has of it, too, inside the factory! Here the employer is absolute law-giver; he makes regulations at will, changes and adds to his codex at pleasure, and even, if he inserts the craziest stuff, the courts say to the working-man: But the operative is his employer s slave in still other respects. If his wife or daughter finds favour in the eyes of the master, a command, a hint suffices, and she must place herself at his disposal. When the employer wishes to supply with signatures a petition in favour of bourgeois interests, he need only send it to his mill. If he wishes to decide a Parliamentary election, he sends his enfranchised operatives in rank and file to the polls, and they vote for the bourgeois candidate whether they will or no. If he desires a majority in a public meeting, he dismisses them half-an- hour earlier than usual, and secures them places close to the platform, where he can watch them to his satisfaction. Two further arrangements contribute especially to force the operative under the dominion of the manufacturer; the Truck system and the Cottage system. The truck system, the payment of the operatives in goods, was formerly universal in England. The manufacturer opens a shop, for the convenience of the operatives, and to protect them from the high prices of the petty dealers". Here goods of all sorts are sold to them on credit, and to keep the operatives from going to the shops where they could get their goods more cheaply the Tommy shops usually charging twenty-five to thirty per cent more than others wages are paid in requisitions on the shop instead of money. The general indignation against this infamous system led to the passage of the Truck Act in 1831, by which, for most employees, payment in truck orders was declared void and illegal, and was made punishable by fine; but, like most other English laws, this has been enforced only here and there. In the towns it is carried out comparatively efficiently; but in the country, the truck system, disguised or undisguised, flourishes. In the town of Leicester, too, it is very common. There lie before me nearly a dozen convictions for this offence, dating from the period between November, 1843, and June, 1844, and reported, in part, in the Manchester Guardian and, in part, in the Northern Star. The system is, of course, less openly carried on at present; wages are usually paid in cash, but the employer still has means enough at command to force him to purchase his wares in the truck shop and nowhere else. Hence it is difficult to combat the truck system, because it can now be carried on under cover of the law, provided only that the operative receives his wages in money. The Northern Star of April 27th, 1844, publishes a letter from an operative of Holmfirth, near Huddersfield, in Yorkshire, which refers to a manufacturer of the name of Bowers, as follows: Such is the factory system sketched as fully as my space permits, and with as little partisan spirit as the heroic deeds of the bourgeoisie against the defenceless workers permit deeds towards which it is impossible to remain indifferent, towards which indifference were a crime. Let us compare the condition of the free Englishman of 1845 with the Saxon serf under the lash of the Norman barons of 1145. The serf was glebae adscriptus, bound to the soil, so is the free working-man through the cottage system. The serf owed his master the jus primae noctis, the right of the first night the free working-man must, on demand, surrender to his master not only that, but the right of every night. The serf could acquire no property; everything that he gained, his master could take from him; the free working-man has no property, can gain none by reason of the pressure of competition, and what even the Norman baron did not do, the modern manufacturer does. Through the truck system, he assumes every day the administration in detail of the things which the worker requires for his immediate necessities. The relation of the lord of the soil to the serf was regulated by the prevailing customs and by laws which were obeyed, because they corresponded to them. The free working-man s relation to his master is regulated by laws which are not obeyed, because they correspond neither with the interests of the employer nor with the prevailing customs. The lord of the soil could not separate the serf from the land, nor sell him apart from it, and since almost all the land was fief and there was no capital, practically could not sell him at all. The modern bourgeois forces the working-man to sell himself. The serf was the slave of the piece of land on which he was born, the working-man is the slave of his own necessaries of life and of the money with which he has to buy them both are slaves of a thing. The serf had a guarantee for the means of subsistence in the feudal order of society in which every member had his own place. The free working-man has no guarantee whatsoever, because he has a place in society only when the bourgeoisie can make use of him; in all other cases he is ignored, treated as non-existent. The serf sacrificed himself for his master in war, the factory operative in peace. The lord of the serf was a barbarian who regarded his villain as a head of cattle; the employer of operatives is civilised and regards his hand as a machine. In short, the position of the two is not far from equal, and if either is at a disadvantage, it is the free working-man. Slaves they both are, with the single difference that the slavery of the one is undissembled, open, honest; that of the other cunning, sly, disguised, deceitfully concealed from himself and every one else, a hypocritical servitude worse than the old. The philanthropic Tories were right when they gave the operatives the name white slaves. But the hypocritical disguised slavery recognises the right to freedom, at least in outward form; bows before a freedom-loving public opinion, and herein lies the historic progress as compared with the old servitude, that the principle of freedom is affirmed, and the oppressed will one day see to it that this principle is carried out. At the close a few stanzas of a poem which voices the sentiments of the workers themselves about the factory system. Written by Edward P. Mead of Birmingham, it is a correct expression of the views prevailing among them. You come to Manchester, you wish to make yourself acquainted with the state of affairs in England. You naturally have good introductions to respectable people. You drop a remark or two as to the condition of the workers. You are made acquainted with a couple of the first Liberal manufacturers, Robert Hyde Greg, perhaps, Edmund Ashworth, Thomas Ashton, or others. They are told of your wishes. The manufacturer understands you, knows what he has to do. He accompanies you to his factory in the country; Mr. Greg to Quarrybank in Cheshire, Mr. Ashworth to Turton near Bolton, Mr. Ashton to Hyde. He leads you through a superb, admirably arranged building, perhaps supplied with ventilators, he calls your attention to the lofty, airy rooms, the fine machinery, here and there a healthy-looking operative. He gives you an excellent lunch, and proposes to you to visit the operatives homes; he conducts you to the cottages, which look new, clean and neat, and goes with you into this one and that one, naturally only to overlookers, mechanics, etc., so that you may see - families who live wholly from the factory . Among other families you might find that only wife and children work, and the husband darns stockings. The presence of the employer keeps you from asking indiscreet questions; you find every one well-paid, comfortable, comparatively healthy by reason of the country air; you begin to be converted from your exaggerated ideas of misery and starvation. But, that the cottage system makes slaves of the operatives, that there may be a truck shop in the neighbourhood, that the people hate the manufacturer, this they do not point out to you, because he is present. He has built a school, church, reading-room, etc. That he uses the school to train children to subordination, that he tolerates in the reading-room such prints only as represent the interests of the bourgeoisie, that he dismisses his employees if they read Chartist or Socialist papers or books, this is all concealed from you. You see an easy, patriarchal relation, you see the life of the overlookers, you see what the bourgeoisie promises the workers if they become its slaves, mentally and morally. This country manufacture has always been what the employers like to show, because in it the disadvantages of the factory system, especially from the point of view of health, are, in part, done away with by the free air and surroundings, and because the patriarchal servitude of the workers can here be longest maintained. Dr. Ure sings a dithyramb upon the theme. But woe to the operatives to whom it occurs to think for themselves and become Chartists! For them the paternal affection of the manufacturer comes to a sudden end. Further, if you should wish to be accompanied through the working-people s quarters of Manchester, if you should desire to see the development of the factory system in a factory town, you may wait long before these rich bourgeoisie will help you! These gentlemen do not know in what condition their employees are nor what they want, and they dare not know things which would make them uneasy or even oblige them to act in opposition to their own interests. But, fortunately, that is of no consequence: what the working-men have to carry out, they carry out for themselves. 1. The Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain, by Dr. A. Ure, 1856. Note by Engels. 2. History of the Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain by E. Baines, Esq. Note by Engels. 3. Stubborn Facts from the Factories by a Manchester Operative. Published and dedicated to the working-classes. by Wm. Rashleigh, M. P., London, Ollivier, 1844. p. 28, et seq.-- Note by Engels. 4. Compare Factories Inquiry Commission s Report. Note by Engels to the American edition of 1887. 5. This is the question posed by J. C. Symons, in Arts and Artisans. Note by Engels. 7. Report of Factory Inspector, L. Horner. October, 1845: There is at present a very anomalous state of things in regard to wages in some departments of cotton mills in Lancashire; for there are hundreds of young men, between 20 and 30 years of age, employed as piecers and otherwise, who are receiving not more than eight or nine shillings a week; while under the same roof, children of 13 years of age are getting five shillings, and young women between 16 and 20 are getting from ten to twelve shillings a week. Note by Engels. 8. Report of Factories Inquiry Commission. Testimony of Dr. Hawkins, p. 3. Note by Engels to the American edition of 1887. 9. In 1842, among the accidents brought to the Infirmary in Manchester, one hundred and eighty-nine were from burning. How many were fatal is not stated. Note by Engels. 10. How numerous married women are in the factories is seen from information furnished by a manufacturer. In 412 factories in Lancashire, 10,721 of them were employed; of the husbands of these women, but 5,314 were also employed in the factories, 3.927 were otherwise employed, 821 were unemployed, and information was wanting as to 659; or two, if not three men for each factory, are supported by the work of their wives. Note by Engels. 11 The surgeons in England are scientifically educated as well as the physicians and have, in general, medical as well as surgical practice. They are, in general, for various reasons, preferred to the physicians. Note by Engels.. 12. Let us hear another competent judge: When this example [i.e., of the Irish] is considered in connexion with the unremitted labour of the whole population engaged in the various branches of the cotton manufacture, our wonder will be less excited by their fatal demoralisation. Prolonged and exhausting labour, continued from day to day, and from year to year, is not calculated to develop the intellectual or moral faculties of man. The dull routine of a ceaseless drudgery, in which the same mechanical process is incessantly repeated, resembles the torment of Sisyphus the toil, like the rock, recoils perpetually on the wearied operative. The mind gathers neither stores nor strength from the constant extension and retraction of the same muscles. The intellect slumbers in supine inertness; but the grosser parts of our nature attain a rank development. To condemn man to such severity of toil is, in some measure, to cultivate in him the habits of an animal. He becomes reckless. He disregards the distinguishing appetites and habits of his species. He neglects the comforts and delicacies of life. He lives in squalid wretchedness, on meagre food, and expounds his superfluous gains in debauchery. Dr. J. Kay. Note by Engels.

Single Branches of Industry

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch08.htm

We were compelled to deal with the factory system somewhat at length, as it is an entirely novel creation of the industrial period; we shall be able to treat the other workers the more briefly, because what has been said either of the industrial proletariat in general, or of the factory system in particular, will wholly, or in part, apply to them. We shall, therefore, merely have to record how far the factory system has succeeded in forcing its way into each branch of industry, and what other peculiarities these may reveal. The four branches comprised under the Factory Act are engaged in the production of clothing stuffs. We shall do best if we deal next with those workers who receive their materials from these factories; and, first of all, with the stocking weavers of Nottingham, Derby, and Leicester. Touching these workers, the Children's Employment Commission reports that the long working-hours, imposed by low wages, with a sedentary life and the strain upon the eyes involved in the nature of the employment, usually enfeeble the whole frame, and especially the eyes. Work at night is impossible without a very powerful light produced by concentrating the rays of the lamp, making them pass through glass globes, which is most injurious to the sight. At forty years of age, nearly all wear spectacles. The children employed at spooling and hemming usually suffer grave injuries to the health and constitution. They work from the sixth, seventh, or eighth year ten to twelve hours daily in small, close rooms. It is not uncommon for them to faint at their work, to become too feeble for the most ordinary household occupation, and so near-sighted as to be obliged to wear glasses during childhood. Many were found by the commissioners to exhibit all the symptoms of a scrofulous constitution, and the manufacturers usually refuse to employ girls who have worked in this way as being too weak. The condition of these children is characterised as "a disgrace to a Christian country", and the wish expressed for legislative interference. The Factory Report adds that the stocking weavers are the worst paid workers in Leicester, earning six, or with great effort, seven shillings a week, for sixteen to eighteen hours' daily work. Formerly they earned twenty to twenty-one shillings, but the introduction of enlarged frames has ruined their business; the great majority still work with old, small, single frames, and compete with difficulty with the progress of machinery. Here, too, every progress is a disadvantage for the workers. Nevertheless, Commissioner Power speaks of the pride of the stocking weavers that they are free, and have no factory bell to measure out the time for their eating, sleeping, and working. Their position today is no better than in 1833, when the Factory Commission made the foregoing statements; the competition of the Saxon stocking weavers, who have scarcely anything to eat, takes care of that. This competition is too strong for the English in nearly all foreign markets, and for the lower qualities of goods even in the English market. It must be a source of rejoicing for the patriotic German stocking weaver that his starvation wages force his English brother to starve too! And, verily, will he not starve on, proud and happy, for the greater glory of German industry, since the honour of the Fatherland demands that his table should be bare, his dish half-empty? Ah! it is a noble thing this competition, this "race of the nations". In the Morning Chronicle, another Liberal sheet, the organ of the bourgeoisie par excellence, there were published some letters from a stocking weaver in Hinckley, describing the condition of his fellow-workers. Among other things, he reports 50 families, 321 persons, who were supported by 109 frames; each frame yielded on an average 5 , shillings; each family earned an average of 11s. 4d. weekly. Out of this there was required for house rent, frame rent, fuel, light, soap, and needles, together 5s. 10d., so that there remained for food, per head daily, 1 d., and for clothing nothing. "Look at my children," said one of them, "and ask no more. It is because my poverty compels me; I cannot and will not hear my children cry for bread without taking the only means honestly to get it. Last Monday morning I rose at two o'clock and worked till near midnight. I rose at six o'clock each succeeding morning and worked until between eleven and twelve each night. I cannot do it longer. I shall go to an untimely grave if I do; I will therefore end my labours at ten o'clock each night and make up the time lost by labouring on the Sunday." In this stocking weavers' district the lace industry also has its headquarters. In the three counties mentioned there are in all 2,760 lace frames in use, while in all the rest of England there are but 787. The manufacture of lace is greatly complicated by a rigid division of labour, and embraces a multitude of branches. The yarn is first spooled by girls fourteen years of age and upwards, winders; then the spools are set up on the frames by boys, eight years old and upwards, threaders, who pass the thread through fine openings, of which each machine has an average of 1,800, and bring it towards its destination; then the weaver weaves the lace which comes out of the machine like a broad piece of cloth and is taken apart by very little children who draw out the connecting threads. This is called running or drawing lace, and the children themselves lace-runners. The lace is then made ready for sale. The winders, like the threaders, have no specified working-time, being called upon whenever the spools on a frame are empty, and are liable, since the weavers work at night, to be required at any time in the factory or work-room. This irregularity, the frequent night-work, the disorderly way of living consequent upon it, engender a multitude of physical and moral ills, especially early and unbridled sexual licence, upon which point all witnesses are unanimous. The work is very bad for the eyes, and although a permanent injury in the case of the threaders is not universally observable, inflammations of the eye, pain, tears, and momentary uncertainty of vision during the act of threading are engendered. For the winders, however, it is certain that their work seriously affects the eye, and produces, besides the frequent inflammations of the cornea, many cases of amaurosis and cataract. The work of the weavers themselves is very difficult, as the frames have constantly been made wider, until those now in use are almost all worked by three men in turn, each working eight hours, and the frame being kept in use the whole twenty-four. Hence it is that the winders and threaders are so often called upon during the night, and must work to prevent the frame from standing idle. The filling in of 1,800 openings with thread occupies three children at least two hours. Many frames are moved by steam-power, and the work of men thus superseded; and, as the Children's Employment Commission's Report mentions only lace factories to which the children are summoned, it seems to follow either that the work of the weavers has been removed to great factory rooms of late, or that steam-weaving has become pretty general; a forward movement of the factory system in either case. Most unwholesome of all is the work of the runners, who are usually children of seven, and even of five and four, years old. Commissioner Grainger actually found one child of two years old employed at this work. Following a thread which is to be withdrawn by a needle from an intricate texture, is very bad for the eyes, especially when, as is usually the case, the work is continued fourteen to sixteen hours. In the least unfavourable case, aggravated near-sightedness follows; in the worst case, which is frequent enough, incurable blindness from amaurosis. But, apart from that, the children, in consequence of sitting perpetually bent up, become feeble, narrow-chested, and scrofulous from bad digestion. Disordered functions of the uterus are almost universal among the girls, and curvature of the spine also, so that "all the runners may be recognised from their gait". The same consequences for the eyes and the whole constitution are produced by the embroidery of lace. Medical witnesses are unanimously of the opinion that the health of all children employed in the production of lace suffers seriously, that they are pale, weak, delicate, undersized, and much less able than other children to resist disease. The affections from which they usually suffer are general debility, frequent fainting, pains in the head, sides, back, and hips, palpitation of the heart, nausea, vomiting and want of appetite, curvature of the spine, scrofula, and consumption. The health of the female lace-makers especially, is constantly and deeply undermined; complaints are universal of anaemia, difficult child-birth, and miscarriage. The same subordinate official of the Children's Employment Commission reports further that the children are very often ill-clothed and ragged, and receive insufficient food, usually only bread and tea, often no meat for months together. As to their moral condition, he reports: This is the price at which society purchases for the fine ladies of the bourgeoisie the pleasure of wearing lace; a reasonable price truly! Only a few thousand blind working-men, some consumptive labourers' daughters, a sickly generation of the vile multitude bequeathing its debility to its equally "vile" children and children's children. But what does that come to? Nothing, nothing whatsoever! Our English bourgeoisie will lay the report of the Government Commission aside indifferently, and wives and daughters will deck themselves with lace as before. It is a beautiful thing, the composure of an English bourgeois. A great number of operatives are employed in the cotton-printing establishments of Lancashire, Derbyshire, and the West of Scotland. In no branch of English industry has mechanical ingenuity produced such brilliant results as here, but in no other has it so crushed the workers. The application of engraved cylinders driven by steam-power, and the discovery of a method of printing four to six colours at once with such cylinders, has as completely superseded hand-work as did the application of machinery to the spinning and weaving of cotton, and these new arrangements in the printing-works have superseded the hand- workers much more than was the case in the production of the fabrics. One man, with the assistance of one child, now does with a machine the work done formerly by 200 block printers; a single machine yields 28 yards of printed cloth per minute. The calico printers are in a very bad way in consequence; the shires of Lancaster, Derby, and Chester produced (according to a petition of the printers to the House of Commons), in the year 1842, 11,000,000 pieces of printed cotton goods: of these, 100,000 were printed by hand exclusively, 900,000 in part with machinery and in part by hand, and 10,000,000 by machinery alone, with four to six colours. As the machinery is chiefly new and undergoes constant improvement, the number of hand-printers is far too great for the available quantity of work, and many of them are therefore starving; the petition puts the number at one-quarter of the whole, while the rest are employed but one or two, in the best case three days in the week, and are ill-paid. Leach asserts of one print-works (Deeply Dale, near Bury, in Lancashire), that the hand-printers did not earn on an average more than five shillings, though he knows that the machine-printers were pretty well paid. The print-works are thus wholly affiliated with the factory system, but without being subject to the legislative restrictions placed upon it. They produce an article subject to fashion, and have therefore no regular work. If they have small orders, they work half-time; if they make a hit with a pattern, and business is brisk, they work twelve hours, perhaps all night. In the neighbourhood of my home, near Manchester, there was a print-works that was often lighted when I returned late at night; and I have heard that the children were obliged at times to work so long there, that they would try to catch a moment's rest and sleep on the stone steps and in the corners of the lobby. I have no legal proof of the truth of the statement, or I should name the firm. The Report of the Children's Employment Commission is very cursory upon this subject, stating merely that in England, at least, the children are mostly pretty well clothed and fed (relatively, according to the wages of the parents), that they receive no education whatsoever, and are morally on a low plane. It is only necessary to remember that these children are subject to the factory system, and then, referring the reader to what has already been said of that, we can pass on. Of the remaining workers employed in the manufacture of clothing stuffs little remains to be said; the bleachers' work is very unwholesome, obliging them to breathe chlorine, a gas injurious to the lungs. The work of the dyers is in many cases very healthful, since it requires the exertion of the whole body; how these workers are paid is little known, and this is ground enough for the inference that they do not receive less than the average wages, otherwise they would make complaint. The fustian cutters, who, in consequence of the large consumption of cotton velvet, are comparatively numerous, being estimated at from 3,000 to 4,000, have suffered very severely, indirectly, from the influence of the factory system. The goods formerly woven with hand-looms, were not perfectly uniform, and required a practised hand in cutting the single rows of threads. Since power-looms have been used, the rows run regularly; each thread of the weft is exactly parallel with the preceding one, and cutting is no longer an art. The workers thrown out of employment by the introduction of machinery turn to fustian cutting, and force down wages by their competition; the manufacturers discovered that they could employ women and children, and the wages sank to the rate paid them, while hundreds of men were thrown out of employment. The manufacturers found that they could get the work done in the factory itself more cheaply than in the cutters' work-room, for which they indirectly paid the rent. Since this discovery, the low upper-storey cutters' rooms stand empty in many a cottage, or are let for dwellings, while the cutter has lost his freedom of choice of his working-hours, and is brought under the dominion of the factory bell. A cutter of perhaps forty-five years of age told me that he could remember a time when he had received 8d. a yard for work, for which he now received ld.; true, he can cut the more regular texture more quickly than the old, but he can by no means do twice as much in an hour as formerly, so that his wages have sunk to less than a quarter of what they were. Leachy gives a list of wages paid in 1827 and in 1843 for various goods, from which it appears that articles paid in 1827 at the rate of 4d., 2 d., 2 d., and 1d. per yard, were paid in 1843 at the rate of 1 d., 1d., d., and 3/8d. per yard, cutters' wages. The average weekly wage, according to Leach, was as follows: 1827, 1 6s. 6d.; l 2s. 6d.; 1; 1 6s. 6d.; and for the same goods in 1843, 10s.; 7s.; 6s. 8d.; 10s.; while there are hundreds of workers who cannot find employment even at these last-named rates. Of the hand-weavers of the cotton industry we have already spoken; the other woven fabrics are almost exclusively produced on hand-looms. Here most of the workers have suffered as the weavers have done from the crowding in of competitors displaced by machinery, and are, moreover, subject like the factory operatives to a severe fine system for bad work. Take, for instance, the silk weavers. Mr. Brocklehurst, one of the largest silk manufacturers in all England, laid before a committee of Members of Parliament lists taken from his books, from which it appears that for goods for which he paid wages in 1821 at the rate of 30s., 14s.; 3 s., s., 1 1/10s, 10s.; he paid in 1831 but 9s., 7 s., 2 s., 1/3s., s., 6 s., while in this case no improvement in the machinery has taken place. But what Mr. Brocklehurst does may very well be taken as a standard for all. From the same lists it appears that the average weekly wage of his weavers, after all deductions, was, in 1821, 16 s., and, in 1831, but 6s. Since that time wages have fallen still further. Goods which brought in 4d. weavers' wages in 1831, bring in but 2 d. in 1845 (single sarsnets), and a great number of weavers in the country can get work only when they undertake these goods at 1 d.-2d. Moreover, they are subject to arbitrary deductions from their wages. Every weaver who receives materials is given a card, on which is usually to be read that the work is to be returned at a specified hour of the day; that a weaver who cannot work by reason of illness must make the fact known at the office within three days, or sickness will not be regarded as an excuse; that it will not be regarded as a sufficient excuse if the weaver claims to have been obliged to wait for yarn; that for certain faults in the work (if, for example, more weft-threads are found within a given space than are prescribed), not less than half the wages will be deducted; and that if the goods should not be ready at the time specified, one penny will be deducted for every yard returned. The deductions in accordance with these cards are so considerable that, for instance, a man who comes twice a week to Leigh, in Lancashire, to gather up woven goods, brings his employer at least 15 fines every time. He asserts this himself, and he is regarded as one of the most lenient. Such things were formerly settled by arbitration; but as the workers were usually dismissed if they insisted upon that, the custom has been almost wholly abandoned, and the manufacturer acts arbitrarily as prosecutor, witness, judge, law-giver, and executive in one person. And if the workman goes to a Justice of the Peace, the answer is: "When you accepted your card you entered upon a contract, and you must abide by it." The case is the same as that of the factory operatives. Besides, the employer obliges the workman to sign a document in which he declares that he agrees to the deductions made. And if a workman rebels, all the manufacturers in the town know at once that he is a man who, as Leach says, After the textile fabrics, by far the most important products of English industry are the metal-wares. This trade has its headquarters at Birmingham, where the finer metal goods of all sorts are produced, at Sheffield for cutlery, and in Staffordshire, especially at Wolverhampton, where the coarser articles, locks, nails, etc., are manufactured. In describing the position of the workers employed in these trades, let us begin with Birmingham. The disposition of the work has retained in Birmingham, as in most places where metals are wrought, something of the old handicraft character; the small employers are still to be found, who work with their apprentices in the shop at home, or when they need steam-power, in great factory buildings which are divided into little shops, each rented to a small employer, and supplied with a shaft moved by the engine, and furnishing motive power for the machinery. Leon Faucher, author of a series of articles in the Revue des deux Mondes, which at least betray study, and are better than what has hitherto been written upon the subject by Englishmen or Germans, characterises this relation in contrast with the manufacture of Lancashire as Democratie industrielle, and observes that it produces no very favourable results for master or men. This observation is perfectly correct, for the many small employers cannot well subsist on the profit divided amongst them, determined by competition, a profit under other circumstances absorbed by a single manufacturer. The centralising tendency of capital holds them down. For one who grows rich ten are ruined, and a hundred placed at greater disadvantage than ever, by the pressure of the one upstart who can afford to sell more cheaply than they. And in the cases where they have to compete from the beginning against great capitalists, it is self-evident that they can only toil along with the greatest difficulty. The apprentices are, as we shall see, quite as badly off under the small employers as under the manufacturers, with the single difference that they, in turn, may become small employers, and so attain a certain independence that is to say, they are at best less directly exploited by the bourgeoisie than under the factory system. Thus these small employers are neither genuine proletarians, since they live in part upon the work of their apprentices, nor genuine bourgeois, since their principal means of support is their own work. This peculiar midway position of the Birmingham iron-workers is to blame for their having so rarely joined wholly and unreservedly in the English labour movements. Birmingham is a politically radical, but not a Chartist, town. There are, however, numerous larger factories belonging to capitalists; and in these the factory system reigns supreme. The division of labour, which is here carried out to the last detail (in the needle industry, for example), and the use of steam-power, admit of the employment of a great multitude of women and children, and we find here precisely the same features reappearing which the Factories' Report presented, the work of women up to the hour of confinement, incapacity as housekeepers, neglect of home and children, indifference, actual dislike to family life, and demoralisation; further, the crowding out of men from employment, the constant improvement of machinery, early emancipation of children, husbands supported by their wives and children, etc., etc. The children are described as half-starved and ragged, the half of them are said not to know what it is to have enough to eat, many of them get nothing to eat before the midday meal, or even live the whole day upon a pennyworth' of bread for a noonday meal there were actually cases in which children received no food from eight in the morning until seven at night. Their clothing is very often scarcely sufficient to cover their nakedness, many are barefoot even in winter. Hence they are all small and weak for their age, and rarely develop with any degree of vigour. And when we reflect that with these insufficient means of reproducing the physical forces, hard and protracted work in close rooms is required of them, we cannot wonder that there are few adults in Birmingham fit for military service. In the iron district of Staffordshire the state of things is still worse. For the coarse wares made here neither much division of labour (with certain exceptions) nor steam-power or machinery can be applied. In Wolverhampton, Willenhall, Bilston, Sedgeley, Wednesfield, Darlaston, Dudley, Walsall, Wednesbury, etc., there are, therefore, fewer factories. But chiefly single forges, where the small masters work alone, or with one or more apprentices, who serve them until reaching the twenty-first year. The small employers are in about the same situation as those of Birmingham; but the apprentices, as a rule, are much worse off. They get almost exclusively meat from diseased animals or such as have died a natural death, or tainted meat, or fish to eat, with veal from calves killed too young, and pork from swine smothered during transportation, and such food is furnished not by small employers only, but by large manufacturers, who employ from thirty to forty apprentices. The custom seems to be universal in Wolverhampton, and its natural consequence is frequent bowel complaints and other diseases. Moreover, the children usually do not get enough to eat, and have rarely other clothing than their working rags, for which reason, if for no other, they cannot go to Sunday school. The dwellings are bad and filthy, often so much so that they give rise to disease; and in spite of the not materially unhealthy work, the children are puny, weak, and, in many cases, severely crippled. In Willenhall, for instance, there are countless persons who have, from perpetually filing at the lathe, crooked backs and one leg crooked, "hind-leg" as they call it, so that the two legs have the form of a K; while it is said that more than one-third of the working-men there are ruptured. Here, as well as in Wolverhampton, numberless cases were found of retarded puberty among girls (for girls, too, work at the forges), as well as among boys, extending even to the nineteenth year. In Sedgeley and its surrounding district, where nails form almost the sole product, the nailers live and work in the most wretched stable-like huts, which for filth can scarcely be equalled. Girls and boys work from the tenth or twelfth year, and are accounted fully skilled only when they make a thousand nails a day. For twelve hundred nails the pay is 5 d. Every nail receives twelve blows, and since the hammer weighs 1 pounds, the nailer must lift 18,000 pounds to earn this miserable pay. With this hard work and insufficient food, the children inevitably develop ill-formed, undersized frames, and the commissioners' depositions confirm this. As to the state of education in this district, data have already been furnished in the foregoing chapters. It is upon an incredibly low plane; half the children do not even go to Sunday school, and the other half go irregularly; very few, in comparison with the other districts, can read, and in the matter of writing the case is much worse. Naturally, for between the seventh and tenth years, just when they are beginning to get some good out of going to school, they are set to work, and the Sunday school teachers, smiths or miners, frequently cannot read, and write their names with difficulty. The prevailing morals correspond with these means of education. In Willenhall, Commissioner Horne asserts, and supplies ample proofs of his assertion, that there exists absolutely no moral sense among the workers. In general, he found that the children neither recognised duties to their parents nor felt any affection for them. They were so little capable of thinking of what they said, so stolid, so hopelessly stupid, that they often asserted that they were well treated, were coming on famously, when they were forced to work twelve to fourteen hours, were clad in rags, did not get enough to eat, and were beaten so that they felt it several days afterwards. They knew nothing of a different kind of life than that in which they toil from morning until they are allowed to stop at night, and did not even understand the question never heard before, whether they were tired. In Sheffield wages are better, and the external state of the workers also. On the other hand, certain branches of work are to be noticed here, because of their extraordinarily injurious influence upon health. Certain operations require the constant pressure of tools against the chest, and engender consumption in many cases; others, file-cutting among them, retard the general development of the body and produce digestive disorders; bone- cutting for knife handles brings with it headache, biliousness, and among girls, of whom many are employed, anaemia. By far the most unwholesome work is the grinding of knife-blades and forks, which, especially when done with a dry stone, entails certain early death. The unwholesomeness of this work lies in part in the bent posture, in which chest and stomach are cramped; but especially in the quantity of sharp-edged metal dust particles freed in the cutting, which fill the atmosphere, and are necessarily inhaled. The dry grinders' average life is hardly thirty-five years, 'the wet grinders' rarely exceeds forty-five. Dr. Knight, in Sheffield, says: Besides these two main centres of the metal industry, there are needle factories in Warrington, Lancashire, where great want, immorality, and ignorance prevail among the workers, and especially among the children; and a number of nail forges in the neighbourhood of Wigan, in Lancashire, and in the east of Scotland. The reports from these latter districts tell almost precisely the same story as those of Staffordshire. There is one more branch of this industry carried on in the factory districts, especially in Lancashire, the essential peculiarity of which is the production of machinery by machinery, whereby the workers, crowded out elsewhere, are deprived of their last refuge, the creation of the very enemy which supersedes them. Machinery for planing and boring, cutting screws, wheels, nuts, etc., with power lathes, has thrown out of employment a multitude of men who formerly found regular work at good wages; and whoever wishes to do so may see crowds of them in Manchester. North of the iron district of Staffordshire lies an industrial region to which we shall now turn our attention, the Potteries, whose headquarters are in the borough of Stoke, embracing Henley, Burslem, Lane End, Lane Delph, Etruria, Coleridge, Langport, Tunstall, and Golden Hill, containing together 70,000 inhabitants. The Children's Employment Commission reports upon this subject that in some branches of this industry, in the production of stoneware, the children have light employment in warm, airy rooms; in others, on the contrary, hard, wearing labour is required, while they receive neither sufficient food nor good clothing. Many children complain: "Don't get enough to eat, get mostly potatoes with salt, never meat, never bread, don't go to school, haven't got no clothes." "Haven't got nothin' to eat today for dinner, don't never have dinner at home, get mostly potatoes and salt, sometimes bread." "This is all the clothes I have, no Sunday suit at home." Among the children whose work is especially injurious are the mould-runners, who have to carry the moulded article with the form to the drying-room, and afterwards bring back the empty form, when the article is properly dried. Thus they must go to and fro the whole day, carrying burdens heavy in proportion to their age, while the high temperature in which they have to do this increases very considerably the exhaustiveness of the work. These children, with scarcely a single exception, are lean, pale, feeble, stunted; nearly all suffer from stomach troubles, nausea, want of appetite, and many of them die of consumption. Almost as delicate are the boys called "jiggers", from the "jigger" wheel which they turn. But by far the most injurious is the work of those who dip the finished article into a fluid containing great quantities of lead, and often of arsenic, or have to take the freshly dipped article up with the hand. The hands and clothing of these workers, adults and children, are always wet with this fluid, the skin softens and falls off under the constant contact with rough objects, so that the fingers often bleed, and are constantly in a state most favourable for the absorption of this dangerous substance. The consequence is violent pain, and serious disease of the stomach and intestines, obstinate constipation, colic, sometimes consumption, and, most common of all, epilepsy among children. Among men, partial paralysis of the hand muscles, colica pictorum, and paralysis of whole limbs are ordinary phenomena. One witness relates that two children who worked with him died of convulsions at their work; another who had helped with the dipping two years while a boy, relates that he had violent pains in the bowels at first, then convulsions, in consequence of which he was confined to his bed two months, since when the attacks of convulsions have increased in frequency, are now daily, accompanied often by ten to twenty epileptic fits, his right arm is paralysed, and the physicians tell him that he can never regain the use of his limbs. In one factory were found in the dipping-house four men, all epileptic and afflicted with severe colic, and eleven boys, several of whom were already epileptic. In short, this frightful disease follows this occupation universally: and that, too, to the greater pecuniary profit of the bourgeoisie! In the rooms in which the stoneware is scoured, the atmosphere is filled with pulverised flint, the breathing of which is as injurious as that of the steel dust among the Sheffield grinders. The workers lose breath, cannot lie down, suffer from sore throat and violent coughing, and come to have so feeble a voice that they can scarcely be heard. They, too, all die of consumption. In the Potteries district, the schools are said to be comparatively numerous, and to offer the children opportunities for instruction; but as the latter are so early set to work for twelve hours and often more per day, they are not in a position to avail themselves of the schools, so that three-fourths of the children examined by the commissioner could neither read nor write, while the whole district is plunged in the deepest ignorance. Children who have attended Sunday school for years could not tell one letter from another, and the moral and religious education, as well as the intellectual, is on a very low plane. In the manufacture of glass, too, work occurs which seems little injurious to men, but cannot be endured by children. The hard labour, the irregularity of the hours, the frequent night-work, and especially the great heat of the working place (100 to 130 Fahrenheit), engender in children general debility and disease, stunted growth, and especially affections of the eye, bowel complaint, and rheumatic and bronchial affections. Many of the children are pale, have red eyes, often blind for weeks at a time, suffer from violent nausea, vomiting, coughs, colds, and rheumatism. When the glass is withdrawn from the fire, the children must often go into such heat that the boards on which they stand catch fire under their feet. The glass-blowers usually die young of debility and chest affections. As a whole, this report testifies to the gradual but sure introduction of the factory system into all branches of industry, recognisable especially by the employment of women and children. I have not thought it necessary to trace in every case the progress of machinery and the superseding of men as workers. Every one who is in any degree acquainted with the nature of manufacture can fill this out for himself, while space fails me to describe in detail an aspect of our present system of production, the result of which I have already sketched in dealing with the factory system. In all directions machinery is being introduced, and the last trace of the working-man's independence thus destroyed. In all directions the family is being dissolved by the labour of wife and children, or inverted by the husband's being thrown out of employment and made dependent upon them for bread; everywhere inevitable machinery bestows upon the great capitalist command of trade and of the workers with it. The centralisation of capital strides forward without interruption, the division of society into great capitalists and non-possessing workers is sharper every day, the industrial development of the nation advances with giant strides towards the inevitable crisis. I have already stated that in the handicrafts the power of capital, and in some cases the division of labour too, has produced the same results, crushed the small tradesmen, and put great capitalists and non-possessing workers in their place. As to these handicraftsmen there is little to be said, since all that relates to them has already found its place where the proletariat in general was under discussion. There has been but little change here in the nature of the work and its influence upon health since the beginning of the industrial movement. But the constant contact with the factory operatives, the pressure of the great capitalists, which is much more felt than that of the small employer to whom the apprentice still stood in a more or less personal relation, the influences of life in towns, and the fall of wages, have made nearly all the handicraftsmen active participators in labour movements. We shall soon have more to say on this point, and turn meanwhile to one section of workers in London who deserve our attention by reason of the extraordinary barbarity with which they are exploited by the money-greed of the bourgeoisie. I mean the dress-makers and sewing-women. It is a curious fact that the production of precisely those articles which serve the personal adornment of the ladies of the bourgeoisie involves the saddest consequences for the health of the workers. We have already seen this in the case of the lace-makers, and come now to the dress-making establishments of London for further proof. They employ a mass of young girls there are said to be 15,000 of them in all who sleep and eat on the premises, come usually from the country, and are therefore absolutely the slaves of their employers. During the fashionable season, which lasts some four months, working-hours, even in the best establishments, are fifteen, and, in very pressing cases, eighteen a day; but in most shops work goes on at these times without any set regulation, so that the girls never have more than six, often not more than three or four, sometimes, indeed, not more than two hours in the twenty-four, for rest and sleep, working nineteen to twenty-two hours, if not the whole night through, as frequently happens! The only limit set to their work is the absolute physical inability to hold the needle another minute. Cases have occurred in which these helpless creatures did not undress during nine consecutive days and nights, and could only rest a moment or two here and there upon a mattress, where food was served them ready cut up in order to require the least possible time for swallowing. In short, these unfortunate girls are kept by means of the moral whip of the modern slave-driver, the threat of discharge, to such long and unbroken toil as no strong man, much less a delicate girl of fourteen to twenty years, can endure. In addition to this, the foul air of the work-room and sleeping-places, the bent posture, the often bad and indigestible food, all these causes, combined with almost total exclusion from fresh air, entail the saddest consequences for the health of the girls. Enervation, exhaustion, debility, loss of appetite, pains in the shoulders, back, and hips, but especially headache, begin very soon; then follow curvatures of the spine, high, deformed shoulders, leanness, swelled, weeping, and smarting eyes, which soon become short-sighted; coughs, narrow chests, and shortness of breath, and all manner of disorders in the development of the female organism. In many cases the eyes suffer so severely that incurable blindness follows; but if the sight remains strong enough to make continued work possible, consumption usually soon ends the sad life of these milliners and dress-makers. Even those who leave this work at an early age retain permanently injured health, a broken constitution; and, when married, bring feeble and sickly children into the world. All the medical men interrogated by the commissioners agreed that no method of life could be invented better calculated to destroy health and induce early death. With the same cruelty, though somewhat more indirectly, the rest of the needle-women of London are exploited. The girls employed in stay-making have a hard, wearing occupation, trying to the eyes. And what wages do they get? I do not know; but this I know, that the middleman who has to give security for the material delivered, and who distributes the work among the needle-women, receives 1 d. per piece. From this he deducts his own pay, at least d., so that 1d. at most reaches the pocket of the girl. The girls who sew neckties must bind themselves to work sixteen hours a day, and receive 4 s. a week. But the shirt- makers' lot is the worst. They receive for an ordinary shirt 1 d., formerly 2d.-3d.; but since the workhouse of St. Pancras, which is administered by a Radical board of guardians, began to undertake work at 1 d., the poor women outside have been compelled to do the same. For fine, fancy shirts, which can be made in one day of eighteen hours, 6d. is paid. The weekly wage of these sewing- women according to this and according to testimony from many sides, including both needle-women and employers, is 2s. 6d. to 3s. for most strained work continued far into the night. And what crowns this shameful barbarism is the fact that the women must give a money deposit for a part of the materials entrusted to them, which they naturally cannot do unless they pawn a part of them (as the employers very well know), redeeming them at a loss; or if they cannot redeem the materials, they must appear before a Justice of the Peace, as happened to a sewing-woman in November, 1843. A poor girl who got into this strait and did not know what to do next, drowned herself in a canal in 1844. These women usually live in little garret rooms in the utmost distress, where as many crowd together as the space can possibly admit, and where, in winter, the animal warmth of the workers is the only heat obtainable. Here they sit bent over their work, sewing from four or five in the morning until midnight, destroying their health in a year or two and ending in an early grave; without being able to obtain the poorest necessities of life meanwhile. And below them roll the brilliant equipages of the upper bourgeoisie, and perhaps ten steps away some pitiable dandy loses more money in one evening at faro than they can earn in a year. 1. The German editions of 1845 and 1892 have here: "and sell not the labour itself, but the ready product." Mention of the sale of labour was perhaps omitted in the American edition of 1887 and the English edition of 1892 in connection with the later opinion of Marxist political economy that the worker sells his labour-power, and not his labour, to the capitalist. 2. Thomas Hood, the most talented of all the English humorists now living, and, like all humorists, full of human feeling, but wanting in mental energy, published at the beginning of 1844 a beautiful poem, The Song of the Shirt, which drew sympathetic but unavailing tears from the eyes of the daughters of the bourgeoisie. Originally published in Punch, it made the round of all the papers. As discussions of the condition of the sewing-women filled all the papers at the time, special extracts are needless. Note by Engels.

The Remaining Branches of Industry

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch09.htm

It must be admitted, even if I had not proved it so often in detail, that the English workers cannot feel happy in this condition; that theirs is not a state in which a man or a whole class of men can think, feel, and live as human beings. The workers must therefore strive to escape from this brutalising condition, to secure for themselves a better, more human position; and this they cannot do without attacking the interest of the bourgeoisie which consists in exploiting them. But the bourgeoisie defends its interests with all the power placed at its disposal by wealth and the might of the State. In proportion as the working-man determines to alter the present state of things, the bourgeois becomes his avowed enemy. Moreover, the working-man is made to feel at every moment that the bourgeoisie treats him as a chattel, as its property, and for this reason, if for no other, he must come forward as its enemy. I have shown in a hundred ways in the foregoing pages, and could have shown in a hundred others, that, in our present society, he can save his manhood only in hatred and rebellion against the bourgeoisie. And he can protest with most violent passion against the tyranny of the propertied class, thanks to his education, or rather want of education, and to the abundance of hot Irish blood that flows in the veins of the English working-class. The English working-man is no Englishman nowadays; no calculating money-grubber like his wealthy neighbour. He possesses more fully developed feelings, his native northern coldness is overborne by the unrestrained development of his passions and their control over him. The cultivation of the understanding which so greatly strengthens the selfish tendency of the English bourgeois, which has made selfishness his predominant trait and concentrated all his emotional power upon the single point of money-greed, is wanting in the working-man, whose passions are therefore strong and mighty as those of the foreigner. English nationality is annihilated in the working-man. Since, as we have seen, no single field for the exercise of his manhood is left him, save his opposition to the whole conditions of his life, it is natural that exactly in this opposition he should be most manly, noblest, most worthy of sympathy. We shall see that all the energy, all the activity of the working-men is directed to this point, and that even their attempts to attain general education all stand in direct connection with this. True, we shall have single acts of violence and even of brutality to report, but it must always be kept in mind that the social war is avowedly raging in England; and that, whereas it is in the interest of the bourgeoisie to conduct this war hypocritically, under the disguise of peace and even of philanthropy, the only help for the working-men consists in laying bare the true state of things and destroying this hypocrisy; that the most violent attacks of the workers upon the bourgeoisie and its servants are only the open, undisguised expression of that which the bourgeoisie perpetrates secretly, treacherously against the workers. The revolt of the workers began soon after the first industrial development, and has passed through several phases. The investigation of their importance in the history of the English people I must reserve for separate treatment, limiting myself meanwhile to such bare facts as serve to characterise the condition of the English proletariat. The earliest, crudest, and least fruitful form of this rebellion was that of crime. The working-man lived in poverty and want, and saw that others were better off than he. It was not clear to his mind why he, who did more for society than the rich idler, should be the one to suffer under these conditions. Want conquered his inherited respect for the sacredness of property, and he stole. We have seen how crime increased with the extension of manufacture; how the yearly number of arrests bore a constant relation to the number of bales of cotton annually consumed. The workers soon realised that crime did not help matters. The criminal could protest against the existing order of society only singly, as one individual; the whole might of society was brought to bear upon each criminal, and crushed him with its immense superiority. Besides, theft was the most primitive form of protest, and for this reason, if for no other, it never became the universal expression of the public opinion of the working-men, however much they might approve of it in silence. As a class, they first manifested opposition to the bourgeoisie when they resisted the introduction of machinery at the very beginning of the industrial .period. The first inventors, Arkwright and others, were persecuted in this way and their machines destroyed. Later, there took place a number of revolts against machinery, in which the occurrences were almost precisely the same as those of the printers' disturbances in Bohemia in 1844; factories were demolished and machinery destroyed. This form of opposition also was isolated, restricted to certain localities, and directed against one feature only of our present social arrangements. When the momentary end was attained, the whole weight of social power fell upon the unprotected evil-doers and punished them to its heart's content, while the machinery was introduced none the less. A new form of opposition had to be found. At this point help came in the shape of a law enacted by the old, unreformed, oligarchic-Tory Parliament, a law which never could have passed the House of Commons later, when the Reform Bill had legally sanctioned the distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and made the bourgeoisie the ruling class. This was enacted in 1824, and repealed all laws by which coalitions between working-men for labour purposes had hitherto been forbidden. The working-men obtained a right previously restricted to the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the right of free association. Secret coalitions had, it is true, previously existed, but could never achieve great results. In Glasgow as Symons relates, a general strike of weavers had taken place in 1812, which was brought about by a secret association. It was repeated in 1822, and on this occasion vitriol was thrown into the faces of the two working-men who would not join the association, and were therefore regarded by the members as traitors to their class. Both the assaulted lost the use of their eyes in consequence of the injury. So, too, in 1818, the association of Scottish miners was powerful enough to carry on a general strike. These associations required their members to take an oath of fidelity and secrecy, had regular lists, treasurers, book-keepers, and local branches. But the secrecy with which everything was conducted crippled their growth. When, on the other hand, the working-men received in 1824 the right of free association, these combinations were very soon spread over all England and attained great power. In all branches of industry Trades Unions were formed with the outspoken intention of protecting the single working-man against the tyranny and neglect of the bourgeoisie. Their objects were to deal, en masse, as a power, with the employers; to regulate the rate of wages according to the profit of the latter, to raise it when opportunity offered, and to keep it uniform in each trade throughout the country. Hence they tried to settle with the capitalists a scale of wages to be universally adhered to, and ordered out on strike the employees of such individuals as refused to accept the scale. They aimed further to keep up the demand for labour by limiting the number of apprentices, and so to keep wages high; to counteract, as far as possible, the indirect wage reductions which the manufacturers brought about by means of new tools and machinery; and finally, to assist unemployed working-men financially. This they do either directly or by means of a card to legitimate the bearer as a society man, and with which the working-man wanders from place to place, supported by his fellow-workers, and instructed as to the best opportunity for finding employment. This is tramping, and the wanderer a tramp. To attain these ends, a President and Secretary are engaged at a salary (since it is to be expected that no manufacturer will employ such persons), and a committee collects the weekly contributions and watches over their expenditure for the purposes of the association. When it proved possible and advantageous, the various trades of single districts united in a federation and held delegate conventions at set times. The attempt has been made in single cases to unite the workers of one branch over all England in one great Union; and several times (in 1830 for the first time) to form one universal trades association for the whole United Kingdom, with a separate organisation for each trade. These associations, however, never held together long, and were seldom realised even for the moment, since an exceptionally universal excitement is necessary to make such a federation possible and effective. The means usually employed by these Unions for attaining their ends are the following: If one or more employers refuse to pay the wage specified by the Union, a deputation is sent or a petition forwarded (the working-men, you see, know how to recognise the absolute power of the lord of the factory in his little State); if this proves unavailing, the Union commands the employees to stop work, and all hands go home. This strike is either partial when one or several, or general when all employers in the trade refuse to regulate wages according to the proposals of the Union. So far go the lawful means of the Union, assuming the strike to take effect after the expiration of the legal notice, which is not always the case. But these lawful means are very weak when there are workers outside the Union, or when members separate from it for the sake of the momentary advantage offered by the bourgeoisie. Especially in the case of partial strikes can the manufacturer readily secure recruits from these black sheep (who are known as knobsticks), and render fruitless the efforts of the united workers. Knobsticks are usually threatened, insulted, beaten, or otherwise maltreated by the members of the Union; intimidated, in short, in every way. Prosecution follows, and as the law-abiding bourgeoisie has the power in its own hands, the force of the Union is broken almost every time by the first unlawful act, the first judicial procedure against its members. The history of these Unions is a long series of defeats of the working-men, interrupted by a few isolated victories. All these efforts naturally cannot alter the economic law according to which wages are determined by the relation between supply and demand in the labour market. Hence the Unions remain powerless against all great forces which influence this relation. In a commercial crisis the Union itself must reduce wages or dissolve wholly; and in a time of considerable increase in the demand for labour, it cannot fix the rate of wages higher than would be reached spontaneously by the competition of the capitalists among themselves. But in dealing with minor, single influences they are powerful. If the employer had no concentrated, collective opposition to expect, he would in his own interest gradually reduce wages to a lower and lower point; indeed, the battle of competition which he has to wage against his fellow-manufacturers would force him to do so, and wages would soon reach the minimum. But this competition of the manufacturers among themselves is, under average conditions, somewhat restricted by the opposition of the working-men. Every manufacturer knows that the consequence of a reduction not justified by conditions to which his competitors also are subjected, would be a strike, which would most certainly injure him, because his capital would be idle as long as the strike lasted, and his machinery would be rusting, whereas it is very doubtful whether he could, in such a case, enforce his reduction. Then he has the certainty that if he should succeed, his competitors would follow him, reducing the price of the goods so produced, and thus depriving him of the benefit of his policy. Then, too, the Unions often bring about a more rapid increase of wages after a crisis than would otherwise follow. For the manufacturer's interest is to delay raising wages until forced by competition, but now the working-men demand an increased wage as soon as the market improves, and they can carry their point by reason of the smaller supply of workers at his command under such circumstances. But, for resistance to more considerable forces which influence the labour market, the Unions are powerless. In such cases hunger gradually drives the strikers to resume work on any terms, and when once a few have begun, the force of the Union is broken, because these few knobsticks, with the reserve supplies of goods in the market, enable the bourgeoisie to overcome the worst effects of the interruption of business. The funds of the Union are soon exhausted by the great numbers requiring relief, the credit which the shopkeepers give at high interest is withdrawn after a time, and want compels the working-man to place himself once more under the yoke of the bourgeoisie. But strikes end disastrously for the workers mostly, because the manufacturers, in their own interest (which has, be it said, become their interest only through the resistance of the workers), are obliged to avoid all useless reductions, while the workers feel in every reduction imposed by the state of trade a deterioration of their condition, against which they must defend themselves as far as in them lies. It will be asked, Why, then, do the workers strike in such cases, when the uselessness of such measures is so evident? Simply because they must protest against every reduction, even if dictated by necessity; because they feel bound to proclaim that they, as human beings, shall not be made to bow to social circumstances, but social conditions ought to yield to them as human beings; because silence on their part would be a recognition of these social conditions, an admission of the right of the bourgeoisie to exploit the workers in good times and let them starve in bad ones. Against this the working-men must rebel so long as they have not lost all human feeling, and that they protest in this way and no other, comes of their 'being practical English people, who express themselves in action, and do not, like German theorists, go to sleep as soon as their protest is properly registered and placed ad acta, there to sleep as quietly as the protesters themselves. The active resistance of the English working-men has its effect in holding the money-greed of the bourgeoisie within certain limits, and keeping alive the opposition of the workers to the social and political omnipotence of the bourgeoisie, while it compels the admission that something more is needed than Trades Unions and strikes to break the power of the ruling class. But what gives these Unions and the strikes arising from them their real importance is this, that they are the first attempt of the workers to abolish competition. They imply the recognition of the fact that the supremacy of the bourgeoisie is based wholly upon the competition of the workers among themselves; i.e., upon their want of cohesion. And precisely because the Unions direct themselves against the vital nerve of the present social order, however one-sidedly, in however narrow a way, are they so dangerous to this social order. The working- men cannot attack the bourgeoisie, and with it the whole existing order of society, at any sorer point than this. If the competition of the workers among themselves is destroyed, if all determine not to be further exploited by the bourgeoisie, the rule of property is at an end. Wages depend upon the relation of demand to supply, upon the accidental state of the labour market, simply because the workers have hitherto been content to be treated as chattels, to be bought and sold. The moment the workers resolve to be bought and sold no longer, when, in the determination of the value of labour, they take the part of men possessed of a will as well as of working-power, at that moment the whole Political Economy of today is at an end. The laws determining the rate of wages would, indeed, come into force again in the long run, if the working-men did not go beyond this step of abolishing competition among themselves. But they must go beyond that unless they are prepared to recede again and to allow competition among themselves to reappear. Thus once advanced so far, necessity compels them to go farther; to abolish not only one kind of competition, but competition itself altogether, and that they will do. The workers are coming to perceive more clearly with every day how competition affects them; they see far more clearly than the bourgeois that competition of the capitalists among themselves presses upon the workers too, by bringing on commercial crises, and that this kind of competition, too, must be abolished. They will soon learn how they have to go about it. That these Unions contribute greatly to nourish the bitter hatred of the workers against the property-holding class need hardly be said. From them proceed, therefore, with or without the connivance of the leading members, in times of unusual excitement, individual actions which can be explained only by hatred wrought to the pitch of despair, by a wild passion overwhelming all restraints. Of this sort are the attacks with vitriol mentioned in the foregoing pages, and a series of others, of which I shall cite several. In 1831, during a violent labour movement, young Ashton, a manufacturer in Hyde, near Manchester, was shot one evening when crossing a field, and no trace of the assassin discovered. There is no doubt that this was a deed of vengeance of the working-men. Incendiarisms and attempted explosions are very common. On Friday, September 29th, 1845, an attempt was made to blow up the saw-works of Padgin, in Howard Street, Sheffield. A closed iron tube filled with powder was the means employed, and the damage was considerable. On the following day, a similar attempt was made in Ibbetson's knife and file works at Shales Moor, near Sheffield. Mr. Ibbetson had made himself obnoxious by an active participation in bourgeois movements, by low wages, the exclusive employment of knobsticks, and the exploitation of the Poor Law for his own benefit. He had reported, during the crisis of 1842, such operatives as refused to accept reduced wages, as persons who could find work but would not take it, and were, therefore, not deserving of relief, so compelling the acceptance of a reduction. Considerable damage was inflicted by the explosion, and all the working-men who came to view it regretted only that the whole concern was not blown into the air. On Friday, October 6th, 1843, an attempt to set fire to the factory of Ainsworth and Crompton, at Bolton, did no damage; it was the third or fourth attempt in the same factory within a very short time. In the meeting of the Town Council of Sheffield, on Wednesday, January 10th, 1844, the Commissioner of Police exhibited a cast-iron machine, made for the express purpose of producing an explosion, and found filled with four pounds of powder, and a fuse which had been lighted but had not taken effect, in the works of Mr. Kitchen, Earl Street, Sheffield. On Sunday, January 21st, 1844, an explosion caused by a package of powder took place in the sawmill of Bentley & White, at Bury, in Lancashire, and produced considerable damage. On Thursday, February 1st, 1844, the Soho Wheel Works, in Sheffield, were set on fire and burnt up. Here are six such cases in four months, all of which have their sole origin in the embitterment of the working-men against the employers. What sort of a social state it must be in which such things are possible I need hardly say. These facts are proof enough that in England, even in good business years, such as 1843, the social war is avowed and openly carried on, and still the English bourgeoisie does not stop to reflect! But the case which speaks most loudly is that of the Glasgow Thugs, which came up before the Assizes from the 3rd to the 11th of January, 1838. It appears from the proceedings that the Cotton-Spinners' Union, which existed here from the year 1816, possessed rare organisation and power. The members were bound by an oath to adhere to the decision of the majority, and had during every turnout a secret committee which was unknown to the mass of the members, and controlled the funds of the Union absolutely. This committee fixed a price upon the heads of knobsticks and obnoxious manufacturers and upon incendiarisms in mills. A mill was thus set on fire in which female knobsticks were employed in spinning in the place of men; a Mrs. M'Pherson, mother of one of these girls, was murdered, and both murderers sent to America at the expense of the association. As early as 1820, a knobstick named M'Quarry was shot at and wounded, for which deed the doer received twenty pounds from the Union, but was discovered and transported for life. Finally, in 1837, in May, disturbances occurred in consequence of a turnout in the Oatbank and Mile End factories, in which perhaps a dozen knobsticks were maltreated. In July, of the same year, the disturbances still continued, and a certain Smith, a knobstick, was so maltreated that he died. The committee was now arrested, an investigation begun, and the leading members found guilty of participation in conspiracies, maltreatment of knobsticks, and incendiarism in the mill of James and Francis Wood, and they were transported for seven years. What do our good Germans say to this story? The property-holding class, and especially the manufacturing portion of it which comes into direct contact with the working-men, declaims with the greatest violence against these Unions, and is constantly trying to prove their uselessness to the working-men upon grounds which are economically perfectly correct, but for that very reason partially mistaken, and for the working-man's understanding totally without effect. The very zeal of the bourgeoisie shows that it is not disinterested in the matter; and apart from the direct loss involved in a turnout, the state of the case is such that whatever goes into the pockets of the manufacturers comes of necessity out of those of the worker. So that even if the working-men did not know that the Unions hold the emulation of their masters in the reduction of wages, at least in a measure, in check, they would still stand by the Unions, simply to the injury of their enemies, the manufacturers. In war the injury of one party is the benefit of the other, and since the working- men are on a war footing towards their employers, they do merely what the great potentates do when they get into a quarrel. Beyond all other bourgeois is our friend Dr. Ure, the most furious enemy of the Unions. He foams with indignation at the secret tribunals of the cotton-spinners, the most powerful section of the workers, tribunals which boast their ability to paralyse every disobedient manufacturer, and so bring ruin on the man who had given them profitable employment for many a year. He speaks of a time when the inventive head and the sustaining heart of trade were held in bondage by the unruly lower members. A pity that the English working-men will not let themselves be pacified so easily with thy fable as the Roman Plebs, thou modern Menenius Agrippa! Finally, he relates the following: At one time the coarse mule-spinners had misused their power beyond all endurance. High wages, instead of awakening thankfulness towards the manufacturers and leading to intellectual improvement (in harmless study of sciences useful to the bourgeoisie, of course), in many cases produced. pride and supplied funds for supporting rebellious spirits in strikes, with which a number of manufacturers were visited one after the other in a purely arbitrary manner. During an unhappy disturbance of this sort in Hyde, Dukinfield, and the surrounding neighbourhood, the manufacturers of the district, anxious lest they should be driven from the market by the French, Belgians, and Americans, addressed themselves to the machine-works of Sharp, Roberts & Co., and requested Mr. Sharp to turn his inventive mind to the construction of an automatic mule in order to emancipate the trade from galling slavery and impending ruin. The incredible frequency of these strikes proves best of all to what extent the social war has broken out all over England. No week passes, scarcely a day, indeed, in which there is not a strike in some direction, now against a reduction, then against a refusal to raise the rate of wages, again by reason of the employment of knobsticks or the continuance of abuses, sometimes against new machinery, or for a hundred other reasons. These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes result in weighty struggles; they decide nothing, it is true, but they are the strongest proof that the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is approaching. They are the military school of the working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided; they are the pronunciamentos of single branches of industry that these too have joined the labour movement. And when one examines a year's file of the Northern Star, the only sheet which reports all the movements of the proletariat, one finds that all the proletarians of the towns and of country manufacture have united in associations, and have protested from time to time, by means of a general strike, against the supremacy of the bourgeoisie. And as schools of war, the Unions are unexcelled. In them is developed the peculiar courage of the English. It is said on the Continent that the English, and especially the working-men, are cowardly, that they cannot carry out a revolution because, unlike the French, they do not riot at intervals, because they apparently accept the bourgeois regime so quietly. This is a complete mistake. The English working-men are second to none in courage; they are quite as restless as the French, but they fight differently. The French, who are by nature political, struggle against social evils with political weapons; the English, for whom politics exist only as a matter of interest, solely in the interest of bourgeois society, fight, not against the Government, but directly against the bourgeoisie; and for the time, this can be done only in a peaceful manner. Stagnation in business, and the want consequent upon it, engendered the revolt at Lyons, in 1834, in favour of the Republic: in 1842, at Manchester, a similar cause gave rise to a universal turnout for the Charter and higher wages. That courage is required for a turnout, often indeed much loftier courage, much bolder, firmer determination than for an insurrection, is self-evident. It is, in truth, no trifle for a working-man who knows want from experience, to face it with wife and children, to endure hunger and wretchedness for months together, and stand firm and unshaken through it all. What is death, what the galleys which await the French revolutionist, in comparison with gradual starvation, with the daily sight of a starving family, with the certainty of future revenge on the part of the bourgeoisie, all of which the English working-man chooses in preference to subjection under the yoke of the property-holding class? We shall meet later an example of this obstinate, unconquerable courage of men who surrender to force only when all resistance would be aimless and unmeaning. And precisely in this quiet perseverance, in this lasting determination which undergoes a hundred tests every day, the English working-man develops that side of his character which commands most respect. People who endure so much to bend one single bourgeois will be able to break the power of the whole bourgeoisie. But apart from that, the English working-man has proved his courage often enough. That the turnout of 1842 had no further results came from the fact that the men were in part forced into it by the bourgeoisie, in part neither clear nor united as to its object. But aside from this, they have shown their courage often enough when the matter in question was a specific social one. Not to mention the Welsh insurrection of 1839, a complete battle was waged in Manchester in May, 1843, during my residence there. Pauling & Henfrey, a brick firm, had increased the size of the bricks without raising wages, and sold the bricks, of course, at a higher price. The workers, to whom higher wages were refused, struck work, and the Brickmakers' Union declared war upon the firm. The firm, meanwhile, succeeded with great difficulty in securing hands from the neighbourhood, and among the knobsticks, against whom in the beginning intimidation was used; the proprietors set twelve men to guard the yard, all ex-soldiers and policemen, armed with guns. When intimidation proved unavailing, the brick-yard, which lay scarcely four hundred paces from an infantry barracks, was stormed at ten o'clock one night by a crowd of brickmakers, who advanced in military order, the first ranks armed with guns. They forced their way in, fired upon the watchmen as soon as they saw them, stamped out the wet bricks spread out to dry, tore down the piled-up rows of those already dry, demolished everything which came in their way, pressed into a building, where they destroyed the furniture and maltreated the wife of the overlooker who was living there. The watchmen, meanwhile, had placed themselves behind a hedge, whence they could fire safely and without interruption. The assailants stood before a burning brick-kiln, which threw a bright light upon them, so that every ball of their enemies struck home, while every one of their own shots missed its mark. Nevertheless, the firing lasted half-an-hour, until the ammunition was exhausted, and the object of the visit the demolition of all the destructible objects in the yard was attained. Then the military approached, and the brickmakers withdrew to Eccles, three miles from Manchester. A short time before reaching Eccles they held roll-call, and each man was called according to his number in the section when they separated, only to fall the more certainly into the hands of the police, who were approaching from all sides. The number of the wounded must have been very considerable, but those only could be counted who were arrested. One of these had received three bullets (in the thigh, the calf, and the shoulder), and had travelled in spite of them more than four miles on foot. These people have proved that they, too, possess revolutionary courage, and do not shun a rain of bullets. And when an unarmed multitude, without a precise aim common to them all, are held in check in a shut-off market-place, whose outlets are guarded by a couple of policemen and dragoons, as happened in 1842, this by no means proves a want of courage. On the contrary, the multitude would have stirred quite as little if the servants of public (i.e., of the bourgeois) order had not been present. Where the working-people have a specific end in view, they show courage enough; as, for instance, in the attack upon Birley's mill, which had later to be protected by artillery. In this connection, a word or two as to the respect for the law in England. True, the law is sacred to the bourgeois, for it is his own composition, enacted with his consent, and for his benefit and protection. He knows that, even if an individual law should injure him, the whole fabric protects his interests; and more than all, the sanctity of the law, the sacredness of order as established by the active will of one part of society, and the passive acceptance of the other, is the strongest support of his social position. Because the English bourgeois finds himself reproduced in his law, as he does in his God, the policeman's truncheon which, in a certain measure, is his own club, has for him a wonderfully soothing power. But for the working-man quite otherwise! The working-man knows too well, has learned from too oft-repeated experience, that the law is a rod which the bourgeois has prepared for him; and when he is not compelled to do so, he never appeals to the law. It is ridiculous to assert that the English working-man fears the police, when every week in Manchester policemen are beaten, and last year an attempt was made to storm a station-house secured by iron doors and shutters. The power of the police in the turnout of 1842 lay, as I have already said, in the want of a clearly defined object on the part of the working-men themselves. Since the working-men do not respect the law, but simply submit to its power when they cannot change it, it is most natural that they should at least propose alterations in it, that they should wish to put a proletarian law in the place of the legal fabric of the bourgeoisie. This proposed law is the People's Charter, which in form is purely political, and demands a democratic basis for the House of Commons. Chartism is the compact form of their opposition to the bourgeoisie. In the Unions and turnouts opposition always remained isolated: it was single working-men or sections who fought a single bourgeois. If the fight became general, this was scarcely by the intention of the working-men; or, when it did happen intentionally, Chartism was at the bottom of it. But in Chartism it is the whole working-class which arises against the bourgeoisie, and attacks, first of all, the political power, the legislative rampart with which the bourgeoisie has surrounded itself. Chartism has proceeded from the Democratic party which arose between 1780 and 1790 with and in the proletariat, gained strength during the French Revolution, and came forth after the peace as the Radical party. It had its headquarters then in Birmingham and Manchester, and later in London; extorted the Reform Bill from the Oligarchs of the old Parliament by a union with the Liberal bourgeoisie, and has steadily consolidated itself, since then, as a more and more pronounced working-men's party in opposition to the bourgeoisie. In 1838 a committee of the General Working-men's Association of London, with William Lovett at its head, drew up the People's Charter, whose six points are as follows: (1) Universal suffrage for every man who is of age, sane and unconvicted of crime; (2) Annual Parliaments; (3) Payment of members of Parliament, to enable poor men to stand for election; (4) Voting by ballot to prevent bribery and intimidation by the bourgeoisie; (5) Equal electoral districts to secure equal representation; and (6) Abolition of the even now merely nominal property qualification of 300 in land for candidates in order to make every voter eligible. These six points, which are all limited to the reconstitution of the House of Commons, harmless as they seem, are sufficient to overthrow the whole English Constitution, Queen and Lords included. The so-called monarchical and aristocratic elements of the Constitution can maintain themselves only because the bourgeoisie has an interest in the continuance of their sham existence; and more than a sham existence neither possesses today. But as soon as real public opinion in its totality backs the House of Commons, as soon as the House of Commons incorporates the will, not of the bourgeoisie alone, but of the whole nation, it will absorb the whole power so completely that the last halo must fall from the head of the monarch and the aristocracy. The English working-man respects neither Lords nor Queen. The bourgeois, while in reality allowing them but little influence, yet offers to them personally a sham worship. The English Chartist is politically a republican, though he rarely or never mentions the word, while be sympathises with the republican parties of all countries, and calls himself in preference a democrat. But he is more than a mere republican, his democracy is not simply political. Chartism was from the beginning of 1835 chiefly a movement among the working-men, though not yet sharply separated from the bourgeoisie. The Radicalism of the workers went hand in hand with the Radicalism of the bourgeoisie; the Charter was the shibboleth of both. They held their National Convention every year in common, seeming to be one party. The lower middle-class was just then in a very bellicose and violent state of mind in consequence of the disappointment over the Reform Bill and of the bad business years of 1837-1839, and viewed the boisterous Chartist agitation with a very favourable eye. Of the vehemence of this agitation no one in Germany has any idea. The people were called upon to arm themselves, were frequently urged to revolt; pikes were got ready, as in the French Revolution, and in 1838, one Stephens, a Methodist parson, said to the assembled working- people of Manchester: The crisis of 1842 came on. Agitation was once more as vigorous as in 1839. But this time the rich manufacturing bourgeoisie, which was suffering severely under this particular crisis, took part in it. The Anti-Corn Law League, as it was now called, assumed a decidedly revolutionary tone. Its journals and agitators used undisguisedly revolutionary language, one very good reason for which was the fact that the Conservative party had been in power since 1841. As the Chartists had previously done, these bourgeois leaders called upon the people to rebel; and the working-men who had most to suffer from the crisis were not inactive, as the year's national petition for the Charter with its three and a half million signatures proves. In short, if the two Radical parties had been somewhat estranged, they allied themselves once more. At a meeting of Liberals and Chartists held in Manchester, February 14th, 1842, a petition urging the repeal of the Corn Laws and the adoption of the Charter was drawn up. The next day it was adopted by both parties. The spring and summer passed amidst violent agitation and increasing distress. The bourgeoisie was determined to carry the repeal of the Corn Laws with the help of the crisis, the want which it entailed, and the general excitement. At this time, the Conservatives being in power, the Liberal bourgeoisie half abandoned their law-abiding habits; they wished to bring about a revolution with the help of the workers. The working-men were to take the chestnuts from the fire to save the bourgeoisie from burning their own fingers. The old idea of a holy month, a general strike, broached in 1839 by the Chartists, was revived. This time, however, it was not the working-men who wished to quit work, but the manufacturers who wished to close their mills and send the operatives into the country parishes upon the property of the aristocracy, thus forcing the Tory Parliament and the Tory Ministry to repeal the Corn Laws. A revolt would naturally have followed, but the bourgeoisie stood safely in the background and could await the result without compromising itself if the worst came to the worst. At the end of July business began to improve; it was high time. In order not to lose the opportunity, three firms in Staleybridge reduced wages in spite of the improvement. Whether they did so of their own motion or in agreement with other manufacturers, especially those of the League, I do not know. Two withdrew after a time, but the third, William Bailey & Brothers, stood firm, and told the objecting operatives that if this did not please them, they had better go and play a bit. This contemptuous answer the hands received with jeers. They left the mill, paraded through the town, and called upon all their fellows to quit work. In a few hours every mill stood idle, and the operatives marched to Mottram Moor to hold a meeting. This was on August 5th. August 8th they proceeded to Ashton and Hyde five thousand strong, closed all the mills and coal-pits, and held meetings, in which, however, the question discussed was not, as the bourgeoisie had hoped, the repeal of the Corn Laws, but, a fair day's wages for a fair day's work. August 9th they proceeded to Manchester, unresisted by the authorities (all Liberals), and closed the mills; on the 11th they were in Stockport, where they met with the first resistance as they were storming the workhouse, the favourite child of the bourgeoisie. On the same day there was a general strike and disturbance in Bolton, to which the authorities here, too, made no resistance. Soon the uprising spread throughout the whole manufacturing district, and all employments, except harvesting and the production of food, came to a standstill. But the rebellious operatives were quiet. They were driven into this revolt without wishing it. The manufacturers, with the single exception of the Tory Birley, in Manchester, had, contrary to their custom, not opposed it. The thing had begun without the working-men's having any distinct end in view, for which reason they were all united in the determination not to be shot at for the benefit of the Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For the rest, some wanted to carry the Charter, others who thought this premature wished merely to secure the wages rate of 1840. On this point the whole insurrection was wrecked. If it had been from the beginning an intentional, determined working-men's insurrection, it would surely have carried its point; but these crowds who had been driven into the streets by their masters, against their own will, and with no definite purpose, could do nothing. Meanwhile the bourgeoisie, which had not moved a finger to carry the alliance of February 15th into effect, soon perceived that the working-men did not propose to become its tools, and that the illogical manner in which it had abandoned its law-abiding standpoint threatened danger. It therefore resumed its law-abiding attitude, and placed itself upon the side of Government as against the working-men. It swore in trusty retainers as special constables (the German merchants in Manchester took part in this ceremony, and marched in an entirely superfluous manner through the city with their cigars in their mouths and thick truncheons in their hands). It gave the command to fire upon the crowd in Preston, so that the unintentional revolt of the people stood all at once face to face, not only with the whole military power of the Government, but with the whole property-holding class as well. The working-men, who had no especial aim, separated gradually, and the insurrection came to an end without evil results. Later, the bourgeoisie was guilty of one shameful act after another, tried to whitewash itself by expressing a horror of popular violence by no means consistent with its own revolutionary language of the spring; laid the blame of insurrection upon Chartist instigators, whereas it had itself done more than all of them together to bring about the uprising; and resumed its old attitude of sanctifying the name of the law with a shamelessness perfectly unequalled. The Chartists, who were all but innocent of bringing about this uprising, who simply did what the bourgeoisie meant to do when they made the most of their opportunity, were prosecuted and convicted, while the bourgeoisie escaped without loss, and had, besides, sold off its old stock of goods with advantage during the pause in work. The fruit of the uprising was the decisive separation of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie. The Chartists had not hitherto concealed their determination to carry the Charter at all costs, even that of a revolution; the bourgeoisie, which now perceived, all at once, the danger with which any violent change threatened its position, refused to hear anything further of physical force, and proposed to attain its end by moral force, as though this were anything else than the direct or indirect threat of physical force. 'I'his was one point of dissension, though even this was removed later by the assertion of the Chartists (who are at least as worthy of being believed as the bourgeoisie) that they, too, refrained from appealing to physical force. The second point of dissension and the main one, which brought Chartism to light in its purity, was the repeal of the Corn Laws. In this the bourgeoisie was directly interested, the proletariat not. The Chartists therefore divided into two parties whose political programmes agreed literally, but which were nevertheless thoroughly different and incapable of union. At the Birmingham National Convention, in January, 1843, Sturge, the representative of the Radical bourgeoisie, proposed that the name of the Charter be omitted from the rules of the Chartist Association, nominally because this name had become connected with recollections of violence during the insurrection, a connection, by the way, which had existed for years, and against which Mr. Sturge had hitherto advanced no objection. The working-men refused to drop the name, and when Mr. Sturge was outvoted, that worthy Quaker suddenly became loyal, betook himself out of the hall, and founded a Complete Suffrage Association within the Radical bourgeoisie. So repugnant had these recollections become to the Jacobinical bourgeoisie, that he altered even the name Universal Suffrage into the ridiculous title, Complete Suffrage. The working-men laughed at him and quietly went their way. From this moment Chartism was purely a working-men's cause freed from all bourgeois elements. The Complete journals, the Weekly Dispatch, Weekly Chronicle, Examiner, etc., fell gradually into the sleepy tone of the other Liberal sheets, espoused the cause of Free Trade, attacked the Ten Hours' Bill and all exclusively working-men's demands, and let their Radicalism as a whole fall rather into the background. The Radical bourgeoisie joined hands with the Liberals against the working-men in every collision, and in general made the Corn Law question, which for the English is the Free Trade question, their main business. They thereby fell under the dominion of the Liberal bourgeoisie, and now play a most pitiful role. The Chartist working-men, on the contrary, espoused with redoubled zeal all the struggles of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Free competition has caused the workers suffering enough to be hated by them; its apostles, the bourgeoisie, are their declared enemies. The working-man has only disadvantages to await from the complete freedom of competition. The demands hitherto made by him, the Ten Hours' Bill, protection of the workers against the capitalist, good wages, a guaranteed position, repeal of the New Poor Law, all of the things which belong to Chartism quite as essentially as the Six Points, are directly opposed to free competition and Free Trade. No wonder, then, that the working-men will not hear of Free Trade and the repeal of the Corn Laws (a fact incomprehensible to the whole English bourgeoisie), and while at least wholly indifferent to the Corn Law question, are most deeply embittered against its advocates. This question is precisely the point at which the proletariat separates from the bourgeoisie, Chartism from Radicalism; and the bourgeois understanding cannot comprehend this, because it cannot comprehend the proletariat. Therein lies the difference between Chartist democracy and all previous political bourgeois democracy. Chartism is of an essentially social nature, a class movement. The Six Points which for the Radical bourgeois are the beginning and end of the matter, which are meant, at the utmost, to call forth certain further reforms of the Constitution, are for the proletarian a mere means to further ends. Political power our means, social happiness our end, is now the clearly formulated war-cry of the Chartists. The knife and fork question of the preacher Stephens was a truth for a part of the Chartists only, in 1838; it is a truth for all of them in 1845. There is no longer a mere politician among the Chartists, and even though their Socialism is very little developed, though their chief remedy for poverty has hitherto consisted in the land-allotment system, which was superseded by the introduction of manufacture, though their chief practical propositions are apparently of a reactionary nature, yet these very measures involve the alternative that they must either succumb to the power of competition once more and restore the old state of things, or they must themselves entirely overcome competition and abolish it. On the other hand, the present indefinite state of Chartism, the separation from the purely political party, involves that precisely the characteristic feature, its social aspect, will have to be further developed. The approach to Socialism cannot fail, especially when the next crisis directs the working-men by force of sheer want to social instead of political remedies. And a crisis must follow the present active state of industry and commerce in 1847 at the latest, and probably in 1846; one, too, which will far exceed in extent and violence all former crises. The working-men will carry their Charter, naturally; but meanwhile they will learn to see clearly with regard to many points which they can make by means of it and of which they now know very little. Meanwhile the Socialist agitation also goes forward. English Socialism comes under our consideration so far only as it affects the working-class. The English Socialists demand the gradual introduction of possession in common in home colonies embracing two to three thousand persons who shall carry on both agriculture and manufacture and enjoy equal rights and equal education. They demand greater facility of obtaining divorce, the establishment of a rational government, with complete freedom of conscience and the abolition of punishment, the same to be replaced by a rational treatment of the offender. These are their practical measures, their theoretical principles do not concern us here. English Socialism arose with Owen, a manufacturer, and proceeds therefore with great consideration toward the bourgeoisie and great injustice toward the proletariat in its methods, although it culminates in demanding the abolition of the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The Socialists are thoroughly tame and peaceable, accept our existing order, bad as it is, so far as to reject all other methods but that of winning public opinion. Yet they are so dogmatic that success by this method is for them, and for their principles as at present formulated, utterly hopeless. While bemoaning the demoralisation of the lower classes, they are blind to the element of progress in this dissolution of the old social order, and refuse to acknowledge that the corruption wrought by private interests and hypocrisy in the property-holding class is much greater. They acknowledge no historic development, and wish to place the nation in a state of Communism at once, overnight, not by the unavoidable march of its political development up to the point at which this transition becomes both possible and necessary. They understand, it is true, why the working-man is resentful against the bourgeois, but regard as unfruitful this class hatred, which is, after all, the only moral incentive by which the worker can be brought nearer the goal. They preach instead, a philanthropy and universal love far more unfruitful for the present state of England. They acknowledge only a psychological development, a development of man in the abstract, out of all relation to the Past, whereas the whole world rests upon that Past, the individual man included. Hence they are too abstract, too metaphysical, and accomplish little. They are recruited in part from the working-class, of which they have enlisted but a very small fraction representing, however, its most educated and solid elements. In its present form, Socialism can never become the common creed of the working-class; it must condescend to return for a moment to the Chartist standpoint. But the true proletarian Socialism having passed through Chartism, purified of its bourgeois elements, assuming the form which it has already reached in the minds of many Socialists and Chartist leaders (who are nearly all Socialists), must, within a short time, play a weighty part in the history of the development of the English people. English Socialism, the basis of which is much more ample than that of the French, is behind it in theoretical development, will have to recede for a moment to the French standpoint in order to proceed beyond it later. Meanwhile the French, too, will develop farther. English Socialism affords the most pronounced expression of the prevailing absence of religion among the working-men, an expression so pronounced indeed that the mass of the working-men, being unconsciously and merely practically irreligious, often draw back before it. But here, too, necessity will force the working-men to abandon the remnants of a belief which, as they will more and more clearly perceive, serves only to make them weak and resigned to their fate, obedient and faithful to the vampire property-holding class. Hence it is evident that the working-men's movement is divided into two sections, the Chartists and the Socialists. The Chartists are theoretically the more backward, the less developed, but they are genuine proletarians all over, the representatives of their class. The Socialists are more far-seeing, propose practical remedies against distress, but, proceeding originally from the bourgeoisie, are for this reason unable to amalgamate completely with the working-class. The union of Socialism with Chartism, the reproduction of French Communism in an English manner, will be the next step, and has already begun. Then only, when this has been achieved, will the working-class be the true intellectual leader of England. Meanwhile, political and social development will proceed, and will foster this new party, this new departure of Chartism. These different sections of working-men, often united, often separated, Trades Unionists, Chartists, and Socialists, have founded on their own hook numbers of schools and reading-rooms for the advancement of education. Every Socialist, and almost every Chartist institution, has such a place, and so too have many trades. Here the children receive a purely proletarian education, free from all the influences of the bourgeoisie; and, in the reading-rooms, proletarian journals and books alone, or almost alone, are to be found. These arrangements are very dangerous for the bourgeoisie, which has succeeded in withdrawing several such institutes, Mechanics' Institutes, from proletarian influences, and making them organs for the dissemination of the sciences useful to the bourgeoisie. Here the natural sciences are now taught, which may draw the working-men away from the opposition to the bourgeoisie, and perhaps place in their hands the means of making inventions which bring in money for the bourgeoisie; while for the working-man the acquaintance with the natural sciences is utterly useless now when it too often happens that he never gets the slightest glimpse of Nature in his large town with his long working-hours..Here Political Economy is preached, whose idol is free competition, and whose sum and substance for the working-man is this, that he cannot do anything more rational than resign himself to starvation. Here all education is tame, flabby, subservient to the ruling politics and religion, so that for the working-man it is merely a constant sermon upon quiet obedience, passivity, and resignation to his fate. The mass of working-men naturally have nothing to do with these institutes, and betake themselves to the proletarian reading-rooms and to the discussion of matters which directly concern their own interests, whereupon the self-sufficient bourgeoisie says its Dixi et salvavi, and turns with contempt from a class which prefers the angry ranting of ill-meaning demagogues to the advantages of solid education. That, however, the working-men appreciate solid education when they can get it unmixed with the interested cant of the bourgeoisie, the frequent lectures upon scientific, aesthetic, and economic subjects prove which are delivered especially in the Socialist institutes, and very well attended. I have often heard working-men, whose fustian jackets scarcely held together, speak upon geological, astronomical, and other subjects, with more knowledge than most cultivated bourgeois in Germany possess. And in how great a measure the English proletariat has succeeded in attaining independent education is shown especially by the fact that the epoch-making products of modern philosophical, political, and poetical literature are read by working-men almost exclusively. The bourgeois, enslaved by social conditions and the prejudices involved in them, trembles, blesses, and crosses himself before everything which really paves the way for progress; the proletarian has open eyes for it, and studies it with pleasure and success. In this respect the Socialists, especially, have done wonders for the education of the proletariat. They have translated the French materialists, Helvetius, Holbach, Diderot, etc., and disseminated them, with the best English works, in cheap editions. Strauss' Life of Jesus and Proudhon's Property also circulate among the working-men only. Shelley, the genius, the prophet, Shelley, and Byron, with his glowing sensuality and his bitter satire upon our existing society, find most of their readers in the proletariat; the bourgeoisie owns only castrated editions, family editions, cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today. The two great practical philosophers of latest date, Bentham and Godwin, are, especially the latter, almost exclusively the property of the proletariat; for though Bentham has a school within the Radical bourgeoisie, it is only the proletariat and the Socialists who have succeeded in developing his teachings a step forward. The proletariat has formed upon this basis a literature, which consists chiefly of journals and pamphlets, and is far in advance of the whole bourgeois literature in intrinsic worth. On this point more later. One more point remains to be noticed. The factory operatives, and especially those of the cotton district, form the nucleus of the labour movement. Lancashire, and especially Manchester, is the seat of the most powerful Unions, the central point of Chartism, the place which numbers most Socialists. The more the factory system has taken possession of a branch of industry, the more the working-men employed in it participate in the labour movement; the sharper the opposition between working-men and capitalists, the clearer the proletarian consciousness in the working-men. The small masters of Birmingham, though they suffer from the crises, still stand upon an unhappy middle ground between proletarian Chartism and shopkeepers' Radicalism. But, in general, all the workers employed in manufacture are won for one form or the other of resistance to capital and bourgeoisie; and all are united upon this point, that they, as working-men, a title of which they are proud, and which is the usual form of address in Chartist meetings, form a separate class, with separate interests and principles, with a separate way of looking at things in contrast with that of all property-owners; and that in this class reposes the strength and the capacity of development of the nation. 1 What kind of wild justice must it be in the hearts of these men that prompts them, with cold deliberation, in conclave assembled, to doom their brother workman, as the deserter of his order and his order's cause. to die as a traitor and deserter; and have him executed, since not by any public judge and hangman, then by a private one; like your old Chivalry Femgericht, and Secret-Tribunal, suddenly in this strange guise become new; suddenly rising once more on the astonished eye, dressed now not in mail-shirts, but in fustian jackets, meeting not in Westphalian forests but in the paved Gallowgate of Glasgow!... Such temper must be widespread, virulent among the many, when even in its worst acme, it can take such a form in a few. Carlyle, Chartism, p. 40. Note by Engels.

Labour Movements

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch10.htm

The production of raw materials and fuel for a manufacture so colossal as that of England requires a considerable number of workers. But of all the materials needed for its industries (except wool, which belongs to the agricultural districts), England produces only the minerals: the metals and the coal. While Cornwall possesses rich copper, tin, zinc, and lead mines, Staffordshire, Wales, and other districts yield great quantities of iron, and almost the whole North and West of England, central Scotland, and certain districts of Ireland, produce a superabundance of coal. In the Cornish mines about 19,000 men, and 11,000 women and children are employed, in part above and in part below ground. Within the mines below ground, men and boys above twelve years old are employed almost exclusively. The condition of these workers seems, according to the Children's Employment Commission's Report, to be comparatively endurable, materially, and the English often enough boast of their strong, bold miners, who follow the veins of mineral below the bottom of the very sea. But in the matter of the health of these workers, this same Children's Employment Commission's Report judges differently. It shows in Dr. Barham's intelligent report how the inhalation of an atmosphere containing little oxygen, and mixed with dust amid the smoke of blasting powder, such as prevails in the mines, seriously affects the lungs, disturbs the action of the heart, and diminishes the activity of the digestive organs; that wearing toil, and especially the climbing up and down of ladders, upon which even vigorous young men have to spend in some mines more than an hour a day, and which precedes and follows daily work, contributes greatly to the development of these evils, so that men who begin this work in early youth are far from reaching the stature of women who work above ground; that many die young of galloping consumption, and most miners at middle age of slow consumption; that they age prematurely and become unfit for work between the thirty-fifth and forty-fifth years; that many are attacked by acute inflammations of the respiratory organs when exposed to the sudden change from the warm air of the shaft (after climbing the ladder in profuse perspiration) to the cold wind above ground; and that these acute inflammations are very frequently fatal. Work above ground, breaking and sorting the ore, is done by girls and children, and is described as very wholesome, being done in the open air. In the North of England, on the borders of Northumberland and Durham, are the extensive lead-mines of Alston Moor. The reports from this districts agree almost wholly with those from Cornwall. Here, too, there are complaints of want of oxygen, excessive dust, powder smoke, carbonic acid gas, and sulphur, in the atmosphere of the workings. In consequence, the miners here, as in Cornwall, are small of stature, and nearly all suffer from the thirtieth year throughout life from chest affections, which end, especially when this work is persisted in, as is almost always the case, in consumption, so greatly shortening the average of life of these people. If the miners of this district are somewhat longer lived than those of Cornwall, this is the case, because they do not enter the mines before reaching the nineteenth year, while in Cornwall, as we have seen, this work is begun in the twelfth year. Nevertheless, the majority die here, too, between forty and fifty years of age, according to medical testimony. Of 79 miners, whose death was entered upon the public register of the district, and who attained an average of 45 years, 37 had died of consumption and 6 of asthma. In the surrounding districts, Allendale, Stanhope, and Middleton, the average length of life was 49, 48, and 47 years respectively, and the deaths from chest affections composed 48, 54, and 56 per cent of the whole number. Let us compare these figures with the so-called Swedish tables, detailed tables of mortality embracing all the inhabitants of Sweden, and recognised in England as the most correct standard hitherto attainable for the average length of life of the British working-class. According to them, male persons who survive the nineteenth year attain an average of 57 1/2 years; but, according to this, the North of England miners are robbed by their work of an average of ten years of life. Yet the Swedish tables are accepted as the standard of longevity of the workers, and present, therefore, the average chances of life as affected by the unfavourable conditions in which the proletariat lives, a standard of longevity less than the normal one. In this district we find again the lodging-houses and sleeping- places with which we have already become acquainted in the towns, and in quite as filthy, disgusting, and overcrowded a state as there. Commissioner Mitchell visited one such sleeping barrack, 18 feet long, 15 feet wide, and arranged for the reception of 42 men and 14 boys, or 56 persons altogether, one-half of whom slept above the other in berths as on shipboard. There was no opening for the escape of the foul air; and, although no one had slept in this pen for three nights preceding the visit, the smell and the atmosphere were such that Commissioner Mitchell could not endure it a moment. What must it be through a hot summer night, with fifty-six occupants? And this is not the steerage of an American slave ship, it is the dwelling of free-born Britons! Let us turn now to the most important branch of British mining, the iron and coal-mines, which the Children's Employment Commission treats in common, and with all the detail which the importance of the subject demands. Nearly the whole of the first part of this report is devoted to the condition of the workers employed in these mines. After the detailed description which I have furnished of the state of the industrial workers, I shall, however, be able to be as brief in dealing with this subject as the scope of the present work requires. In the coal and iron mines which are worked in pretty much the same way, children of four, five, and seven years are employed. They are set to transporting the ore or coal loosened by the miner from its place to the horse-path or the main shaft, and to opening and shutting the doors (which separate the divisions of the mine and regulate its ventilation) for the passage of workers and material. For watching the doors the smallest children are usually employed, who thus pass twelve hours daily, in the dark, alone, sitting usually in damp passages without even having work enough to save them from the stupefying, brutalising tedium of doing nothing. The transport of coal and iron-stone, on the other hand, is very hard labour, the stuff being shoved in large tubs, without wheels, over the uneven floor of the mine; often over moist clay, or through water, and frequently up steep inclines and through paths so low-roofed that the workers are forced to creep on hands and knees. For this more wearing labour, therefore, older children and half-grown girls are employed. One man or two boys per tub are employed, according to circumstances; and, if two boys, one pushes and the other pulls. The loosening of the ore or coal, which is done by men or strong youths of sixteen years or more, is also very weary work. The usual working-day is eleven to twelve hours, often longer; in Scotland it reaches fourteen hours, and double time is frequent, when all the employees are at work below ground twenty-four, and even thirty-six hours at a stretch. Set times for meals are almost unknown, so that these people eat when hunger and time permit. The standard of living of the miners is in general described as fairly good and their wages high in comparison with those of the agricultural labourers surrounding them (who, however, live at starvation rates), except in certain parts of Scotland and in the Irish mines, where great misery prevails. We shall have occasion to return later to this statement, which, by the way, is merely relative, implying comparison to the poorest class in all England. Meanwhile, we shall consider the evils which arise from the present method of mining, and the reader may judge whether any pay in money can indemnify the miner for such suffering. The children and young people who are employed in transporting coal and iron-stone all complain of being overtired. Even in the most recklessly conducted industrial establishments there is no such universal and exaggerated overwork. The whole report proves this, with a number of examples on every page. It is constantly happening that children throw themselves down on the stone hearth or the floor as soon as they reach home, fall asleep at once without being able to take a bite of food, and have to be washed and put to bed while asleep; it even happens that they lie down on the way home, and are found by their parents late at night asleep on the road. It seems to be a universal practice among these children to spend Sunday in bed to recover in some degree from the overexertion of the week. Church and school are visited by but few, and even of these the teachers complain of their great sleepiness and the want of all eagerness to learn. The same thing is true of the elder girls and women. They are overworked in the most brutal manner. This weariness, which is almost always carried to a most painful pitch, cannot fail to affect the constitution. The first result of such overexertion is the diversion of vitality to the one-sided development of the muscles, so that those especially of the arms, legs, and back, of the shoulders and chest, which are chiefly called into activity in pushing and pulling, attain an uncommonly vigorous development, while all the rest of the body suffers and is atrophied from want of nourishment. More than all else the stature suffers, being stunted and retarded; nearly all miners are short, except those of Leicestershire and Warwickshire, who work under exceptionally favourable conditions. Further, among boys as well as girls, puberty is retarded, among the former often until the eighteenth year; indeed, a nineteen years old boy appeared before Commissioner Symons, showing no evidence beyond that of the teeth, that he was more than eleven or twelve years old. This prolongation of the period of childhood is at bottom nothing more than a sign of checked development, which does not fail to bear fruit in later years. Distortions of the legs, knees bent inwards and feet bent outwards, deformities of the spinal column and other malformations, appear the more readily in constitutions thus weakened, in consequence of the almost universally constrained position during work; and they are so frequent that in Yorkshire and Lancashire, as in Northumberland and Durham, the assertion is made by many witnesses, not only by physicians, that a miner may be recognised by his shape among a hundred other persons. The women seem to suffer especially from this work, and are seldom, if ever, as straight as other women. There is testimony here, too, to the fact that deformities of the pelvis and consequent difficult, even fatal, child-bearing arise from the work of women in the mines. But apart from these local deformities, the coal-miners suffer from a number of special affections easily explained by the nature of the work. Diseases of the digestive organs are first in order; want of appetite, pains in the stomach, nausea, and vomiting, are most frequent, with violent thirst, which can be quenched only with the dirty, lukewarm water of the mine; the digestion is checked and all the other affections are thus invited. Diseases of the heart, especially hypertrophy, inflammation of the heart and pericardium, contraction of the auriculo-ventricular communications and the entrance of the aorta are also mentioned repeatedly as diseases of the miners, and are readily explained by overwork; and the same is true of the almost universal rupture which is a direct consequence of protracted overexertion. In part from the same cause and in part from the bad, dust-filled atmosphere mixed with carbonic acid and hydrocarbon gas, which might so readily be avoided, there arise numerous painful and dangerous affections of the lungs, especially asthma, which in some districts appears in the fortieth, in others in the thirtieth year in most of the miners, and makes them unfit for work in a short time. Among those employed in wet workings the oppression in the chest naturally appears much earlier; in some districts of Scotland between the twentieth and thirtieth years, during which time the affected lungs are especially susceptible to inflammations and diseases of a feverish nature. The peculiar disease of workers of this sort is "black spittle", which arises from the saturation of the whole lung with coal particles, and manifests itself in general debility, headache, oppression of the chest, and thick, black mucous expectoration. In some districts this disease appears in a mild form; in others, on the contrary, it is wholly incurable, especially in Scotland. Here, besides the symptoms just mentioned, which appear in an intensified form, short, wheezing breathing, rapid pulse (exceeding 100 per minute), and abrupt coughing, with increasing leanness and debility, speedily make the patient unfit for work. Every case of this disease ends fatally. Dr. Mackellar, in Pencaitland, East Lothian, testified that in all the coal-mines which are properly ventilated this disease is unknown, while it frequently happens that miners who go from well- to ill-ventilated mines are seized by it. The profit-greed of mine owners which prevents the use of ventilators is therefore responsible for the fact, that this working-men's disease exists at all. Rheumatism, too, is, with the exception of the Warwick and Leicestershire workers, a universal disease of the coal-miners, and arises especially from the frequently damp working-places. The consequence of all these diseases is that, in all districts without exception, the coal-miners age early and become unfit for work soon after the fortieth year, though this is different in different places. A coal-miner who can follow his calling after the 45th or 50th year is a very great rarity indeed. It is universally recognised that such workers enter upon old age at forty. This applies to those who loosen the coal from the bed; the loaders, who have constantly to lift heavy blocks of coal into the tubs, age with the twenty-eighth or thirtieth year, so that it is proverbial in the coal-mining districts that the loaders are old before they are young. That this premature old age is followed by the early death of the colliers is a matter of course, and a man who reaches sixty is a great exception among them. Even in South Staffordshire, where the mines are comparatively wholesome, few men reach their fifty-first year. Along with this early superannuation of the workers we naturally find, just as in the case of the mills, frequent lack of employment of the elder men, who are often supported by very young children. If we sum up briefly the results of the work in coal-mines, we find, as Dr. Southwood Smith, one of the commissioners, does, that through prolonged childhood on the one hand and premature age on the other, that period of life in which the human being is in full possession of his powers, the period of manhood, is greatly shortened, while the length of life in general is below the average. This, too, on the debit side of the bourgeoisie's reckoning! All this deals only with the average of the English coal-mines. But there are many in which the state of things is much worse, those, namely, in which thin seams of coal are worked. The coal would be too expensive if a part of the adjacent sand and clay were removed; so the mine owners permit only the seams to be worked; whereby the passages which elsewhere are four or five feet high and more are here kept so low that to stand upright in them is not to be thought of. The working-man lies on his side and loosens the coal with his pick; resting upon his elbow as a pivot, whence follow inflammations of the joint, and in cases where he is forced to kneel, of the knee also. The women and children who have to transport the coal crawl upon their hands and knees, fastened to the tub by a harness and chain (which frequently passes between the legs), while a man behind pushes with hands and head. The pushing with the head engenders local irritations, painful swellings, and ulcers. In many cases, too, the shafts are wet, so that these workers have to crawl through dirty or salt water several inches deep, being thus exposed to a special irritation of the skin. It can be readily imagined how greatly the diseases already peculiar to the miners are fostered by this especially frightful, slavish toil. But these are not all the evils which descend upon the head of the coal-miner. In the whole British Empire there is no occupation in which a man may meet his end in so many diverse ways as in this one. The coal-mine is the scene of a multitude of the most terrifying calamities, and these come directly from the selfishness of the bourgeoisie. The hydrocarbon gas which develops so freely in these mines, forms, when combined with atmospheric air, an explosive which takes fire upon coming into contact with a flame, and kills every one within its reach. Such explosions take place, in one mine or another, nearly every day; on September 28th, 1844, one killed 96 men in Haswell Colliery, Durham. The carbonic acid gas, which also develops in great quantities, accumulates in the deeper parts of the mine, frequently reaching the height of a man, and suffocates every one who gets into it. The doors which separate the sections of the mines are meant to prevent the propagation of explosions and the movement of the gases; but since they are entrusted to small children, who often fall asleep or neglect them, this means of prevention is illusory. A proper ventilation of the mines by means of fresh air-shafts could almost entirely remove the injurious effects of both these gases. But for this purpose the bourgeoisie has no money to spare, preferring to command the working-men to use the Davy lamp, which is wholly useless because of its dull light, and is, therefore, usually replaced by a candle. If an explosion occurs, the recklessness of the miner is blamed, though the bourgeois might have made the explosion well-nigh impossible by supplying good ventilation. Further, every few days the roof of a working falls in, and buries or mangles the workers employed in it. It is the interest of the bourgeois to have the seams worked out as completely as possible, and hence the accidents of this sort. Then, too, the ropes by which the men descend into the mines are often rotten, and break, so that the unfortunates fall, and are crushed. All these accidents, and I have no room for special cases, carry off yearly, according to the Mining Journal, some fourteen hundred human beings. The Manchester Guardian reports at least two or three accidents every week for Lancashire alone. In nearly all mining districts the people composing the coroner's juries are, in almost all cases, dependent upon the mine owners, and where this is not the case, immemorial custom insures that the verdict shall be: "Accidental Death". Besides, the jury takes very little interest in the state of the mine, because it does not understand anything about the matter. But the Children's Employment Commission does not hesitate to make the mine owners directly responsible for the greater number of these cases. As to the education and morals of the mining population, they are, according to the Children's Employment Commission, pretty good in Cornwall, and excellent in Alston Moor; in the coal districts, in general, they are, on the contrary, reported as on an excessively low plane. The workers live in the country in neglected regions, and if they do their weary work, no human being outside the police force troubles himself about them. Hence, and from the tender age at which children are put to work, it follows that their mental education is wholly neglected. The day schools are not within their reach, the evening and Sunday schools mere shams, the teachers worthless. Hence, few can read and still fewer write. The only point upon which their eyes are as yet open is the fact that their wages are far too low for their hateful and dangerous work. To church they go seldom or never; all the clergy complain of their irreligion as beyond comparison. As a matter of fact, their ignorance of religious and of secular things, alike, is such that the ignorance of the factory operatives, shown in numerous examples in the foregoing pages, is trifling in comparison with it. The categories of religion are known to them only from the terms of their oaths. Their morality is destroyed by their work itself. That the overwork of all miners must engender drunkenness is self- evident. As to their sexual relations, men, women, and children work in the mines, in many cases, wholly naked, and in most cases, nearly so, by reason of the prevailing heat, and the consequences in the dark, lonely mines may be imagined. The number of illegitimate children is here disproportionately large, and indicates what goes on among the half-savage population below ground; but proves too, that the illegitimate intercourse of the sexes has not here, as in the great cities, sunk to the level of prostitution. The labour of women entails the same consequences as in the factories, dissolves the family, and makes the mother totally incapable of household work. When the Children's Employment Commission's Report was laid before Parliament, Lord Ashley hastened to bring in a bill wholly forbidding the work of women in the mines, and greatly limiting that of children. The bill was adopted, but has remained a dead letter in most districts, because no mine inspectors were appointed to watch over its being carried into effect. The evasion of the law is very easy in the country districts in which the mines are situated; and no one need be surprised that the Miners' Union laid before the Home Secretary an official notice, last year, that in the Duke of Hamilton's coal-mines in Scotland, more than sixty women were at work; or that the Manchester Guardian reported that a girl perished in an explosion in a mine near Wigan, and no one troubled himself further about the fact that an infringement of the law was thus revealed. In single cases the employment of women may have been discontinued, but in general the old state of things remains as before. These are, however, not all the afflictions known to the coal-miners. The bourgeoisie, not content with ruining the health of these people, keeping them in danger of sudden loss of life, robbing them of all opportunity for education, plunders them in other directions in the most shameless manner. The truck system is here the rule, not the exception, and is carried on in the most direct and undisguised manner. The cottage system, likewise, is universal, and here almost a necessity; but it is used here, too, for the better plundering of the workers. To these means of oppression must be added all sorts of direct cheating. While coal is sold by weight, the worker's wages are reckoned chiefly by measure; and when his tub is not perfectly full he receives no pay whatever, while he gets not a farthing for overmeasure. If there is more than a specified quantity of dust in the tub, a matter which depends much less upon the miner than upon the nature of the seam, he not only loses his whole wage but is fined besides. The fine system in general is so highly perfected in the coal-mines, that a poor devil who has worked the whole week and comes for his wages, sometimes learns from the overseer, who fines at discretion and without summoning the workers, that he not only has no wages but must pay so and so much in fines extra! The overseer has, in general, absolute power over wages; he notes the work done, and can please himself as to what he pays the worker, who is forced to take his word. In some mines, where the pay is according to weight, false decimal scales are used, whose weights are not subject to the inspection of the authorities; in one coal-mine there was actually a regulation that any workman who intended to complain of the falseness of the scales must give notice to the overseer three weeks in advance! In many districts, especially in the North of England, it is customary to engage the workers by the year; they pledge themselves to work for no other employer during that time, but the mine owner by no means pledges himself to give them work, so that they are often without it for months together, and if they seek elsewhere, they are sent to the treadmill for six weeks for breach of contract. In other contracts, work to the amount of 26s. every 14 days, is promised the miners, but not furnished; in others still, the employers advance the miners small sums to be worked out afterwards, thus binding the debtors to themselves. In the North, the custom is general of keeping the payment of wages one week behindhand, chaining the miners in this way to their work. And to complete the slavery of these enthralled workers, nearly all the Justices of the Peace in the coal districts are mine owners themselves, or relatives or friends of mine owners, and possess almost unlimited power in these poor, uncivilised regions where there are few newspapers, these few in the service of the ruling class, and but little other agitation. It is almost beyond conception how these poor coal-miners have been plundered and tyrannised over by Justices of the Peace acting as judges in their own cause. So it went on for a long time. The workers did not know any better than that they were there for the purpose of being swindled out of their very lives. But gradually, even among them, and especially in the factory districts, where contact with the more intelligent operatives could not fail of its effect, there arose a spirit of opposition to the shameless oppression of the "coal kings". The men began to form Unions and strike from time to time. In civilised districts they joined the Chartists body and soul. The great coal district of the North of England, shut off from all industrial intercourse, remained backward until, after many efforts, partly of the Chartists and partly of the more intelligent miners themselves, a general spirit of opposition arose in 1843. Such a movement seized the workers of Northumberland and Durham that they placed themselves at the forefront of a general Union of coal-miners throughout the kingdom, and appointed W. P. Roberts, a Chartist solicitor, of Bristol, their "Attorney General", he having distinguished himself in earlier Chartist trials. The Union soon spread over a great majority of the districts; agents were appointed in all directions, who held meetings everywhere and secured new members; at the first conference of delegates, in Manchester, in 1844, there were 60,000 members represented, and at Glasgow, six months later, at the second conference, 100,000. Here all the affairs of the coal-miners were discussed and decisions as to the greater strikes arrived at. Several journals were founded, especially the Miner's Advocate at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, for defending the rights of the miners. On March 31st, 1844, the contracts of all the miners of Northumberland and Durham expired. Roberts was empowered to draw up a new agreement, in which the men demanded: (1) Payment by weight instead of measure; (2) Determination of weight by means of ordinary scales subject to the public inspectors; (3) Half-yearly renewal of contracts; (4) Abolition of the fines system and payment according to work actually done; (5) The employers to guarantee to miners in their exclusive service at least four days' work per week, or wages for the same. This agreement was submitted to the "coal kings", and a deputation appointed to negotiate with them; they answered, however, that for them the Union did not exist, that they had to deal with single workmen only, and should never recognise the Union. They also submitted an agreement of their own which ignored all the foregoing points, and was, naturally, refused by the miners. War was thus declared. On March 31st, 1844, 40,000 miners laid down their picks, and every mine in the county stood empty. The funds of the Union were so considerable that for several months a weekly contribution of 2s. 6d. could be assured to each family. While the miners were thus putting the patience of their masters to the test, Roberts organised with incomparable perseverance both strike and agitation, arranged for the holding of meetings, traversed England from one end to the other, preached peaceful and legal agitation, and carried on a crusade against the despotic Justices of the Peace and truck masters, such as had never been known in England. This he had begun at the beginning of the year. Wherever a miner had been condemned by a Justice of the Peace, he obtained a habeas corpus from the Court of Queen's bench, brought his client to London, and always secured an acquittal. Thus, January 13th, Judge Williams of Queen's bench acquitted three miners condemned by the Justices of the Peace of Bilston, South Staffordshire; the offence of these people was that they refused to work in a place which threatened to cave in, and had actually caved in before their return! On an earlier occasion, Judge Patteson had acquitted six working-men, so that the name Roberts began to be a terror to the mine owners. In Preston four of his clients were in jail. In the first week of January he proceeded thither to investigate the case on the spot, but found, when he arrived, the condemned all released before the expiration of the sentence. In Manchester there were seven in jail; Roberts obtained a habeas corpus and acquittal for all from Judge Wightman. In Prescott nine coal-miners were in jail, accused of creating a disturbance in St. Helens, South Lancashire, and awaiting trial; when Roberts arrived upon the spot, they were released at once. All this took place in the first half of February. In April, Roberts released a miner from jail in Derby, four in Wakefield, and four in Leicester. So it went on for a time until these Dogberries came to have some respect for the miners. The truck system shared the same fate. One after another Roberts brought the disreputable mine owners before the courts, and compelled the reluctant Justices of the Peace to condemn them; such dread of this lightning Attorney General who seemed to be everywhere at once spread among them, that at Belper, for instance, upon Roberts' arrival, a truck firm published the following notice: This triumph aroused the greatest jubilation throughout the English working-class, and brought the Union a mass of new members. Meanwhile the strike in the North was proceeding. Not a hand stirred, and Newcastle, the chief coal port, was so stripped of its commodity that coal had to be brought from the Scotch coast, in spite of the proverb. At first, while the Union's funds held out, all went well, but towards summer the struggle became much more painful for the miners. The greatest want prevailed among them; they had no money, for the contributions of the workers of all branches of industry in England availed little among the vast number of strikers, who were forced to borrow from the small shopkeepers at a heavy loss. The whole press, with the single exception of the few proletarian journals, was against them; the bourgeois, even the few among them who might have had enough sense of justice to support the miners, learnt from the corrupt Liberal and Conservative sheets only lies about them. A deputation of twelve miners who went to London received a sum from the proletariat there, but this, too, availed little among the mass who needed support. Yet, in spite of all this, the miners remained steadfast, and what is even more significant, were quiet and peaceable in the face of all the hostilities and provocation of the mine owners and their faithful servants. No act of revenge was carried out, not a renegade was maltreated, not one single theft committed. Thus the strike had continued well on towards four months, and the mine owners still had no prospect of getting the upper hand. One way was, however, still open to them. They remembered the cottage system; it occurred to them that the houses of the rebellious spirits were THEIR property. In July, notice to quit was served the workers, and, in a week, the whole forty thousand were put out of doors. This measure was carried out with revolting cruelty. The sick, the feeble, old men and little children, even women in child-birth, were mercilessly turned from their beds and cast into the roadside ditches. One agent dragged by the hair from her bed, and into the street, a woman in the pangs of child-birth. Soldiers and police in crowds were present, ready to fire at the first symptom of resistance, on the slightest hint of the Justices of the Peace, who had brought about the whole brutal procedure. This, too, the working-men endured without resistance. The hope had been that the men would use violence; they were spurred on with all force to infringements of the laws, to furnish an excuse for making an end of the strike by the intervention of the military. The homeless miners, remembering the warnings of their Attorney General, remained unmoved, set up their household goods upon the moors or the harvested fields, and held out. Some, who had no other place, encamped on the roadsides and in ditches, others upon land belonging to other people, whereupon they were prosecuted, and, having caused "damage of the value of a halfpenny", were fined a pound, and, being unable to pay it, worked it out on the treadmill. Thus they lived eight weeks and more of the wet fag-end of last summer under the open sky with their families, with no further shelter for themselves and their little ones than the calico curtains of their beds; with no other help than the scanty allowances of their Union and the fast shrinking credit with the small dealers. Hereupon Lord Londonderry, who owns considerable mines in Durham, threatened the small tradesmen in "his" town of Seaham with his most high displeasure if they should continue to give credit to "his" rebellious workers. This "noble" lord made himself the first clown of the turnout in consequence of the ridiculous, pompous, ungrammatical ukases addressed to the workers, which he published from time to time, with no other result than the merriment of the nation. When none of their efforts produced any effect, the mine owners imported, at great expense, hands from Ireland and such remote parts of Wales as have as yet no labour movement. And when the competition of workers against workers was thus restored, the strength of the strikers collapsed. The mine owners obliged them to renounce the Union, abandon Roberts, and accept the conditions laid down by the employers. Thus ended at the close of September the great five months' battle of the coal-miners against the mine owners, a battle fought on the part of the oppressed with .an endurance, courage, intelligence, and coolness which demands the highest admiration. What a degree of true human culture, of enthusiasm and strength of character, such a battle implies on the part of men who, as we have seen in the Children's Employment Commission's Report, were described as late as 1840, as being thoroughly brutal and wanting in moral sense! But how hard, too, must have been the pressure which brought these forty thousand colliers to rise as one man and to fight out the battle like an army not only well-disciplined but enthusiastic, an army possessed of one single determination, with the greatest coolness and composure, to a point beyond which further resistance would have been madness. And what a battle! Not against visible, mortal enemies, but against hunger, want, misery, and homelessness, against their own passions provoked to madness by the brutality of wealth. If they had revolted with violence, they, the unarmed and defenceless, would have been shot down, and a day or two would have decided the victory of the owners. This law-abiding reserve was no fear of the constable's staff, it was the result of deliberation, the best proof of the intelligence and self-control of the working-men. Thus were the working-men forced once more, in spite of their unexampled endurance, to succumb to the might of capital. But the fight had not been in vain. First of all, this nineteen weeks' strike had tom the miners of the North of England forever from the intellectual death in which they had hitherto lain; they have left their sleep, are alert to defend their interests, and have entered the movement of civilisation, and especially the movement of the workers. The strike, which first brought to light the whole cruelty of the owners, has established the opposition of the workers here, forever, and made at least two-thirds of them Chartists; and the acquisition of thirty thousand such determined, experienced men is certainly of great value to the Chartists. Then, too, the endurance and law-abiding which characterised the whole strike, coupled with the active agitation which accompanied it, has fixed public attention upon the miners. On the occasion of the debate upon the export duty on coal, Thomas Duncombe, the only decidedly Chartist member of the House of Commons, brought up the condition of the coal-miners, had their petition read, and by his speech forced the bourgeois journals to publish, at least in their reports of Parliamentary proceedings, a correct statement of the case. Immediately after the strike, occurred the explosion at Haswell; Roberts went to London, demanded an audience with Peel, insisted as representative of the miners upon a thorough investigation of the case, and succeeded in having the first geological and chemical notabilities of England, Professors Lyell and Faraday, commissioned to visit the spot. As several other explosions followed in quick succession, and Roberts again laid the details before the Prime Minister, the latter promised to propose the necessary measures for the protection of the workers, if possible, in the next session of Parliament, i. e., the present one of 1845. All this would not have been accomplished if these workers had not, by means of the strike, proved themselves freedom-loving men worthy of all respect, and if they had not engaged Roberts as their counsel. Scarcely had it become known that the coal-miners of the North had been forced to renounce the Union and discharge Roberts, when the miners of Lancashire formed a Union of some ten thousand men, and guaranteed their Attorney General a salary of 1,200 a year. In the autumn of last year they collected more than 700, rather more than 200 of which they expended upon salaries and judicial expenses, and the rest chiefly in support of men out of work, either through want of employment or through dissensions with their employers. Thus the working-men are constantly coming to see more clearly that, united, they too are a respectable power, and can, in the last extremity, defy even the might of the bourgeoisie. And this insight, the gain of all labour movements, has been won for all the miners of England by the Union and the strike of 1844. In a very short time the difference of intelligence and energy which now exists in favour of the factory operatives will have vanished, and the miners of the kingdom will be able to stand abreast of them in every respect. Thus one piece of standing ground after another is undermined beneath the feet of the bourgeoisie; and how long will it be before their whole social and political edifice collapses with the basis upon which it rests? But the bourgeoisie will not take warning. The resistance of the miners does but embitter it the more. Instead of appreciating this forward step in the general movement of the workers, the property-holding class saw in it only a source of rage against a class of people who are fools enough to declare themselves no longer submissive to the treatment they had hitherto received. It saw in the just demands of the non-possessing workers only impertinent discontent, mad rebellion against "Divine and human order", and, in the best case, a success (to be resisted by the bourgeoisie with all its might) won by "ill-intentioned demagogues who live by agitation and are too lazy to work". It sought, of course, without success, to represent to the workers that Roberts and the Union's agents, whom the Union very naturally had to pay, were insolent swindlers, who drew the last farthing from the working-men's pockets. When such insanity prevails in the property-holding class, when it is so blinded by its momentary profit that it no longer has eyes for the most conspicuous signs of the times, surely all hope of a peaceful solution of the social question for England must be abandoned. The only possible solution is a violent revolution, which cannot fail to take place. 1. According to the census of 1841, the number of working-men employed in mines in Great Britain, without Ireland, was: As the coal and iron mines are usually worked by the same people, a part of the miners attributed to the coal-mines, and a very considerable part of those mentioned under the last heading are to be attributed to the iron mines. Note by Engels.

The Mining Proletariat

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch11.htm

We have seen in the introduction how, simultaneously with the small bourgeoisie and the modest independence of the former workers, the small peasantry also was ruined when the former Union of industrial and agricultural work was dissolved, the abandoned fields thrown together into large farms, and the small peasants superseded by the overwhelming competition of the large farmers. Instead of being landowners or leaseholders, as they had been hitherto, they were now obliged to hire themselves as labourers to the large farmers or the landlords. For a time this position was endurable, though a deterioration in comparison with their former one. The extension of industry kept pace with the increase of population until the progress of manufacture began to assume a slower pace, and the perpetual improvement of machinery made it impossible for manufacture to absorb the whole surplus of the agricultural population. From this time forward, the distress which had hitherto existed only in the manufacturing districts, and then only at times, appeared in the agricultural districts too. The twenty-five years' struggle with France came to an end at about the same time; the diminished production at the various seats of the wars, the shutting off of imports, and the necessity of providing for the British army in Spain, had given English agriculture an artificial prosperity, and had besides withdrawn to the army vast numbers of workers from their ordinary occupations. This check upon the import trade, the opportunity for exportation, and the military demand for workers, now suddenly came to an end; and the necessary consequence was what the English call agricultural distress. The farmers had to sell their corn at low prices, and could, therefore, pay only low wages. In 1815, in order to keep up prices, the Corn Laws were passed, prohibiting the importation of corn so long as the price of wheat continued less than 80 shillings per quarter. These naturally ineffective laws were several times modified, but did not succeed in ameliorating the distress in the agricultural districts. All that they did was to change the disease, which, under free competition from abroad, would have assumed an acute form, culminating in a series of crises, into a chronic one which bore heavily but uniformly upon the farm labourers. For a time after the rise of the agricultural proletariat, the patriarchal relation between master and man, which was being destroyed for manufacture, developed here the same relation of the farmer to his hands which still exists almost everywhere in Germany. So long as this lasted, the poverty of the farm-hands was less conspicuous; they shared the fate of the farmer, and were discharged only in cases of the direst necessity. But now all this is changed. The farm-hands have become day-labourers almost everywhere, are employed only when needed by the farmers, and, therefore, often have no work for weeks together, especially in winter. In the patriarchal time, the hands and their families lived on the farm, and their children grew up there, the farmer trying to find occupation on the spot for the oncoming generation; day-labourers, then, were the exception, not the rule. Thus there was, on every farm, a larger number of hands than were strictly necessary. It became, therefore, the interest of the farmers to dissolve this relation, drive the farm-hand from the farm, and transform him into a day-labourer. This took place pretty generally towards the year 1830, and the consequence was that the hitherto latent over-population was set free, the rate of wages forced down, and the poor-rate enormously increased. From this time the agricultural districts became the headquarters of permanent, as the manufacturing districts had long been of periodic, pauperism, and the modification of the Poor Law was the first measure which the State was obliged to apply to the daily increasing impoverishment of the country parishes. Moreover, the constant extension of farming on a large scale, the introduction of threshing and other machines, and the employment of women and children (which is now so general that its effects have recently been investigated by a special official commission), threw a large number of men out of employment. It is manifest, therefore, that here, too, the system of industrial production has made its entrance, by means of farming on a large scale, by the abolition of the patriarchal relation, which is of the greatest importance just here, by the introduction of machinery, steam, and the labour of women and children. In so doing, it has swept the last and most stationary portion of working humanity into the revolutionary movement. But the longer agriculture had remained stationary, the heavier now became the burden upon the worker, the more violently broke forth the results of the disorganisation of the old social fabric. The "over-population" came to light all at once, and could not, as in the manufacturing districts, be absorbed by the needs of an increasing production. New factories could always be built, if there were consumers for their products, but new land could not be created. The cultivation of waste common land was too daring a speculation for the bad times following the conclusion of peace. The necessary consequence was that the competition of the workers among each other reached the highest point of intensity, and wages fell to the minimum. So long as the Old Poor Law existed, the workers received relief from the rates; wages naturally fell still lower, because the farmers forced the largest possible number of labourers to claim relief. The higher poor-rate, necessitated by the surplus population, was only increased by this measure, and the New Poor Law, of which we shall have more to say later, was now enacted as a remedy. But this did not improve matters. Wages did not rise, the surplus population could not be got rid of, and the cruelty of the new law did but serve to embitter the people to the utmost. Even the poor-rate, which diminished at first after the passage of the new law, attained its old height after a few years. Its only effect was that whereas previously three to four million half-paupers had existed, a million of total paupers now appeared, and the rest, still half-paupers, merely went without relief. The poverty in the agricultural districts has increased every year. The people live in the greatest want, whole families must struggle along with 6, 7, or 8 shillings a week, and at times have nothing. Let us hear a description of this population given by a Liberal member of Parliament as early as 1830: Our author adds that besides this class of agricultural labourers, there is still another, somewhat more energetic and better endowed physically, mentally, and morally; those, namely, who live as wretchedly, but were not born to this condition. These he represents as better in their family life, but smugglers and poachers who get into frequent bloody conflicts with the gamekeepers and revenue officers of the coast, become more embittered against society during the prison life which they often undergo, and so stand abreast of the first class in their hatred of the property-holders. Down to the present time, this description applies to the greater portion of the agricultural labourers of England. In June, 1844, the Times sent a correspondent into the agricultural districts to report upon the condition of this class, and the report which he furnished agreed wholly with the foregoing. In certain districts wages were not more than six shillings a week; not more, that is, than in many districts in Germany, while the prices of all the necessaries of life are at least twice as high. What sort of life these people lead may be imagined; their food scanty and bad, their clothing ragged, their dwellings cramped and desolate, small, wretched huts, with no comforts whatsoever; and, for young people, lodging-houses, where men and women are scarcely separated, and illegitimate intercourse thus provoked. One or two days without work in the course of a month must inevitably plunge such people into the direst want. Moreover, they cannot combine to raise wages, because they are scattered, and if one alone refuses to work for low wages, there are dozens out of work, or supported by the rates, who are thankful for the most trifling offer, while to him who declines work, every other form of relief than the hated workhouse is refused by the Poor Law guardians as to a lazy vagabond; for the guardians are the very farmers from whom or from whose neighbours and acquaintances alone he can get work. And not from one or two special districts of England do such reports come. On the contrary, the distress is general, equally great in the North and South, the East and West. The condition of the labourers in Suffolk and Norfolk corresponds with that of Devonshire, Hampshire, and Sussex. Wages are as low in Dorsetshire and Oxfordshire as in Kent and Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Cambridgeshire. One especially barbaric cruelty against the working-class is embodied in the Game Laws, which are more stringent than in any other country, while the game is plentiful beyond all conception. The English peasant who, according to the old English custom and tradition, sees in poaching only a natural and noble expression of courage and daring, is stimulated still further by the contrast between his own poverty and the car tel est notre plaisir of the lord, who preserves thousands of hares and game birds for his private enjoyment. The labourer lays snares, or shoots here and there a piece of game. It does not injure the landlord as a matter of fact, for he has a vast superfluity, and it brings the poacher a meal for himself and his starving family. But if he is caught he goes to jail, and for a second offence receives at the least seven years transportation. From the severity of these laws arise the frequent bloody conflicts with the gamekeepers, which lead to a number of murders every year. Hence the post of gamekeeper is not only dangerous, but of ill-repute and despised. Last year, in two cases, gamekeepers shot themselves rather than continue their work. Such is the moderate price at which the landed aristocracy purchases the noble sport of shooting; but what does it matter to the lords of the soil? Whether one or two more or less of the "surplus" live or die matters nothing, and even if in consequence of the Game Laws half the surplus population could be put out of the way, it would be all the better for the other half according to the philanthropy of the English landlords. Although the conditions of life in the country, the isolated dwellings, the stability of the surroundings and occupations, and consequently of the thoughts, are decidedly unfavourable to all development, yet poverty and want bear their fruits even here. The manufacturing and mining proletariat emerged early from the first stage of resistance to our social order, the direct rebellion of the individual by the perpetration of crime; but the peasants are still in this stage at the present time. Their favourite method of social warfare is incendiarism, In the winter which followed the Revolution of July, in 1830-31, these incendiarisms first became general. Disturbances had taken place, and the whole region of Sussex and the adjacent counties had been brought into a state of excitement in October, in consequence of an increase of the coastguard (which made smuggling much more difficult and "ruined the coast" in the words of a farmer), changes in the Poor Law, low wages, and the introduction of machinery. In the winter the farmers' hay and corn-stacks were burnt in the fields, and the very barns and stables under their windows. Nearly every night a couple of such fires blazed up, and spread terror among the farmers and landlords. The offenders were rarely discovered, and the workers attributed the incendiarism to a mythical person whom they named "Swing". Men puzzled their brains to discover who this Swing could be and whence this rage among the poor of the country districts. Of the great motive power, Want, Oppression, only a single person here and there thought, and certainly no one in the agricultural districts. Since that year the incendiarisms have been repeated every winter, with each recurring unemployed season of the agricultural labourers. In the winter of 1843-44, they were once more extraordinarily frequent. There lies before me a series of numbers of the Northern Star of that time, each one of which contains a report of several incendiarisms, stating in each case its authority. The numbers wanting in the following list I have not at hand; but they, too, doubtless contain a number of cases. Moreover, such a sheet cannot possibly ascertain all the cases which occur. November 25th, 1843, two cases; several earlier ones are discussed. December 16th, in Bedfordshire, general excitement for a fortnight past in consequence of frequent incendiarisms, of which several take place every night. Two great farm-houses burnt down within the last few days; in Cambridgeshire four great farm-houses, Hertfordshire one, and besides these, fifteen other incendiarisms in different districts. December 30th, in Norfolk one, Suffolk two, Essex two, Cheshire one, Lancashire one, Derby, Lincoln, and the South twelve. January 6th, 1844, in all ten. January 13th, seven. January 20th, four incendiarisms. From this time forward, three of four incendiarisms per week are reported, and not as formerly until the spring only, but far into July and August. And that crimes of this sort are expected to increase in the approaching hard season of 1844-45, the English papers already indicate. What do my readers think of such a state of things in the quiet, idyllic country districts of England? Is this social war, or is it not? Is it a natural state of things which can last? Yet here the landlords and farmers are as dull and stupefied, as blind to everything which does not directly put money into their pockets, as the manufacturers and the bourgeoisie in general in the manufacturing districts. If the latter promise their employees salvation through the repeal of the Corn Laws, the landlords and a great part of the farmers promise theirs Heaven upon earth from the maintenance of the same laws. But in neither case do the property-holders succeed in winning the workers to the support of their pet hobby. Like the operatives, the agricultural labourers are thoroughly indifferent to the repeal or non-repeal of the Corn Laws. Yet the question is an important one for both. That is to say by the repeal of the Corn Laws, free competition, the present social economy is carried to its extreme point; all further development within the present order comes to an end, and the only possible step farther is a radical transformation of the social order. For the agricultural labourers the question has, further, the following important bearing: Free importation of corn involves (how, I cannot explain here) the emancipation of the farmers from the landlords, their transformation into Liberals. Towards this consummation the Anti-Corn Law League has already largely contributed, and this is its only real service. When the farmers become Liberals, i.e., conscious bourgeois, the agricultural labourers will inevitably become Chartists and Socialists; the first change involves the second. And that a new movement is already beginning among the agricultural labourers is proved by a meeting which Earl Radnor, a Liberal landlord, caused to be held in October, 1844, near Highworth, where his estates lie, to pass resolutions against the Corn Laws. At this meeting, the labourers, perfectly indifferent as to these laws, demanded something wholly different, namely small holdings, at low rent, for themselves, telling Earl Radnor all sorts of bitter truths to his face. Thus the movement of the working-class is finding its way into the remote, stationary, mentally dead agricultural districts; and, thanks to the general distress, will soon be as firmly rooted and energetic as in the manufacturing districts. As to the religious state of the agricultural labourers, they are, it is true, more pious than the manufacturing operatives; but they, too, are greatly at odds with the Church for in these districts members of the Established Church almost exclusively are to be found. A correspondent of the Morning Chronicle, who, over the signature, "One who has whistled at the plough" [Alexander Somerville], reports his tour through the agricultural districts, relates, among other things, the following conversation with some labourers after service: After describing their poverty and ignorance, the correspondent closes by saying: If the peasantry of England shows the consequences which a numerous agricultural proletariat in connection with large farming involves for the country districts, Wales illustrates the ruin of the small holders. If the English country parishes reproduce the antagonism between capitalist and proletarian, the state of the Welsh peasantry corresponds to the progressive ruin of the small bourgeoisie in the towns. In Wales are to be found, almost exclusively, small holders, who cannot with like profit sell their products as cheaply as the larger, more favourably situated English farmers, with whom, however, they are obliged to compete. Moreover, in some places the quality of the land admits of the raising of livestock only, which is but slightly profitable. Then, too, these Welsh farmers, by reason of their separate nationality, which they retain pertinaciously, are much more stationary than the English farmers. But the competition among themselves and with their English neighbours (and the increased mortgages upon their land consequent upon this) has reduced them to such a state that they can scarcely live at all; and because they have not recognised the true cause of their wretched condition, they attribute it to all sorts of small causes, such as high tolls, etc., which do check the development of agriculture and commerce, but are taken into account as standing charges by every one who takes a holding, and are therefore really ultimately paid by the landlord. Here, too, the New Poor Law is cordially hated by the tenants, who hover in perpetual danger of coming under its sway. In 1843, the famous Rebecca disturbances broke out among the Welsh peasantry; the men dressed in women s clothing, blackened their faces, and fell in armed crowds upon the toll-gates, destroyed them amidst great rejoicing and firing of guns, demolished the toll-keepers houses, wrote threatening letters in the name of the imaginary Rebecca , and once went so far as to storm the workhouse of Carmarthen. Later, when the militia was called out and the police strengthened, the peasants drew them off with wonderful skill upon false scents, demolished toll-gates at one point while the militia, lured by false signal bugles, was marching in some opposite direction; and betook themselves finally, when the police was too thoroughly reinforced, to single incendiarisms and attempts at murder. As usual, these greater crimes were the end of the movement. Many withdrew from disapproval, others from fear, and peace was restored of itself. The Government appointed a commission to investigate the affair and its causes, and there was an end of the matter. The poverty of the peasantry continues, however, and will one day, since it cannot under existing circumstances grow less, but must go on intensifying, produce more serious manifestations than these humorous Rebecca masquerades. If England illustrates the results of the system of farming on a large scale and Wales on a small one, Ireland exhibits the consequences of overdividing the soil. The great mass of the population of Ireland consists of small tenants who occupy a sorry hut without partitions, and a potato patch just large enough to supply them most scantily with potatoes through the winter. In consequence of the great competition which prevails among these small tenants, the rent has reached an unheard-of height, double, treble, and quadruple that paid in England. For every agricultural labourer seeks to become a tenant-farmer, and though the division of land has gone so far, there still remain numbers of labourers in competition for plots. Although in Great Britain 34,000,000 acres of land are cultivated, and in Ireland but 14,000,000; although Great Britain produces agricultural products to the value of 150,000,000, and Ireland of but 36,000,000, there are in Ireland 75,000 agricultural proletarians more than in the neighbouring island. How great the competition for land in Ireland must be is evident from this extraordinary disproportion, especially when one reflects that the labourers in Great Britain are living in the utmost distress. The consequence of this competition is that it is impossible for the tenants to live much better than the labourers, by reason of the high rents paid. The Irish people is thus held in crushing poverty, from which it cannot free itself under our present social conditions. These people live in the most wretched clay huts, scarcely good enough for cattle-pens, have scant food all winter long, or, as the report above quoted expresses it, they have potatoes half enough thirty weeks in the year, and the rest of the year nothing. When the time comes in the spring at which this provision reaches its end, or can no longer be used because of its sprouting, wife and children go forth to beg and tramp the country with their kettle in their hands. Meanwhile the husband, after planting potatoes for the next year, goes in search of work either in Ireland or England, and returns at the potato harvest to his family. This is the condition in which nine-tenths of the Irish country folks live. They are poor as church mice, wear the most wretched rags, and stand upon the lowest plane of intelligence possible in a half-civilised country. According to the report quoted, there are, in a population of 8 1/2 millions, 585,000 heads of families in a state of total destitution; and according to other authorities, cited by Sheriff Alison, there are in Ireland 2,300,000 persons who could not live without public or private assistance or 27 per cent of the whole population paupers! The cause of this poverty lies in the existing social conditions, especially in competition here found in the form of the subdivision of the soil. Much effort has been spent in finding other causes. It has been asserted that the relation of the tenant to the landlord who lets his estate in large lots to tenants, who again have their sub-tenants, and sub-sub-tenants, in turn, so that often ten middlemen come between the. landlord and the actual cultivator it has been asserted that the shameful law which gives the landlord the right of expropriating the cultivator who may have paid his rent duly, if the first tenant fails to pay the landlord, that this law is to blame for all this poverty. But all this determines only the form in which the poverty manifests itself. Make the small tenant a landowner himself and what follows? The majority could not live upon their holdings even if they had no rent to pay, and any slight improvement which might take place would be lost again in a few years in consequence of the rapid increase of population. The children would then live to grow up under the improved conditions who now die in consequence of poverty in early childhood. From another side comes the assertion that the shameless oppression inflicted by the English is the cause of the trouble. It is the cause of the somewhat earlier appearance of this poverty, but not of the poverty itself. Or the blame is laid on the Protestant Church forced upon a Catholic nation; but divide among the Irish what the Church takes from them, and it does not reach six shillings a head. Besides, tithes are a tax upon landed property, not upon the tenant, though he may nominally pay them; now, since the Commutation Bill of 1838, the landlord pays the tithes directly and reckons so much higher rent, so that the tenant is none the better off. And in the same way a hundred other causes of this poverty are brought forward, all proving as little as these. This poverty.is the result of our social conditions; apart from these, causes may be found for the manner in which it manifests itself, but not for the fact of its existence. That poverty manifests itself in Ireland thus and not otherwise, is owing to the character of the people, and to their historical development. The Irish are a people related in their whole character to the Latin nations, to the French, and especially to the Italians. The bad features of their character we have already had depicted by Carlyle. Let us now hear an Irishman, who at least comes nearer to the truth than Carlyle, with his prejudice in favour of the Teutonic character: With the Irish, feeling and passion predominate; reason must bow before them. Their sensuous, excitable nature prevents reflection and quiet, persevering activity from reaching development such a nation is utterly unfit for manufacture as now conducted. Hence they held fast to agriculture, and remained upon the lowest plane even of that. With the small subdivisions of land, which were not here artificially created, as in France and on the Rhine, by the division of great estates, but have existed from time immemorial, an improvement of the soil by the investment of capital was not to be thought of; and it would, according to Alison, require 120 million pounds sterling to bring the soil up to the not very high state of fertility already attained in England. The English immigration, which might have raised the standard of Irish civilisation, has contented itself with the most brutal plundering of the Irish people; and while the Irish, by their immigration into England, have furnished England a leaven which will produce its own results in the future, they have little for which to be thankful to the English immigration. The attempts of the Irish to save themselves from their present ruin, on the one hand, take the form of crimes. These are the order of the day in the agricultural districts, and are nearly always directed against the most immediate enemies, the landlords agents, or their obedient servants, the Protestant intruders, whose large farms are made up of the potato patches of hundreds of ejected families. Such crimes are especially frequent in the South and West. On the other hand, the Irish hope for relief by means of the agitation for the repeal of the Legislative Union with England. From all the foregoing, it is clear that the uneducated Irish must see in the English their worst enemies; and their first hope of improvement in the conquest of national independence. But quite as clear is it, too, that Irish distress cannot be removed by any Act of Repeal. Such an Act would, however, at once lay bare the fact that the cause of Irish misery, which now seems to come from abroad, is really to be found at home. Meanwhile, it is an open question whether the accomplishment of repeal will be necessary to make this clear to the Irish. Hitherto, neither Chartism nor Socialism has had marked success in Ireland. I close my observations upon Ireland at this point the more readily, as the Repeal Agitation of 1843 and O'Connell's trial have been the means of making the Irish distress more and more known in Germany. We have now followed the proletariat of the British Islands through all branches of its activity, and found it everywhere living in want and misery under totally inhuman conditions. We have seen discontent arise with the rise of the proletariat, grow, develop, and organise; we have seen open bloodless and bloody battles of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. We have investigated the principles according to which the fate, the hopes, and fears of the proletariat are determined, and we have found that there is no prospect of improvement in their condition. We have had an opportunity, here and there, of observing the conduct of the bourgeoisie towards the proletariat, and we have found that it considers only itself, has only its own advantage in view. However, in order not to be unjust, let us investigate its mode of action somewhat more exactly. 1. For such is our pleasure. Ed. 2. "The State of Ireland" London 1807; 2nd edition 1821.[anonymous pamphlet] 3. Mistake. Small-scale agriculture had been the prevailing form of farming ever since the Middle Ages. Thus the small peasant farms existed even before the Revolution. The only thing the latter changed was their ownership; that it took away from the feudal lords and transferred, directly or indirectly, to the peasants. Note by Engels to the German edition of 1892.

The Agricultural Proletariat

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch12.htm

In speaking of the bourgeoisie I include the so-called aristocracy, for this is a privileged class, an aristocracy, only in contrast with the bourgeoisie, not in contrast with the proletariat. The proletarian sees in both only the property-holder i.e., the bourgeois. Before the privilege of property all other privileges vanish. The sole difference is this, that the bourgeois proper stands in active relations with the manufacturing, and, in a measure, with the mining proletarians, and, as farmer, with the agricultural labourers, whereas the so-called aristocrat comes into contact with the agricultural labourer only. I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, particularly the Liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted. True, these English bourgeois are good husbands and family men, and have all sorts of other private virtues, and appear, in ordinary intercourse, as decent and respectable as all other bourgeois; even in business they are better to deal with than the Germans; they do not higgle and haggle so much as our own pettifogging merchants; but how does this help matters? Ultimately it is self-interest, and especially money gain, which alone determines them. I once went into Manchester with such a bourgeois, and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working-peoples quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: "And yet there is a great deal of money made here, good morning, sir." It is utterly indifferent to the English bourgeois whether his working-men starve or not, if only he makes money. All the conditions of life are measured by money, and what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical, idealistic bosh. Hence, Political Economy, the Science of Wealth, is the favourite study of these bartering Jews. Every one of them is a Political Economist. The relation of the manufacturer to his operatives has nothing human in it; it is purely economic. The manufacturer is Capital, the operative Labour. And if the operative will not be forced into this abstraction, if he insists that he is not Labour, but a man, who possesses, among other things, the attribute of labour-power, if he takes it into his head that he need not allow himself to be sold and bought in the market, as the commodity "Labour", the bourgeois reason comes to a standstill. He cannot comprehend that he holds any other relation to the operatives than that of purchase and sale; he sees in them not human beings, but hands, as he constantly calls them to their faces; he insists, as Carlyle says, that "Cash Payment is the only nexus between man and man." Even the relation between himself and his wife is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, mere "Cash Payment". Money determines the worth of the man; he is "worth ten thousand pounds". He who has money is of "the better sort of people", is "influential", and what he does counts for something in his social circle. The huckstering spirit penetrates the whole language, all relations are expressed in business terms, in economic categories. Supply and demand are the formulas according to which the logic of the English bourgeois judges all human life. Hence free competition in every respect, hence the regime of laissez-faire, laissez-aller in government, in medicine, in education, and soon to be in religion, too, as the State Church collapses more and more. Free competition will suffer no limitation, no State supervision; the whole State is but a burden to it. It would reach its highest perfection in a wholly ungoverned anarchic society, where each might exploit the other to his hearts content. Since, however, the bourgeoisie cannot dispense with government, but must have it to hold the equally indispensable proletariat in check, it turns the power of government against the proletariat and keeps out of its way as far as possible. Let no one believe, however, that the "cultivated" Englishman openly brags with his egotism. On the contrary, he conceals it under the vilest hypocrisy. What? The wealthy English fail to remember the poor? They who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of! Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow. But let us hear the English bourgeoisie's own words. It is not yet a year since I read in the Manchester Guardian the following letter to the editor, which was published without comment as a perfectly natural, reasonable thing: There you have it! The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: "If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary!" It is infamous, this charity of a Christian bourgeois! And so writes "A Lady"; she does well to sign herself such, well that she has lost the courage to call herself a woman! But if the "Ladies" are such as this, what must the "Gentlemen" be? It will be said that this is a single case; but no, the foregoing letter expresses the temper of the great majority of the English bourgeoisie, or the editor would not have accepted it, and some reply would have been made to it, which I watched for in vain in the succeeding numbers. And as to the efficiency of this philanthropy, Canon Parkinson himself says that the poor are relieved much more by the poor than by the bourgeoisie; and such relief given by an honest proletarian who knows himself what it is to be hungry, for whom sharing his scanty meal is really a sacrifice, but a sacrifice borne with pleasure, such help has a wholly different ring to it from the carelessly-tossed alms of the luxurious bourgeois. In other respects, too, the bourgeoisie assumes a hypocritical, boundless philanthropy, but only when its own interests require it; as in its Politics and Political Economy. It has been at work now well on towards five years to prove to the working-men that it strives to abolish the Corn Laws solely in their interest. But the long and short of the matter is this: the Corn Laws keep the price of bread higher than in other countries, and thus raise wages; but these high wages render difficult competition of the manufacturers against other nations in which bread, and consequently wages, are cheaper. The Corn Laws being repealed, the price of bread falls, and wages gradually approach those of other European countries, as must be clear to every one from our previous exposition of the principles according to which wages are determined. The manufacturer can compete more readily, the demand for English goods increases, and, with it, the demand for labour. In consequence of this increased demand wages would actually rise somewhat, and the unemployed workers be re-employed; but for how long? The surplus population of England, and especially of Ireland, is sufficient to supply English manufacture with the necessary operatives, even if it were doubled; and, in a few years, the small advantage of the repeal of the Corn Laws would be balanced, a new crisis would follow, and we should be back at the point from which we started, while the first stimulus to manufacture would have increased population meanwhile. All this the proletarians understand very well, and have told the manufacturers to their faces; but, in spite of that, the manufacturers have in view solely the immediate advantage which the repeal of the Corn Laws would bring them. They are too narrow-minded to see that, even for themselves, no permanent advantage can arise from this measure, because their competition with each other would soon force the profit of the individual back to its old level; and thus they continue to shriek to the working-men that it is purely for the sake of the starving millions that the rich members of the Liberal party pour hundreds and thousands of pounds into the treasury of the Anti-Corn Law League, while every one knows that they are only sending the butter after the cheese, that they calculate upon earning it all back in the first ten years after the repeal of the Corn Laws. But the workers are no longer to be misled by the bourgeoisie, especially since the insurrection of 1842. They demand of every one who presents himself as interested in their welfare, that he should declare himself in favour of the Peoples Charter as proof of the sincerity of his professions, and in so doing, they protest against all outside help, for the Charter is a demand for the power to help themselves. Whoever declines so to declare himself they pronounce their enemy, and are perfectly right in so doing, whether he be a declared foe or a false friend. Besides, the Anti-Corn Law League has used the most despicable falsehoods and tricks to win the support of the workers. It has tried to prove to them that the money price of labour is in inverse proportion to the price of corn; that wages are high when grain is cheap, and vice versa, an assertion which it pretends to prove with the most ridiculous arguments, and one which is, in itself, more ridiculous than any other that has proceeded from the mouth of an Economist. When this failed to help matters, the workers were promised bliss supreme in consequence of the increased demand in the labour market; indeed, men went so far as to carry through the streets two models of loaves of bread, on one of which, by far the larger, was written: American Eightpenny Loaf, Wages Four Shillings per Day , and upon the much smaller one: English Eightpenny Loaf, Wages Two Shillings a Day . But the workers have not allowed themselves to be misled. They know their lords and masters too well. But rightly to measure the hypocrisy of these promises, the practice of the bourgeoisie must be taken into account. We have seen in the course of our.report how the bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat in every conceivable way for its own benefit! We have, however, hitherto seen only how the.single bourgeois maltreats the proletariat upon his own account. Let us turn now to the manner in which the bourgeoisie as a party, as the power of the State, conducts itself towards the proletariat. Laws are necessary only because there are persons in existence who own nothing; and although this is directly expressed in but few laws, as, for instance, those against vagabonds and tramps, in which the proletariat as such is outlawed, yet enmity to the proletariat is so emphatically the basis of the law that the judges, and especially the Justices of the Peace, who are bourgeois themselves, and with whom the proletariat comes most in contact, find this meaning in the laws without further consideration. If a rich man is brought up, or rather summoned, to appear before the court, the judge regrets that he is obliged to impose so much trouble, treats the matter as favourably as possible, and, if he is forced to condemn the accused, does so with extreme regret, etc., etc., and the end of it all is a miserable fine, which the bourgeois throws upon the table with contempt and then departs. But if a poor devil gets into such a position as involves appearing before the Justice of the Peace he has almost always spent the night in the station-house with a crowd of his peers he is regarded from the beginning as guilty; his defence is set aside with a contemptuous Oh! we know the excuse , and a fine imposed which he cannot pay and must work out with several months on the treadmill. And if nothing can be proved against him, he is sent to the treadmill, none the less, as a rogue and a vagabond . The partisanship of the Justices of the Peace, especially in the country, surpasses all description, and it is so much the order of the day that all cases which are not too utterly flagrant are quietly reported by the newspapers, without comment. Nor is anything else to be expected. For on the one hand, these Dogberries do merely construe the law according to the intent of the farmers, and, on the other, they are themselves bourgeois, who see the foundation of all true order in the interests of their class. And the conduct of the police corresponds to that of the Justices of the Peace. The bourgeois may do what he will and the police remain ever polite, adhering strictly to the law, but the proletarian is roughly, brutally treated; his poverty both casts the suspicion of every sort of crime upon him and cuts him off from legal redress against any caprice of the administrators of the law; for him, therefore, the protecting forms of the law do not exist, the police force their way into his house without further ceremony, arrest and abuse him; and only when a working-men's association, such as the miners, engages a Roberts, does it become evident how little the protective side of the law exists for the working-man, how frequently he has to bear all the burdens of the law without enjoying its benefits. Down to the present hour, the property-holding class in Parliament still struggles against the better feelings of those not yet fallen a prey to egotism, and seeks to subjugate the proletariat still further. One piece of common land after another is appropriated and placed under cultivation, a process by which the general cultivation is furthered, but the proletariat greatly injured. Where there were still commons, the poor could pasture an ass, a pig, or geese, the children and young people had a place where they could play and live out of doors; but this is gradually coming to an end. The earnings of the worker are less, and the young people, deprived of their play-ground, go to the beer-shops. A mass of acts for enclosing and cultivating commons is passed at every session of Parliament. When the Government determined during the session of 1844 to force the all monopolising railways to make travelling possible for the workers by means of charges proportionate to their means, a penny a mile, and proposed therefore to introduce such a third class train upon every railway daily, the "Reverend Father in God", the Bishop of London, proposed that Sunday, the only day upon which working-men in work can travel, be exempted from this rule, and travelling thus be left open to the rich and shut off from the poor. This proposition was, however, too direct, too undisguised to pass through Parliament, and was dropped. I have no room to enumerate the many concealed attacks of even one single session upon the proletariat. One from the session of 1844 must suffice. An obscure member of Parliament, a Mr. Miles, proposed a bill regulating the relation of master and servant which seemed comparatively unobjectionable. The Government became interested in the bill, and it was referred to a committee. Meanwhile the strike among the miners in the North broke out, and Roberts made his triumphal passage through England with his acquitted working-men. When the bill was reported by the committee, it was discovered that certain most despotic provisions had been interpolated in it, especially one conferring upon the employer the power to bring before any Justice of the Peace every working-man who had contracted verbally or in writing to do any work whatsoever, in case of refusal to work or other misbehaviour, and have him condemned to prison with hard labour for two months, upon the oath of the employer or his agent or overlooker, i.e., upon the oath of the accuser. This bill aroused the working-men to the utmost fury, the more so as the Ten Hours Bill was before Parliament at the same time, and had called forth a considerable agitation. Hundreds of meetings were held, hundreds of working-men's petitions forwarded to London to Thomas Duncombe, the representative of the interests of the proletariat. This man was, except Ferrand, the representative of "Young England", the only vigorous opponent of the bill; but when the other Radicals saw that the people were declaring against it, one after the other crept forward and took his place by Duncombe's side; and as the Liberal bourgeoisie had not the courage to defend the bill in the face of the excitement among the working-men, it was ignominiously lost. Meanwhile the most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat is Malthus Law of Population and the New Poor Law framed in accordance with it. We have already alluded several times to the theory of Malthus. We may sum up its final result in these few words, that the earth is perennially over-populated, whence poverty, misery, distress, and immorality must prevail; that it is the lot, the eternal destiny of mankind, to exist in too great numbers, and therefore in diverse classes, of which some are rich, educated, and moral, and others more or less poor, distressed, ignorant, and immoral. Hence it follows in practice, and Malthus himself drew this conclusion, that charities and poor-rates are, properly speaking, nonsense, since they serve only to maintain, and stimulate the increase of, the surplus population whose competition crushes down wages for the employed; that the employment of the poor by the Poor Law Guardians is equally unreasonable, since only a fixed quantity of the products of labour can be consumed, and for every unemployed labourer thus furnished employment, another hitherto employed must be driven into enforced idleness, whence private undertakings suffer at cost of Poor Law industry; that, in other words, the whole problem is not how to support the surplus population, but how to restrain it as far as possible. Malthus declares in plain English that the right to live, a right previously asserted in favour of every man in the world, is nonsense. He quotes the words of a poet, that the poor man comes to the feast of Nature and finds no cover laid for him, and adds that she bids him begone , for he did not before his birth ask of society whether or not he is welcome. This is now the pet theory of all genuine English bourgeois, and very naturally, since it is the most specious excuse for them, and has, moreover, a good deal of truth in it under existing conditions. If, then, the problem is not to make the surplus population useful, to transform it into available population, but merely to let it starve to death in the least objectionable way and to prevent its having too many children, this, of course, is simple enough, provided the surplus population perceives its own superfluousness and takes kindly to starvation. There is, however, in spite of the violent exertions of the humane bourgeoisie, no immediate prospect of its succeeding in bringing about such a disposition among the workers. The workers have taken it into their heads that they, with their busy hands, are the necessary, and the rich capitalists, who do nothing, the surplus population. Since, however, the rich hold all the power, the proletarians must submit, if they will not good-temperedly perceive it for themselves, to have the law actually declare them superfluous.. This has been done by the New Poor Law. The Old Poor Law which rested upon the Act of 1601 (the 43rd of Elizabeth), naively started from the notion that it is the duty of the parish to provide for the maintenance of the poor. Whoever had no work received relief, and the poor man regarded the parish as pledged to protect him from starvation. He demanded his weekly relief as his right, not as a favour, and this became, at last, too much for the bourgeoisie. In 1833, when the bourgeoisie had just come into power through the Reform Bill, and pauperism in the country districts had just reached its full development, the bourgeoisie began the reform of the Poor Law according to its own point of view. A commission was appointed, which investigated the administration of the Poor Laws, and revealed a multitude of abuses. It was discovered that the whole working-class in the country was pauperised and more or less dependent upon the rates, from which they received relief when wages were low; it was found that this system by which the unemployed were maintained, the ill-paid and the parents of large families relieved, fathers of illegitimate children required to pay alimony, and poverty, in general, recognised as needing protection, it was found that this system was ruining the nation, was This description of the action of the Old Poor Law is certainly correct; relief fosters laziness and increase of surplus population . Under present social conditions it is perfectly clear that the poor man is compelled to be an egotist, and when he can choose, living equally well in either case, he prefers doing nothing to working. But what follows therefrom? That our present social conditions are good for nothing, and not as the Malthusian Commissioners conclude, that poverty is a crime, and, as such, to be visited with heinous penalties which may serve as a warning to others. But these wise Malthusians were so thoroughly convinced of the infallibility of their theory that they did not for one moment hesitate to cast the poor into the Procrustean bed of their economic notions and treat them with the most revolting cruelty. Convinced with Malthus and the rest of the adherents of free competition that it is best to let each one take care of himself, they would have preferred to abolish the Poor Laws altogether. Since, however, they had neither the courage nor the authority to do this, they proposed a Poor Law constructed as far as possible in harmony with the doctrine of Malthus, which is yet more barbarous than that of laissez-faire, because it interferes actively in cases in which the latter is passive. We have seen how Malthus characterises poverty, or rather the want of employment, as a crime under the title "superfluity", and recommends for it punishment by starvation. The commissioners were not quite so barbarous; death outright by starvation was something too terrible even for a Poor Law Commissioner. "Good," said they, "we grant you poor a right to exist, but only to exist; the right to multiply you have not, nor the right to exist as befits human beings. You are a pest, and if we cannot get rid of you as we do of other pests, you shall feel, at least, that you are a pest, and you shall at least be held in check, kept from bringing into the world other surplus, either directly or through inducing in others laziness and want of employment. Live you shall, but live as an awful warning to all those who might have inducements to become superfluous." They accordingly brought in the New Poor Law, which was passed by Parliament in 1834, and continues in force down to the present day. All relief in money and provisions was abolished; the only relief allowed was admission to the workhouses immediately built. The regulations for these workhouses, or, as the people call them, Poor Law Bastilles, is such as to frighten away every one who has the slightest prospect of life without this form of public charity. To make sure that relief be applied for only in the most extreme cases and after every other effort had failed, the workhouse has been made the most repulsive residence which the refined ingenuity of a Malthusian can invent. The food is worse than that of the most ill-paid working-man while employed, and the work harder, or they might prefer the workhouse to their wretched existence outside. Meat, especially fresh meat, is rarely furnished, chiefly potatoes, the worst possible bread and oatmeal porridge, little or no beer. The food of criminal prisoners is better, as a rule, so that the paupers frequently commit some offence for the purpose of getting into jail. For the workhouse is a jail too; he who does not finish his task gets nothing to eat; he who wishes to go out must ask permission, which is granted or not, according to his behaviour or the inspectors whim; tobacco is forbidden, also the receipt of gifts from relatives or friends outside the house; the paupers wear a workhouse uniform, and are handed over, helpless and without redress, to the caprice of the inspectors. To prevent their labour from competing with that of outside concerns, they are set to rather useless tasks: the men break stones, as much as a strong man can accomplish with effort in a day ; the women, children, and aged men pick oakum, for I know not what insignificant use. To prevent the superfluous from multiplying, and demoralised parents from influencing their children, families are broken up; the husband is placed in one wing, the wife in another, the children in a third, and they are permitted to see one another only at stated times after long intervals, and then only when they have, in the opinion of the officials, behaved well. And in order to shut off the external world from contamination by pauperism within these bastilles, the inmates are permitted to receive visits only with the consent of the officials, and in the reception-rooms; to communicate in general with the world outside only by leave and under supervision. Yet the food is supposed to be wholesome and the treatment humane with all this. But the intent of the law is too loudly outspoken for this requirement to be in any wise fulfilled. The Poor Law Commissioners and the whole English bourgeoisie deceive themselves if they believe the administration of the law possible without these results. The treatment, which the letter of the law prescribes, is in direct contradiction of its spirit. If the law in its essence proclaims the poor criminals, the workhouses prisons, their inmates beyond the pale of the law, beyond the pale of humanity, objects of disgust and repulsion, then all commands to the contrary are unavailing. In practice, the spirit and not the letter of the law is followed in the treatment of the poor, as in the following few examples: In the workhouse at Greenwich, in the summer of 1843, a boy five years old was punished by being shut into the dead-room, where he had to sleep upon the lids of the coffins. In the workhouse at Herne, the same punishment was inflicted upon a little girl for wetting the bed at night, and this method of punishment seems to be a favourite one. This workhouse, which stands in one of the most beautiful regions of Kent, is peculiar, in so far as its windows open only upon the court, and but two, newly introduced, afford the inmates a glimpse of the outer world. The author who relates this in the Illuminated Magazine, closes his description with the words: In November, 1843, a man died at Leicester, who had been dismissed two days before from the workhouse at Coventry. The details of the treatment of the poor in this institution are revolting. The man, George Robson, had a wound upon the shoulder, the treatment of which was wholly neglected; he was set to work at the pump, using the sound arm; was given only the usual workhouse fare, which he was utterly unable to digest by reason of the unhealed wound and his general debility; he naturally grew weaker, and the more he complained, the more brutally he was treated. When his wife tried to bring him her drop of beer, she was reprimanded, and forced to drink it herself in the presence of the female warder. He became ill, but received no better treatment. Finally, at his own request, and under the most insulting epithets, he was discharged, accompanied by his wife. Two days later he died at Leicester, in consequence of the neglected wound and of the food given him, which was utterly indigestible for one in his condition, as the surgeon present at the inquest testified. When he was discharged, there were handed to him letters containing money, which had been kept back six weeks, and opened, according to a rule of the establishment, by the inspector! In Birmingham such scandalous occurrences took place, that finally, in 1843, an official was sent to investigate the case. He found that four tramps had been shut up naked under a stair-case in a black hole, eight to ten days, often deprived of food until noon, and that at the severest season of the year. A little boy had been passed through all grades of punishment known to the institution; first locked up in a damp, vaulted, narrow, lumber- room; then in the dog-hole twice, the second time three days and three nights; then the same length of time in the old dog-hole, which was still worse; then the tramp-room, a stinking, disgustingly filthy hole, with wooden sleeping stalls, where the official, in the course of his inspection, found two other tattered boys, shrivelled with cold, who had been spending three days there. In the dog-hole there were often seven, and in the tramp-room, twenty men huddled together. Women, also, were placed in the dog-hole, because they refused to go to church and one was shut four days into the tramp-room, with God knows what sort of company, and that while she was ill and receiving medicines. Another woman was placed in the insane department for punishment, though she was perfectly sane. In the workhouse at Bacton, in Suffolk, in January, 1844, a similar investigation revealed the fact that a feeble-minded woman was employed as nurse, and took care of the patients accordingly, while sufferers, who were often restless at night, or tried to get up, were tied fast with cords passed over the covering and under the bedstead, to save the nurses the trouble of sitting up at night. One patient was found dead, bound in this way. In the St. Pancras workhouse in London (where the cheap shirts already mentioned are made), an epileptic died of suffocation during an attack in bed, no one coming to his relief; in the same house, four to six, sometimes eight children, slept in one bed. In Shoreditch workhouse a man was placed, together with a fever patient violently ill, in a bed teeming with vermin. In Bethnal Green workhouse, London, a woman in the sixth month of pregnancy was shut up in the reception-room with her two-year- old child, from February 28th to March 19th, without being admitted into the workhouse itself, and without a trace of a bed or the means of satisfying the most natural wants. Her husband, who was brought into the workhouse, begged to have his wife released from this imprisonment, whereupon he received twenty-four hours imprisonment, with bread and water, as the penalty of his insolence. In the workhouse at Slough, near Windsor, a man lay dying in September, 1844. His wife journeyed to him, arriving at midnight; and hastening to the workhouse, was refused admission. She was not permitted to see her husband until the next morning, and then only in the presence of a female warder, who forced herself upon the wife at every succeeding visit, sending her away at the end of half-an-hour. In the workhouse at Middleton, in Lancashire, twelve, and at times eighteen, paupers, of both sexes, slept in one room. This institution is not embraced by the New Poor Law, but is administered under an old special act (Gilberts Act). The inspector had instituted a brewery in the house for his own benefit. In Stockport, July 31st, 1844, a man, seventy-two years old, was brought before the Justice of the Peace for refusing to break stones, and insisting that, by reason of his age and a stiff knee, he was unfit for this work. In vain did he offer to undertake any work adapted to his physical strength; he was sentenced to two weeks upon the treadmill. In the workhouse at Basford, an inspecting official found that the sheets had not been changed in thirteen weeks, shirts in four weeks, stockings in two to ten months, so that of forty-five boys but three had stockings, and all their shirts were in tatters. The beds swarmed with vermin, and the tableware was washed in the slop-pails. In the west of London workhouse, a porter who had infected four girls with syphilis was not discharged, and another who had concealed a deaf and dumb girl four days and nights in his bed was also retained. As in life, so in death. The poor are dumped into the earth like infected cattle. The pauper burial-ground of St. Brides, London, is a bare morass, in use as a cemetery since the time of Charles II., and filled with heaps of bones; every Wednesday the paupers are thrown into a ditch fourteen feet deep; a curate rattles through the Litany at the top of his speed; the ditch is loosely covered in, to be reopened the next Wednesday, and filled with corpses as long as one more can be forced in. The putrefaction thus engendered contaminates the whole neighbourhood. In Manchester, the pauper burial-ground lies opposite to the Old Town, along the Irk; this, too, is a rough, desolate place. About two years ago a railroad was carried through it. If it had been a respectable cemetery, how the bourgeoisie and the clergy would have shrieked over the desecration! But it was a pauper burial-ground, the resting-place of the outcast and superfluous, so no one concerned himself about the matter. It was not even thought worth while to convey the partially decayed bodies to the other side of the cemetery; they were heaped up just as it happened, and piles were driven into newly made graves, so that the water oozed out of the swampy ground, pregnant with putrefying matter, and filled the neighbourhood with the most revolting and injurious gases. The disgusting brutality which accompanied this work I cannot describe in further detail. Can any one wonder that the poor decline to accept public relief under these conditions? That they starve rather than enter these bastilles? I have the reports of five cases in which persons actually starving, when the guardians refused them outdoor relief, went back to their miserable homes and died of starvation rather than enter these hells. Thus far have the Poor Law Commissioners attained their object. At the same time, however, the workhouses have intensified, more than any other measure of the party in power, the hatred of the working-class against the property-holders, who very generally admire the New Poor Law. From Newcastle to Dover, there is but one voice among the workers the voice of hatred against the new law. The bourgeoisie has formulated so clearly in this law its conception of its duties towards the proletariat, that it has been appreciated even by the dullest. So frankly, so boldly has the conception never yet been formulated, that the non-possessing class exists solely for the purpose of being exploited, and of starving when the property- holders can no longer make use of it. Hence it is that this New Poor Law has contributed so greatly to accelerate the labour movement, and especially to spread Chartism; and, as it is carried out most extensively in the country, it facilitates the development of the proletarian movement which is arising in the agricultural districts. Let me add that a similar law in force in Ireland since 1838, affords a similar refuge for eighty thousand paupers. Here, too, it has made itself disliked, and would have been intensely hated if it had attained anything like the same importance as in England. But what difference does the ill-treatment of eighty thousand proletarians make in a country in which there are two and a half millions of them? In Scotland there are, with local exceptions, no Poor Laws. I hope that after this picture of the New Poor Law and its results, no word which I have said of the English bourgeoisie will be thought too stern. In this public measure, in which it acts in corpore as the ruling power, it formulates its real intentions, reveals the animus of those smaller transactions with the proletariat, of which the blame apparently attaches to individuals. And that this measure did not originate with any one section of the bourgeoisie, but enjoys the approval of the whole class, is proved by the Parliamentary debates of 1844. The Liberal party had enacted the New Poor Law; the Conservative party, with its Prime Minister Peel at the head, defends it, and only alters some pettifogging trifles in the Poor Law Amendment Bill of 1844. A Liberal majority carried the bill, a Conservative majority approved it, and the "Noble Lords" gave their consent each time. Thus is the expulsion of the proletariat from State and society outspoken, thus is it publicly proclaimed that proletarians are not human beings, and do not deserve to be treated as such. Let us leave it to the proletarians of the British Empire to reconquer their human rights. Such is the state of the British working-class as I have come to know it in the course of twenty-one months, through the medium of my own eyes, and through official and other trustworthy reports. And when I call this condition, as I have frequently enough done in the foregoing pages, an utterly unbearable one, I am not alone in so doing. As early as 1833, Gaskell declared that he despaired of a peaceful issue, and that a revolution can hardly fail to follow. 1n 1838, Carlyle explained Chartism and the revolutionary activity of the working-men as arising out of the misery in which they live, and only wondered that they have sat so quietly eight long years at the Barmecide feast, at which they have been regaled by the Liberal bourgeoisie with empty promises. And in 1844 he declared that the work of organising labour must be begun at once And the Times, the first journal of Europe , said in June, 1844: Meanwhile, let us review once more the chances of the English bourgeoisie. In the worst case, foreign manufacture, especially that of America, may succeed in withstanding English competition, even after the repeal of the Corn Laws, inevitable in the course of a few years. German manufacture is now making great efforts, and that of America has developed with giant strides. America, with its inexhaustible resources, with its unmeasured coal and iron fields, with its unexampled wealth of water-power and its navigable rivers, but especially with its energetic, active population, in comparison with which the English are phlegmatic dawdlers, America has in less than ten years created a manufacture which already competes with England in the coarser cotton goods, has excluded the English from the markets of North and South America, and holds its own in China, side by side with England. If any country is adapted to holding a monopoly of manufacture, it is America. Should English manufacture be thus vanquished and in the course of the next twenty years, if the present conditions remain unchanged, this is inevitable the majority of the proletariat must become forever superfluous, and has no other choice than to starve or to rebel. Does the English bourgeoisie reflect upon this contingency? On the contrary; its favourite economist, McCulloch, teaches from his student s desk, that a country so young as America, which is not even properly populated, cannot carry on manufacture successfully or dream of competing with an old manufacturing country like England. It were madness in the Americans to make the attempt, for they could only lose by it; better far for them to stick to their agriculture, and when they have brought their whole territory under the plough, a time may perhaps come for carrying on manufacture with a profit. So says the wise economist, and the whole bourgeoisie worships him, while the Americans take possession of one market after another, while a daring American speculator recently even sent a shipment of American cotton goods to England, where they were sold for re-exportation! But assuming that England retained the monopoly of manufactures, that its factories perpetually multiply, what must be the result? The commercial crises would continue, and grow more violent, more terrible, with the extension of industry and the multiplication of the proletariat. The proletariat would increase in geometrical proportion, in consequence of the progressive ruin of the lower middle-class and the giant strides with which capital is concentrating itself in the hands of the few; and the proletariat would soon embrace the whole nation, with the exception of a few millionaires. But in this development there comes a stage at which the proletariat perceives how easily the existing power may be overthrown, and then follows a revolution. Neither of these supposed conditions may, however, be expected to arise. The commercial crises, the mightiest levers for all independent development of the proletariat, will probably shorten the process, acting in concert with foreign competition and the deepening ruin of the lower middle-class. I think the people will not endure more than one more crisis. The next one, in 1846 or 1847, will probably bring with it the repeal of the Corn Laws and the enactment of the Charter. What revolutionary movements the Charter may give rise to remains to be seen. But, by the time of the next following crisis, which, according to the analogy of its predecessors, must break out in 1852 or 1853, unless delayed perhaps by the repeal of the Corn Laws or hastened by other influences, such as foreign competition by the time this crisis arrives, the English people will have had enough of being plundered by the capitalists and left to starve when the capitalists no longer require their services. If, up to that time, the English bourgeoisie does not pause to reflect and to all appearance it certainly will not do so a revolution will follow with which none hitherto known can be compared. The proletarians, driven to despair, will seize the torch which Stephens has preached to them; the vengeance of the people will come down with a wrath of which the rage of 1795 gives no true idea. The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged. Even the union of a part of the bourgeoisie with the proletariat, even a general reform of the bourgeoisie, would not help matters. Besides, the change of heart of the bourgeoisie could only go as far as a lukewarm juste-milieu; the more determined, uniting with the workers, would only form a new Gironde, and succumb in the course of the mighty development. The prejudices of a whole class cannot be laid aside like an old coat: least of all, those of the stable, narrow, selfish English bourgeoisie. These are all inferences which may be drawn with the greatest certainty: conclusions, the premises for which are undeniable facts, partly of historical development, partly facts inherent in human nature. Prophecy is nowhere so easy as in England, where all the component elements of society are clearly defined and sharply separated. The revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution; but it can be made more gently than that prophesied in the foregoing pages. This depends, however, more upon the development of the proletariat than upon that of the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the proletariat absorbs socialistic and communistic elements, will the revolution diminish in bloodshed, revenge, and savagery. Communism stands, in principle, above the breach between bourgeoisie and proletariat, recognises only its historic significance for the present, but not its justification for the future: wishes, indeed, to bridge over this chasm, to do away with all class antagonisms Hence it recognises as justified, so long as the struggle exists, the exasperation of the proletariat towards its oppressors as a necessity, as the most important lever for a labour movement just beginning; but it goes beyond this exasperation, because Communism is a question of humanity and not of the workers alone. Besides, it does not occur to any Communist to wish to revenge himself upon individuals, or to believe that, in general, the single bourgeois can act otherwise, under existing circumstances, than he does act. English Socialism, i.e., Communism, rests directly upon the irresponsibility of the individual. Thus the more the English workers absorb communistic ideas, the more superfluous becomes their present bitterness, which, should it continue so violent as at present, could accomplish nothing; and the more their action against the bourgeoisie will lose its savage cruelty. If, indeed, it were possible to make the whole proletariat communistic before the war breaks out, the end would be very peaceful; but that is no longer possible, the time has gone by. Meanwhile, I think that before the outbreak of open, declared war of the poor against the rich, there will be enough intelligent comprehension of the social question among the proletariat, to enable the communistic party, with the help of events, to conquer the brutal element of the revolution and prevent a "Ninth Thermidor". In any case, the experience of the French will not have been undergone in vain, and most of the Chartist leaders are, moreover, already Communists. And as Communism stands above the strife between bourgeoisie and proletariat, it will be easier for the better elements of the bourgeoisie (which are, however, deplorably few, and can look for recruits only among the rising generation) to unite with it than with purely proletarian Chartism. If these conclusions have not been sufficiently established in the course of the present work, there may be other opportunities for demonstrating that they are necessary consequences of the historical development of England. But this I maintain, the war of the poor against the rich now carried on in detail and indirectly will become direct and universal. It is too late for a peaceful solution. The classes are divided more and more sharply, the spirit of resistance penetrates the workers, the bitterness intensifies, the guerrilla skirmishes become concentrated in more important battles, and soon a slight impulse will suffice to set the avalanche in motion. Then, indeed, will the war-cry resound through the land: "War to the mansion, peace to the cottage!" but then it will be too late for the rich to beware. 1. To prevent misconstructions and consequent objections, I would observe that I have spoken of the bourgeoisie as a class, and that all such facts as refer to individuals serve merely as evidence of the way of thinking and acting of a class. Hence I have not entered upon the distinctions between the diverse sections, subdivisions and parties of the bourgeoisie, which have a mere historical and theoretical significance. And I can, for the same reason, mention but casually the few members of the bourgeoisie who have shown themselves honourable exceptions. These are, on the one hand, the pronounced Radicals, who are almost Chartists, such as a few members of the House of Commons, the manufacturers Hindley of Ashton, and Fielden of Todmorden (Lancashire), and, on the other hand, the philanthropic Tories, who have recently constituted themselves "Young England", among whom are the Members of Parliament, Disraeli, Borthwick, Ferrand, Lord John Manners, etc., Lord Ashley, too, is in sympathy with them. The hope of "Young England" is a restoration of the old "merry England" with its brilliant features and its romantic feudalism. This object is of course unattainable and ridiculous, a satire upon all historic development; but the good intention, the courage to resist the existing state of things and prevalent prejudices, and to recognise the vileness of our present condition, is worth something anyhow. Wholly isolated is the half-German Englishman, Thomas Carlyle, who, originally a Tory, goes beyond all those hitherto mentioned. He has sounded the social disorder more deeply than any other English bourgeois, and demands the organisation of labour.

The Attitude of the Bourgeoisie Towards the Proletariat

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch13.htm

In my book on the above subject I was unable to give factual proof of individual points. In order not to make the book too thick and indigestible, I had to consider my statements sufficiently proven when I had confirmed them by quotations from official documents, impartial writers or the writings of the parties whose interests I was attacking. This sufficed to guard me against contradiction in those cases where I was unable to speak from personal observation when describing particular living conditions. But it was not sufficient to produce in the reader the incontestable certainty which can only be given by striking, irrefutable facts, and which, especially in an age in which we are obliged by the infinite "wisdom of the fathers" to be sceptical, can never be generated by mere reasoning, no matter how good the authorities. Above all when it is a question of important consequences, of facts coalescing into principles, when it is not the condition of separate, small sections of the people that has to be described, but the position of whole classes in relation to each other, then facts are absolutely essential. For the reasons just mentioned, I was unable to provide these in all cases in my book. I will now make good this unavoidable deficiency and, from time to time, will present facts as I find them in the sources available to me. In order, at the same time, to demonstrate that my account is still correct today, I will only use facts which have taken place since I left England last year, and have become known to me only since my book was published. Readers of my book will remember that I was chiefly concerned to describe the position of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in relation to each other and the necessity of struggle between these two classes; and that I attached especial importance to proving how completely justified the proletariat was in waging this struggle, and to rebutting the English bourgeoisie's fine phrases by means of their ugly deeds. From the first page to the last, I was writing a bill of indictment against the English bourgeoisie. I will now provide a few more choice pieces of evidence. However, since I have already displayed enough passion over these English bourgeois it is not my intention to work myself up over them once again and, so far as I can, I will keep my temper. The first good citizen and worthy paterfamilias we are going to meet is an old friend, or rather there are two of them. By 1843 Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey had already had Lord knows how many conflicts with their workers, who, refusing to be dissuaded even by the best of arguments from their demand that they should receive increased wages for increased work, stopped work. Pauling & Henfrey, who are important building contractors and employ many brickmakers, carpenters, and so on, took on other workers; this led to a conflict and in the end to a bloody battle with guns and cudgels in Pauling & Henfrey's brickyard, which resulted in the transportation of half a dozen workers to Van Diemen's Land, all of which is dealt with at length in my book. But Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey have to try something on with their workers every year, otherwise they are not happy; so they began baiting them again in October 1844. This time it was the carpenters whose well-being the philanthropic building contractors were anxious to promote. From time immemorial the custom had prevailed among the carpenters of Manchester and the surrounding area of not "striking a light" from Candlemas to November 17, i.e., of working from six in the morning till six in the evening during the long days, and of starting as soon as it was light and finishing as soon as it began to get dark during the short days. Then from November 17 onwards the lights were lit and work carried on for the full time. Pauling & Henfrey, who had long had enough of this "barbaric" custom, decided to put an end to this relic of the "Dark Ages" with the help of gas lighting, and when one evening before six o'clock the carpenters could not see any longer and put away their tools and went for their coats, the foreman lit the gas and said that they had to work till six o'clock. The carpenters, whom this did not suit, called a general meeting of the workers in their trade. Mr. Pauling, much astonished, asked his workers if they were dissatisfied about something since they had called a meeting. Some of the workers said that it was not they who were directly responsible for calling the meeting, but the committee of the craft union, to which Mr. Pauling replied that he didn't care a fig for the craft union, but he would like to put a proposition to them: if they would agree to the lights being lit he would be prepared in return to give them three hours off on Saturdays, and generous fellow also to allow them to work an extra quarter of an hour every day for which they would get extra pay! They on their part should work half an hour longer when all other workshops began to put on their lights. The workers considered this proposal and calculated that as a result Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey would gain a whole working hour every day during the short days, that each worker would have to work altogether 92 hours, i.e., 9 1/4 days extra without getting a farthing in return, and that taking into account all the workers employed by the firm, the above-named gentlemen would save 400 (2,100 taler) in wages during the winter months. So the workers held their meeting and explained to their fellow-workers that if one firm succeeded in putting this through, all the other firms would follow suit and, as a result, there would be a general indirect reduction in wages which would rob the carpenters in the district of about 4,000 a year. It was decided that on the following Monday all the carpenters employed by Pauling & Henfrey should hand in their 3-months' notice and if their employers did not change their minds, should stop work when this notice expired. The union on its part promised to support them by a general levy in the event of a stoppage of work. On Monday, October 14, the workers went and gave in their notice, whereupon they were told that they could leave right away, which of course they did. The same evening another meeting of all the building workers took place, at which all categories of building workers pledged their support to the strikers. On the Wednesday and Thursday following, all the carpenters in the vicinity employed by Pauling & Henfrey also stopped work and the strike was thus in full swing. The building employers, left so suddenly high and dry, immediately sent people out in all directions, even as far as Scotland, to recruit workers since in the whole vicinity there was not a soul willing to work for them. In a few days thirteen men did arrive from Staffordshire. But as soon as the strikers found an opportunity of talking to them and explaining the dispute and the reasons why they had stopped work, several of the new arrivals refused to continue working. But the masters had an effective way of dealing with this: they had the recalcitrants, along with those who led them astray, brought before Daniel Maude, Esquire, Justice of the Peace. But before we follow them there, we must first put the virtues of Daniel Maude, Esq., in their proper light. Daniel Maude, Esq., is the "stipendiary magistrate"' or paid Justice of the Peace in Manchester. The English magistrates are usually rich bourgeois or landowners, occasionally also clergymen, who are appointed by the Ministry. But since these Dogberries understand nothing about the law, they make the most flagrant blunders, bring the bourgeoisie into ridicule and do it harm, since, even when faced with a worker, they are frequently reduced to a state of confusion if he is defended by a skilful lawyer, and either neglect some legal form when sentencing him, which results in a successful appeal, or let themselves be misled into acquitting him. Besides, the rich manufacturers in the big towns and industrial areas have no time to spare for passing days of boredom in a court of law and prefer to install a replacement. As a result in these towns, on the initiative of the towns themselves, paid magistrates are usually appointed, men versed in law, who are able to take advantage of all the twists and subtle distinctions of English law, and when necessary to supplement and improve it for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. Their efforts in this respect are illustrated by the following example. Daniel Maude, Esq., is one of those liberal justices of the peace who were appointed in large numbers under the Whig Government. Among his heroic exploits, inside and outside the arena of the Manchester Borough Court, we will mention two. When in 1842 the manufacturers succeeded in forcing the workers of South Lancashire into an insurrection, which broke out in Stalybridge and Ashton at the beginning of August, some 10,000 workers, with Richard Pilling, the Chartist, at their head, marched on August 9 from there to Manchester When they reached the outskirts of the town, they were met by Daniel Maude, Esq., with the whole estimable police force, a detachment of cavalry and a company of riflemen. But this was all only for the sake of appearances since it was in the interest of the manufacturers and liberals that the insurrection should spread and force the repeal of the Corn Laws. In this Daniel Maude, Esq., was in complete agreement with his worthy colleagues, and he began to come to terms with the workers and allowed them to enter the town on their promise to keep the peace and follow a prescribed route. He knew very well that the insurgents would not do this nor did he in the least wish them to he could have nipped the whole contrived insurrection in the bud with a little energy but, had he done so, he would not have been acting in the interest of his Anti-Corn Law friends but in the interest of Sir Robert Peel. So he withdrew the soldiers and allowed the workers to enter the town, where they immediately brought all the factories to a standstill. But as soon as the insurrection proved to be definitely directed against the liberal bourgeoisie and completely ignored the hellish Corn Laws , Daniel Maude, Esq., once more assumed his judicial office and had workers arrested by the dozen and marched off to prison without mercy for breach of the peace so that he first caused the breaches and then punished them. Another characteristic feature in the career of this Manchester Solomon is revealed by the following. Since the Anti-Corn Law League was several times beaten up in public in Manchester, it holds private meetings, admission to which is by ticket only but the decisions and petitions of which are presented to the public as those of public meetings, and as manifestations of Manchester public opinion . In order to put a stop to this fraudulent boasting by the liberal manufacturers, three or four Chartists, among them my good friend James Leach, secured tickets for themselves and went to one of these meetings. When Mr. Cobden rose to speak, James Leach asked the Chairman whether this was a public meeting. Instead of answering, the Chairman called the police and had Leach arrested without more ado. A second Chartist asked the question again, then a third, and a fourth, all were set upon one after the other by the bluebottles (police) who stood massed at the door, and packed off to the Town Hall. They appeared the next morning before Daniel Maude, Esq., who was already fully informed about everything. They were charged with having caused a disturbance at a meeting, were hardly allowed to say a word, and then had to listen to a solemn speech by Daniel Maude, Esq., who told them that he knew them, that they were political vagabonds who did nothing, but cause uproar at meetings and disturb decent, law-abiding, citizens and a stop must be put to this kind of thing. Therefore and Daniel Maude, Esq., knew very well that he could not impose any real punishment on them therefore, he would sentence them to pay the costs this time. It was before this same Daniel Maude, Esq., whose bourgeois virtues we have just described, that the recalcitrant workers from Pauling & Henfrey's were hauled. But they had brought a lawyer with them as a precaution. First to be heard was the worker newly arrived from Staffordshire who had refused to continue working at a place where others had stopped work in self-defence. Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey had a written contract signed by the workers from Staffordshire, and this was submitted to the magistrate. The defending lawyer interjected that this agreement had been signed on a Sunday and was therefore invalid. With much dignity Daniel Maude, Esq., admitted that business transactions concluded on a Sunday were not valid, but said that he could not believe that Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey regarded this as a business transaction ! So without spending very much time asking the worker whether he regarded the document as a business transaction , he told the poor devil that he must either continue working or amuse himself on the treadmill for three months. O Solomon of Manchester! After this case had been dealt with, Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey brought forward the second accused. His name was Salmon, and he was one of the firm's old workers who had stopped work. He was accused of having intimidated the new workers into taking part in the strike. The witness one of these latter stated that Salmon had taken him by the arm and spoken to him. Daniel Maude, Esq., asked whether the accused had perhaps used threats or beaten him? No, said the witness. Daniel Maude, Esq., delighted at having found an opportunity to demonstrate his impartiality after having just fulfilled his duty to the bourgeoisie declared that there was nothing in the case incriminating the accused. He had every right to take a walk on the public highway and to talk to other people as long as he did not indulge in intimidating words or actions he was therefore acquitting him. But Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey had at least had the satisfaction, by paying the costs of the case, of having the said Salmon sent to the lock-up for a night and that was something after all. Nor did Salmon's happiness last long. For after having been discharged on Thursday, October 31, he was up again before Daniel Maude, Esq., on Tuesday, November 5th, charged with having assaulted Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey in the street. On that same Thursday on which Salmon had been acquitted, a number of Scotsmen arrived in Manchester, decoyed by false statements that the disputes were over and that Pauling & Henfrey could not find enough workers in their district to cope with their extensive contracts. On the Friday a number of Scottish joiners who had been working for some time in Manchester, came to explain the cause of the stoppage to their countrymen. A large number of their fellow-workers some 400 gathered around the inn where the Scots were quartered. But these Scotsmen were kept there like prisoners with a foreman on guard at the door. After some time, Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey arrived in order to escort in person their new workers to their place of work. When the group came out, those gathered outside called to the Scots not to take work against the Manchester rules of the trade and not to disgrace their fellow-countrymen. Two of the Scots did in fact lag behind a little and Mr. Pauling himself ran back to drag them forward. The crowd remained quiet, only prevented the group from moving too quickly and called to the Scots not to interfere in other people's business, to go back home, etc. Mr. Henfrey finally lost his temper; he saw several of his old workers in the crowd, .among them Salmon, and in order to put an end to the affair, he gripped the latter by the arm. Mr. Pauling seized him by the other arm and both shouted for the police with all their might. The police inspector came up and asked what charge was being made against the man, at which both partners were greatly embarrassed! But they said, We know the man. Oh, said the inspector, that's enough then, we can let him go for the time being. Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey, needing to bring some kind of charge against Salmon, considered the matter for several days until finally, on the advice of their lawyer, they lodged the above charge. After all the witnesses against Salmon had been heard, W. P. Roberts, the Miners' Attorney General , the terror of all magistrates, suddenly rose up on behalf of the accused and asked whether he should still call his witnesses, since nothing had been brought against Salmon. Daniel Maude, Esq., let him question his witnesses, who testified that Salmon had behaved calmly until Mr. Henfrey took hold of him. When the proceedings for and against had been concluded, Daniel Maude, Esq., said that he would pass sentence on Saturday. Clearly, the presence of Attorney General Roberts led him to think twice before he spoke once. On Saturday, Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey brought an additional criminal charge of conspiracy and intimidation against three of their old workers Salmon, Scott and Mellor. By this they hoped to deliver a mortal blow to the craft union and, in order to be secure against the dreaded Roberts, they called in a distinguished barrister from London, Mr. Monk. As his first witness, Mr. Monk produced Gibson, one of the newly engaged Scotsmen, who had also acted as witness against Salmon the previous Tuesday. He declared that on Friday, November 1, as he and his companions came out of the inn, they were surrounded by a crowd of people who pushed and pulled them and that the three accused were among the crowd. Roberts now began to cross-question this witness, confronted him with another worker, and asked whether he, Gibson, had not told this worker the previous night that he had not known he was under oath when he was giving his evidence the previous Tuesday and that he had not really understood what he was supposed to do and say in court. Gibson replied that he did not know the man, he had been with two men the previous evening but could not say whether this man was one of them as it had been dark. It was possible that he said something of the sort since the form of oath in Scotland was different from that in England; he couldn't quite remember. Mr. Monk then rose and declared that Mr. Roberts had no right to put questions like that, to which Mr. Roberts replied that objections of that kind were quite in place when one was representing a bad cause, but that he had the right to ask what he wanted, not only where the witness was born but also where he had stayed every day since that time, and what he had had to eat every day. Daniel Maude, Esq., confirmed that Mr. Roberts had this right but gave him the fatherly advice to keep to the point as much as possible. Then, after Mr. Roberts had obtained from the witness a statement that he only really began working for Pauling & Henfrey on the day after the incident on which the charge was based, that is, on November 2, he dismissed him. Then Mr. Henfrey himself appeared as a witness and repeated what Gibson had said about the incident. At this, Mr. Roberts asked him: Are you not looking for an unfair advantage over your competitors? Mr. Monk again objected to this question. Very well, said Mr. Roberts, I will put it more clearly. Mr. Henfrey, do you know that the working hours of the carpenters in Manchester are fixed by certain rules? Mr. Henfrey: I have nothing to do with those rules, I have the right to make my own rules. Mr. Roberts: Quite so. On oath, Mr. Henfrey, do you not demand longer working hours from your workers than other building contractors and master carpenters? Mr. Henfrey: Yes. Mr. Roberts: How many hours, approximately? Mr. Henfrey did not know exactly and took out his notebook in order to calculate. Daniel Maude, Esq.: You need not spend a long time working it out, just tell us roughly how many. Mr. Henfrey: Well, about an hour in the mornings and an hour in the evenings for six weeks before the time when the lights are usually turned on, and the same for six weeks after the day when it is usual to stop putting on the lights. Daniel Maude, Esq.: So every one of your workers has to work an extra 72 hours before the lights are turned on and 72 hours after, that is, 144 hours in 12 weeks? Mr. Henfrey: Yes. This statement was received with signs of great indignation by the public. Mr. Monk looked angrily at Mr. Henfrey and Mr. Henfrey looked at his barrister in confusion and Mr. Pauling tugged at Mr. Henfrey's coat-tails but it was too late; Daniel Maude, Esq., who obviously saw that he would have to play at being impartial again that day, had heard the admission and made it public. After two unimportant witnesses had been heard, Mr. Monk said that his evidence against the accused was now concluded. Daniel Maude, Esq., then said that the plaintiff had not made out any case for a criminal investigation against the accused, not having shown that the threatened Scots had been taken on by Pauling & Henfrey before November 1, since there was no proof of a hire contract or employment of the men concerned before November 2, while charge had been lodged on November 1st. Thus on this date the men were not yet employed by Pauling & Henfrey and the accused had every right to try and deter them by every legal means from going to work for Pauling & Henfrey. In reply to this, Mr. Monk said that the defendants had been engaged from the moment they left Scotland and boarded the steamer. Daniel Maude, Esq., remarked that it had indeed been stated that such hire contract had been made out but this document had not been produced. Mr. Monk replied that the document was in Scotland and he asked Mr. Maude to adjourn the case until it could be laid before the court. Mr. Roberts intervened here to say: this was something new to him. Evidence for the plaintiff had been declared concluded and now the plaintiff was demanding that the case be adjourned in order to introduce new evidence. He insisted that the case proceed. Daniel Maude, Esq., decided that both pleas were superfluous since no substantiated charge was before the court upon which the accused were dismissed. Meanwhile the workers had likewise not been inactive. Week after week they held meetings in the Carpenters Hall or the Socialist Hall, called for aid from the different craft unions, which was given in plenty, never ceased to make known everywhere the behaviour of Pauling & Henfrey and finally sent delegates in all directions in order to inform their fellow craftsmen in all the areas where Pauling & Henfrey were recruiting workers, of the reasons for this recruitment and to prevent them taking work with this firm. Only a few weeks after the strike began there were seven delegates on their way and posters on the street corners in all the big towns in the country warned unemployed carpenters about Pauling & Henfrey. On November 9 some of the delegates who had returned reported on their mission. One of these, named Johnson, who had been in Scotland, described how Pauling & Henfrey's representative had recruited thirty workers in Edinburgh but as soon as they heard from him the real facts of the case they decided they would sooner starve than go to Manchester in such circumstances. A second delegate had been in Liverpool keeping watch on the arriving steamers, but not a single man had arrived and so he found that he had nothing to do. A third man had been in Cheshire but wherever he went he found he had nothing more to do, for the Northern Star, the workers' paper, had broadcast the real state of affairs far and wide and had put an end to any desire people had of going to Manchester. Indeed in one town, Macclesfield, the carpenters had already taken a collection in support of the strikers and promised to contribute a further shilling per man should the necessity arise. In other places he was able to stimulate the local craftsmen to initiate such contributions. In order to provide Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey with another opportunity of coming to an agreement with the workers, all the craftsmen employed in the building trade gathered at the Carpenters' Hall on Monday, November 18th, elected a deputation to present an address to these gentlemen and marched in procession with flags and emblems to the premises of Pauling & Henfrey. First came the deputation followed by the strike committee, then the carpenters, the brick-moulders and kiln-workers, the day labourers, bricklayers, sawyers, glaziers, plasterers, painters, a band, stonemasons, cabinetmakers. They passed the hotel where their Attorney General , Roberts, was staying and greeted him with loud hurrahs as they marched by. Arrived at the premises, the deputation fell out while the crowd marched on to Stevenson Square where they were to hold a public meeting. The deputation was received by the police who demanded their names and addresses before allowing them to proceed any further. When they had entered the office, the partners Sharps & Pauling told them that they would accept no written address from a crowd of workers brought together merely for the purpose of intimidation. The deputation denied that this was their aim, since the procession had not even stopped, but had at once gone on its way. While this procession of 5,000 workers continued its march, the deputation was finally received and taken into a room in which were present the Chief Constable, an officer and three newspaper reporters. Mr. Sharps, a partner in Pauling & Henfrey, usurped the Chairman's seat, remarking that the deputation should be careful what it said as everything would be duly recorded and, in certain circumstances, would be used against them in court. They now began to ask the deputation what they were complaining about, etc., and said that they wanted to give the men work according to the rules customary in Manchester. The deputation asked if the men picked up in Staffordshire and Scotland were working according to the regulations for craftsmen prevailing in Manchester. Mr. Sharps added that all firms with which he was connected had always treated their workers well and paid them the highest wages. The deputation replied that if, as they had heard, he was associated with the firm of Pauling & Henfrey, this firm had fiercely opposed the best interests of the workers. A brickmaker, a member of the deputation, was asked what the members of his craft had to complain about. Oh, you've had enough, have you? answered Mr. Pauling with a sneer, and then took the opportunity of delivering them a long lecture about craft unions, strikes, etc., and the misery to which they brought the workers whereupon one of the deputation remarked they were not by any means disposed to allow their rights to be taken away from them bit by bit, and, for example, to work 144 hours a year for nothing, as was now being demanded. Mr. Sharps remarked that they ought also to take into account the loss incurred by those taking part in the procession because they were not working that day, as well as the cost of the strike, the loss of wages suffered by the strikers, etc. One of the deputation said: With that the deputation left and reported to the assembled workers in the Carpenters' Hall, where it was revealed that not only had all those in the area working for Pauling & Henfrey (those who were not carpenters and were therefore not on strike) come to take part in the procession, but that many of the newly imported Scotsmen had also struck that very morning. A painter also declared that Pauling & Henfrey had made the same unjust demands on the painters as they had on the joiners but that they too intended to resist. In order to simplify the whole business and shorten the struggle it was decided that all building workers employed by Pauling & Henfrey should stop work. This they did. The painters stopped work on the following Saturday and the glaziers on the Monday, and on the new theatre for which Pauling & Henfrey had received the contract only two bricklayers and four day labourers were working after a few days instead of 200 men. Some of the new arrivals also stopped work. Pauling & Henfrey foamed with rage. When three more of the new arrivals stopped work they were hauled before Daniel Maude, Esq., on Friday, November 22. The previous reverses had had no effect. A worker called Reed was the first to be dealt with, charged with breach of contract; a contract which the accused had signed in Derby was laid before the court. Roberts, who was again defending, stated at once that there was not the slightest connection between the contract and the charge, they were two quite different things. Daniel Maude, Esq., saw the point right away once the formidable Roberts had made it, but it took him a long, harassing time to make it clear to the Counsel for the other side. Finally, the latter asked permission to alter the charge and after a while he came back with one that was much worse than the first. When he saw that this would not do either, he asked for a further adjournment of the case and Daniel Maude, Esq., gave him until Friday, November 29, that is, a whole week, to consider the matter. I have not been able to find out whether or not he succeeded because the one issue of the paper which must have contained a report of the verdict is missing from my files. Meanwhile, Roberts went over to the offensive and had several of the recruited workers and one of Pauling & Henfrey's foremen brought before the court for forcing their way into the house of one of the strikers and assaulting his wife; in two other cases some of the workers on strike had been attacked. To his great regret, Daniel Maude, Esq., had to find all the accused guilty but he dealt with them as leniently as he possibly could and only bound them over to keep the peace themselves in future. Finally, at the end of December, Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey succeeded in getting sentence against two of their opponents, likewise on charges of assault against one of their workers. But this time the court was not so lenient. Without more ado, it sentenced them to a month's imprisonment and bound them over to keep the peace after their release. From here on news about the strike becomes meagre. It was still in full swing on January 18. I have found no later reports. It has probably come to an end like most others; in the course of time Pauling & Henfrey will have secured a sufficient number of workers from distant parts and from a few turncoats from the workers' side; after a longer or shorter strike and its accompanying misery, for which the strikers will have been consoled by the consciousness that they have nothing to reproach themselves with and that they have helped to maintain the level of wages of their fellow workers, the majority of them will have found jobs elsewhere. And as for the points in dispute, Messrs. Pauling & Henfrey will have learnt that they cannot impose their will so rigorously, since for them also the strike involved considerable loss, and the other employers, after such a fierce struggle, will not think of changing the old rules of the craftsmen carpenters so soon. 1. This contract contained the following: the worker pledged himself to work for Pauling & Henfrey for six months and to be satisfied with the wages which they would give him; but Pauling & Henfrey were not bound to keep him for six months and could dismiss him at any moment with a week's notice, and although Pauling & Henfrey would pay his travelling expenses from Staffordshire to Mancbester, they were to recover them by a weekly deduction of 2 shillings (20 silver groschen) from his wages. How do you like that really marvellous contract? Note by Engels.

An English Turnout

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch14.htm

All this is supposed to have taken place in the realm of pure thought. Certainly it is an interesting event we are dealing with: the putrescence of the absolute spirit. When the last spark of its life had failed, the various components of this caput mortuum began to decompose, entered into new combinations and formed new substances. The industrialists of philosophy, who till then had lived on the exploitation of the absolute spirit, now seized upon the new combinations. Each with all possible zeal set about retailing his apportioned share. This naturally gave rise to competition, which, to start with, was carried on in moderately staid bourgeois fashion. Later when the German market was glutted, and the commodity in spite of all efforts found no response in the world market, the business was spoiled in the usual German manner by fabricated and fictitious production, deterioration in quality, adulteration of the raw materials, falsification of labels, fictitious purchases, bill-jobbing and a credit system devoid of any real basis. The competition turned into a bitter struggle, which is now being extolled and interpreted to us as a revolution of world significance, the begetter of the most prodigious results and achievements. If we wish to rate at its true value this philosophic charlatanry, which awakens even in the breast of the honest German citizen a glow of national pride, if we wish to bring out clearly the pettiness, the parochial narrowness of this whole Young-Hegelian movement and in particular the tragicomic contrast between the illusions of these heroes about their achievements and the actual achievements themselves, we must look at the whole spectacle from a standpoint beyond the frontiers of Germany. German criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never quitted the realm of philosophy. Far from examining its general philosophic premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their answers but in their very questions there was a mystification. This dependence on Hegel is the reason why not one of these modern critics has even attempted a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system, however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel. Their polemics against Hegel and against one another are confined to this each extracts one side of the Hegelian system and turns this against the whole system as well as against the sides extracted by the others. To begin with they extracted pure unfalsified Hegelian categories such as substance and self-consciousness, later they desecrated these categories with more secular names such as species the Unique, Man, etc. The entire body of German philosophical criticism from Strauss to Stirner is confined to criticism of religious conceptions. [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] claiming to be the absolute redeemer of the world from all evil. Religion was continually regarded and treated as the arch-enemy, as the ultimate cause of all relations repugnant to these philosophers. The critics started from real religion and actual theology. What religious consciousness and a religious conception really meant was determined variously as they went along. Their advance consisted in subsuming the allegedly dominant metaphysical, political, juridical, moral and other conceptions under the class of religious or theological conceptions; and similarly in pronouncing political, juridical, moral consciousness as religious or theological, and the political, juridical, moral man man in the last resort as religious. The dominance of religion was taken for granted. Gradually every dominant relationship was pronounced a religious relationship and transformed into a cult, a cult of law, a cult of the State, etc. On all sides it was only a question of dogmas and belief in dogmas. The world was sanctified to an ever-increasing extent till at last our venerable Saint Max was able to canonise it en bloc and thus dispose of it once for all. The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was reduced to an Hegelian logical category. The Young Hegelians criticised everything by attributing to it religious conceptions or by pronouncing it a theological matter. The Young Hegelians are in agreement with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of a universal principle in the existing world. Only, the one party attacks this dominion as usurpation, while the other extols it as legitimate. Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly world-shattering" statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against phrases. They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance. It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings. The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men. Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life. The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production. This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population. In its turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr] of individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again determined by production. The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labour and internal intercourse. This statement is generally recognised. But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has been carried. Each new productive force, insofar as it is not merely a quantitative extension of productive forces already known (for instance the bringing into cultivation of fresh land), causes a further development of the division of labour. The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labour. At the same time through the division of labour inside these various branches there develop various divisions among the individuals co-operating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these individual groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes). These same conditions are to be seen (given a more developed intercourse) in the relations of different nations to one another. The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour. The first form of ownership is tribal [Stammeigentum] ownership. It corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest stage, agriculture. In the latter case it presupposes a great mass of uncultivated stretches of land. The division of labour is at this stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division of labour existing in the family. The social structure is, therefore, limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains, below them the members of the tribe, finally slaves. The slavery latent in the family only develops gradually with the increase of population, the growth of wants, and with the extension of external relations, both of war and of barter. The second form is the ancient communal and State ownership which proceeds especially from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or by conquest, and which is still accompanied by slavery. Beside communal ownership we already find movable, and later also immovable, private property developing, but as an abnormal form subordinate to communal ownership. The citizens hold power over their labouring slaves only in their community, and on this account alone, therefore, they are bound to the form of communal ownership. It is the communal private property which compels the active citizens to remain in this spontaneously derived form of association over against their slaves. For this reason the whole structure of society based on this communal ownership, and with it the power of the people, decays in the same measure as, in particular, immovable private property evolves. The division of labour is already more developed. We already find the antagonism of town and country; later the antagonism between those states which represent town interests and those which represent country interests, and inside the towns themselves the antagonism between industry and maritime commerce. The class relation between citizens and slaves is now completely developed. With the development of private property, we find here for the first time the same conditions which we shall find again, only on a more extensive scale, with modern private property. On the one hand, the concentration of private property, which began very early in Rome (as the Licinian agrarian law proves) and proceeded very rapidly from the time of the civil wars and especially under the Emperors; on the other hand, coupled with this, the transformation of the plebeian small peasantry into a proletariat, which, however, owing to its intermediate position between propertied citizens and slaves, never achieved an independent development. The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property. If antiquity started out from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started out from the country. This different starting-point was determined by the sparseness of the population at that time, which was scattered over a large area and which received no large increase from the conquerors. In contrast to Greece and Rome, feudal development at the outset, therefore, extends over a much wider territory, prepared by the Roman conquests and the spread of agriculture at first associated with it. The last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces; agriculture had declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out or been violently suspended, the rural and urban population had decreased. From these conditions and the mode of organisation of the conquest determined by them, feudal property developed under the influence of the Germanic military constitution. Like tribal and communal ownership, it is based again on a community; but the directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry. As soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also arises antagonism to the towns. The hierarchical structure of land ownership, and the armed bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over the serfs. This feudal organisation was, just as much as the ancient communal ownership, an association against a subjected producing class; but the form of association and the relation to the direct producers were different because of the different conditions of production. This feudal system of land ownership had its counterpart in the towns in the shape of corporative property, the feudal organisation of trades. Here property consisted chiefly in the labour of each individual person. The necessity for association against the organised robber-nobility, the need for communal covered markets in an age when the industrialist was at the same time a merchant, the growing competition of the escaped serfs swarming into the rising towns, the feudal structure of the whole country: these combined to bring about the guilds. The gradually accumulated small capital of individual craftsmen and their stable numbers, as against the growing population, evolved the relation of journeyman and apprentice, which brought into being in the towns a hierarchy similar to that in the country. Thus the chief form of property during the feudal epoch consisted on the one hand of landed property with serf labour chained to it, and on the other of the labour of the individual with small capital commanding the labour of journeymen. The organisation of both was determined by the restricted conditions of production the small-scale and primitive cultivation of the land, and the craft type of industry. There was little division of labour in the heyday of feudalism. Each country bore in itself the antithesis of town and country; the division into estates was certainly strongly marked; but apart from the differentiation of princes, nobility, clergy and peasants in the country, and masters, journeymen, apprentices and soon also the rabble of casual labourers in the towns, no division of importance took place. In agriculture it was rendered difficult by the strip-system, beside which the cottage industry of the peasants themselves emerged. In industry there was no division of labour at all in the individual trades themselves, and very little between them. The separation of industry and commerce was found already in existence in older towns; in the newer it only developed later, when the towns entered into mutual relations. The grouping of larger territories into feudal kingdoms was a necessity for the landed nobility as for the towns. The organisation of the ruling class, the nobility, had, therefore, everywhere a monarch at its head. The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people s imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will. The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness. This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists. Where speculation ends in real life there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement the real depiction of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present. The removal of these difficulties is governed by premises which it is quite impossible to state here, but which only the study of the actual life-process and the activity of the individuals of each epoch will make evident. We shall select here some of these abstractions, which we use in contradistinction to the ideologists, and shall illustrate them by historical examples. Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises, we must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to make history. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick as with Saint Bruno [Bauer], it presupposes the action of producing the stick. Therefore in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due importance. It is well known that the Germans have never done this, and they have never, therefore, had an earthly basis for history and consequently never an historian. The French and the English, even if they have conceived the relation of this fact with so-called history only in an extremely one-sided fashion, particularly as long as they remained in the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by being the first to write histories of civil society, of commerce and industry. The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need (the action of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act. Here we recognise immediately the spiritual ancestry of the great historical wisdom of the Germans who, when they run out of positive material and when they can serve up neither theological nor political nor literary rubbish, assert that this is not history at all, but the prehistoric era. They do not, however, enlighten us as to how we proceed from this nonsensical prehistory to history proper; although, on the other hand, in their historical speculation they seize upon this prehistory with especial eagerness because they imagine themselves safe there from interference on the part of crude facts, and, at the same time, because there they can give full rein to their speculative impulse and set up and knock down hypotheses by the thousand. The third circumstance which, from the very outset, enters into historical development, is that men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family. The family, which to begin with is the only social relationship, becomes later, when increased needs create new social relations and the increased population new needs, a subordinate one (except in Germany), and must then be treated and analysed according to the existing empirical data, not according to the concept of the family, as is the custom in Germany. These three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken as three different stages, but just as three aspects or, to make it clear to the Germans, three moments, which have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in history today. The production of life, both of one s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a productive force. Further, that the multitude of productive forces accessible to men determines the nature of society, hence, that the history of humanity must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange. But it is also clear how in Germany it is impossible to write this sort of history, because the Germans lack not only the necessary power of comprehension and the material but also the evidence of their senses, for across the Rhine you cannot have any experience of these things since history has stopped happening. Thus it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old as men themselves. This connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a history independently of the existence of any political or religious nonsense which in addition may hold men together. Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of the primary historical relationships, do we find that man also possesses consciousness, but, even so, not inherent, not pure consciousness. From the start the spirit is afflicted with the curse of being burdened with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men,[A] and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter into relations with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time it is consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men s relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural religion) just because nature is as yet hardly modified historically. (We see here immediately: this natural religion or this particular relation of men to nature is determined by the form of society and vice versa. Here, as everywhere, the identity of nature and man appears in such a way that the restricted relation of men to nature determines their restricted relation to one another, and their restricted relation to one another determines men s restricted relation to nature.) On the other hand, man s consciousness of the necessity of associating with the individuals around him is the beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all. This beginning is as animal as social life itself at this stage. It is mere herd-consciousness, and at this point man is only distinguished from sheep by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of instinct or that his instinct is a conscious one. This sheep-like or tribal consciousness receives its further development and extension through increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the increase of population. With these there develops the division of labour, which was originally nothing but the division of labour in the sexual act, then that division of labour which develops spontaneously or naturally by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g. physical strength), needs, accidents, etc. etc. Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. (The first form of ideologists, priests, is concurrent.) From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of pure theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. But even if this theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. comes into contradiction with the existing relations, this can only occur because existing social relations have come into contradiction with existing forces of production; this, moreover, can also occur in a particular national sphere of relations through the appearance of the contradiction, not within the national orbit, but between this national consciousness and the practice of other nations, i.e. between the national and the general consciousness of a nation (as we see it now in Germany). Moreover, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its own: out of all such muck we get only the one inference that these three moments, the forces of production, the state of society, and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one another, because the division of labour implies the possibility, nay the fact that intellectual and material activity enjoyment and labour, production and consumption devolve on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of labour. It is self-evident, moreover, that spectres, bonds, the higher being, concept, scruple, are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception apparently of the isolated individual, the image of very empirical fetters and limitations, within which the mode of production of life and the form of intercourse coupled with it move. With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity. Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the general interest, but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now. The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these. How otherwise could, for instance, property have had a history at all, have taken on different forms, and landed property, for example, according to the different premises given, have proceeded in France from parcellation to centralisation in the hands of a few, in England from centralisation in the hands of a few to parcellation, as is actually the case today? Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and, implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again? In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on the part of the so-called universal spirit, etc.), a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market. But it is just as empirically established that, by the overthrow of the existing state of society by the communist revolution (of which more below) and the abolition of private property which is identical with it, this power, which so baffles the German theoreticians, will be dissolved; and that then the liberation of each single individual will be accomplished in the measure in which history becomes transformed into world history. From the above it is clear that the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections. Only then will the separate individuals be liberated from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man). All-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them. Now this view can be expressed again in speculative-idealistic, i.e. fantastic, terms as self-generation of the species ( society as the subject ), and thereby the consecutive series of interrelated individuals connected with each other can be conceived as a single individual, which accomplishes the mystery of generating itself. It is clear here that individuals certainly make one another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves. This alienation (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an intolerable power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity propertyless, and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the propertyless mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples all at once and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers the utterly precarious position of labour power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a world-historical existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history. Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. In the main we have so far considered only one aspect of human activity, the reshaping of nature by men. The other aspect, the reshaping of men by men ... [Intercourse and productive power] Origin of the state and the relation of the state to civil society. ...

The German Ideology

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm

The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces at all previous historical stages, and in its turn determining these, is civil society. The latter, as is clear from what we have said above, has as its premises and basis the simple family and the multiple, the so-called tribe, the more precise determinants of this society are enumerated in our remarks above. Already here we see how this civil society is the true source and theatre of all history, and how absurd is the conception of history held hitherto, which neglects the real relationships and confines itself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states. Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage and, insofar, transcends the State and the nation, though, on the other hand again, it must assert itself in its foreign relations as nationality, and inwardly must organise itself as State. The word civil society [b rgerliche Gesellschaft] emerged in the eighteenth century, when property relationships had already extricated themselves from the ancient and medieval communal society. Civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however, always been designated by the same name. History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. This can be speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier history, e.g. the goal ascribed to the discovery of America is to further the eruption of the French Revolution. Thereby history receives its own special aims and becomes a person rating with other persons (to wit: Self-Consciousness, Criticism, the Unique, etc.), while what is designated with the words destiny, goal, germ, or idea of earlier history is nothing more than an abstraction formed from later history, from the active influence which earlier history exercises on later history. The further the separate spheres, which interact on one another, extend in the course of this development, the more the original isolation of the separate nationalities is destroyed by the developed mode of production and intercourse and the division of labour between various nations naturally brought forth by these, the more history becomes world history. Thus, for instance, if in England a machine is invented, which deprives countless workers of bread in India and China, and overturns the whole form of existence of these empires, this invention becomes a world-historical fact. Or again, take the case of sugar and coffee which have proved their world-historical importance in the nineteenth century by the fact that the lack of these products, occasioned by the Napoleonic Continental System, caused the Germans to rise against Napoleon, and thus became the real basis of the glorious Wars of liberation of 1813. From this it follows that this transformation of history into world history is not indeed a mere abstract act on the part of the self-consciousness, the world spirit, or of any other metaphysical spectre, but a quite material, empirically verifiable act, an act the proof of which every individual furnishes as he comes and goes, eats, drinks and clothes himself. This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e. civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; and to show it in its action as State, to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc. etc. and trace their origins and growth from that basis; by which means, of course, the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category, but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into self-consciousness or transformation into apparitions, spectres, fancies, etc. but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory. It shows that history does not end by being resolved into self-consciousness as spirit of the spirit, but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances. This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as substance and essence of man, and what they have deified and attacked; a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as self-consciousness and the Unique. These conditions of life, which different generations find in existence, decide also whether or not the periodically recurring revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of the entire existing system. And if these material elements of a complete revolution are not present (namely, on the one hand the existing productive forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass, which revolts not only against separate conditions of society up till then, but against the very production of life till then, the total activity on which it was based), then, as far as practical development is concerned, it is absolutely immaterial whether the idea of this revolution has been expressed a hundred times already, as the history of communism proves. In the whole conception of history up to the present this real basis of history has either been totally neglected or else considered as a minor matter quite irrelevant to the course of history. History must, therefore, always be written according to an extraneous standard; the real production of life seems to be primeval history, while the truly historical appears to be separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial. With this the relation of man to nature is excluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created. The exponents of this conception of history have consequently only been able to see in history the political actions of princes and States, religious and all sorts of theoretical struggles, and in particular in each historical epoch have had to share the illusion of that epoch. For instance, if an epoch imagines itself to be actuated by purely political or religious motives, although religion and politics are only forms of its true motives, the historian accepts this opinion. The idea, the conception of the people in question about their real practice, is transformed into the sole determining, active force, which controls and determines their practice. When the crude form in which the division of labour appears with the Indians and Egyptians calls forth the caste-system in their State and religion, the historian believes that the caste-system is the power which has produced this crude social form. While the French and the English at least hold by the political illusion, which is moderately close to reality, the Germans move in the realm of the pure spirit, and make religious illusion the driving force of history. The Hegelian philosophy of history is the last consequence, reduced to its finest expression, of all this German historiography, for which it is not a question of real, nor even of political, interests, but of pure thoughts, which consequently must appear to Saint Bruno as a series of thoughts that devour one another and are finally swallowed up in self-consciousness. and even more consistently the course of history must appear to Saint Max Stirner, who knows not a thing about real history, as a mere tale of knights, robbers and ghosts, from whose visions he can, of course, only save himself by unholiness . This conception is truly religious: it postulates religious man as the primitive man, the starting-point of history, and in its imagination puts the religious production of fancies in the place of the real production of the means of subsistence and of life itself. This whole conception of history, together with its dissolution and the scruples and qualms resulting from it, is a purely national affair of the Germans and has merely local interest for Germany, as for instance the important question which has been under discussion in recent times: how exactly one passes from the realm of God to the realm of Man [Ludwig Feuerbach, Ueber das Wesen des Christenthums] as if this realm of God had ever existed anywhere save in the imagination, and the learned gentlemen, without being aware of it, were not constantly living in the realm of Man to which they are now seeking the way; and as if the learned pastime (for it is nothing more) of explaining the mystery of this theoretical bubble-blowing did not on the contrary lie in demonstrating its origin in actual earthly relations. For these Germans, it is altogether simply a matter of resolving the ready-made nonsense they find into some other freak, i.e., of presupposing that all this nonsense has a special sense which can be discovered; while really it is only a question of explaining these theoretical phrases from the actual existing relations. The real, practical dissolution of these phrases, the removal of these notions from the consciousness of men, will, as we have already said, be effected by altered circumstances, not by theoretical deductions. For the mass of men, i.e., the proletariat, these theoretical notions do not exist and hence do not require to be dissolved, and if this mass ever had any theoretical notions, e.g., religion, these have now long been dissolved by circumstances. The purely national character of these questions and solutions is moreover shown by the fact that these theorists believe in all seriousness that chimeras like the God-Man, Man, etc., have presided over individual epochs of history (Saint Bruno even goes so far as to assert that only criticism and critics have made history, [Bruno Bauer, Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs] and when they themselves construct historical systems, they skip over all earlier periods in the greatest haste and pass immediately from Mongolism [Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum] to history with meaningful content, that is to say, to the history, of the Hallische and Deutsche Jahrb cher and the dissolution of the Hegelian school into a general squabble. They forget all other nations, all real events, and the theatrum mundi is confined to the Leipzig book fair and the mutual quarrels of criticism, [Bruno Bauer] man, [Ludwig Feuerbach] and the unique . [Max Stirner] If for once these theorists treat really historical subjects, as for instance the eighteenth century, they merely give a history of ideas, separated from the facts and the practical development underlying them; and even that merely in order to represent that period as an imperfect preliminary stage, the as yet limited predecessor of the truly historical age, i.e., the period of the German philosophic struggle from 1840 to 1844. As might be expected when the history of an earlier period is written with the aim of accentuating the brilliance of an unhistoric person and his fantasies, all the really historic events, even the really historic interventions of politics in history, receive no mention. Instead we get a narrative based not on research but on arbitrary constructions and literary gossip, such as Saint Bruno provided in his now forgotten history of the eighteenth century. [Bruno Bauer, Geschichte der Politik, Cultur und Aufkl rung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts] These pompous and arrogant hucksters of ideas, who imagine themselves infinitely exalted above all national prejudices, are thus in practice far more national than the beer-swilling philistines who dream of a united Germany. They do not recognise the deeds of other nations as historical; they live in Germany, within Germany 1281 and for Germany; they turn the Rhine-song into a religious hymn and conquer Alsace and Lorraine by robbing French philosophy instead of the French state, by Germanising French ideas instead of French provinces. Herr Venedey is a cosmopolitan compared with the Saints Bruno and Max, who, in the universal dominance of theory, proclaim the universal dominance of Germany. [...] It is also clear from these arguments how grossly Feuerbach is deceiving himself when (Wigand s Vierteljahrsschrift, 1845, Band 2) by virtue of the qualification common man he declares himself a communist, transforms the latter into a predicate of man, and thereby thinks it possible to change the word communist, which in the real world means the follower of a definite revolutionary party, into a mere category. Feuerbach s whole deduction with regard to the relation of men to one another goes only so far as to prove that men need and always have needed each other. He wants to establish consciousness of this fact, that is to say, like the other theorists, merely to produce a correct consciousness about an existing fact; whereas for the real communist it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things. We thoroughly appreciate, moreover, that Feuerbach, in endeavouring to produce consciousness of just this fact, is going as far as a theorist possibly can, without ceasing to be a theorist and philosopher... As an example of Feuerbach s acceptance and at the same time misunderstanding of existing reality, which he still shares with our opponents, we recall the passage in the Philosophie der Zukunft where he develops the view that the existence of a thing or a man is at the same time its or his essence, that the conditions of existence, the mode of life and activity of an animal or human individual are those in which its essence feels itself satisfied. Here every exception is expressly conceived as an unhappy chance, as an abnormality which cannot be altered. Thus if millions of proletarians feel by no means contented with their living conditions, if their existence does not in the least correspond to their essence, then, according to the passage quoted, this is an unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne quietly. The millions of proletarians and communists, however, think differently and will prove this in time, when they bring their existence into harmony with their essence in a practical way, by means of a revolution. Feuerbach, therefore, never speaks of the world of man in such cases, but always takes refuge in external nature, and moreover in nature which has not yet been subdued by men. But every new invention, every advance made by industry, detaches another piece from this domain, so that the ground which produces examples illustrating such Feuerbachian propositions is steadily shrinking. The essence of the fish is its being, water to go no further than this one proposition. The essence of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the essence of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence. The explanation that all such contradictions are inevitable abnormalities does not essentially differ from the consolation which Saint Max Stirner offers to the discontented, saving that this contradiction is their own contradiction and this predicament their own predicament, whereupon then, should either set their minds at ease, keep their disgust to themselves, or revolt against it in some fantastic way. It differs just as little from Saint Bruno s allegation that these unfortunate circumstances are due to the fact that those concerned are stuck in the muck of substance, have not advanced to absolute self-consciousness and do not realise that these adverse conditions are spirit of their spirit. [...] We shall, of course, not take the trouble to enlighten our wise philosophers by explaining to them that the liberation of man is not advanced a single step by reducing philosophy, theology, substance and all the trash to self-consciousness and by liberating man from the domination of these phrases, which have never held him in thrall. Nor will we explain to them that it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. Liberation is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse...[There is here a gap in the manuscript] In Germany, a country where only a trivial historical development is taking place, these mental developments, these glorified and ineffective trivialities, naturally serve as a substitute for the lack of historical development, and they take root and have to be combated. But this fight is of local importance. In reality and for the practical materialist, i.e. the communist, it is a question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things. When occasionally we find such views with Feuerbach, they are never more than isolated surmises and have much too little influence on his general outlook to be considered here as anything else than embryos capable of development. Feuerbach s conception of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he says Man instead of real historical man. Man is really the German. In the first case, the contemplation of the sensuous world, he necessarily lights on things which contradict his consciousness and feeling, which disturb the harmony he presupposes, the harmony of all parts of the sensuous world and especially of man and nature. To remove this disturbance, he must take refuge in a double perception, a profane one which only perceives the flatly obvious and a higher, philosophical, one which perceives the true essence of things. He does not see how the sensuous world around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse, modifying its social system according to the changed needs. Even the objects of the simplest sensuous certainty are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age it has become sensuous certainty for Feuerbach. Incidentally, when we conceive things thus, as they really are and happened, every profound philosophical problem is resolved, as will be seen even more clearly later, quite simply into an empirical fact. For instance, the important question of the relation of man to nature (Bruno [Bauer] goes so far as to speak of the antitheses in nature and history (p. 110), as though these were two separate things and man did not always have before him an historical nature and a natural history) out of which all the unfathomably lofty works on substance and self-consciousness were born, crumbles of itself when we understand that the celebrated unity of man with nature has always existed in industry and has existed in varying forms in every epoch according to the lesser or greater development of industry, just like the struggle of man with nature, right up to the development of his productive powers on a corresponding basis. Industry and commerce, production and the exchange of the necessities of life, themselves determine distribution, the structure of the different social classes and are, in turn, determined by it as to the mode in which they are carried on; and so it happens that in Manchester, for instance, Feuerbach sees only factories and machines, where a hundred years ago only spinning-wheels and weaving-rooms were to be seen, or in the Campagna of Rome he finds only pasture lands and swamps, where in the time of Augustus he would have found nothing but the vineyards and villas of Roman capitalists. Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and commerce? Even this pure natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men. So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous labour and creation, this production, the basis of the whole sensuous world as it now exists, that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach would not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but would very soon find that the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were missing. Of course, in all this the priority of external nature remains unassailed, and all this has no application to the original men produced by generatio aequivoca [spontaneous generation]; but this differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct from nature. For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach. Certainly Feuerbach has a great advantage over the pure materialists in that he realises how man too is an object of the senses. But apart from the fact that he only conceives him as an object of the senses, not as sensuous activity, because he still remains in the realm of theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, not under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they are, he never arrives at the really existing active men, but stops at the abstraction man, and gets no further than recognising the true, individual, corporeal man, emotionally, i.e. he knows no other human relationships of man to man than love and friendship, and even then idealised. He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it; and therefore when, for example, he sees instead of healthy men a crowd of scrofulous, overworked and consumptive starvelings, he is compelled to take refuge in the higher perception and in the ideal compensation in the species, and thus to relapse into idealism at the very point where the communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure. As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him materialism and history diverge completely, a fact which incidentally is already obvious from what has been said. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an eternal law. The division of labour, which we already saw above as one of the chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labour, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, which, however, in the case of a practical collision, in which the class itself is endangered, automatically comes to nothing, in which case there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class. The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premises for the latter sufficient has already been said above. If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc. were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines this to be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class. It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connected with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes, because under the pressure of hitherto existing conditions its interest has not yet been able to develop as the particular interest of a particular class. Its victory, therefore, benefits also many individuals of the other classes which are not winning a dominant position, but only insofar as it now puts these individuals in a position to raise themselves into the ruling class. When the French bourgeoisie overthrew the power of the aristocracy, it thereby made it possible for many proletarians to raise themselves above the proletariat, but only insofar as they become bourgeois. Every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously, whereas the opposition of the non-ruling class against the new ruling class later develops all the more sharply and profoundly. Both these things determine the fact that the struggle to be waged against this new ruling class, in its turn, aims at a more decided and radical negation of the previous conditions of society than could all previous classes which sought to rule. This whole semblance, that the rule of a certain class is only the rule of certain ideas, comes to a natural end, of course, as soon as class rule in general ceases to be the form in which society is organised, that is to say, as soon as it is no longer necessary to represent a particular interest as general or the general interest as ruling. Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals and, above all, from the relationships which result from a given stage of the mode of production, and in this way the conclusion has been reached that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas the idea, the notion, etc. as the dominant force in history, and thus to understand all these separate ideas and concepts as forms of self-determination on the part of the concept developing in history. It follows then naturally, too, that all the relationships of men can be derived from the concept of man, man as conceived, the essence of man, Man. This has been done by the speculative philosophers. Hegel himself confesses at the end of the Geschichtsphilosophie that he has considered the progress of the concept only and has represented in history the true theodicy. (p.446.) Now one can go back again to the producers of the concept, to the theorists, ideologists and philosophers, and one comes then to the conclusion that the philosophers, the thinkers as such, have at all times been dominant in history: a conclusion, as we see, already expressed by Hegel. The whole trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history (hierarchy Stirner calls it) is thus confined to the following three efforts. Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true. This historical method which reigned in Germany, and especially the reason why, must be understood from its connection with the illusion of ideologists in general, e.g. the illusions of the jurist, politicians (of the practical statesmen among them, too), from the dogmatic dreamings and distortions of these fellows; this is explained perfectly easily from their practical position in life, their job, and the division of labour.

The German Ideology. Karl Marx 1845

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm

[...] From the first there follows the premise of a highly developed division of labour and an extensive commerce; from the second, the locality. In the first case the individuals must be brought together; in the second they find themselves alongside the given instrument of production as instruments of production themselves. Here, therefore, arises the difference between natural instruments of production and those created by civilisation. The field (water, etc.) can be regarded as a natural instrument of production. In the first case, that of the natural instrument of production, individuals are subservient to nature; in the second, to a product of labour. In the first case, therefore, property (landed property) appears as direct natural domination, in the second, as domination of labour, particularly of accumulated labour, capital. The first case presupposes that the individuals are united by some bond: family, tribe, the land itself, etc.; the second, that they are independent of one another and are only held together by exchange. In the first case, what is involved is chiefly an exchange between men and nature in which the labour of the former is exchanged for the products of the latter; in the second, it is predominantly an exchange of men among themselves. In the first case, average, human common sense is adequate physical activity is as yet not separated from mental activity; in the second, the division between physical and mental labour must already be practically completed. In the first case, the domination of the proprietor over the propertyless may be based on a personal relationship, on a kind of community; in the second, it must have taken on a material shape in a third party - money. In the first case, small industry exists, but determined by the utilisation of the natural instrument of production and therefore without the distribution of labour among various individuals; in the second, industry exists only in and through the division of labour. The greatest division of material and mental labour is the separation of town and country. The antagonism between town and country begins with the transition from barbarism to civilisation, from tribe to State, from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of civilisation to the present day (the Anti-Corn Law League). The existence of the town implies, at the same time, the necessity of administration, police, taxes, etc.; in short, of the municipality, and thus of politics in general. Here first became manifest the division of the population into two great classes, which is directly based on the division of labour and on the instruments of production. The town already is in actual fact the concentration of the population, of the instruments of production, of capital, of pleasures, of needs, while the country demonstrates just the opposite fact, isolation and separation. The antagonism between town and country can only exist within the framework of private property. It is the most crass expression of the subjection of the individual under the division of labour, under a definite activity forced upon him a subjection which makes one man into a restricted town-animal, the other into a restricted country-animal, and daily creates anew the conflict between their interests. Labour is here again the chief thing, power over individuals, and as long as the latter exists, private property must exist. The abolition of the antagonism between town and country is one of the first conditions of communal life, a condition which again depends on a mass of material premises and which cannot be fulfilled by the mere will, as anyone can see at the first glance. (These conditions have still to be enumerated.) The separation of town and country can also be understood as the separation of capital and landed property, as the beginning of the existence and development of capital independent of landed property the beginning of property having its basis only in labour and exchange. In the towns which, in the Middle Ages, did not derive ready-made from an earlier period but were formed anew by the serfs who had become free, each man's own particular labour was his only property apart from the small capital he brought with him, consisting almost solely of the most necessary tools of his craft. The competition of serfs constantly escaping into the town, the constant war of the country against the towns and thus the necessity of an organised municipal military force, the bond of common ownership in a particular kind of labour, the necessity of common buildings for the sale of their wares at a time when craftsmen were also traders, and the consequent exclusion of the unauthorised from these buildings, the conflict among the interests of the various crafts, the necessity of protecting their laboriously acquired skill, and the feudal organisation of the whole of the country: these were the causes of the union of the workers of each craft in guilds. We have not at this point to go further into the manifold modifications of the guild-system, which arise through later historical developments. The flight of the serfs into the towns went on without interruption right through the Middle Ages. These serfs, persecuted by their lords in the country, came separately into the towns, where they found an organised community, against which they were powerless and in which they had to subject themselves to the station assigned to them by the demand for their labour and the interest of their organised urban competitors. These workers, entering separately, were never able to attain to any power, since, if their labour was of the guild type which had to be learned, the guild-masters bent them to their will and organised them according to their interest; or if their labour was not such as had to be learned, and therefore not of the guild type, they became day-labourers and never managed to organise, remaining an unorganised rabble. The need for day-labourers in the towns created the rabble. These towns were true "associations", called forth by the direct need, the care of providing for the protection of property, and of multiplying the means of production and defence of the separate members. The rabble of these towns was devoid of any power, composed as it was of individuals strange to one another who had entered separately, and who stood unorganised over against an organised power, armed for war, and jealously watching over them. The journeymen and apprentices were organised in each craft as it best suited the interest of the masters. The patriarchal relationship existing between them and their masters gave the latter a double power on the one hand because of their influence on the whole life of the journeymen, and on the other because, for the journeymen who worked with the same master, it was a real bond which held them together against the journeymen of other masters and separated them from these. And finally, the journeymen were bound to the existing order by their simple interest in becoming masters themselves. While, therefore, the rabble at least carried out revolts against the whole municipal order, revolts which remained completely ineffective because of their powerlessness, the journeymen never got further than small acts of insubordination within separate guilds, such as belong to the very nature of the guild-system. The great risings of the Middle Ages all radiated from the country, but equally remained totally ineffective because of the isolation and consequent crudity of the peasants. In the towns, the division of labour between the individual guilds was as yet [quite naturally derived] and, in the guilds themselves, not at all developed between the individual workers. Every workman had to be versed in a whole round of tasks, had to be able to make everything that was to be made with his tools. The limited commerce and the scanty communication between the individual towns, the lack of population and the narrow needs did not allow of a higher division of labour, and therefore every man who wished to become a master had to be proficient in the whole of his craft. Thus there is found with medieval craftsmen an interest in their special work and in proficiency in it, which was capable of rising to a narrow artistic sense. For this very reason, however, every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in his work, to which he had a contented, slavish relationship, and to which he was subjected to a far greater extent than the modern worker, whose work is a matter of indifference to him. Capital in these towns was a naturally derived capital, consisting of a house, the tools of the craft, and the natural, hereditary customers; and not being realisable, on account of the backwardness of commerce and the lack of circulation, it descended from father to son. Unlike modern capital, which can be assessed in money and which may be indifferently invested in this thing or that, this capital was directly connected with the particular work of the owner, inseparable from it and to this extent estate capital. The next extension of the division of labour was the separation of production and commerce, the formation of a special class of merchants; a separation which, in the towns bequeathed by a former period, had been handed down (among other things with the Jews) and which very soon appeared in the newly formed ones. With this there was given the possibility of commercial communications transcending the immediate neighbourhood, a possibility, the realisation of which depended on the existing means of communication, the state of public safety in the countryside, which was determined by political conditions (during the whole of the Middle Ages, as is well known, the merchants travelled in armed caravans), and on the cruder or more advanced needs (determined by the stage of culture attained) of the region accessible to intercourse. With commerce the prerogative of a particular class, with the extension of trade through the merchants beyond the immediate surroundings of the town, there immediately appears a reciprocal action between production and commerce. The towns enter into relations with one another, new tools are brought from one town into the other, and the separation between production and commerce soon calls forth a new division of production between the individual towns, each of which is soon exploiting a predominant branch of industry. The local restrictions of earlier times begin gradually to be broken down. It depends purely on the extension of commerce whether the productive forces achieved in a locality, especially inventions, are lost for later development or not. As long as there exists no commerce transcending the immediate neighbourhood, every invention must be made separately in each locality, and mere chances such as irruptions of barbaric peoples, even ordinary wars, are sufficient to cause a country with advanced productive forces and needs to have to start right over again from the beginning. In primitive history every invention had to be made daily anew and in each locality independently. How little highly developed productive forces are safe from complete destruction, given even a relatively very extensive commerce, is proved by the Phoenicians, whose inventions were for the most part lost for a long time to come through the ousting of this nation from commerce, its conquest by Alexander and its consequent decline. Likewise, for instance, glass-painting in the Middle Ages. Only when commerce has become world commerce and has as its basis large-scale industry, when all nations are drawn into the competitive struggle, is the permanence of the acquired productive forces assured. The immediate consequence of the division of labour between the various towns was the rise of manufactures, branches of production which had outgrown the guild-system. Manufactures first flourished, in Italy and later in Flanders, under the historical premise of commerce with foreign nations. In other countries, England and France for example, manufactures were at first confined to the home market. Besides the premises already mentioned manufactures depend on an already advanced concentration of population, particularly in the countryside, and of capital, which began to accumulate in the hands of individuals, partly in the guilds in spite of the guild regulations, partly among the merchants. That labour which from the first presupposed a machine, even of the crudest sort, soon showed itself the most capable of development. Weaving, earlier carried on in the country by the peasants as a secondary occupation to procure their clothing, was the first labour to receive an impetus and a further development through the extension of commerce. Weaving was the first and remained the principal manufacture. The rising demand for clothing materials, consequent on the growth of population, the growing accumulation and mobilisation of natural capital through accelerated circulation, the demand for luxuries called forth by the latter and favoured generally by the gradual extension of commerce, gave weaving a quantitative and qualitative stimulus, which wrenched it out of the form of production hitherto existing. Alongside the peasants weaving for their own use, who continued, and still continue, with this sort of work, there emerged a new class of weavers in the towns, whose fabrics were destined for the whole home market and usually for foreign markets too. Weaving, an occupation demanding in most cases little skill and soon splitting up into countless branches, by its whole nature resisted the trammels of the guild. Weaving was, therefore, carried on mostly in villages and market-centres without guild organisation, which gradually became towns, and indeed the most flourishing towns in each land. With guild-free manufacture, property relations also quickly changed. The first advance beyond naturally derived estate capital was provided by the rise of merchants whose capital was from the beginning movable, capital in the modern sense as far as one can speak of it, given the circumstances of those times. The second advance came with manufacture, which again made mobile a mass of natural capital, and altogether increased the mass of movable capital as against that of natural capital. At the same time, manufacture became a refuge of the peasants from the guilds which excluded them or paid them badly, just as earlier the guild-towns had [served] as a refuge for the peasants from [the oppressive landed nobility]. Simultaneously with the beginning of manufactures there was a period of vagabondage caused by the abolition of the feudal bodies of retainers, the disbanding of the swollen armies which had flocked to serve the kings against their vassals, the improvement of agriculture, and the transformation of great strips of tillage into pasture land. From this alone it is clear how this vagabondage is strictly connected with the disintegration of the feudal system. As early as the thirteenth century we find isolated epochs of this kind, but only at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth does this vagabondage make a general and permanent appearance. These vagabonds, who were so numerous that, for instance, Henry VIII of England had 72,000 of them hanged, were only prevailed upon to work with the greatest difficulty and through the most extreme necessity, and then only after long resistance. The rapid rise of manufactures, particularly in England, absorbed them gradually. With the advent of manufactures, the various nations entered into a competitive relationship, the struggle for trade, which was fought out in wars, protective duties and prohibitions, whereas earlier the nations, insofar as they were connected at all, had carried on an inoffensive exchange with each other. Trade had from now on a political significance. With the advent of manufacture the relationship between worker and employer changed. In the guilds the patriarchal relationship between journeyman and master continued to exist; in manufacture its place was taken by the monetary relation between worker and capitalist a relationship which in the countryside and in small towns retained a patriarchal tinge, but in the larger, the real manufacturing towns, quite early lost almost all patriarchal complexion. Manufacture and the movement of production in general received an enormous impetus through the extension of commerce which came with the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies. The new products imported thence, particularly the masses of gold and silver which came into circulation and totally changed the position of the classes towards one another, dealing a hard blow to feudal landed property and to the workers; the expeditions of adventurers, colonisation; and above all the extension of markets into a world market, which had now become possible and was daily becoming more and more a fact, called forth a new phase of historical development, into which in general we cannot here enter further. Through the colonisation of the newly discovered countries the commercial struggle of the nations amongst one another was given new fuel and accordingly greater extension and animosity. The expansion of trade and manufacture accelerated the accumulation of movable capital, while in the guilds, which were not stimulated to extend their production, natural capital remained stationary or even declined. Trade and manufacture created the big bourgeoisie; in the guilds was concentrated the petty bourgeoisie, which no longer was dominant in the towns as formerly, but had to bow to the might of the great merchants and manufacturers. Hence the decline of the guilds, as soon as they came into contact with manufacture. The intercourse of nations took on, in the epoch of which we have been speaking, two different forms. At first the small quantity of gold and silver in circulation involved the ban on the export of these metals; and industry, for the most part imported from abroad and made necessary by the need for employing the growing urban population, could not do without those privileges which could be granted not only, of course, against home competition, but chiefly against foreign. The local guild privilege was in these original prohibitions extended over the whole nation. Customs duties originated from the tributes which the feudal lords exacted as protective levies against robbery from merchants passing through their territories, tributes later imposed likewise by the towns, and which, with the rise of the modern states, were the Treasury's most obvious means of raising money. The appearance of American gold and silver on the European markets, the gradual development of industry, the rapid expansion of trade and the consequent rise of the non-guild bourgeoisie and of money, gave these measures another significance. The State, which was daily less and less able to do without money, now retained the ban on the export of gold and silver out of fiscal considerations; the bourgeois, for whom these masses of money which were hurled onto the market became the chief object of speculative buying, were thoroughly content with this; privileges established earlier became a source of income for the government and were sold for money; in the customs legislation there appeared the export duty, which, since it only [placed] a hindrance in the way of industry, had a purely fiscal aim. The second period began in the middle of the seventeenth century and lasted almost to the end of the eighteenth. Commerce and navigation had expanded more rapidly than manufacture, which played a secondary role; the colonies were becoming considerable consumers; and after long struggles the separate nations shared out the opening world market among themselves. This period begins with the Navigation Laws and colonial monopolies. The competition of the nations among themselves was excluded as far as possible by tariffs, prohibitions and treaties; and in the last resort the competitive struggle was carried on and decided by wars (especially naval wars). The mightiest maritime nation, the English, retained preponderance in trade and manufacture. Here, already, we find concentration in one country. Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the home market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and abroad as much as possible by differential duties. The working-up of home-produced material was encouraged (wool and linen in England, silk in France), the export of home-produced raw material forbidden (wool in England), and the [working-up] of imported material neglected or suppressed (cotton in England). The nation dominant in sea trade and colonial power naturally secured for itself also the greatest quantitative and qualitative expansion of manufacture. Manufacture could not be carried on without protection, since, if the slightest change takes place in other countries, it can lose its market and be ruined; under reasonably favourable conditions it may easily be introduced into a country, but for this very reason can easily be destroyed. At the same time through the mode in which it is carried on, particularly in the eighteenth century, in the countryside, it is to such an extent interwoven with the vital relationships of a great mass of individuals, that no country dare jeopardise its existence by permitting free competition. Insofar as it manages to export, it therefore depends entirely on the extension or restriction of commerce, and exercises a relatively very small reaction [on the latter]. Hence its secondary [importance] and the influence of [the merchants] in the eighteenth century. It was the merchants and especially the shippers who more than anybody else pressed for State protection and monopolies; the manufacturers also demanded and indeed received protection, but all the time were inferior in political importance to the merchants. The commercial towns, particularly the maritime towns, became to some extent civilised and acquired the outlook of the big bourgeoisie, but in the factory towns an extreme petty-bourgeois outlook persisted. Cf Aikin, etc. The eighteenth century was the century of trade. Pinto says this expressly: "Le commerce fait la marotte du si cle" ; and: "Depuis quelque temps il n'est plus question que de commerce, de navgation et de marine." ["Commerce is the rage of the century." "For some time now people have been talking only about commerce, navigation and the navy." - Ed.] This period is also characterised by the cessation of the bans on the export of gold and silver and the beginning of the trade in money; by banks, national debts, paper money; by speculation in stocks and shares and stockjobbing in all articles; by the development of finance in general. Again capital lost a great part of the natural character which had still clung to it. The concentration of trade and manufacture in one country, England, developing irresistibly in the seventeenth century, gradually created for this country a relative world market, and thus a demand for the manufactured products of this country, which could no longer be met by the industrial productive forces hitherto existing. This demand, outgrowing the productive forces, was the motive power which, by producing big industry the application of elemental forces to industrial ends, machinery and the most complex division of labour called into existence the third period of private ownership since the Middle Ages. There already existed in England the other pre-conditions of this new phase: freedom of competition inside the nation, the development of theoretical mechanics, etc. (Indeed, the science of mechanics perfected by Newton was altogether the most popular science in France and England in the eighteenth century.) (Free competition inside the nation itself had everywhere to be conquered by a revolution 1640 and 1688 in England, 1789 in France.) Competition soon compelled every country that wished to retain its historical role to protect its manufactures by renewed customs regulations (the old duties were no longer any good against big industry) and soon after to introduce big industry under protective duties. Big industry universalised competition in spite of these protective measures (it is practical free trade; the protective duty is only a palliative, a measure of defence within free trade), established means of communication and the modern world market, subordinated trade to itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus produced the rapid circulation (development of the financial system) and the centralisation of capital. By universal competition it forced all individuals to strain their energy to the utmost. It destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc. and where it could not do this, made them into a palpable lie. It produced world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. It made natural science subservient to capital and took from the division of labour the last semblance of its natural character. It destroyed natural growth in general, as far as this is possible while labour exists, and resolved all natural relationships into money relationships. In the place of naturally grown towns it created the modern, large industrial cities which have sprung up overnight. Wherever it penetrated, it destroyed the crafts and all earlier stages of industry. It completed the victory of the commercial town over the countryside. [Its first premise] was the automatic system. [Its development] produced a mass of productive forces, for which private [property] became just as much a fetter as the guild had been for manufacture and the small, rural workshop for the developing craft. These productive forces received under the system of private property a one-sided development only, and became for the majority destructive forces; moreover, a great multitude of such forces could find no application at all within this system. Generally speaking, big industry created everywhere the same relations between the classes of society, and thus destroyed the peculiar individuality of the various nationalities. And finally, while the bourgeoisie of each nation still retained separate national interests, big industry created a class, which in all nations has the same interest and with which nationality is already dead; a class which is really rid of all the old world and at the same time stands pitted against it. Big industry makes for the worker not only the relation to the capitalist, but labour itself, unbearable. It is evident that big industry does not reach the same level of development in all districts of a country. This does not, however, retard the class movement of the proletariat, because the proletarians created by big industry assume leadership of this movement and carry the whole mass along with them, and because the workers excluded from big industry are placed by it in a still worse situation than the workers in big industry itself. The countries in which big industry is developed act in a similar manner upon the more or less non-industrial countries, insofar as the latter are swept by universal commerce into the universal competitive struggle. These different forms are just so many forms of the organisation of labour, and hence of property. In each period a unification of the existing productive forces takes place, insofar as this has been rendered necessary by needs. The first form of property, in the ancient world as in the Middle Ages, is tribal property, determined with the Romans chiefly by war, with the Germans by the rearing of cattle. In the case of the ancient peoples, since several tribes live together in one town, the tribal property appears as State property, and the right of the individual to it as mere "possession" which, however, like tribal property as a whole, is confined to landed property only. Real private property began with the ancients, as with modern nations, with movable property. (Slavery and community) (dominium ex jure Quiritum ). In the case of the nations which grew out of the Middle Ages, tribal property evolved through various stages feudal landed property, corporative movable property, capital invested in manufacture to modern capital, determined by big industry and universal competition, i.e. pure private property, which has cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the State from any influence on the development of property. To this modern private property corresponds the modern State, which, purchased gradually by the owners of property by means of taxation, has fallen entirely into their hands through the national debt, and its existence has become wholly dependent on the commercial credit which the owners of property, the bourgeois, extend to it, as reflected in the rise and fall of State funds on the stock exchange. By the mere fact that it is a class and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organise itself no longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean average interest. Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests. The independence of the State is only found nowadays in those countries where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes, where the estates, done away with in more advanced countries, still have a part to play, and where there exists a mixture; countries, that is to say, in which no one section of the population can achieve dominance over the others. This is the case particularly in Germany. The most perfect example of the modern State is North America. The modern French, English and American writers all express the opinion that the State exists only for the sake of private property, so that this fact has penetrated into the consciousness of the normal man. Since the State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomised, it follows that the State mediates in the formation of all common institutions and that the institutions receive a political form. Hence the illusion that law is based on the will, and indeed on the will divorced from its real basis on free will. Similarly, justice is in its turn reduced to the actual laws. Civil law develops simultaneously with private property out of the disintegration of the natural community. With the Romans the development of private property and civil law had no further industrial and commercial consequences, because their whole mode of production did not alter. (Usury!) With modern peoples, where the feudal community was disintegrated by industry and trade, there began with the rise of private property and civil law a new phase, which was capable of further development. The very first town which carried on an extensive maritime trade in the Middle Ages, Amalfi, also developed maritime law. As soon as industry and trade developed private property further, first in Italy and later in other countries, the highly developed Roman civil law was immediately adopted again and raised, to authority. When later the bourgeoisie had acquired so much power that the princes took up its interests in order to overthrow the feudal nobility by means of the bourgeoisie, there began in all countries in France in the sixteenth century the real development of law, which in all countries except England proceeded on the basis of the Roman Codex. In England, too, Roman legal principles had to be introduced to further the development of civil law (especially in the case of movable property). (It must not be forgotten that law has just as little an independent history as religion.) In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi itself asserts on the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal of the thing. In practice, the abuti has very definite economic limitations for the owner of private property, if he does not wish to see his property and hence his jus abutendi pass into other hands, since actually the thing, considered merely with reference to his will, is not a thing at all, but only becomes a thing, true property in intercourse, and independently of the law (a relationship, which the philosophers call an idea). This juridical illusion, which reduces law to the mere will, necessarily leads, in the further development of property relationships, to the position that a man may have a legal title to a thing without really having the thing. If, for instance, the income from a piece of land is lost owing to competition, then the proprietor has certainly his legal title to it along with the jus utendi et abutendi. But he can do nothing with it: he owns nothing as a landed proprietor if in addition he has not enough capital to cultivate his ground. This illusion of the jurists also explains the fact that for them, as for every code, it is altogether fortuitous that individuals enter into relationships among themselves (e.g. contracts); it explains why they consider that these relationships [can] be entered into or not at will, and that their content rests purely on the individual [free] will of the contracting parties. Whenever, through the development of industry and commerce, new forms of intercourse have been evolved (e.g. assurance companies, etc.), the law has always been compelled to admit them among the modes of acquiring property. The influence of the division of labour on science. The role of repression with regard to the state, law, morality, etc. It is precisely because the bourgeoisie rules as a class that in the law it must give itself a general expression. Natural science and history. There is no history of politics, law, science, etc., of art, religion, etc. [Marginal note by Marx:] To the community as it appears in the ancient state, in feudalism and in the absolute monarchy, to this bond correspond especially the religious conceptions. Why the ideologists turn everything upside-down. Clerics, jurists, politicians. Jurists, politicians (statesmen in general), moralists, clerics. For this ideological subdivision within a class: 1) The occupation assumes an independent existence owing to division of labour. Everyone believes his craft to be the true one. Illusions regarding the connection between their craft and reality are the more likely to be cherished by them because of the very nature of the craft. In consciousness in jurisprudence, politics, etc. relations become concepts; since they do not go beyond these relations, the concepts of the relations also become fixed concepts in their mind. The judge, for example, applies the code, he therefore regards legislation as the real, active driving force. Respect for their goods, because their craft deals with general matters. Idea of law. Idea of state. The matter is turned upside-down in ordinary consciousness. Religion is from the outset consciousness of the transcendental arising from actually existing forces. This more popularly. Tradition, with regard to law, religion, etc. Individuals always proceeded, and always proceed, from themselves. Their relations are the relations of their real life-process. How does it happen that their relations assume an independent existence over against them? and that the forces of their own life become superior to them? In short: division of labour, the level of which depends on the development of the productive power at any particular time. Landed property. Communal property. Feudal. Modern. Estate property. Manufacturing property. Industrial capital.

The German Ideology

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01c.htm

In the Middle Ages the citizens in each town were compelled to unite against the landed nobility to save their skins. The extension of trade, the establishment of communications, led the separate towns to get to know other towns, which had asserted the same interests in the struggle with the same antagonist. Out of the many local corporations of burghers there arose only gradually the burgher class. The conditions of life of the individual burghers became, on account of their contradiction to the existing relationships and of the mode of labour determined by these, conditions which were common to them all and independent of each individual. The burghers had created the conditions insofar as they had torn themselves free from feudal ties, and were created by them insofar as they were determined by their antagonism to the feudal system which they found in existence. When the individual towns began to enter into associations, these common conditions developed into class conditions. The same conditions, the same contradiction, the same interests necessarily called forth on the whole similar customs everywhere. The bourgeoisie itself with its conditions, develops only gradually, splits according to the division of labour into various fractions and finally absorbs all propertied classes it finds in existence (while it develops the majority of the earlier propertyless and a part of the hitherto propertied classes into a new class, the proletariat) in the measure to which all property found in existence is transformed into industrial or commercial capital. The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under it. This is the same phenomenon as the subjection of the separate individuals to the division of labour and can only be removed by the abolition of private property and of labour itself. We have already indicated several times how this subsuming of individuals under the class brings with it their subjection to all kinds of ideas, etc. If from a philosophical point of view one considers this evolution of individuals in the common conditions of existence of estates and classes, which followed on one another, and in the accompanying general conceptions forced upon them, it is certainly very easy to imagine that in these individuals the species, or "Man", has evolved, or that they evolved "Man" and in this way one can give history some hard clouts on the ear. One can conceive these various estates and classes to be specific terms of the general expression, subordinate varieties of the species, or evolutionary phases of "Man". This subsuming of individuals under definite classes cannot be abolished until a class has taken shape, which has no longer any particular class interest to assert against the ruling class. The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from one's mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible without the community. Only in community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In the previous substitutes for the community, in the State, etc. personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class. The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In a real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association. Individuals have always built on themselves, but naturally on themselves within their given historical conditions and relationships, not on the "pure" individual in the sense of the ideologists. But in the course of historical evolution, and precisely through the inevitable fact that within the division of labour social relationships take on an independent existence, there appears a division within the life of each individual, insofar as it is personal and insofar as it is determined by some branch of labour and the conditions pertaining to it. (We do not mean it to be understood from this that, for example, the rentier, the capitalist, etc. cease to be persons; but their personality is conditioned and determined by quite definite class relationships, and the division appears only in their opposition to another class and, for themselves, only when they go bankrupt.) In the estate (and even more in the tribe) this is as yet concealed: for instance, a nobleman always remains a nobleman, a commoner always a commoner, apart from his other relationships, a quality inseparable from his individuality. The division between the personal and the class individual, the accidental nature of the conditions of life for the individual, appears only with the emergence of the class, which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie. This accidental character is only engendered and developed by competition and the struggle of individuals among themselves. Thus, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are more subjected to the violence of things. The difference from the estate comes out particularly in the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. When the estate of the urban burghers, the corporations, etc. emerged in opposition to the landed nobility, their condition of existence movable property and craft labour, which had already existed latently before their separation from the feudal ties appeared as something positive, which was asserted against feudal landed property, and, therefore, in its own way at first took on a feudal form. Certainly the refugee serfs treated their previous servitude as something accidental to their personality. But here they only were doing what every class that is freeing itself from a fetter does; and they did not free themselves as a class but separately. Moreover, they did not rise above the system of estates, but only formed a new estate, retaining their previous mode of labour even in their new situation, and developing it further by freeing it from its earlier fetters, which no longer corresponded to the development already attained. For the proletarians, on the other hand, the condition of their existence, labour, and with it all the conditions of existence governing modern society, have become something accidental, something over which they, as separate individuals, have no control, and over which no social organisation can give them control. The contradiction between the individuality of each separate proletarian and labour, the condition of life forced upon him, becomes evident to him himself, for he is sacrificed from youth upwards and, within his own class, has no chance of arriving at the conditions which would place him in the other class. Thus, while the refugee serfs only wished to be free to develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State. It follows from all we have been saying up till now that the communal relationship into which the individuals of a class entered, and which was determined by their common interests over against a third party, was always a community to which these individuals belonged only as average individuals, only insofar as they lived within the conditions of existence of their class a relationship in which they participated not as individuals but as members of a class. With the community of revolutionary proletarians, on the other hand, who take their conditions of existence and those of all members of society under their control, it is just the reverse; it is as individuals that the individuals participate in it. It is just this combination of individuals (assuming the advanced stage of modern productive forces, of course) which puts the conditions of the free development and movement of individuals under their control conditions which were previously abandoned to chance and had won an independent existence over against the separate individuals just because of their separation as individuals, and because of the necessity of their combination which had been determined by the division of labour, and through their separation had become a bond alien to them. Combination up till now (by no means an arbitrary one, such as is expounded for example in the Contrat social, but a necessary one) was an agreement upon these conditions, within which the individuals were free to enjoy the freaks of fortune (compare, e.g., the formation of the North American State and the South American republics). This right to the undisturbed enjoyment, within certain conditions, of fortuity and chance has up till now been called personal freedom. These conditions of existence are, of course, only the productive forces and forms of intercourse at any particular time. Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves. Thus the communists in practice treat the conditions created up to now by production and intercourse as inorganic conditions, without, however, imagining that it was the plan or the destiny of previous generations to give them material, and without believing that these conditions were inorganic for the individuals creating them. The difference between the individual as a person and what is accidental to him, is not a conceptual difference but an historical fact. This distinction has a different significance at different times e.g. the estate as something accidental to the individual in the eighteenth century, the family more or less too. It is not a distinction that we have to make for each age, but one which each age makes itself from among the different elements which it finds in existence, and indeed not according to any theory, but compelled by material collisions in life. What appears accidental to the later age as opposed to the earlier and this applies also to the elements handed down by an earlier age is a form of intercourse which corresponded to a definite stage of development of the productive forces. The relation of the productive forces to the form of intercourse is the relation of the form of intercourse to the occupation or activity of the individuals. (The fundamental form of this activity is, of course, material, on which depend all other forms - mental, political, religious, etc. The various shaping of material life is, of course, in every case dependent on the needs which are already developed, and the production, as well as the satisfaction, of these needs is an historical process, which is not found in the case of a sheep or a dog (Stirner's refractory principal argument adversus hominem), although sheep and dogs in their present form certainly, but malgr eux, are products of an historical process.) The conditions under which individuals have intercourse with each other, so long as the above-mentioned contradiction is absent, are conditions appertaining to their individuality, in no way external to them; conditions under which these definite individuals, living under definite relationships, can alone produce their material life and what is connected with it, are thus the conditions of their self-activity and are produced by this self-activity. The definite condition under which they produce, thus corresponds, as long as the contradiction has not yet appeared, to the reality of their conditioned nature, their one-sided existence, the one-sidedness of which only becomes evident when the contradiction enters on the scene and thus exists for the later individuals. Then this condition appears as an accidental fetter, and the consciousness that it is a fetter is imputed to the earlier age as well. These various conditions, which appear first as conditions of self-activity, later as fetters upon it, form in the whole evolution of history a coherent series of forms of intercourse, the coherence of which consists in this: in the place of an earlier form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, a new one is put, corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals - a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another. Since these conditions correspond at every stage to the simultaneous development of the productive forces, their history is at the same time the history of the evolving productive forces taken over by each new generation, and is, therefore, the history of the development of the forces of the individuals themselves. Since this evolution takes place naturally, i.e. is not subordinated to a general plan of freely combined individuals, it proceeds from various localities, tribes, nations, branches of labour, etc. each of which to start with develops independently of the others and only gradually enters into relation with the others. Furthermore, it takes place only very slowly; the various stages and interests are never completely overcome, but only subordinated to the prevailing interest and trail along beside the latter for centuries afterwards. It follows from this that within a nation itself the individuals, even apart from their pecuniary circumstances, have quite different developments, and that an earlier interest, the peculiar form of intercourse of which has already been ousted by that belonging to a later interest, remains for a long time afterwards in possession of a traditional power in the illusory community (State, law), which has won an existence independent of the individuals; a power which in the last resort can only be broken by a revolution. This explains why, with reference to individual points which allow of a more general summing-up, consciousness can sometimes appear further advanced than the contemporary empirical relationships, so that in the struggles of a later epoch one can refer to earlier theoreticians as authorities. On the other hand, in countries which, like North America, begin in an already advanced historical epoch, the development proceeds very rapidly. Such countries have no other natural premises than the individuals, who settled there and were led to do so because the forms of intercourse of the old countries did not correspond to their wants. Thus they begin with the most advanced individuals of the old countries, and, therefore, with the correspondingly most advanced form of intercourse, before this form of intercourse has been able to establish itself in the old countries. This is the case with all colonies, insofar as they are not mere military or trading stations. Carthage, the Greek colonies, and Iceland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, provide examples of this. A similar relationship issues from conquest, when a form of intercourse which has evolved on another soil is brought over complete to the conquered country: whereas in its home it was still encumbered with interests and relationships left over from earlier periods, here it can and must be established completely and without hindrance, if only to assure the conquerors' lasting power. (England and Naples after the Norman conquest, when they received the most perfect form of feudal organisation.) This contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse, which, as we saw, has occurred several times in past history, without, however, endangering the basis, necessarily on each occasion burst out in a revolution, taking on at the same time various subsidiary forms, such as all-embracing collisions, collisions of various classes, contradiction of consciousness, battle of ideas, etc., political conflict, etc. From a narrow point of view one may isolate one of these subsidiary forms and consider it as the basis of these revolutions; and this is all the more easy as the individuals who started the revolutions had illusions about their own activity according to their degree of culture and the stage of historical development. Thus all collisions in history have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse. Incidentally, to lead to collisions in a country, this contradiction need not necessarily have reached its extreme limit in this particular country. The competition with industrially more advanced countries, brought about by the expansion of international intercourse, is sufficient to produce a similar contradiction in countries with a backward industry (e.g. the latent proletariat in Germany brought into view by view by the competition of English industry). This whole interpretation of history appears to be contradicted by the fact of conquest. Up till now violence, war, pillage, murder and robbery, etc. have been accepted as the driving force of history. Here we must limit ourselves to the chief points and take, therefore, only the most striking example the destruction of an old civilisation by a barbarous people and the resulting formation of an entirely new organisation of society. (Rome and the barbarians; feudalism and Gaul; the Byzantine Empire and the Turks.) With the conquering barbarian people war itself is still, as indicated above, a regular form of intercourse, which is the more eagerly exploited as the increase in population together with the traditional and, for it, the only possible, crude mode of production gives rise to the need for new means of production. In Italy, on the other hand, the concentration of landed property (caused not only by buying-up and indebtedness but also by inheritance, since loose living being rife and marriage rare, the old families gradually died out and their possessions fell into the hands of a few) and its conversion into grazing land (caused not only by the usual economic forces still operative today but by the importation of plundered and tribute-corn and the resultant lack of demand for Italian corn) brought about the almost total disappearance of the free population. The very slaves died out again and again, and had constantly to be replaced by new ones. Slavery remained the basis of the whole productive system. The plebeians, midway between freemen and slaves, never succeeded in becoming more than a proletarian rabble. Rome indeed never became more than a city; its connection with the provinces was almost exclusively political and could, therefore, easily be broken again by political events. Nothing is more common than the notion that in history up till now it has only been a question of taking. The barbarians take the Roman Empire, and this fact of taking is made to explain the transition from the old world to the feudal system. In this taking by barbarians, however, the question is, whether the nation which is conquered has evolved industrial productive forces, as is the case with modern peoples, or whether their productive forces are based for the most part merely on their association and on the community. Taking is further determined by the object taken. A banker's fortune, consisting of paper, cannot be taken at all, without the taker's submitting to the conditions of production and intercourse of the country taken. Similarly the total industrial capital of a modern industrial country. And finally, everywhere there is very soon an end to taking, and when there is nothing more to take, you have to set about producing. From this necessity of producing, which very soon asserts itself, it follows that the form of community adopted by the settling conquerors must correspond to the stage of development of the productive forces they find in existence; or, if this is not the case from the start, it must change according to the productive forces. By this, too, is explained the fact, which people profess to have noticed everywhere in the period following the migration of the peoples, namely, that the servant was master, and that the conquerors very soon took over language, culture and manners from the conquered. The feudal system was by no means brought complete from Germany, but had its origin, as far as the conquerors were concerned, in the martial organisation of the army during the actual conquest, and this only evolved after the conquest into the feudal system proper through the action of the productive forces found in the conquered countries. To what an extent this form was determined by the productive forces is shown by the abortive attempts to realise other forms derived from reminiscences of ancient Rome (Charlemagne, etc.). Our investigation hitherto started from the instruments of production, and it has already shown that private property was a necessity for certain industrial stages. In industrie extractive private property still coincides with labour; in small industry and all agriculture up till now property is the necessary consequence of the existing instruments of production; in big industry the contradiction between the instrument of production and private property appears from the first time and is the product of big industry; moreover, big industry must be highly developed to produce this contradiction. And thus only with big industry does the abolition of private property become possible. In big industry and competition the whole mass of conditions of existence, limitations, biases of individuals, are fused together into the two simplest forms: private property and labour. With money every form of intercourse, and intercourse itself, is considered fortuitous for the individuals. Thus money implies that all previous intercourse was only intercourse of individuals under particular conditions, not of individuals as individuals. These conditions are reduced to two: accumulated labour or private property, and actual labour. If both or one of these ceases, then intercourse comes to a standstill. The modern economists themselves, e.g. Sismondi, Cherbuliez, etc., oppose "association of individuals" to "association of capital." On the other hand, the individuals themselves are entirely subordinated to the division of labour and hence are brought into the most complete dependence on one another. Private property, insofar as within labour itself it is opposed to labour, evolves out of the necessity of accumulation, and has still, to begin with, rather the form of the communality; but in its further development it approaches more and more the modern form of private property. The division of labour implies from the outset the division of the conditions of labour, of tools and materials, and thus the splitting-up of accumulated capital among different owners, and thus, also, the division between capital and labour, and the different forms of property itself. The more the division of labour develops and accumulation grows, the sharper are the forms that this process of differentiation assumes. Labour itself can only exist on the premise of this fragmentation. Thus two facts are here revealed. First the productive forces appear as a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from the individuals, alongside the individuals: the reason for this is that the individuals, whose forces they are, exist split up and in opposition to one another, whilst, on the other hand, these forces are only real forces in the intercourse and association of these individuals. Thus, on the one hand, we have a totality of productive forces, which have, as it were, taken on a material form and are for the individuals no longer the forces of the individuals but of private property, and hence of the individuals only insofar as they are owners of private property themselves. Never, in any earlier period, have the productive forces taken on a form so indifferent to the intercourse of individuals as individuals, because their intercourse itself was formerly a restricted one. On the other hand, standing over against these productive forces, we have the majority of the individuals from whom these forces have been wrested away, and who, robbed thus of all real life-content, have become abstract individuals, but who are, however, only by this fact put into a position to enter into relation with one another as individuals. The only connection which still links them with the productive forces and with their own existence labour has lost all semblance of self-activity and only sustains their life by stunting it. While in the earlier periods self-activity and the production of material life were separated, in that they devolved on different persons, and while, on account of the narrowness of the individuals themselves, the production of material life was considered as a subordinate mode of self-activity, they now diverge to such an extent that altogether material life appears as the end, and what produces this material life, labour (which is now the only possible but, as we see, negative form of self-activity), as the means. Thus things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse. From this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse. The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves. This appropriation is further determined by the persons appropriating. Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the thus postulated development of a totality of capacities. All earlier revolutionary appropriations were restricted; individuals, whose self-activity was restricted by a crude instrument of production and a limited intercourse, appropriated this crude instrument of production, and hence merely achieved a new state of limitation. Their instrument of production became their property, but they themselves remained subordinate to the division of labour and their own instrument of production. In all expropriations up to now, a mass of individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all. Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all. This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which it must be effected. It can only be effected through a union, which by the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society. Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations. The transformation of labour into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the earlier limited intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as such. With the appropriation of the total productive forces through united individuals, private property comes to an end. Whilst previously in history a particular condition always appeared as accidental, now the isolation of individuals and the particular private gain of each man have themselves become accidental. The individuals, who are no longer subject to the division of labour, have been conceived by the philosophers as an ideal, under the name "Man". They have conceived the whole process which we have outlined as the evolutionary process of "Man," so that at every historical stage "Man" was substituted for the individuals and shown as the motive force of history. The whole process was thus conceived as a process of the self-estrangement of "Man," and this was essentially due to the fact that the average individual of the later stage was always foisted on to the earlier stage, and the consciousness of a later age on to the individuals of an earlier. Through this inversion, which from the first is an abstract image of the actual conditions, it was possible to transform the whole of history into an evolutionary process of consciousness. Finally, from the conception of history we have sketched we obtain these further conclusions:

The German Ideology

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm

In the foregoing presentation Jacques le bonhomme conceives history merely as the product of abstract thoughts or, rather, of his notions of abstract thoughts as governed by these notions, which, in the final analysis, are all resolved into the "holy". This domination of the "holy", of thought, of the Hegelian absolute idea over the incurable world he further betrays as a historical relation existing at the present time, as the domination of the holy ones, the ideologies, over the vulgar world as a hierarchy. In this hierarchy, what previously appeared consecutively exists side-by-side, so that one of the two co-existing forms of development rules over the other... The outcome, of course, is bound to be that the domination which the "world of thoughts" exercises from the outset in history is at the end of the latter also presented as the real, actually existing domination of the thinkers and, as we shall see, in the final analysis, as the domination of the speculative philosophers over the world of things, so that Saint Max has only to fight against thoughts and ideas of the ideologies and to overcome them, in order to make himself "possessor of the world of things in the world of thoughts". As for the actual hierarchy of the Middle Ages, we shall merely note here that it did not exist for the people, for the great mass of human beings. For the great mass only feudalism existed, and hierarchy only existed insofar as it was itself either feudal or anti-feudal (within the framework of feudalism). Feudalism itself had entirely empirical relations as its basis. Hierarchy and struggle against feudalism (the struggle of the ideologies of a class against the class itself) are only the ideological expression of feudalism and of the struggles developing within feudalism itself which include also the struggles of the feudally organized nations among themselves. Hierarchy is the ideal form of feudalism; feudalism is a political form of the medieval relations of production and intercourse. Consequently, the struggle of feudalism against hierarchy can only be explained by elucidating these practical material relations. This elucidation of itself puts an end to the previous conception of history which took the illusions of the Middle Ages on trust, in particular those illusions which the Emperor and the Pope brought to bear in their struggle against each other. We now come to present-day hierarchy, to the domination of the idea in ordinary life.... Since the middle class demand love for their kingdom, their regime, they want, according to Jacques le bonhomme, to "establish the kingdom of love on earth". (p. 98) Since they demand respect for their domination and for the conditions in which it is exercised, and therefore want to usurp domination over respect, they demand, according to this worthy man [Jacques le bonhomme], the domination of respect as such, their attitude towards respect is the same as towards the holy spirit dwelling within them. (p. 95) Jacques le bonhomme, with his faith that can move mountains, takes as the actual, earthly basis of the bourgeois world the distorted form in which the sanctimonious and hypocritical ideology of the bourgeoisie voices their particular interests as universal interests. Why this ideological delusion assumes precisely this form for our Saint, we shall see in connection with "political liberalism". In religion people make their empirical world into an entity that is only conceived, imagined, that confronts them as something foreign. This again is by no means to be explained from other concepts, from "self-consciousness" and similar nonsense, but from the entire hitherto existing mode of production and intercourse, which is just as independent of the pure concept as the invention of the self-acting mule and the use of railways are independent of Hegelian philosophy. If he wants to speak of an "essence" of religion, i.e., of a material basis of this inessentiality, then he should look for it neither in the "essence of man", nor in the predicate of God, but in the material world which each stage of religious development finds in existence. The only reason why Christianity wanted to free us from the domination of the flesh and "desires as a driving force" was because it regarded our flesh, our desires as something foreign to us; it wanted to free us from determination by nature only because it regarded our own nature as not belonging to us. For if I myself am not nature, if my natural desires, my whole natural character, do not belong to myself and this is the doctrine of Christianity then all determination by nature whether due to my own natural character or to what is known as external nature seems to me a determination by something foreign, a fetter, compulsion used against me, heteronomy as opposed to autonomy of the spirit . Incidentally, Christianity has indeed never succeeded in freeing us from the domination of desires. [In ancient times] the ideas and thoughts of people were, of course, ideas and thoughts about themselves and their relationships, their consciousness of themselves and of people in general for it was the consciousness not merely of a single individual but of the individual in his interconnection with the whole of society and about the whole of the society in which they live. The conditions, independent of them, in which they produce their life, the necessary forms of intercourse connected herewith, and the personal and social relations thereby given, had to take the form insofar as they were expressed in thoughts of ideal conditions and necessary relations, i.e., they had to be expressed in consciousness as determinations arising from the concept of man as such , from human essence, from the nature of man, from man as such . What people were, what their relations were, appeared in consciousness as ideas of man as such , of his modes of existence or of his immediate conceptual determinations. So, after the ideologists had assumed that ideas and thoughts had dominated history up to now, that the history of these ideas and thoughts constitutes all history up to now, after they had imagined that real conditions had conformed to man as such and his ideal conditions, i.e., to conceptual determinations, after they had made the history of people's consciousness of themselves the basis of their actual history, after all this, nothing was easier than to call the history of consciousness, of ideas, of the holy, of established concepts the history of "man" and to put it in the place of real history. Sancho raises the important question: In the form in which Sancho understands it, the question again becomes sheer nonsense. He imagines that people up to now have always formed a concept of man, and then won freedom for themselves to the extent that was necessary to realize this concept; that the measure of freedom that they achieved was determined each time by their idea of the ideal of man at the time; it was thus unavoidable that in each individual there remained a residue which did not correspond to this ideal and, hence, since it was "inhuman", was either not set free or only freed malgre eux . In reality, of course, what happened was that people won freedom for themselves each time to the extent that was dictated and permitted not by their ideal of man, but by the existing productive forces. All emancipation carried through hitherto has been based, however, on unrestricted productive forces. The production which these productive forces could provide was insufficient for the whole of society and made development possible only if some persons satisfied their needs at the expense of others, and therefore some the minority obtained the monopoly of development, while others the majority owing to the constant struggle to satisfy their most essential needs, were for the time being (i.e., until the creation of new revolutionary productive forces) excluded from any development. Thus, society has hitherto always developed within the framework of a contradiction in antiquity the contradiction between freemen and slaves, in the Middle Ages that between nobility and serfs, in modern times that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This explains, on the one hand, the abnormal, "inhuman" way in which the oppressed class satisfies its needs, and, on the other hand, the narrow limits within which intercourse, and with it the whole ruling class, develops. And this restricted character of development consists not only in the exclusion of one class from development, but also in the narrowmindedness of the excluding class, and the "inhuman" is to be found also within the ruling class. This so-called "inhuman" is just as much a product of present-day relations as the "human" is; it is their native aspect, the rebellion which is not based on any new revolutionary productive force against the prevailing relations brought about by the existing productive forces, and against the way of satisfying needs that correspond to these relations. The positive expression "human" corresponds to the definite relations predominate at a certain stage of production in the way of satisfying needs determined by them, just as the negative expression "inhuman" corresponds to the attempt to negate these predominate relations in the way of satisfying needs prevailing under them without changing the existing mode of production, an attempt that this stage of production daily engenders afresh. One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is a secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life. We have shown [in Chapter 1] that thoughts and ideas acquire an independent existence in consequence of the personal circumstances and relations of individuals acquiring independent existence. We have shown that exclusive, systematic occupation with these thoughts on the part of ideologists and philosophers, and hence the systemization of these thoughts, is a consequence of division of labour, and that, in particular, German philosophy is a consequence of German petty-bourgeois conditions. The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognize it as the distorted language of the actual world and to realize that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life. We have seen that the whole problem of the transition from thought to reality, hence from language to life, exists only in philosophical illusion, i.e., it is justified only for philosophical consciousness, which cannot possibly be clear about the nature and origin of its apparent separation from life. This great problem, insofar as it at all entered the minds of our ideologists, was bound, of course, to result of finely in one of these knights-errant setting out in search of a word which, as a word , formed the transition in question, which, as a word, ceases to be simply a word, and which, as a word, in a mysterious super linguistic manner, points from within the language to the actual object it denotes; which, in short, plays among words the same role as the Redeeming God-Man plays among people in Christian fantasy. The emptiest, shallowest brain among the philosophers had to "end" philosophy by proclaiming his lack of thought to be the end of philosophy and thus the triumphant entry into "corporal" life. His philosophizing mental vacuity was already in itself the end of philosophy just as his unspeakable language was the end of all language. Far from it being true that "out of nothing" I make myself, for example, a "[public] speaker", the nothing which forms the basis here is a very manifold something, the real individual, his speech organs, a definite stage of physical development, an existing language and dialects, ears capable of hearing and a human environment from which it is possible to hear something, etc., etc. therefore, in the development of a property something is created by something out of something, and by no means comes, as in Hegel's Logic, from nothing, through nothing to nothing. [Th. I. Abt. 2 of Hegel] When the narrow-minded bourgeois says to the Communists: by abolishing property, i.e., my existence as a capitalist, as a landed proprietor, as a factory owner, and your existence as workers, you abolished my individuality and your own; by making it impossible for me to exploit you, the workers, to rake in my profit, interest or rent, you make it impossible for me to exist as an individual. When, therefore, the bourgeois tells the Communists: by abolishing my existence as the bourgeois , you abolish my existence as an individual ; when thus he identifies himself as a bourgeois with himself as an individual, one must, at least, recognize his frankness and shamelessness. For the bourgeois it is actually the case, he believes himself to be an individual only in so far as he is a bourgeois. But when the theoreticians of the bourgeoisie come forward and give a general expression to this assertion, when they equate the bourgeois's property with individuality in theory as well and want to give a logical justification for this equation, then this nonsense begins to become solemn and holy. [Sancho asks:] How is it that personal interests always develop, against the will of individuals, into class interests, into common interests which acquire independent existence in relation to the individual persons, and in their independence assume the form of general interests? How is it that as such they come into contradiction with the actual individuals and in this contradiction, by which they are defined as general interests, they can be conceived by consciousness as ideal and even as religious, holy interests? How is it that in this process of private interests acquiring independent existence as class interests the personal behavior of the individual is bound to be objectified [sich versachlichen], estranged [sich entfremden], and at the same time exists as a power independent of him and without him, created by intercourse, and is transformed into social relations, into a series of powers which determined and subordinate the individual, in which, therefore, appear in the imagination as "holy" powers? Had Sancho understood the fact that within the framework of definite modes of production , which, of course, are not dependent on the will, alien practical forces, which are independent not only of isolated individuals but even of all of them together, always come to stand above people then he could be fairly indifferent as to whether this fact is preserved in the religious form or distorted in the fancy of the egoist, above whom everything is placed in imagination, in such a way that he places nothing above himself. Sancho would then have descended from the realm of speculation into the realm of reality, from what people fancy to what they actually are, from what they imagine to how they act and are bound to act in definite circumstances. What seems to him a product of thought , he would have understood to be a product of life . He would not then have arrived at the absurdity worthy of him of explaining the division between personal and general interests by saying that people imagine this division also in a religious way and seem to themselves to be such and such, which is, however, only another word for "imagining". Incidentally, even in the banal, petty-bourgeois German form in which Sancho perceives contradiction of personal and general interests, he should realize that individuals have always started out from themselves, and could not do otherwise, and that therefore the two aspects he noted are aspects of the personal development of individuals; both are equally engendered by the empirical conditions under which the individuals live, both are only expressions of one and the same personal development of people and are therefore only in seeming contradiction to each other. Whether a desire becomes fixed or not, i.e., whether it obtains exclusive [power over us] which, however, does [not] exclude [further progress] depends on whether material circumstances, "bad" mundane conditions permit the normal satisfaction of this desire and, on the other hand, the development of a totality of desires. This latter depends, in turn, on whether we live in circumstances that allow all-round activity and thereby the full development of all our potentialities. On the actual conditions, and the possibility of development they give each individual, depends also whether thoughts become fixed or not just as, for example, the fixed ideas of the German philosophers, these "victims of society", qui nous font pitie [for whom we feel pity], are inseparable from the German conditions. No one can do anything without at the same time doing it for the sake of one or other of his needs and for the sake of the organ of this need for Stirner this means that this need and its organ are made into a master over him, just as earlier he made the means for satisfying a need into a master over him. Stirner cannot eat without at the same time eating for the sake of his stomach. If the worldly conditions prevent him from satisfying his stomach, then his stomach becomes a master over him, the desire to eat becomes a fixed desire, and the thought of eating becomes a fixed idea which at the same time gives him an example of the influence of world conditions and fixing his desires and ideas. Sancho's "revolt" against the fixation of desires and thoughts is thus reduced to an impotent moral injunction about self-control and provides new evidence that he merely gives an ideologically high sounding expression to the most trivial sentiments of the petty-bourgeois. [The following two paragraphs are crossed out in the manuscript (brackets are used for words that were illegible)]: Since they attack the material basis on which the hitherto inevitable fixedness of desires and ideas depended, the Communists are the only people through whose historical activity the liquefaction of the fixed desires and ideas is in fact brought about and ceases to be an impotent moral injunction, as it was up to now with all moralists "down to" Stirner. Communist organization has a twofold effect on the desires produced in the individual by present-day relations; some of these desires namely desires which exist under all relations, and only change their form and direction under different social relations are merely altered by the Communist social system, for they are given the opportunity to develop normally; but others namely those originating solely in a particular society, under particular conditions of [production] and intercourse are totally deprived of their conditions of existence. Which [of the desires] will be merely changed and [which eliminated] in a Communist [society] can [only occur in a practical] way, by [changing the real], actual [conditions of production and intercourse.] A desire is already by its mere existence something "fixed", and it can occur only to St. Max and his like not to allow his sex instinct, for instance, to become "fixed"; it is that already and will cease to be fixed only as a result of castration or impotence. Each need, which forms the basis of a "desire", is likewise something "fixed", and try as he may St. Max cannot abolish this "fixedness" and for example contrive to free himself from the necessity of eating within "fixed" periods of time. The Communists have no intention of abolishing the fixedness of their desires and needs, an intention which Stirner, immersed in his world of fancy, ascribes to them and all other men; they only strive to achieve an organization of production and intercourse which will make possible the normal satisfaction of all needs, i.e., a satisfaction which is limited only by the needs themselves. It depends not on consciousness , but on being ; not on thought, but on life; it depends on the individual's empirical development and manifestation of life, which in turn depends on the conditions existing in the world. If the circumstances in which the individual lives allow him only the [one]-sided development of one quality at the expense of all the rest, [if] they give him the material and time to develop only that one quality, then this individual achieves only a one-sided, crippled development. No moral preaching avails here. And the manner in which this one, preeminently favored quality develops depends again, on the one hand, on the material available for its development and, on the other hand, on the degree and manner in which the other qualities are suppressed. Precisely because thought, for example, is the thought of a particular, definite individual, it remains his definite thought, determined by his individuality in the conditions in which he lives. The thinking individual therefore has no need to resort to prolonged reflection about thought as such in order to declare that his thought is his own thought, his property; from the outset it is his own, peculiarly determined thought and it was precisely his peculiarity which [in the case of St.] Sancho [was found to be] the "opposite" of this, the peculiarity which is peculiar " as such ". In the case of an individual, for example, whose life embraces a wide circle of varied activities and practical relations to the world, and who, therefore, lives a many-sided life, thought has the same character of universality as every other manifestation of his life. Consequently, it neither becomes fixed in the form of abstract thought nor does it need complicated tricks of reflection when the individual passes from thought to some other manifestation of life. From the outset it is always a factor in the total life of the individual, one which disappears and is reproduced as required . In the case of a parochial Berlin schoolmaster or author, however, whose activity is restricted to arduous work on the one hand and the pleasure of thought on the other, whose world extends from [the small confines of their city], whose relations to this world are reduced to a minimum by his pitiful position in life, when such an individual experiences the need to think, it is indeed inevitable that his thought becomes just as abstract as he himself and his life, and that thought confronts him, who is quite incapable of resistance, in the form of a fixed power, whose activity offers the individual the possibility of a momentary escape from his "bad world", of a momentary pleasure. In the case of such an individual the few remaining desires, which arise not so much from intercourse with a world as from the constitution of the human body, expressed themselves only through repercussion , i.e., they assume their narrow development the same one-sided and crude character as does his thought, they appear only along intervals, stimulated by the excessive development of the predominant desire (fortified by immediate physical causes, e.g., [stomach] spasm) and are manifested turbulently and forcibly, with the most brutal suppression of the ordinary, [natural] desire [ this leads to further] domination over [thought.] As a matter of course, the schoolmaster's [thinking reflects on and speculates about] is empirical [fact in a school] masterly fashion. For St. Sancho vocation has a double form; firstly as a vocation which others choose for me examples of which we have already had above in the case of newspapers that are full of politics and the prisons that our Saint mistook for houses of moral correction. Afterward vocation appears also as a vocation in which the individual himself believes. If the ego is divorced from all its empirical conditions of life, it's activity, the conditions of its existence, if it is separated from the world that forms its basis and from its own body, then, of course, it has no other vocation and no other designation than that of representing the human being of the logical proposition and to assist St. Sancho in arriving at the equations given above. In the real world, on the other hand, where individuals have needs, they thereby already have a vocation and task ; and at the outset it is still immaterial whether they make this their vocation in their imagination as well. It is clear, however, that because the individuals possess consciousness they form an idea of this vocation which their empirical existence has given them and, thus, furnish St. Sancho with the opportunity of seizing on the word vocation, that is, on the mental expression of their actual conditions of life, and of leading out of account these conditions of life themselves. The proletarian, for example, who like every human being has the vocation of satisfying his needs and who is not in a position to satisfy even the needs that he has in common with all human beings, the proletarian whom the necessity to work a 14 hour day debases to the level of the beast of burden, whom competition degrades to a mere thing, an article of trade, who from his position as a mere productive force, the sole position left to him, is squeezed out by other, more powerful productive forces this proletarian is, if only for these reasons, confronted with the real task of revolutionizing his conditions. He can, of course, imagine this to be his "vocation", he can also, if he likes to engage in propaganda, express his "vocation" by saying that to do this or that is the human vocation of the proletarian, the more so since his position does not even allow him to satisfy the needs arising directly from his human nature. St. Sancho does not concern himself with the reality underlining this idea, with the practical name of this proletarian he clings to the word "vocation" and declares it to be the holy, and the proletarian to be a servant of the holy the easiest way of considering himself superior and "proceeding further". Particularly in the relations that have existed hitherto, when one class always ruled, when the conditions of life of an individual always coincided with the conditions of life of a class, when, therefore, the practical task of each newly emerging class was bound to appear to each of its members as a universal task, and when each class could actually overthrow its predecessor only by liberating the individuals of all classes from certain chains which had hitherto fettered them under these circumstances it was essential that the task of the individual members of a class striving for domination should be described as a universal human task. Incidentally, when for example the bourgeois tells the proletarian that his, the proletarian's, human task is to work 14 hours a day, the proletarian is quite justified in replying in the same language that, on the contrary, his task is to overthrow the entire bourgeois system. "Vocation, designation, task, ideal" are either: In actual history, those theoreticians who regarded might as the basis of right were in direct contradiction to those who looked on will as the basis of right... If power is taken as the basis of right, as Hobbes, etc., do, then right, law, etc., are merely the symptom, the expression of other relations upon which state power rests. The material life of individuals, which by no means depends merely on their "will", their mode of production and form of intercourse, which mutually determined each other this is the real basis of the state and remained so at all the stages at which division of labor and private property are still necessary, quite independently of the will of individuals. These actual relations are in no way created by the state power; on the contrary they are the power creating it. The individuals who rule in these conditions leaving aside the fact that their power must assume the form of the state have to give their will, which is determined by these definite conditions, a universal expression as the will of the state, as law, an expression whose content is always determined by the relations of this class, as the civil and criminal law demonstrates in the clearest possible way. Just as the weight of their bodies does not depend on there idealistic will or on their arbitrary decision, so also the fact that they enforce their own will in the form of law, and at the same time to make it independent of the personal arbitrariness of each individual among them, does not depend on there idealistic will. Their personal rule must at the same time assume the form of average rule. Their personal power is based on conditions of life which as they develop are common to many individuals, and the continuance of which they, as ruling individuals, have to maintain against others and, at the same time, to maintain that they are holding good for everybody. The expression of this will, which is determined by their common interests, is the law. It is precisely because individuals who are independent of one another assert themselves and their own will, and because on this basis their attitude to one another is bound to be egoistical, that self-denial is made necessary in law and right, self-denial in the exceptional case, in self-assertion of their interests in the average case (which, therefore, not they , but only the "egoist in agreement with himself" regards as self-denial). The same applies to the classes which are ruled, whose will plays just as small a part in determining the existence of law and the state. For example, so long as the productive forces are still insufficiently developed to make competition superfluous, and therefore would give rise to competition over and over again, for so long the classes which are ruled would be wanting to be impossible if they had the "will" to abolish competition and with it the state and the law. Incidentally, too, it is only in the imagination of the ideologists that this "will" arises before relations have developed far enough to make the emergence of such a will possible. After relations have developed sufficiently to produce it, the ideologist is able to imagine this will as being purely arbitrary and therefore as conceivable at all times and under all circumstances. Like right, so crime, i.e., the struggle of the isolated individual against the predominant relations, is not the result of pure arbitrariness. On the contrary, it depends on the same conditions as that domination. The same visionaries who see in right and law the domination of some independently existing general will see in crime the mere violation of right and along. Hence the state does not exist owing to the dominant will, but the state, which arises from the material mode of life of individuals, has also the form of a dominant will. If the latter loses its domination, it means that not only the will has changed but also the material existence and life of individuals, and only for that reason has their will changed. It is possible for rights and laws to be "inherited", but in that case they are no longer dominant, but nominal, of which striking examples are furnished by the history of ancient Roman law and English law. We saw earlier how a theory and history of pure thought could arise among philosophers owning to the separation of ideas from the individuals and empirical relations which serve as the basis of these ideas. In the same way, here too one can separate right from its real basis, whereby one obtains a "dominant will" which in different eras undergoes various modifications and has its own, independent history in its creations, the laws. On this account, political and civil history becomes ideologically merged in a history of the domination of successive laws.... The most superficial examination of legislation, e.g., for laws and all countries, shows how far the rulers got when they imagined that they could achieve something by means of their "dominant will" alone, i.e., simply by exercising their will. Even that which constitutes the advantage of an individual as such over other individuals, is in our day at the same time a product of society and in its realization is bound to assert itself as privilege, as we have already shown Sancho in connection with competition. Further, the individual as such, regarded by himself, is subordinated to division of labour, which makes him one-sided, cripples and determines him. Individuals have always and in all circumstances "proceeded from themselves ", but since they were not unique in the sense of not needing any connections with one another, and since their needs , consequently their nature, and the method of satisfying their needs, connected them with one another (relations between the sexes, exchange, division of labour), they had to enter into relations with one another. Moreover, since they entered into intercourse with one another not as pure egos, but as individuals at a definite stage of development of their productive forces and requirements, and since this intercourse, in its turn, determined production and needs, it was, therefore, precisely the personal, individual behavior of individuals, their behavior to one another as individuals, that created the existing relations and daily reproduces them anew. They entered into intercourse with one another as what they were, they proceeded "from themselves", as they were, irrespective of their "outlook onlife". This "outlook on life" even the warped one of the [idealist] philosophers could, of course, only be determined by their actual life. Hence it certainly follows that the development of an individual is determined by the development of all the others with whom he is directly or indirectly associative, and that the different generations of individuals entering into relations with one another are connected with one another, that the physical existence of the latter generations is determined by that of their predecessors, and that these later generations inherit the productive forces and forms of intercourse accumulated by their predecessors, their own mutual relations being determined thereby. In short, it is clear that development takes place and that the history of the single individual cannot possibly be separated from the history of preceding or contemporary individuals, but is determined by this history. The transformation of the individual relationship into its opposite, a purely material relationship, the distinction of individuality and fortuity by the individuals themselves is a historical process, as we have already shown ( Chapter 1, Part IV, 6 ), and at different stages of development it assumes different, ever sharper and more universal forms. In the present epoch, the domination of material relations over individuals, and the suppression of individuality by fortuitous circumstances, has assumed its sharpest and most universal form, thereby setting existing individuals a very definite task. It has set them the task of replacing the domination of circumstances and a chance over individuals by the domination of individuals over chance and circumstances. It has not, as Sancho imagines, put forward the demand that "I should develop myself", which up to now every individual has done without Sancho's good advice; it has on the contrary called for liberation from a quite definite mode of development. This task, dictated by present-day relations, coincides with the task of organizing society in the Communist way. We have already shown above that the abolition of a state of affairs in which relations become independent of individuals, in which individuality is subservient to chance and the personal relations of individuals are subordinated to general class relations, etc. that the abolition of this state of affairs is determined in the final analysis by the abolition of division of labour. We also shown that the abolition of division of labour is determined by the development of intercourse and productive forces to such a degree of universality that private property and division of labour becomes fetters on them. We have further shown that private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-around development of individuals, precisely because the existing form of intercourse and the existing productive forces are all embracing and only individuals that are developing in an all-around fashion can appropriate them, i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of their lives. We have shown that at the present time individuals must abolish private property, because the productive forces and forms of intercourse have developed so far that, under the domination of private property, they have become destructive forces, and because the contradiction between the classes has reached its extreme limit. Finally, we have shown that the abolition of private property in the division of labour is itself the association of individuals on the basis created by modern productive forces and world's intercourse. [See Chapter One] Within Communist society, the only society in which the genuine and free development of individuals ceases to be a mere phrase, this development is determined precisely by the connection of individuals, a connection which consists partly in the economic prerequisites and partly in the necessary solidarity of the free development of all, and finally, in the universal character of the activity of individuals on the basis of the existing productive forces. We are, therefore, here concerned with individuals at a definite historical stage of development and by no means merely with individuals chosen at random, even disregarding the indispensable Communist revolution, which itself is a general condition for their free development. The individuals' consciousness of their mutual relations will, of course, likewise be completely changed, and, therefore, will no more be the "principal of love" or devoument than it will be egoism. [In the family] entirely empirical relations dominate. The attitude of the bourgeois to the institutions of his regime is like that of the Jew to the law; he evades them whenever it is possible to do so in each individual case, but he wants everyone else to observe them. If the entire bourgeoisie, in a mass and at one time, were to evade bourgeois institutions, it would cease to be bourgeois a conduct which, of course, never occurs to the bourgeois and by no means depends on their willing or running [i.e., it is dictated by historical conditions]. The dissolute bourgeois evades marriage and secretly commits adultery; the merchant evades the institution of property by depriving others of property by speculation, bankruptcy, etc.; the young bourgeois makes himself independent of his family, if he can by in fact abolishing the family as far as he is concerned. But marriage, property, the family remain untouched in theory, because they are the practical basis on which the bourgeoisie has directed its domination, and because in their bourgeois form they are the conditions which make the bourgeois a bourgeois, just as the constantly evaded law makes the religious Jew a religious Jew. This attitude of the bourgeois to the conditions of his existence acquires one of its universal forms in bourgeois mentality. One cannot speak at all of the family " as such ". Historically the bourgeois gives the family the character of the bourgeois family, in which boredom and money are the binding link, in which also includes the bourgeois dissolution of the family, which does not prevent the family itself from always continuing to exist. It's dirty existence as its counterpart in the holy concept of it in official phraseology and universal hypocrisy. Where the family is actually abolished, as with the proletariat, just the opposite of what "Stirner" thinks takes place. Then the concept of the family does not exist at all, but here and there family affection based on extremely real relations is certainly to be found. In the 18th-century the concept of the [feudal] family was abolished by the philosophers, because the actual family was already in the process of dissolution at the highest pinnacles of civilization. The internal family bond, the separate components constituting the concept of the family were dissolved, for example, obedience, piety, fidelity in marriage, etc.; but the real body the family, the property relation, the exclusive attitude in relation to their families, forced cohabitation relations determined by the existence of children, the structure of modern towns, the formation of capital, etc. all these were preserved, along with numerous violations, because the existence of the family is made necessary by its connection with the mode of production, which exists independently of the will of bourgeois society. That it was impossible to do without it was demonstrated in the most striking way during the French Revolution, when for a moment the family was as good as legally abolished. The family continues to exist even in the 19th-century, only the process of its dissolution has become more general, not on account of the concept, but because of the higher development of industry and competition; the family still exists although its dissolution was long ago proclaimed by French and English Socialists and this has at last penetrated also to the German church fathers, by way of French novels.[A] The more the normal form of intercourse of society, and with it the conditions of the ruling class, develop their contradiction to the advanced productive forces, and the greater the consequent discord within the ruling class itself as well as between it and the class ruled by it, the more fictitious, of course, becomes the consciousness which originally corresponded to this form of intercourse (i.e., it ceases to be the consciousness corresponding to this form of intercourse), and the more do the old traditional ideas of these relations of intercourse, in which actual private interests, etc., etc., are expressed as universal interests, descend to the level of mere idealizing phrases, conscious illusion, deliberate hypocrisy. But the more their falsity is exposed by life, and the less meaning they have to consciousness itself, the more resolutely are they asserted, the more hypocritical, moral and holy becomes the language of this normal society. The modern state, the rule of the bourgeoisie, is based on freedom of labour .... Freedom of Labour is free competition of the workers among themselves.... Labor is free in all civilized countries; it is not a matter of freeing labor but of abolishing it. Free activity for the Communists is the creative manifestation of life arising from the free development of all abilities of the whole person. Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not preach morality at all. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination. Communist theoreticians, the only Communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the "general interest" is created by individuals who are defined as "private persons". They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the "general interest", is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter is by no means an independent force with an independent history so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian "negative unity" of two sides of the contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears. Private property alienates the individuality not only of people but also of things. Land has nothing to do with rent of land, the machine has nothing to do with profit. For the landed proprietor, land has the significance only of rent of land; he leases his plots of land and receives rent; this is a feature which land can lose without losing a single one of its inherent features, without, for example, losing any part of its fertility; it is a feature the extent and even the existence of which depends on social relations which are created and destroyed without the assistance of individual landed proprietors. It is the same with machines. How little connection there is between money, the most general form of property, and personal peculiarity, how much they are directly opposed to each other was already known to Shakespeare better than to our theorizing petty-bourgeois: In a word, rent of land, profit, etc., these forms of existence of private property, are social relations corresponding to a definite stage of production, and they are "individual" only so long as they have not become fetters on the existing productive forces. With the development and accumulation of bourgeois property, i.e., with the development of commerce and industry, individuals grew richer and richer while the state fell ever more deeply into debt. It is therefore obvious that as soon as the bourgeoisie has accumulated money, the state has to beg from the bourgeoisie and in the end it is actually bought up by the latter. This takes place in the period in which the bourgeoisie is still confronted by another class, and consequently the state can retain some appearance of independence in relation to both of them. Even after the state has been bought up [by special trusts, interest groups, lobbying, bribes, etc.], it still needs money and, therefore, continues to be dependent on the bourgeoisie; nevertheless, when the interests of the bourgeoisie demanded, the state can have had its disposal more funds then states which are less developed and, therefore, less burdened with debts. Those relations brought about by competition: the abolition of local narrowness, the establishment of means of communication, highly developed division of Labour, world intercourse, the proletariat, machinery, the relation between supply and demand, etc. * As for the proletarians, they at any rate in the modern form first arose out of competition; they have already repeatedly set up collected enterprises which, however, always perish because they were unable to compete with the "contending" private bankers, butchers, etc., and because for proletarians owing to the frequent opposition of interests among them arising out of the division of labour no other "agreement" is possible than a political one directed against the whole present system. Where the development of competition enables the proletarians to "come to an understanding", they reach an understanding not about public bakeries but about quite different matters [,i.e. the overthrow of the bourgeois system for a proletarian one.]. Incidentally, competition certainly began as a "competition of persons" possessing "personal means". The liberation of the feudal serfs, the first condition of competition, and the first accumulation of "things" were purely "personal" acts. If one person, thanks to good food, careful education and physical exercise, has acquired well-developed bodily powers and skill, while another, owing to inadequate and unhealthy food and consequent poor digestion, and as the result of neglect in childhood and overexertion, has never been able to acquire the "things" necessary for developing his muscles not to mention acquiring mastery over them within the "personal power" of the first in relation to the second is a purely material one. It was not "through personal power" that he gained the "means that were lacking"; on the contrary, he owes his "personal power" to the material means already existing. Incidentally, the transformation of personal means into material means and of material means into personal means is only an aspect of competition and quite inseparable from it. The demand that competition should be conducted not with material means but with personal means amounts to the moral postulate that competition and the relations on which it depends should have consequences other than those inevitably arising from them. The power of money, the fact that the universal means of exchange becomes independent in relation both to society and to individuals, reveals most clearly that the relations of production and intercourse as a whole assume an independent existence.... The material power of money, which is strikingly revealed in monetary crisis and which, in the form of a prominent scarcity of money, oppresses the petty-bourgeois who is "inclined to make purchases", is likewise a highly unpleasant fact for that egoist [a reference to Sancho] in agreement with himself. He gets rid of the difficulty by reversing the ordinary idea of the petty-bourgeois, thus making it appear that the attitude of individuals to the power of money is something that depends solely on their personal willing or running. This fortunate turn of thought then gives him the chance of reading a moral lecture, buttressed by synonymy, etymology and vowel mutation, to the astounded petty-bourgeois already disheartening by lack of money, and thus debarring in advance all inconvenient questions about the causes of the pecuniary embarrassment. The monetary crisis consist primarily in the fact that all "wealth" [vermogen] suddenly becomes depreciated in relation to the means of exchange and loses its "power" [vermogen] over money. A crisis is in existence precisely when one can no longer pay with one's "wealth"[vermogen], but must pay with money. And this again does not happen because of a shortage of money, as is imagined by the petty-bourgeois who judges the crisis by his personal difficulties, but because the specific difference becomes fixed between money and as the universal commodity, the "marketable property and property in circulation", and all the other, particular commodities, which suddenly ceased to be marketable property.

The German Ideology — Ch 3

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03abs.htm

End of the Old Testament

The German Ideology by Marx and Engels: Saint Max

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03e.htm

Here we again start from the point at which, above, we began the description of the union. Sancho employs two categories: property and wealth; the illusions about property correspond mainly to the positive data given on landed property, the illusions about wealth to the data on the organisation of labour and the monetary system in the union. Interpretation of his hereditary tenure of a plot of land. a euphemistic way of saying that his needs are his possession and that what he needs as a corv e peasant is determined by his circumstances. In the. same way the economists maintain that the worker is the owner of everything that he needs as a worker. See the discourse on the minimum wage in Ricardo. [David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation] A musical flourish in honour of his rate of wages, his plot of land, his permanent lack of money, and his expulsion from everything that the society does not want him to have in exclusive possession. The same idea occurs on page 327, expressed thus: This pompous allegro marciale passes in the following way into a gentle cadence, in which it gradually collapses on its backside Sancho s usual fate: The practical variation on this theme occurs on page 330, where the individuals collectively (i.e., all) are counterposed as a regulating force to the Isolated individual (i.e., the I as distinct from all). These dissonances are at last resolved in the soothing final chord, to the effect that what I do not possess is at any rate the property of another ego . Thus, ownership of everything is only an interpretation of the statement that each person possesses exclusive property. We already know that only freedom, and not peculiarity, is affected if freedom of trade and unconditionality are not respected in the union. Unconditional property is a fitting supplement to the secure , guaranteed property in the union. On page 329 we saw how the soci t makes itself the owner and on page 330 how it excludes individuals from its property . In general, we saw that the tribal system of feudal tenure, the crudest beginnings of the system of feudal tenure, was introduced. According to page 416, the feudal system = absence of property ; hence, according to the same page, property is recognised in the union, and only in the union , and moreover for a conclusive reason: because no one any longer holds his possession in feudal tenure from any being [Wesen] (ibid.). That is to say, under the hitherto existing feudal system, the feudal lord was this being , in the union it is the soci t . From this one may at least conclude that Sancho possesses an exclusive but by no means secure property in the essence [Wesen] [Wesen can mean being or essence"], of past history. In connection with page 330, according to which each individual is excluded from that which society does not consider it right for him to hold in his sole possession, and in connection with the state and legal system of the union, it is stated: He thus proves the astounding fact that what is right in the union does not have to be right for him an Indisputable right of man. If there exists in the union the institution of the old French parliaments, which Sancho loves so much, then he can even have his dislike recorded and deposit the document in the office of the law courts, consoling himself with the thought that lone cannot get rid of everything . These various statements appear to contradict themselves, one another and the actual state of things in the union. But the key o this riddle is to be found n the juridical fiction, already mentioned, that when Sancho is excluded from the property of others, he is merely coming to an agreement with these others. This fiction is expounded in more detail in the following statements: If, according to the rules of the union, Sancho is given a drubbing as soon as he tries to seize another s property, he will, of course, maintain that pilfering is a peculiarity of his; nevertheless, the union will decide that Sancho has merely taken a liberty . And if Sancho takes the liberty of attempting to seize another s possessions, the union has the peculiarity of sentencing him to a flogging for it. The essence of the matter is this. Bourgeois and, particularly, petty-bourgeois and small-peasant property is, as we have seen, retained in the union. Merely the interpretation, the point of view , is different, for which reason Sancho always lays stress on the way of regarding . Agreement is reached when this new philosophy of regarding enjoys the regard of the whole union. This philosophy consists of the following. Firstly, every relation, whether caused by, economic conditions or direct compulsion, is regarded as a relation of agreement . Secondly, it is imagined that all property belonging to others is relinquished to them by us and remains with them only until we have the power to take it from them; and if we never get the power, tant mieux. Thirdly, Sancho and his union in theory guarantee each other absence of respect, whereas in practice the. union reaches agreement with Sancho with the aid of a stick. Finally, this agreement is a mere phrase, since everyone knows that the others enter into it only with the secret reservation that they will reject it on the first convenient occasion, I see in your property something that is not yours but mine; since every ego does likewise, they see in it the universal, by which we arrive at the modern-German philosophical interpretation of ordinary, special and exclusive private property. The union s philosophy of property includes, inter alia, the following fancies derived from Sancho s system: On page 342, that property can be acquired in the union through, absence of respect; on page 351, that we are all in the midst of abundance , and have only to help myself to as much as I can whereas in actual fact the whole union belongs to Pharaoh s seven lean kine and finally, that Sancho cherishes thoughts which arc written in his book; and which are sung on page 374 in the incomparable ode addressed to himself imitating Heine s three odes to Schlegel: You, who cherishes such thoughts as are written in your. book ... you cherish nonsense Such is the hymn which for the time being Sancho addresses to himself, and about which the union will later reach agreement with him. Finally, it is obvious even without reaching agreement that property in the extraordinary sense, about which we already spoke in the Phenomenology , is accepted in the union in lieu of payment, as marketable property and property in circulation . Concerning simple facts, e.g., that I feel sympathy, that I talk to others, that my leg is amputated (or torn off), the union will reach agreement that the feeling experienced by sentient beings is also mine, my property (p. 387); that other people s ears and tongues are Likewise my property, and that mechanical relations too are my property. Thus, appropriation in the union will consist chiefly in all relations being transformed into property relations by means of a facile paraphrase. This new mode of expressing evils that are already now rife is an essential means or faculty in the union and will successfully make up for the deficit in the means of existence that is inevitable in view of Sancho s social gifts . These moral sayings, which Sancho learned from an Andalusian Jewish huckster who drew up rules of life and trade for his son, and which Sancho now pulls out of his knapsack, form the main wealth of the union. The basis of all these statements is the great proposition on page 351: This proposition is either meaningless, i. e., mere tautology, or is nonsense. It is tautology if it means: what you are able to do, you are able to do. It is nonsense if Verm gen No. 2 is meant to denote wealth in the ordinary sense , commercial wealth, and if the proposition is based, therefore, on the etymological similarity. The collision consists precisely in the fact that what is expected of my ability [Verm gen] is different from what it is capable of doing, c. g., it is demanded of my ability to write verses that it should make money out of these verses. My ability is expected to produce something quite different from the specific product of this special ability, viz., a product depending on extraneous conditions which are not subject to my ability. This difficulty is supposed to be resolved in the union by means of etymological synonymy. We see that our egoistical school-master hopes to occupy an important post in the union. Incidentally, this difficulty is only an apparent one. The usual pithy moral saying of the bourgeois: Anything is good to make money of , is here expounded at length in Sancho s solemn manner. On the other hand, on page 229, he reproaches the bourgeois period for the following: That is to say, attention is paid solely to what I am for others, to my usefulness, I am dealt with as a useful creature. Sancho spits into the bourgeois period s soup, so that in the union he alone can devour it. If the individuals of modern society regard one another as owners, as workers and, if Sancho wishes, as ragamuffins, this only means that they treat one another as useful creatures, a fact which can only be doubted by such a useless individual as Sancho. The capitalist, who regards the worker as a worker , shows consideration for him only because he needs workers; the worker treats the capitalist in the same way, and the Americans too, in Sancho s opinion (we would like him to point out the source from which he took this historic fact), have no use for a king, because he is useless to them as a worker. Sancho has chosen his example with his usual clumsiness, for it is supposed to prove exactly the opposite of what it actually proves. The relation of usefulness , which is supposed to be the sole relation of the individuals to one another in the union, is at once paraphrased as eating one another. The perfect Christians of the union, of course, also celebrate holy communion, only not by eating together but by eating one another. The extent to which this theory of mutual exploitation, which Bentham expounded ad nauseam, could already at the beginning of the present century be regarded as a phase of the previous one is shown by Hegel in his Ph nomenologie. See there the chapter The Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition , where the theory of usefulness is depicted as the final result of enlightenment. The apparent absurdity of merging all the manifold relationships of people in the one relation of usefulness, this apparently metaphysical abstraction arises from the fact that in modern bourgeois society all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation. This theory came to the fore with Hobbes and Locke, at the same time as the first and second English revolutions, those first battles by which the bourgeoisie won political power. it is to be found even earlier, of course, among writers on political economy, as a tacit presupposition. Political economy is the real science of this theory of utility; it acquires its true content among the Physiocrats, since they were the first to treat political economy systematically. In Helv tius and Holbach one can already find an idealisation of this doctrine, which fully corresponds to the attitude of opposition adopted by the French bourgeoisie before the revolution. Holbach depicts the entire activity of individuals in their mutual intercourse, e. g., speech, love, etc., as a relation of utility and utilisation. Hence the actual relations that are presupposed here are speech, love, definite manifestations of definite qualities of individuals. Now these relations are supposed not to have the meaning peculiar to them but to be the expression and manifestation of some third relation attributed to them, the relation of utility or utilisation. This paraphrasing ceases to be meaningless and arbitrary only when these relations have validity for the individual not on their own account, not as spontaneous activity, but rather as disguises, though by no means disguises of the category of Utilisation, but of an actual third aim and relation which is called the relation of utility. The verbal masquerade only has meaning when it is the unconscious or deliberate expression of an actual masquerade. In this case, the utility relation has a quite definite meaning, namely, that I derive benefit for myself by doing harm to someone else (exploitation de 1'homme par l'homme, [exploitation of man by man. See Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition. Premi re ann e]); in this case moreover the use that I derive from some relation is entirely extraneous to this relation, as we saw above in connection with ability [Verm gen] that from each ability a product alien to it was demanded, a relation determined by social relations and this is precisely the relation of utility. All this is actually the case with the bourgeois. For him only one relation is valid on its own account the relation of exploitation; all other relations have validity for him only insofar as he can include them under this one relation; and even where he encounters relations which cannot be directly subordinated to the relation of exploitation, he subordinates them to it at least in his imagination. The material expression of this use is money which represents the value of all things, people and social relations. Incidentally, one sees at a glance that the category of utilisation is first abstracted from the actual relations of intercourse which I have with other people (but by no means from reflection and mere will) and then these relations. are made out to be the reality of the category that has been abstracted from them themselves, a wholly metaphysical method of procedure. In exactly the same way and with the same justification, Hegel depicts all relations as relations of the objective spirit. Hence Holbach s theory is the historically justified philosophical illusion about the bourgeoisie just then developing in France, whose thirst for exploitation could still be regarded as a thirst for the full development of individuals in conditions of intercourse freed from the old feudal fetters. Liberation from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, i. e., competition, was, of course, for the eighteenth century the only possible way of offering the individuals a new career for freer development. The theoretical proclamation of the consciousness corresponding to this bourgeois practice, of the consciousness of mutual exploitation as the universal mutual relation of all individuals, was also a bold and open step forward. It was a kind of enlightenment which interpreted the political, patriarchal, religious and sentimental embellishment of exploitation under feudalism in a secular way; the embellishment corresponded to the form of exploitation existing at that time and it had been systematised especially by the theoretical writers of the absolute monarchy. Even if Sancho had done the same thing in his book as Helv tius and Holbach did in the last century, the anachronism would still have made it ridiculous. But we have seen that in the place of active bourgeois egoism he put a bragging egoism in agreement with itself. His sole service rendered against his will and without realising it was that he expressed the aspirations of the German petty bourgeois of today whose aim it is to become bourgeois. It was quite fitting that the petty, shy and timid behaviour of these petty bourgeois should have as its counterpart the noisy, blustering and impertinent public boasting of the unique among their philosophical representatives. It is quite in accordance with the situation of these petty bourgeois that they do not want to know about their theoretical loud-mouthed champion, and that he knows nothing about them; that they are at variance with one another, and he is forced to preach egoism in agreement with itself. Now, perhaps, Sancho will realise the sort of umbilical cord that connects his union with the Customs Union. The advances made by the theory of utility and exploitation, its various phases are closely connected with the various periods of development of the bourgeoisie. In the case of Helv tius and Holbach, the actual content of the theory never went much beyond paraphrasing the mode of expression of writers belonging to the period of the absolute monarchy. It was a different method of expression which reflected the desire to reduce all relations to the relation of exploitation and to explain the intercourse of people from their material needs and the ways of satisfying them, rather than the actual realisation of this desire. The problem was set. Hobbes and Locke had before their eyes not only the earlier development of the Dutch bourgeoisie (both of them had lived for some time in Holland) but also the first political actions by which the English bourgeoisie emerged from local and provincial limitations, as well as a comparatively highly developed stage of manufacture, overseas trade and colonisation. This particularly applies to Locke, who wrote during the first period of the English economy, at the time of the rise of joint-stock companies, the Bank of England and time of England s mastery of the seas. In their case, and particularly in that of Locke, the theory of exploitation was still directly connected with the economic content. Helv tius and Holbach had before them, besides English theory and the preceding development of the Dutch and English bourgeoisie, also the French bourgeoisie which was still struggling for its free development. The commercial spirit, universal in the eighteenth century, had especially in France taken possession of all classes in the form of speculation. The financial difficulties of the government and the resulting disputes over taxation occupied the attention of all France even at. that time. In addition, Paris in the eighteenth century was the only world city, the only city where there was personal intercourse among individuals of all nations. These premises, combined with the more universal character typical of the French in general, gave the theory of Helv tius and Holbach its peculiar universal colouring, but at ,he same time deprived it of the positive economic content that was still to be found among the English. The theory which for the English was still simply the registration of facts becomes for the French a philosophical system. This generality devoid of positive content, such as we find it in Helv tius and Holbach, is essentially different from the substantial comprehensive view which is first found in Bentham and Mill. The former corresponds to the struggling, still undeveloped bourgeoisie, the latter to the ruling, developed bourgeoisie. The content of the theory of exploitation that was neglected by Helv tius and Holbach was developed and systematised by the Physiocrats who worked at the same time as Holbach but because their basis was the undeveloped economic relations of France where feudalism, under which landownership plays the chief role, was still unshaken, they remained in thrall to the feudal outlook insofar as they declared landownership and land cultivation to be that [productive force] which determines the whole structure of society. The theory of exploitation owes its further development in England to Godwin, and especially to Bentham. As the bourgeoisie succeeded in asserting itself more and more both in England and in France, the economic content, which the French had neglected, was gradually re-introduced by Bentham. Godwin s Political Justice was written during the terror, and Bentham s chief works during and after the French Revolution and the development of large-scale industry in England. The complete union of the theory of utility with political economy is to be found, finally, in Mill. At an earlier period political economy had been the subject of inquiry either by financiers, bankers and merchants, i.e., in general by persons directly concerned with economic relations, or by persons with an all-round education like Hobbes, Locke and Hume, for whom it was of importance as a branch of encyclopaedic knowledge. Thanks to the Physiocrats, political economy for the first time was raised to the rank of a special science and has been treated as such ever since. As a special branch of science it absorbed the other relations political, juridical, etc. to such an extent that it reduced them to economic relations. But it regarded this subordination of all relations to itself as only one aspect of these relations, and thereby allowed them for the rest an independent significance outside political economy. The complete subordination of all existing relations to the relation of utility, and its unconditional elevation to the sole content of all other relations, occurs for the first time in Bentham s works, where, after the French Revolution and the development of large-scale industry, the bourgeoisie is no longer presented as a special class, but as the class whose conditions of existence are those of the whole society. When the sentimental and moral paraphrases, which for the French were the entire content of the utility theory, had been exhausted, all that remained for its further development was the question how individuals and relations were to be used, to be exploited. Political economy had meanwhile already provided the answer to this question; the only possible advance consisted in the inclusion of the economic content. Bentham achieved this advance. Political economy, however, had already given expression to the fact that the chief relations of exploitation are determined by production in general, independently of the will of individuals, who find them already in existence. Hence, no other field of speculative thought remained for the utility theory than the attitude of individuals to these important relations, the private exploitation of an already existing world by individuals. On this subject Bentham and his school indulged in lengthy moral reflections. The whole criticism of the existing world by the utility theory was consequently restricted within a narrow range. Remaining within the confines of bourgeois conditions, it could criticise. only those relations which had been handed down from a past epoch and were an obstacle to the development of the bourgeoisie. Hence, although the utility theory does expound the connection of all existing relations with economic relations, it does so only in a restricted way. From the outset the utility theory had the aspect of a theory of general utility, yet this aspect only became fraught with meaning when economic relations, especially division of labour and exchange, were included. With division of labour, the private activity of the individual becomes generally useful; Bentham s general utility becomes reduced to the same general utility which is asserted in competition as a whole. By taking into account the economic relations of rent, profit and wages, the definite relations of exploitation of the various classes were introduced, since the manner of exploitation depends on the social position of the exploiter. Up to this point the theory of utility was able to base itself on definite social facts; its further account of the manner of exploitation amounts to a mere recital of catechism phrases. The economic content gradually turned the utility theory into a mere apologia for the existing state of affairs, an attempt to prove that under existing conditions the mutual relations of people today are the most advantageous and generally useful. It has this character among all modern economists. But whereas the utility theory had thus at least the advantage of indicating the connection of all existing relations with the economic foundations of society, in Sancho the theory has lost all positive content; it is divorced from all actual relations and is restricted to the mere illusion cherished by the isolated bourgeois about his cleverness , by means of which he reckons to exploit the world. Incidentally, it is only in a few passages that Sancho deals with the theory of utility even in this diluted form; almost the entire book is taken up, as we have seen, with egoism in agreement with itself, i.e., with an illusion about this illusion of the petty bourgeois. Even these few passages are finally reduced by Sancho to mere vapour, as we shall see. I perceive , I recognise , I have to subdue , power is permitted to be only one of my means . We have already been shown in connection with the union what these moral demands mean and how far they correspond to reality. This illusion about his power is closely connected with the other illusion: that in the union substance is abolished (see Humane Liberalism ), and that the relations of the union members never assume a rigid form in respect to separate individuals. As regards the natural bond , it exists, despite Sancho s ill will , in the form of corv e peasant economy and organisation of labour, etc., in the union; likewise the spiritual bond in Sancho s philosophy. For the rest we need only refer to what we have already said several times, and repeated in connection with the union, about division of labour causing the relations to confront individuals as something existing independently of them. Whereas hitherto we were shown no other possibility of reaching the union than through rebellion, now we learn from the Commentary that the union of egoists already exists in hundreds of thousands of cases as one of the aspects of existing bourgeois society and that it is accessible to us even without any rebellion and any Stirner . Then Sancho shows us Sancho then makes some children meet for a game in front of Hess window, and makes a few friends take Hess to a tavern and lets him associate with his beloved . In just the same way, on page 305 of the book , association for interests is graciously accepted as a voluntary material aims and union of egoists. Thus the union here is reduced, on the one hand, to bourgeois associations and joint-stock companies and, on the other hand, to bourgeois clubs, picnics, etc. That the former belong wholly to the present epoch is well known, and that this equally applies to the latter is a so well known. Let Sancho look at the unions of an earlier epoch, e.g., of feudal times, or those of other nations, e.g., of the Italians, English, etc., right down to the unions of children, in order to realise what the difference is. By this new interpretation of the union he confirms only his obdurate conservatism. Sancho, who incorporated the whole of bourgeois society, insofar as he liked it, into his allegedly new institution, here by way of supplement only assures us that in his union people will also enjoy themselves and indeed in quite the traditional way. Our bonhomme, of course, does not consider the question: what relations existing independently of him enable or do not enable him to accompany a few friends to a tavern . The idea of resolving the whole of society into voluntary groups which is here, on the basis of hearsay accounts current in Berlin, turned into a Stirnerian idea belongs to Fourier. [Charles Fourier, Th orie de l'unit universelle] But with Fourier this view presupposes a complete transformation of society and is based on a criticism of the existing unions , so much admired by Sancho, and of their infinite tedium. Fourier describes these present-day attempts at amusement in their connection with the existing relations of production and intercourse, and wages a polemic against them; Sancho, far from criticising them, wants on the contrary to transplant them in their entirety into his new mutual agreement institution for promoting happiness; he thereby only proves once again how strongly he is held in thrall to existing bourgeois society. Finally, Sancho delivers the following oratio pro domo, i.e., in defence of the union . Sancho, therefore, expresses the pious wish that in his union, based on mutual exploitation, all the members will be equally powerful, cunning, etc., etc., so that each can exploit the others to exactly the same extent as they exploit him, and so that no one will be cheated in regard to his most natural and obvious interests or be able to satisfy his needs at the expense of others . We note here that Sancho recognises natural and obvious interests and needs of all consequently, equal interests and needs. Further, we recall at once page 456 of the book, according to which overreaching is a moral idea inculcated by the guild spirit , and for a man who has had a wise education , it remains a fixed idea from which no freedom of thought can give protection . Sancho gets his thoughts from above and adheres to them (ibid.). This equal power of all consists, according to his demand, in that everyone should become omnipotent , i.e., all should become impotent in relation to one another, a perfectly consistent postulate that coincides with the sentimental desire of the petty bourgeois for a world of hucksters, in which everyone gets his advantage. Or, on the other hand, our saint quite suddenly presupposes a society in which each can satisfy his needs unhampered, without doing so at the expense of others , and in that case the theory of exploitation again becomes a meaningless paraphrase for the actual relations of individuals to one another. After Sancho in his union has devoured and consumed the others, thereby transforming intercourse with the world into intercourse with himself, he passes from this indirect self-enjoyment to direct self-enjoyment, by consuming himself.

The German Ideology by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03m.htm

[The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] In the Middle Ages the pleasures were strictly classified; each estate had its own distinct forms of pleasure and its distinct manner of enjoyment. The nobility was the estate privileged to devote itself exclusively to pleasure, while the separation of work and enjoyment already existed for the bourgeoisie and pleasure was subordinated to work. The serfs, the class destined exclusively to labour, had only extremely few and restricted. pleasures, which came their way mostly by chance, depended on the whim of their masters and other contingencies, and are hardly worth considering. Under the rule of the bourgeoisie the nature of the pleasures depended on the classes of society. The pleasures of the bourgeoisie are determined by the material brought forth by this class at various stages of its development and they have acquired the tedious character which they still retain from the individuals and from the continuous subordination of pleasure to money-making. The present crude form of proletarian pleasure is due, on the one hand, to the long working hours, which led to the utmost intensification of the need for enjoyment, and, on the other hand, to the restriction -both qualitative and quantitative of the means of pleasure accessible to the proletarian. In general, the pleasures of all hitherto existing estates and classes had to be either childish, exhausting or crude, because they were always completely divorced from the vital activity, the real content of the life of the individuals. and more or less reduced to imparting an illusory content to a meaningless activity. The hitherto existing forms of enjoyment could, of course, only be criticised when the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat had developed to such an extent that the existing mode of production and intercourse could be criticised as well.

The German Ideology by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03n.htm

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and -- existing reality will collapse. These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy, which not only is received by the German public with horror and awe, but is announced by our philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its cataclysmic dangerousness and criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class; how the boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany. It is its aim to debunk and discredit the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation. Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.

The German Ideology

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/preface.htm

Real humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism, which substitutes "self-consciousness" or the "spirit" for the real individual man and with the evangelist teaches: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing." Needless to say, this incorporeal spirit is spiritual only in its imagination. What we are combating in Bauer's criticism is precisely speculation reproducing itself as a caricature. We see in it the most complete expression of the Christian-Germanic principle, which makes its last effort by transforming "criticism" itself into a transcendent power. Our exposition deals first and foremost with Bruno Bauer's Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung -- the first eight numbers are here before us -- because in it Bauer's criticism, and with it the nonsense of German speculation in general, has reached its peak. The more completely Critical Criticism (the criticism of the Literatur-Zeitung) distorts reality into an obvious comedy through philosophy, the more instructive it is. -- For examples see Faucher and Szeliga. -- The Literatur-Zeitung offers material by which even the broad public can be enlightened on the illusions of speculative philosophy. That is the aim of our book. Our exposition is naturally determined by its subject. Critical Criticism is in all respects below the level already attained by German theoretical development. The nature of our subject therefore justifies our refraining here from further discussion of that development itself. Critical Criticism makes it necessary rather to assert, in contrast to it, the already achieved results as such. We therefore give this polemic as a preliminary to the independent works in which we -- each of us for himself, of course -- shall present our positive view and thereby our positive attitude to the more recent philosophical anti social doctrines. Paris, September 1844 Engels, Marx

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch00.htm

Critical Criticism, however superior to the mass it deems itself, nevertheless has boundless pity for the mass. And therefore Criticism has so loved the mass that it sent its only begotten son, that all who believe in him may not be lost, but may have Critical life. Criticism was made mass and dwells amongst us and we behold its glory, the glory of the only begotten son of the father. In other words, Criticism becomes socialistic and speaks of works on pauperism. It considers it not a crime to be equal to God but empties itself and takes the form of a bookbinder and humbles itself even to nonsense, yea, even to Critical nonsense in foreign languages. It, whose heavenly virginal purity shrinks from contact with the sinful leprous mass, overcomes itself to the extent of taking notice of "Boz" and "all original writers on pauperism" and "has for years been following this evil of the present time step by step"; it scorns writing for experts, it writes for the general public, banning all outlandish expressions, all "Latin intricacies, all professional jargon". It bans all that from the works of others, for it would be too much to expect Criticism itself to submit to "this administrative regulation". And yet it does do so partly, renouncing with admirable ease, if not the words themselves, at least their content. And who will reproach it for using "the huge heap of unintelligible foreign words" when it repeatedly proves that it does not understand those words itself? Here are a few samples: That is why the institutions of mendicancy inspire them with horror. A doctrine of responsibility in which every motion of human thought becomes an image of Lot's wife. On the keystone of this really profound edifice of art. This is the main content of Stein's political testament, which the great statesman handed in even before retiring from the active service of the government and from all its transactions. This people had not yet any dimensions at that time for such extensive freedom. By palavering with fair assurance at the end of his publicistic work that only confidence was still lacking. To the manly state-elevating understanding, rising above routine and pusillanimous fear, reared on history and nurtured with a live perception of foreign public state system. The education of general national welfare. Freedom lay dead in the breast of the Prussian national mission under the control of the authorities. Popular-organic publicism. The people to whom even Herr Br ggemann delivers the baptismal certificate of its adulthood. A rather glaring contradiction to the other certitudes which are expressed in the work on the professional capacities of the people. Wretched self-interest quickly dispels all the chimeras of the national will. Passion for great gains, etc., was the spirit that pervaded the whole of the Restoration period and which, with a fair quantity of indifference, adhered to the new age. The vague idea of political significance to be found in the Prussian countrymanship nationality rests on the memory of a great history. The antipathy disappeared and turned into a completely exalted condition. In this wonderful transition each one in his own way still put forward in prospect his own special wish. A catechism with unctuous Solomon-like language the words of which rise gently like a dove chirp! chirp! to the regions of pathos and thunder-like aspects. All the dilettantism of thirty-five years of neglect. The too sharp thundering at the citizens by one of their former town authorities could have been suffered with the calmness of mind characteristic of our representatives if Benda's view of the Town Charter of 1808 had not laboured under a Mussulman conceptual affliction with regard to the essence and the application of the Town Charter. In Herr Reichardt, the audacity of style always corresponds to the audacity of the thought. He makes transitions like the following: Herr Br ggemann ... 1843 ... state theory ... every upright man ... the great modesty of our Socialists ... natural marvels ... demands to be made on Germany ... supernatural marvels ... Abraham ... Philadelphia ... manna ... baker ... but since we are speaking of marvels, Napoleon brought, etc. After these samples it is no wonder that Critical Criticism gives us a further "explanation" of a sentence which it itself describes as expressed in "popular language", for it "arms its eyes with organic power to penetrate chaos". And here it must be said that then even "popular language" cannot remain unintelligible to Critical Criticism. It is aware that the way of the writer must necessarily be a crooked one if the individual who sets out on it is not strong enough to make it straight; and therefore it naturally ascribes "mathematical operations" to the author. It is self-evident and history, which proves everything which is self-evident, also proves this that Criticism does not become mass in order to remain mass, but in order to redeem the mass from its mass-like mass nature, that is, to raise the popular language of the mass to the critical language of Critical Criticism. It is the lowest grade of degradation for Criticism to learn the popular language of the mass and transfigure that vulgar jargon into the high-flown intricacy of the dialectics of Critical Criticism.

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch01.htm

After rendering most substantial services to self-consciousness by humiliating itself to the extent of nonsense in foreign languages, and thereby at the same time freeing the world from pauperism, Criticism still further humiliates itself to the extent of nonsense in practice and history. It masters "English questions of the day" and gives us a genuinely critical outline of the history of English industry. Criticism, which is self-sufficient, and complete and perfect in itself, naturally cannot recognise history as it really took place, for that would mean recognising the base mass in all its mass-like mass nature, whereas the problem is precisely to redeem the mass from its mass nature. History is therefore freed from its mass nature, and Criticism, which has a free attitude to its object, calls to history: "You ought to have happened in such and such a way!" All the laws of Criticism have retrospective force: prior to the decrees of Criticism, history behaved quite differently from how it did after them. Hence mass-type history, so-called real history, deviates considerably from Critical history, as it takes place in Heft VII of the Literatur-Zeitung from page 4 onwards. In mass-type history there were no factory towns before there were factories; but in Critical history, in which, as already in Hegel, the son begets his father, Manchester, Bolton and Preston were flourishing factory towns before factories were even thought of. In real history the cotton industry was founded mainly on Hargreaves' jenny and Arkwright's throstle, Crompton's mule being only an improvement of the spinning jenny according to the new principle discovered by Arkwright. But Critical history knows how to make distinctions: it scorns the one-sidedness of the jenny and the throstle, and gives the crown to the mule as the speculative identity of the extremes. In reality, the invention of the throstle and the mule immediately made possible the application of water-power to those machines, but Critical Criticism sorts out the principles lumped together by crude history and makes this application come only later, as something quite special. In reality the invention of the steam-engine preceded all the above-mentioned inventions; according to Criticism it is the crown of them all and the last. In reality the business ties between Liverpool and Manchester in their present scope were the result of the export of English goods; according to Criticism they are the cause of the export and both are the result of the proximity of the two towns. In reality nearly all goods from Manchester go to the Continent via Hull,according to Criticism via Liverpool. In reality all grades of wages exist in English factories, from Is 6d to 40s and more; but according to Criticism only one rate is paid 11s. In reality the machine replaces manual labour; according to Criticism it replaces thought. In reality the association of workers for wage rises is allowed in England, but according to Criticism it is prohibited, for when the Mass wants to allow itself anything it must first ask Criticism. In reality factory labour is extremely tiring and gives rise to specific diseases there are even special medical works on them; according to Criticism "excessive exertion cannot be a hindrance to work, for the power is provided by the machine". In reality the machine is a machine; according to Criticism it has a will, for as it does not rest, neither can the worker, and he is subordinated to an alien will. But that is still nothing at all. Criticism cannot be content with the mass-type parties in England; it creates new ones, including a "factory party", for which history may be thankful to it. On the other hand, it lumps together the factory-owners and the factory workers in one massive heap why bother about such trifles! and decrees that the factory workers refused to contribute to the Anti-Corn-Law Leagues not out of ill-will or because of Chartism, as the stupid factory-owners maintain, but merely because they were poor. It further decrees that with the repeal of the English Corn Laws agricultural labourers will have to put up with a lowering of wages, in regard to which, however, we must most submissively remark that that destitute class cannot be deprived of another penny without being reduced to absolute starvation. It decrees that the working day in English factories is sixteen hours, although a silly un-Critical English law has fixed a maximum of twelve hours. It decrees that England is to become a huge workshop for the world, although the un-Critical mass of Americans, Germans and Belgians are ruining one market after another for the English by their competition. Lastly, it decrees that neither the propertied nor the non-propertied classes in England are aware of the centralisation of property and its consequences for the working classes, although the stupid Chartists think they are well aware of them; the Socialists maintain that they expounded those consequences in detail long ago, and even Tories and Whigs like Carlyle, Alison and Gaskell have proved their knowledge of them in their works. Criticism decrees that Lord Ashley's Ten Hour Bill is a half-hearted juste-milieu measure and Lord Ashley himself "a true illustration of constitutional action", while the factory-owners, the Chartists, the landowners in short, all that makes up the mass nature of England have so far considered this measure as an expression, the mildest possible one admittedly, of a downright radical principle, since it would lay the axe at the root of foreign trade and thereby at the root of the factory system nay, not merely lay the axe to it, but cut deeply into it. Critical Criticism knows better. It knows that the ten hour question was discussed before a "commission" of the Lower House, although the un-Critical newspapers try to make us believe that this "commission" was the House itself, "a Committee of the Whole House" ; but Criticism must needs do away with that eccentricity of the English Constitution. Critical Criticism, which itself begets its opposite, the stupidity of the Mass, also produces the stupidity of Sir James Graham: by a Critical understanding of the English language it puts things in his mouth which the un-Critical Home Secretary never said, just to allow Critical wisdom to shine brighter in comparison with his stupidity. Graham, according to Criticism, says that the machines in the factories wear out in about twelve years whether they work ten hours a day or twelve, and that therefore a Ten Hour Bill would make it impossible for the capitalists to reproduce in twelve years through the work of their machines the capital laid out on them. Criticism proves that it has thus put a false conclusion in the mouth of Sir James Graham, for a machine that works one-sixth of the time less every day will naturally remain usable longer. However correct this observation of Critical Criticism against its own false conclusion, it must, on the other hand, be conceded that Sir James Graham said that under a Ten Hour Bill the machine would have to work quicker in the proportion that its working time was reduced (Criticism itself quotes this in [Heft] VIII, page 32) and that in that case the time when it would be worn out would be the same twelve years. This must all the more be acknowledged as the acknowledgment contributes to the glory and exaltation of "Criticism"; for only Criticism both made the false conclusion and then refuted it. Criticism is just as magnanimous towards Lord John Russell, to whom it imputes the wish to change the political form of the state and the electoral system. From this we must conclude either that Criticism's urge to produce stupidities is uncommonly powerful or that Lord John Russell must have become a Critical Critic within the past week. But Criticism only becomes truly magnificent in its fabrication of stupidities when it discovers that the English workers who in April and May held meeting after meeting, drew up petition after petition, and all for the Ten Hour Bill, and displayed more agitation throughout the factory districts than at any time during the past two years that those workers take only a "partial interest" in this question, although it is evident that "legislation limiting the working day has also occupied their attention" Criticism is truly magnificent when it finally makes the great, the glorious, the unheard-of discovery that proves it to workers who drag Anti-Corn-Law agitators down from the platform at every public meeting, who have seen to it that the Anti-Corn-Law League no longer dares to hold a public meeting in any English industrial town, who consider the League to be their only enemy and who, during the debate of the Ten Hour Bill as nearly always before in similar matters had the support of the Tories. Criticism is superb, too, when it discovers that "the workers still let themselves be lured by the sweeping promises of the Chartist movement", which is nothing but the political expression of public opinion among the workers. Criticism is superb, too, when it realises, in the depths of its Absolute Spirit, that It was so far not known that the party grouping of the landowners and the mill-owners, because of the numerical smallness of either class of owners and the equal political rights of each (with the exception of the few peers), was so comprehensive that it was completely identical with the political party groupings, and not their most consistent expression, their peak. Criticism is splendid when it suggests that the Anti-Corn-Law Leaguers do not know that, ceteris paribus, a drop in the price of bread must be followed by a drop in wages, so that all would remain as it was; whereas these people expect that, granted there is a drop in wages and a consequent lowering of production costs, the result will be an expansion of the market. This, they expect, would lead to a reduction of competition among the workers, and consequently wages would still be kept a little higher in comparison with the price of bread than they are now. Freely creating its opposite nonsense and moving in artistic rapture, Criticism, which only two years ago exclaimed "Criticism speaks German, theology speaks Latin!", has now learnt English and calls the estate-owners "Landeigner" (landowners), the factoryowners "M hleigner" (mill-owners) in English a mill means any factory with machinery driven by steam or water-power and the workers "H nde" (hands). Instead of "Einmischung" it says Interferenz (interference); and in its infinite mercy for the English language, the sinful mass nature of which is abundantly evident, it condescends to improve it by doing away with the pedantry with which the English place the title "Sir" before the Christian name of knights and baronets. Where the Mass says "Sir James Graham", it says "Sir Graham". That Criticism reforms English history and the English language out of principle and not out of levity will presently be provided by the thoroughness with which it treats the history of Herr Nauwerck.

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch02.htm

Criticism cannot ignore Herr Nauwerck's infinitely important dispute with the Berlin Faculty of Philosophy. It has indeed had a similar experience and it must take Herr Nauwerck's fate as a background in order to put its own dismissal from Bonn in sharper relief. Criticism, being accustomed to considering the Bonn affair as the event of the century, and having already written the "philosophy of the deposition of criticism", could be expected to give a similar detailed philosophical construction of the Berlin "collision". Criticism proves a priori that everything had to happen in such a way and no other. It proves: Criticism disposes of these important questions with rare thoroughness in four pages, proving by means of Hegel's logic why everything had to happen as it did and why no god could have prevented it. In another place Criticism says that there has not yet been full knowledge of a single epoch in history; modesty prevents it from saying that it has full knowledge of at least its own collision and Nauwerck's, which, although they are not epochs, appear to Criticism to be epoch-making. Having "abolished" in itself the "element" of thoroughness, Critical Criticism becomes "the tranquillity of knowledge".

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch03.htm

The French Socialists maintain that the worker makes everything, produces everything and yet has no rights, no possessions, in short, nothing at all. Criticism answers in the words of Herr Edgar, the personification of the tranquillity of Knowledge: Here Criticism achieves a height of abstraction in which it regards only the creations of its own thought and generalities which contradict all reality as "something", indeed as "everything", The worker creates nothing because he creates only "individual", that is, perceptible, palpable, spiritless and un-Critical objects, which are an abomination in the eyes of pure Criticism. Everything that is real and living is un-Critical, of a mass nature, and therefore "nothing"; only the ideal, fantastic creatures of Critical Criticism are "everything". The worker creates nothing, because his work remains individual, having only his individual needs as its object, that is, because in the present world system the individual interconnected branches of labour are separated from, and even opposed to, one another; in short, because labour is not organized. Criticism's own proposition, if taken in the only reasonable sense it can possibly have, demands the organization of labour. Flora Tristan, in an assessment of whose work this great proposition appears, puts forward the same demand and is treated en canaille for her insolence in anticipating Critical Criticism. Anyhow, the proposition that the worker creates nothing is absolutely crazy except in the sense that the individual worker produces nothing whole, which is tautology. Critical Criticism creates nothing, the worker creates everything; and so much so that even his intellectual creations put the whole of Criticism to shame; the English and the French workers provide proof of this. The worker creates even man; the critic will never he anything but sub-human though on the other hand, of course, he has the satisfaction of being a Critical critic. Criticism does nothing but "construct formulae out of the categories of what exists'', namely, out of the existing Hegelian philosophy and the existing social aspirations. Formulae, nothing but formulae. And despite ail its invectives against dogmatism, it condemns itself to dogmatism and even to feminine dogmatism. It is and remains an old woman faded, widowed Hegelian philosophy which paints and adorns its body, shrivelled into the most repulsive abstraction, and ogles all over Germany in search of a wooer. Herr Edger, taking pity on social questions, meddles also in "conditions of prostitutes" (Heft V, p. 26). He criticizes Paris Police Commissioner Be raud's book on prostitution because he is concerned with the "point of view" from which "B raud considers the attitude of prostitutes to society" The "tranquillity of knowledge" is surprised to see that a policeman adopts the point of view of the police, and it gives the mass to understand that that point of view is quite wrong. But it does not reveal its own point of view. Of course not! When Criticism takes up with prostitutes it cannot be expected to do so in public. In order to complete its transformation into the ''tranquillity of knowledge", Critical Criticism must first seek to dispose of love. Love is a passion, and nothing is more dangerous for the tranquillity of knowledge than passion. That is why, speaking of Madame von Paalzow's novels, which, he assures us, he has "thoroughly studied". Herr Edgar is amazed at "a childish thing like so-called love". It is a horror and abomination and excites the wrath of Critical Criticism, makes it almost as bitter as gall, indeed, insane. In order to change love into "Moloch", the devil incarnate, Herr Edgar first changes it into a goddess. When love has become a goddess, i.e., a theological object, it is of course submitted to theological criticism; moreover, it is known that god and the devil are not far apart. Herr Edgar changes love into a "goddess", a, "cruel goddess" at that, by changing man who loves, the love of man, into a man of love; by making "love" a being apart, separate from man and as such independent. By this simple process, by changing the predicate into the subject, all the attributes and manifestations of human nature can be Critically transformed into their negation and into alienations of human nature." Thus, for example, Critical Criticism makes criticism, as a predicate and activity of man, into a subject apart, criticism which relates itself to itself and is therefore Critical Criticism: a "Moloch", the worship of which consists in the self-immolation, the suicide of man, and in particular of his ability to think. Object! Horrible! There is nothing more damnable, more profane, more mass-like than an object agrave; bas the object! How could absolute subjectivity, the actus puris, "pure" Criticism, not see in love its b te noire, that Satan incarnate, in love, which first really teaches man to believe in the objective world outside himself, which not only makes man into an object, but even the object into a man! Love, continues the tranquillity of knowledge, beside itself, is not even content with turning man into the category of "object" for another man, it even makes him into a definite, real object, into this bad-individual (see Hegel's Ph nomenologie on the categories "This" and "That", where there is also a polemic against the bad "This"), external object, which does not remain internal, hidden in the brain, but is sensuously manifest. Lives not only in the brain immured. No, the beloved is a sensuous object, and if Critical Criticism is to condescend to recognition of an object, it demands at the very least a senseless object. But love is an un-Critical, un-Christian materialist. Finally, love even makes one human being "this external object of the emotion of the soul" of another, the object in which the selfish feeling of the other finds its satisfaction, a selfish feeling because it looks for its own essence in the other, and that must not be. Critical Criticism is so free from all selfishness that for it the whole range of human essence is exhausted by its own self. Herr Edgar, of course, does not tell us in what way the beloved differs from the other "external objects of the emotion of the soul in which the selfish feelings of men find their satisfaction". The spiritually profound, meaningful, highly expressive object of love means nothing to the tranquillity of knowledge but the abstract formula: "this external object of the emotion of the soul", much as the comet means nothing to the speculative natural philosopher but "negativity". By making man the external object of the emotion of his soul, man does in fact attach "importance" to him, Critical Criticism itself admits, but only objective importance, so to speak, while the importance which Criticism attaches to objects is none other than that which it attaches to itself. Hence this importance lies not in "bad external being", but in the "Nothing" of the Critically important object. If the tranquillity of knowledge has no object in real man, it has, on the other hand, a cause in humanity. Critical love "is careful above all not to forget the cause behind the personality, for that cause is none other than the cause of humanity". Un-Critical love does not separate humanity from the personal, individual man. In the eyes of the tranquillity of knowledge, love is an abstract passion according to the speculative terminology in which the concrete is called abstract and the abstract concrete. For abstraction, love is "the maid from a foreign land" who has no dialectical passport and is therefore expelled from the country by the Critical police. The passion of love is incapable of having an interest in internal development because it cannot be construed a priori, because its development is a real one which takes place in the world of the senses and between real individuals. But the main interest of speculative construction is the "Whence" and the "Whither". The "Whence" is the "necessity of a concept, its proof and deduction" (Hegel). The "Whither" is the determination "by which each individual link of the speculative circular course, as the animated content of the method, is at the same time the beginning of a new link" (Hegel). Hence, only if its "Whence" and its "Whither" could be construed a priori would love deserve the "interest" of speculative Criticism. What Critical Criticism combats here is not merely love but everything living, everything which is immediate, every sensuous experience, any and every real experience, the "Whence" and the "Whither" of which one never knows beforehand. By overcoming love, Herr Edgar has completely asserted himself as the "tranquillity of knowledge", and now by his treatment of Proudhon, he can show great virtuosity in knowledge, the "object" of which is no longer "this external object", and a still greater lack of love for the French language. It was not Proudhon himself, but "Proudhon's point of view", Critical Criticism informs us, that wrote Qu'est-ce que la propri t ? As only the works of the Critical point of view possess a character of their own, the Critical characterization necessarily begins by giving a character to Proudhon's work. Herr Edgar gives this work a character by translating it. He naturally gives it a bad character, for he turns it into an object of "Criticism" Proudhon's work, therefore, is subjected to a double attack by Herr Edgar an unspoken one in his characterising translation and an outspoken one in his Critical comments. We shall see that Herr Edgar is more devastating when he translates than when he comments. The characterized Proudhon confines himself to will and opinion, because "good will" and unscientific "opinion" are characteristic attributes of the un-Critical Mass. The characterized Proudhon behaves with the humility that is fitting for the mass and subordinates what he wishes to what he does not wish. He does not presume to wish to give a system of the new, he wishes less, he even wishes for nothing but the abolition of privilege, etc. Besides this Critical subordination of the will he has to the will he has not, his very first word is marked by a characteristic lack of logic. A writer who begins his book by saying that he does not wish to give any system of the new, should then tell us what he does wish to give: whether it is a systematised old or an unsystematised new. But does the characterized Proudhon, who does not wish to give any system of the new, wish to give the abolition of privilege? No. He just wishes it. The real Proudhon says: "Je ne fais pas de syst me; je demande la fin du privil ge," etc. I make no system, I demand, etc., that is to say, the real Proudhon declares that he does not pursue any abstract scientific aims, but makes immediately practical demands on society. And the demand he makes is not an arbitrary one. It is motivated and justified by his whole argument and is the summary of that argument for, he says, "justice, rien que justice; tel est le resum ' de mon discours." With his "Justice, nothing but justice, that is what I mean", the characterized Proudhon gets himself into a position which is all the more embarrassing as he means much more. According to Herr Edgar, for example, he "means" that philosophy has not been practical enough, he "means" to refute Charles Comte, and so forth. The Critical Proudhon asks: "Ought man then always to be unhappy?" In other words, he asks whether unhappiness is man's moral destiny. The real Proudhon is a light-minded Frenchman and he asks whether unhappiness is a material necessity, a must. (L'homme doit-il tre ternellement malheureux?) The expression " toute fin" being a bad mass-type expression that is not in the mass-type German dictionaries, the Critical, Proudhon naturally omits this more exact definition of the "explanations". This term is taken from mass-type French jurisprudence, and "explications ... toute fin" means explanations which preclude any objection. The Critical Proudhon censures the "Reformists", a French Socialist Party; the massy Proudhon censures the initiators of reforms. The mass-type Proudhon distinguishes various classes of "entrepreneurs de r formes". These (ceux-ci) say one thing, those (ceix-l ) say another, others (d'autres) a third. The Critical Proudhon, on the other hand, makes the same reformists "accuse now one, then another, then a third", which in any case is proof of their inconstancy. The real Proudhon, who follows mass-type French practice, speaks of "les conspirateurs et les meutes", i.e., first of the conspirators and then of their activity, revolts. The Critical Proudhon, on the other hand, who has lumped together the various classes of reformists, classifies the rebels and hence says: the conspirators and the rebels. The mass-type Proudhon speaks of ignorance and "general corruption". The Critical Proudhon changes ignorance into stupidity, "corruption" into '"depravity, and finally, as a Critical critic, makes the stupidity general. He himself gives an immediate example of it by putting "g n rale" in the singular instead of the plural. He writes: "l'ignorance et la corruption g n rale" for general stupidity and depravity. According to un-Critical French grammar this should be: "l'ignorance et la corruption g n rales. The characterized Proudhon, who speaks and thinks otherwise than the mass-type one, necessarily went through quite a different course of education. He "questioned the masters of science, read hundreds of volumes of philosophy and law, etc., and at last" he "realised that we have never yet grasped the meaning of the words Justice, Equity, Freedom". The real Proudhon thought he had realised at first (je crus d'abord reconna tre) what the Critical Proudhon realised only "at last". The Critical alteration of d'abord into enfin is necessary because the mass may not think it realises anything "at first". The mass-type Proudhon tells explicitly how he was staggered by the unexpected result of his studies and distrusted it. Hence he decided to carry out a "countertest" and asked himself: "Is it possible that mankind has so long and so universally been mistaken over the principles of the application of morals? How and why was it mistaken?" etc. He made the correctness of his observations dependent on the solution of these questions. He found that in morals, as in all other branches of knowledge, errors "are stages of science". The Critical Proudhon, on the other hand, immediately trusted the first impression that his studies of political economy, law and the like made upon him. Needless to say, the mass cannot proceed in any thorough way; it is bound to raise the first results of its investigations to the level of indisputable truths. It has "reached the end before it has started, before it has measured itself with its opposite". Hence, "it is seen" later "that it is not yet at the beginning when it thinks it has reached the end". The Critical Proudhon therefore continues his reasoning in the most untenable and incoherent way. The Critical Proudhon does not give any reason why incomplete knowledge of moral laws call suffice for social progress even for a single day. The real Proudhon, having asked himself whether and why mankind could universally and so long have been mistaken and having found as the solution that all errors are stages of science and that our most imperfect judgments contain a sum of truths sufficient for a certain number of inductions and for a certain area of practical life, beyond which number and which area they lead theoretically to the absurd and practically to decay, is in a position to say that even imperfect knowledge of moral laws can suffice for social progress for a time. The Critical Proudhon says: How can a struggle arise against an opponent who does not yet exist? Admitted, the Critical Proudhon has told us that a new idea has become necessary but he has not said that it has already come into existence. The mass-type Proudhon says: The Critical Proudhon asserts: "It is man's destiny to learn step by step", as if man did not have a quite different destiny, namely, that of being man, and as if that learning "step by step" necessarily brought him a step farther. I can go step by step and arrive at the very point from which I set out. The un-Critical Proudhon speaks, not of "destiny", but of the condition (condition) for man to learn not step by step (pas pas), but by degrees (par degr s). The Critical Proudhon says to himself: In the first sentence the Critical Proudhon says that the principle is spoilt, misunderstood by society,hence that it is correct in itself. In the second sentence he admits superfluously that it is true in its essence; nevertheless he reproaches society with willing and honouring "this principle". The mass-type Proudhon, on the other hand, reproaches society with willing and honouring not this principle, but this principle as falsified by our ignorance ("Ce principe ... tel que notre ignorance l'a fait, est honor "). The Critical Proudhon finds the essence of the principle in its untrue form true. The mass-type Proudhon finds that the essence of the falsified principle is our incorrect conception, but that it is true in its object (objet), just as the essence of alchemy and astrology is our imagination, but their objects the movement of the heavenly bodies and the chemical properties of substances are true. The Critical Proudhon continues his monologue: The Critical Proudhon has a most fantastic way of reasoning. From the fact that the politicians are ignorant and unclear, he goes on in the most arbitrary fashion to say that a reality lies at the basis of every error, which can all the less he doubted as there is a reality at the basis of every error in the person of the one who errs. From the fact that a reality lies at the basis of every error he goes on to conclude that truth is to be found in the books of politicians. And finally he even makes out that the politicians have brought this truth into the world. Had they brought it into the world we should not need to look for it in their books. The mass-type Proudhon says: The Critical Proudhon asks himself: "What is justice, what is its essence, its character, its meaning?" As if it had some meaning apart from its essence and character. The un-Critical Proudhon asks: What is its principle, its character and its formula (formule)? The formula is the principle as a principle of scientific reasoning. In the mass-type French language there is an essential difference between formule and signification. In the Critical French language there is none. After his highly irrelevant disquisitions, the Critical Proudhon pulls himself together and exclaims: The un-Critical Proudhon, on the other hand, who arrived at his object long ago, tries to attain more precise and more positive definitions of his object (d'arriver quelque chose de plus pr cis et de plus positif). For the Critical Proudhon "the law" is a "definition of what is right", for the un-Critical Proudhon it is a "statement" (d claration) of it. The un-Critical Proudhon disputes the view that right is made by law. But a "definition of the law" can mean that the law is defined just as it can mean that it defines. Previously, the Critical Proudhon himself spoke about the definition of the social principle in this latter sense. To be sure, it is unseemly of the mass-type Proudhon to make such nice distinctions. Considering these differences between the Critically characterised Proudhon and the real Proudhon, it is no wonder that Proudhon No. 1 seeks to prove quite different things than Proudhon No. 2. The Critical Proudhon The mass-type Proudhon is far from wishing to prove what is evident. He says instead: What, then, does the un-Critical Proudhon wish to prove? And precisely that inconstancy, that change, that progress "is what history proves by the most striking testimonies". And the un-Critical Proudhon quotes these striking testimonies of history. His Critical double, who proves a completely different proposition by the experience of history, also presents that experience itself in a different way. According to the real Proudhon, "the wise" (les sages), according to the Critical Proudhon, "the philosophers", foresaw the fall of the Roman Empire. The Critical Proudhon can of course consider only philosophers to be wise men. According to the real Proudhon, Roman "rights were consecrated by ten centuries of law practice" or "administration of justice" (ces droits consacr s par une justice dix: fois s culaire); according to the Critical Proudhon, Rome had "rights consecrated by ten centuries of justice". According to the same Proudhon No. 1, the Romans reasoned as follows: According to the un-Critical Proudhon, the Romans reasoned more logically. The fact was set out in detail: And the mass-type Proudhon adds, referring to law: "Rome's claims were justified by the law of nations (droit des gens)." This way of proving the right of subjugation was completely in keeping with the Roman view on law. See the mass-type pandects: "jure gentium servitus invasit" (Fr. 4. D.I.I)." According to the Critical Proudhon, "idolatry, slavery and softness" were "the basis of Roman institutions", of all its institutions without exception. The real Proudhon says: "Idolatry in religion, slavery in the state and Epicureanism in private life" ( picurisme in the ordinary French language is not synonymous with mollesse, softness) "were the basis of the institutions." Within that Roman situation there "appeared", says the mystic Proudhon, "the Word of God", whereas according to the real, rationalistic Proudhon, it was "a man who called himself the Word of God". In the real Proudhon this man calls the priests "vipers" (vip res); in the Critical Proudhon he speaks more courteously with them and calls them "serpents". In the former he speaks in the Roman way of "advocates" [Advokaten], in the latter in the German way of "lawyers" [Rechtsgelehrte]. The Critical Proudhon calls the spirit of the French Revolution a spirit of contradiction, and adds: He cannot refrain from repeating mechanically the favourite categories of Critical Criticism, the "old" and the "new". He cannot refrain from the senseless demand that the "new" should have on itself [an sich] something methodical and considered, just as one might have a stain on oneself [an sich]. The real Proudhon says: Carried away by the memory of the French Revolution, the Critical Proudhon revolutionises the French language so much that he translates un fait physique by "a fact of physics", and un fait intellectuel by "a fact of the intellect". By this revolution in the French language the Critical Proudhon manages to put physics in possession of all the facts to be found in nature. Raising natural science unduly on one side, he debases it just as much on the other by depriving it of intellect and distinguishing between a fact of physics and a fact of the intellect. To the same extent he makes all further psychological and logical investigation unnecessary by raising the intellectual fact directly to the level of a fact of the intellect. Since the Critical Proudhon, Proudhon No. 1, has not the slightest idea what the real Proudhon, Proudhon No. 2, wishes to prove by his historical deduction, neither does the real content of that deduction exist for him, namely, the proof of the change in the views on law and of the continuous implementation of justice by the negation of historical actual right. Thus the real Proudhon proves how the negation of Roman law led to the widening of right in the Christian conception, the negation of the right of conquest to the right of the communes and the negation of the whole feudal law by the French Revolution to the present more comprehensive system of law. Critical Criticism could not possibly leave Proudhon the glory of having discovered the law of the implementation of a principle by its negation. In this conscious formulation, this idea was a real revelation for the French. As the first criticism of any science is necessarily influenced by the premises of the science it is fighting against, so Proudhon's treatise Qu'est-ce que la propri t ? is the criticism of political economy from the standpoint of political economy. We need not go more deeply into the juridical part of the book, which criticizes law from the standpoint of law, for our main interest is the criticism of political economy. Proudhon's treatise will therefore be scientifically superseded by a criticism of political economy, including Proudhon's conception of political economy. This work became possible only owing to the work of Proudhon himself, just as Proudhon's criticism has as its premise the criticism of the mercantile system by the Physiocrats, Adam Smith's criticism of the Physiocrats, Ricardo's criticism of Adam Smith, and the works of Fourier and Saint-Simon. All treatises on political economy take private property for granted. This basic premise is for them an incontestable fact to which they devote no further investigation, indeed a fact which is spoken about only "accidentellement'', as Say naively admits. But Proudhon makes a critical investigation the first resolute, ruthless, and at the same time scientific investigation of the basis of political economy, private property. This is the great scientific advance he made, an advance which revolutionizes political economy and for the first time makes a real science of political economy possible. Proudhon's treatise Qu'est-ce que la propri t ? is as important for modern political economy as Siey s' work Qu'est-ce que le tiers tat? for modern politics. Proudhon does not consider the further creations of private property, e.g., wages, trade, value, price, money, etc., as forms of private property in themselves, as they are considered, for example, in the Deutsch-Franz sische Jahrb cher (see Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy by F. Engels), but uses these economic premises in arguing against the political economists; this is fully in keeping with his historically justified standpoint to which we referred above. Accepting the relationships of private property as human and rational, political economy operates in permanent contradiction to its basic premise, private property, a contradiction analogous to that of the theologian who continually gives a human interpretation to religious conceptions, and by that very fact comes into constant conflict with his basic premise, the superhuman character of religion. Thus in political economy wages appear at the beginning as the proportional share of the product due to labour. Wages and profit on capital stand in the most friendly, mutually stimulating, apparently most human relationship to each other. Afterwards it turns out that they stand in the most hostile relationship, in inverse proportion to each other. Value is determined at the beginning in an apparently rational way, by the cost of production of an object and by its social usefulness. Later it turns out that value is determined quite fortuitously and that it does not need to bear any relation to either the cost of production or social usefulness. The size of wages is determined at the beginning by free agreement between the free worker and the free capitalist. Later it turns out that the worker is compelled to allow the capitalist to determine it, just as the capitalist is compelled to fix it as low as possible. Freedom of the contracting parties has been supplanted by compulsion. The same holds good of trade and-all other economic relationships. The economists themselves occasionally feel these contradictions, the development of which is the main content of the conflict between them. When, however, the economists become conscious of these contradictions, they themselves attack private property in one or other particular form as the falsifier of what is in itself (i.e., in their imagination) rational wages, in itself rational value, in itself rational trade. Adam Smith, for instance, occasionally polemises against the capitalists, Destutt de Tracy against the money-changers, Simonde de Sismondi against the factory system, Ricardo against landed property, and nearly all modern economists against the non-industrial capitalists, among whom property appears as a mere consumer. Thus, as an exception when they attack some special abuse the economists occasionally stress the semblance of humanity in economic relations, but sometimes, and as a rule, they take these relations precisely in their clearly pronounced difference from the human, in their strictly economic sense. They stagger about within this contradiction completely unaware of it. Now Proudhon has put an end to this unconsciousness once for all. He takes the human semblance of the economic relations seriously and sharply opposes it to their inhuman reality. He forces them to be in reality what they imagine themselves to be, or rather to give up their own idea of themselves and confess their real inhumanity. He therefore consistently depicts as the falsifier of economic relations not this or that particular kind of private property, as other economists do, but private property as such and in its entirety. He has done all that criticism of political economy from the standpoint of political economy can do. Herr Edgar, who wishes to characterise the standpoint of the treatise Qu'est-ce que la propri t ?, naturally does not say a word either of political economy or of the distinctive character of this book, which is precisely that it has made the essence of private property the vital question of political economy and jurisprudence. This is all self-evident for Critical Criticism. Proudhon, it says, has done nothing new by his negation of private property. He has only let out a secret which Critical Criticism did not want to divulge. "Proudhon," Herr Edgar continues immediately after his characterising translation, "therefore finds something absolute, an eternal foundation in history, a god that guides mankind justice." Proudhon's book, written in France in 1840, does not adopt the standpoint of German development in 1844. It is Proudhon's standpoint, a standpoint which is shared by countless diametrically opposed French writers, which therefore gives Critical Criticism the advantage of having characterized the most contradictory standpoints with a single stroke of the pen. Incidentally, to be relieved from this Absolute in history as well one has only to apply consistently the law formulated by Proudhon himself, that of the implementation of justice by its negation. If Proudhon does not carry consistency as far as that, it is only because he had the misfortune of being born a Frenchman, not a German. For Herr Edgar, Proudhon has become a theological object by his Absolute in history, his belief in justice, and Critical Criticism, which is ex professo a criticism of theology, can now set to work on him in order to expatiate on "religious conceptions" We shall see how religious Critical Criticism sets up as a dogma a situation in which at the end one of the opposites, "Criticism", comes out victorious over the other, the "Mass", as the only truth. By seeing in mass-type justice an Absolute, a god of history, Proudhon committed an injustice that is all the greater because just Criticism has explicitly reserved for itself the role of that Absolute, that god in history. The tranquillity of knowledge tells us that Proudhon sees in the fact of poverty a contradiction to justice, that is to say, finds it unjustified; yet in the same breath it assures us that this fact becomes for him absolute and justified. Hitherto political economy proceeded from wealth, which the movement of private property supposedly creates for the nations, to its considerations which are an apology for private property. Proudhon proceeds from the opposite side, which political economy sophistically conceals, from the poverty bred by the movement of private property to his considerations which negate private property. The first criticism of private property proceeds, of course, from the fact in which its contradictory essence appears in the form that is most perceptible and most glaring and most directly arouses man's indignation from the fact of poverty, of misery. Criticism, which has hitherto understood nothing of the facts of property and of poverty, uses, "on the other hand", the deed which it has accomplished in its imagination as an argument against Proudhon' s real deed. It unites the two facts in a single one, and having made one out of two, grasps the inner link between the two. Criticism cannot deny that Proudhon, too, is aware of an inner link between the facts of poverty and of property, since because of that very link he abolishes property in order to abolish poverty. Proudhon did even more. He proved in detail how the movement of capital produces poverty. But Critical Criticism does not bother with such trifles. It recognizes that poverty and private property are opposites a rather widespread recognition. It makes poverty and wealth a single whole, which it "investigates as such to find the preconditions for its existence" an investigation which is all the more superfluous since it has just made "the whole as such" and therefore its making is in itself the precondition for the existence of this whole. By investigating "the whole as such" to find the preconditions for its existence, Critical Criticism is searching in the genuine theological manner outside the "whole" for the preconditions for its existence. Critical speculation operates outside the object which it pretends to deal with. Whereas the whole antithesis is nothing but the movement of both its sides, and the precondition for the existence of the whole lies in the very nature of the two sides. But Critical Criticism dispenses with the study of this real movement which forms the whole in order to be able to declare that it, Critical Criticism as the tranquillity of knowledge, is above both extremes of the antithesis, and that its activity, which has made "the whole as such", is now alone in a position to abolish the abstraction of which it is the maker. Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are both creations of the world of private property. The question is exactly what place each occupies in the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole. Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the antithesis, self-satisfied private property. The proletariat, on the contrary, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it proletariat. It is the negative side of the antithesis, its restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property. The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it. Indeed private property drives itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not depend on it, which is unconscious and which takes place against the will of private property by the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty which is conscious of its spiritual and physical poverty, dehumanization which is conscious of its dehumanization, and therefore self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence that wage-labour pronounces on itself by producing wealth for others and poverty for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property. When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need the practical expression of necessity is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity. "Critical Criticism" can all the less admit this since it has proclaimed itself the exclusive creative element in history. To it belong the historical antitheses, to it belongs the task of abolishing them. That is why it issues the following notification through its incarnation, Edgar: Property and absence of property have received metaphysical consecration as Critical speculative antitheses. That is why only the hand of Critical Criticism can touch them without committing a sacrilege. Capitalists and workers must not interfere in their mutual relationship. Far from having any idea that his Critical conception of antitheses could be touched, that this holy thing could be desecrated, Herr Edgar lets his opponent make an objection that he alone could make to himself. It is now clear why Critical Criticism does not give a single thought in German. The language of its thoughts has not yet come into being in spite of all that Herr Reichardt by his Critical handling of foreign words, Herr Faucher by his handling of English, and Herr Edgar by his handling of French, have done to prepare the new Critical language. The Critical Proudhon says: The Critical Proudhon makes landed property arise simultaneously with the division of land. He effects the transition from possession to property by the expression "on this occasion". The real Proudhon says: On this occasion, therefore, it is possession that equality consecrated in the first place. According to the Critical Proudhon According to the real Proudhon it was not that the founders of property overlooked this course of its development in their concern for their needs. It was rather that they did not foresee it; but even if they had been able to foresee it, their actual need would have gained the upper hand. Besides, the real Proudhon is too mass-minded to counterpose the right to alienate, sell, etc., to the "right of property", i.e., to counterpose the varieties to the species. He contrasts the "right to keep one's heritage" to the "right to alienate it, etc.", which constitutes a real opposition and a real step forward. A short consideration would have sufficed to arouse the belief of Herr Edgar. He must be aware that Herr Bruno Bauer based all his arguments on "infinite self-consciousness" and that he also saw in this principle the creative principle of the gospels which, by their infinite unconsciousness, appear to be in direct contradiction to infinite self-consciousness. In the same way Proudhon conceives equality as the creative principle of private property, which is in direct contradiction to equality. If Herr Edgar compares French equality with German "self-consciousness" for an instant, he will see that the latter principle expresses in German, i.e., in abstract thought, what the former says in French, that is, in the language of politics and of thoughtful observation. Self-consciousness is man's equality with himself in pure thought. Equality is man's consciousness of himself in the element of practice, i.e., man's consciousness of other men as his equals and man's attitude to other men as his equals. Equality is the French expression for the unity of human essence, for man's consciousness of his species and his attitude towards his species, for the practical identity of man with man, i.e., for the social or human relation of man to man. Hence, just as destructive criticism in Germany, before it had progressed in Feuerbach to the consideration of real man, tried to resolve everything definite and existing by the principle of self-consciousness, destructive criticism in France tried to do the same by the principle of equality. The opinion that philosophy is the abstract expression of the existing state of things does not belong originally to Herr Edgar. It belongs to Feuerbach, who was the first to describe philosophy as speculative and mystical empiricism and to prove it. But Herr Edgar manages to give this opinion an original, Critical twist. While Feuerbach concludes that philosophy must come down from the heaven of speculation to the depth of human misery, Herr Edgar, on the contrary, informs us that philosophy is over-practical. However, it seems rather that philosophy, precisely because it was only the transcendent, abstract expression of the actual state of things, by reason of its transcendentalism and abstraction, by reason of its imaginary difference from the world, must have imagined it had left the actual state of things and real human beings far below itself. On the other hand, it seems that because philosophy was not really different from the world it could not pronounce any real judgment on it, it could not bring any real differentiating force to bear on it and could therefore not interfere practically, but had to be satisfied at most with a practice in abstracto. Philosophy was over-practical only in the sense that it soared above practice. Critical Criticism, by lumping humanity together in a spiritless mass, gives the most striking proof how infinitely small real human beings seem to speculation. In this the old speculation agrees with Critical Criticism, as the following sentence out of Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie shows: In other cases in which speculation speaks of man it does not mean the concrete, but the abstract, the idea, the spirit, etc. The way in which philosophy expresses the actual state of things is strikingly exemplified by Herr Faucher in connection with the actual English situation and by Herr Edgar in connection with the actual situation of the French language. Proudhon here does exactly the same thing as the German critics who,, finding that the proofs of the existence of God are based on the idea of man, argue from that idea against the existence of God. Self-consciousness, according to Herr Bruno Bauer, lies at the basis of all religious ideas. It is, he says, the creative principle of the gospels. Why, then, were the consequences of the principle of self-consciousness more powerful than self-consciousness itself? Because, the answer comes after the German fashion, self-consciousness is indeed the creative principle of religious ideas, but only as self-consciousness outside itself, in contradiction to itself, alienated and estranged. Self-consciousness that has come to itself, that understands itself, that apprehends its essence, therefore governs the creations of its self-alienation. Proudhon finds himself in exactly the same case, with the difference, of course, that he speaks French whereas we speak German, and he therefore expresses in a French way what we express in a German way. Proudhon asks himself why equality, although as the creative principle of reason it underlies the institution of property and as the ultimate rational foundation is the basis of all arguments in favour of property, nevertheless does not exist, while its negation, private property, does. He accordingly considers the fact of property in itself. He proves "that, in truth, property, as an institution and a principle, is impossible" (p. 34), i.e., that it contradicts itself and abolishes itself in all points; that, to put it in the German way, it is the existence of alienated, self-contradicting, self-estranged equality. The real state of things in France, like the recognition of this estrangement, suggests correctly to Proudhon the necessity of the real abolition of this estrangement. While negating private property, Proudhon feels the need to justify the existence of private property historically. His argument, like all first arguments of this kind, is pragmatic, i.e., he assumes that earlier generations wished consciously and with reflection to realised in their institutions that equality which for him represents the human essence. He does not write in the interest of self-sufficient Criticism or out of any abstract, self-made interest, but out of a mass-type, real, historic interest, an interest that goes beyond criticism, that will go as far as a crisis. Not only does Proudhon write in the interest of the proletarians, he is himself a proletarian, an ouvrier. His work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat and therefore has quite a different historical significance from that of the literary botch-work of any Critical Critic. According to Herr Edgar, having and not having are for Proudhon absolute categories. Critical Criticism sees nothing but categories everywhere. Thus, according to Herr Edgar, having and not having, wages, salary, want and need, and work to satisfy that need, are nothing but categories. If society had to free itself only from the categories of having and not having, how easy would the "overcoming" and "abolition" of those categories be made for it by any dialectician, even if he were weaker than Herr Edgar! Indeed, Herr Edgar considers this such a trifle that he does not think it worth the trouble to give even an explanation of the categories of having and not having as an argument against Proudhon. But not having is not a mere category, it is a most dismal reality; today the man who has nothing is nothing, for he is cut off from existence in general, and still more from a human existence, for the condition of not having is the condition of the complete separation of man from his objectivity. Therefore not having seems quite justified in being the highest object of thought for Proudhon; all the more since so little thought had been given to this subject prior to him and the socialist writers in general. Not having is the most despairing spiritualism, a complete unreality of the human being, a complete reality of the dehumanized being, a very positive having, a having of hunger, of cold, of disease, of crime, of debasement, of hebetude, of all inhumanity and abnormity. But every object which for the first time is made the object of thought with full consciousness of its importance is the highest object of thought. Proudhon's wish to abolish not having and the old way of having is quite identical with his wish to abolish the practically estranged relation of man to his objective essence and the economic expression of human self-estrangement. But since his criticism of political economy is still captive to the premises of political economy, the re-appropriation of the objective world itself is still conceived in the economic form of possession. Proudhon does not oppose having to not having, as Critical Criticism makes him do; he opposes possession to the old way of having, to private property. He proclaims possession to be a "social function". What is "interesting" in a function, however, is not to "exclude" the other person, but to affirm and to realised the forces of my own being. Proudhon did not succeed in giving this thought appropriate development The idea of "equal possession" is the economic and therefore itself still estranged expression for the fact that the object as being for man, as the objective being of man, is at the same time the existence of man for other men, his human relation to other men, the social behaviour of man to man. Proudhon abolishes economic estrangement within economic estrangement. The Critical Proudhon has a Critical property-owner, too, according to whose The mass-type Proudhon says to the mass-type property-owner: By "richesse naturelle"," the Critical Proudhon makes Say understand "natural possessions" although Say, to preclude any error, states explicitly in the pitom; to his Trait d' conomie politique that by richesse he understands neither property nor possession, but a "sum of values". Of course, the Criti cal Proudhon reforms Say just as he himself is reformed by Herr Edgar. He makes Say "infer immediately a right to take a field as property" because land is easier to appropriate than air or water. But Say, far from inferring from the greater possibility of appropriating land a property right to it, says instead quite explicitly: That is why, in Say's opinion, there must be "concours de la l gislation" and "droit positif" to provide a basis for the right to landed property. The real Proudhon does not make Say "immediately" infer the right of landed property from the easier appropriation of land. He reproaches him with basing himself on possibility instead of right and confusing the question of possibility with the question of right: The Critical Proudhon continues: Far from making "only" this remark, the real Proudhon says, on the contrary, that he draws "attention", to the appropriation of air and water incidentally (en passant). The Critical Proudhon makes an unaccountable use of the Roman formula of banishment. He forgets to say who the "we" are who have been banished. The real Proudhon addresses the non-property-owners : The Critical Proudhon polemises against Charles Comte as follows: How childish the Critical Proudhon's polemic is! He expects Charles Comte to give up the categories he uses for his proof and to jump over to others so as to come, not to his own conclusions, but "perhaps" to those of the Critical Proudhon. The real Proudhon does not make any such demands on Charles Comte; he does not dispose of him with a "perhaps", but defeats him with his own categories. Charles Comte, Proudhon says, proceeds from the indispensability of air, food, and, in certain climates, clothing, not in order to live, but in order not to stop living. Hence (according to Charles Comte) in order to maintain himself, man constantly needs to appropriate things of various kinds. These things do not all exist in the same proportion. Proudhon proceeds from Comte's own definitions. First of all he proves to him that land is also an object of primary necessity, the usufruct of which must therefore remain free to everyone, within the limits of Comte's clause, namely: "without prejudice to the enjoyment of others." Why then has land become private property? Charles Comte answers: because it is not unlimited. He should have concluded, on the contrary, that because land is limited it may not be appropriated. The appropriation of air and water causes no prejudice to anybody because, as they are unlimited, there is always enough left. The arbitrary appropriation of land, on the other hand, prejudices the enjoyment of others precisely because the land is limited. The use of the land must therefore be regulated in the interests of all. Charles Comte's method of proving refutes his own thesis. The real Proudhon does not speak of jus utendi et abutendi that the right of property "involves". He is too mass-minded to speak of a right of property that the right of property involves. Jus utendi et abutendi re sua is, in fact, the right of property itself. Hence Proudhon directly refuses a people the right of property over its territory. To those who find that exaggerated, he replies that in all epochs the imagined right of national property gave rise to suzerainty, tribute, royal prerogatives, corv e, etc. The real Proudhon reasons against Charles Comte as follows: Comte wishes to expound how property arises and he begins with the hypothesis of a nation as owner. He thus falls into a petitio principii. He makes the state sell lands, he lets industrialists buy those estates, that is to say, he presupposes the property relations that he wishes to prove. The Critical Proudhon scraps the French decimal system. He keeps the franc but replaces the centime by the "Dreier'. The real Proudhon does not speak of the fact that land has value not only today but also tomorrow: he contrasts the full present value to the value of its capacity and its future, which depends on my skill in exploiting the land. He says: For Proudhon the question is not one of stressing the contrast between one harvest and the lasting good the money I get for the field can, as capital, also become a "lasting good" but the contrast between the present value and the value the land can acquire through continuous cultivation. The real Proudhon says: Cessante causa cessat effectus. When the owner is owner only as a worker, he ceases to be an owner as soon as he ceases to be a worker. "The system of appropriation through work," Proudhon goes on, "is therefore contrary to law; and when the supporters of that system put it forward as an explanation of the laws they are contradicting themselves." To say further, according to this opinion, that the cultivation of the land, for example, "creates full ownership of the same" is a petitio principii. It is a fact that a new productive capacity of the matter has been created. But what has to be proved is that ownership of the matter itself has thereby been created. Man has not created the matter itself. And he cannot even create any productive capacity if the matter does not exist beforehand. The Critical Proudhon makes Gracchus Babeuf a partisan of freedom, but for the mass-minded Proudhon he is a partisan of equality (partisan de l' galit ). The Critical Proudhon, who wanted to estimate Homer's fee for the Iliad, says: The Critical Proudhon is too superior to the trifles of political economy to know that the value of an object and what that object gives somebody else are two different things. The real Proudhon says: The real Proudhon supposes that the Iliad has an infinite price (or exchange value, prix), while the Critical Proudhon supposes that it has an infinite value. The real Proudhon counterposes the value of the Iliad, its value in the economic sense (valeur intrinsque), to its exchange value (valeur changeable); the Critical Proudhon counterposes its "value for exchange" to its "intrinsic value", i,e., its value as a poem. The real Proudhon says: The Critical Proudhon says: In the Critical Proudhon we read that The real Proudhon does not speak anywhere about the feelings of talent. He says that talent must lower itself to the level of society. Nor does he at all assert that the man of talent is only a product of society. On the contrary, he says: The Critical Proudhon goes on to say: The real Proudhon nowhere resorts to the gratitude of the man of talent. He says: Finally, the Critical Proudhon achieves the miracle of making a society of 150 workers able to maintain a "marshal" and, therefore, probably, an army. In the real Proudhon the marshal is a "farrier" (mar chal). This is the only point on which Critical Criticism attempts to solve its problem and to prove to Proudhon that from the standpoint of political economy he is arguing wrongly against political economy. Here Criticism disgraces itself in truly Critical fashion. Proudhon agrees with Hugo Grotius in arguing that prescription is no title to change possession into property or a "legal principle" into another principle, any more than time can change the truth that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles into the truth that they are equal to three right angles. Herr Edgar's conclusion is: since Proudhon said that mere time cannot change one legal principle into another, that by itself it cannot change or modify anything, he is inconsistent when he makes labour time the measure of the economic value of the product of labour. Herr Edgar achieves this Critically Critical remark by translating "valeur"" by "Geltung" so that he can use the word for validity of a legal principle in the same sense as for the commercial value of a product of labour. He achieves it by identifying empty length of time with time filled with labour. Had Proudhon said that time cannot change a fly into an elephant, Critical Criticism could have said with the same justification: he has therefore no right to make labour time the measure of wages. Even Critical Criticism must be capable of grasping that the labour time expended on the production of an object is included in the cost of production of that object, that the cost of production of an object is what it costs, and therefore what it can be sold for, abstraction being made of the influence of competition. Besides the labour time and the material of labour, economists include in the cost of production the rent paid to the owner of the land, interest and the profit of the capitalist. The latter are excluded by Proudhon because he excludes private property. Hence there remain only the labour time and the expenses. By making labour time, the immediate existence of human activity as activity, the measure of wages and the determinant of the value of the product, Proudhon makes the human side the decisive factor. In old political economy, on the other hand, the decisive factor was the material power of capital and of landed property. In other words, Proudhon reinstates man in his rights, but still in an economic and therefore contradictory way. How right he is from the standpoint of political economy can be seen from the fact that Adam Smith, the founder of modern political economy, in the very first pages of his book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, develops the idea that before the invention of private property, that is to say, presupposing the non-existence of private property, labour time was the measure of wages and of the value of the product of labour, which was not yet distinguished from wages. But even let Critical Criticism suppose for an instant that Proudhon did not proceed from the premise of wages. Does it believe that the time which the production of an object requires will ever not be an essential factor in the "validity" of the object! Does it believe that time will lose its costliness? As far as immediate material production is concerned, the decision whether an object is to be produced or not, i.e., the decision on the value of the object, will depend essentially on the labour time required for its production. For it depends on time whether society has time to develop in a human way. And even as far as intellectual production is concerned, must I not, if I proceed reasonably in other respects, consider the time necessary for the production of an intellectual work when I determine its scope, its character and its plan? Otherwise I risk at least that the object that is in my idea will never become an object in reality, and can therefore acquire only the value of an imaginary object, i.e., an imaginary value. The criticism of political economy from the standpoint of political economy recognizes all the essential determinants of human activity, but only in an estranged, alienated form. Here, for example, it converts the importance of time for human labour into its importance for wages, for wage-labour. Herr Edgar continues: Among the followers of Fourier and Saint-Simon, talent puts forward exaggerated fee claims on an economic basis and makes its imagined notion of its infinite value the measure of the exchange value of its products. Proudhon answers it in exactly the same way as political economy answers any claim for a price much higher than the so-called natural price, that is, higher than the cost of production of the object offered. He answers by freedom of contract. But Proudhon does not misuse this relation in the sense of political economy; on the contrary, he assumes that to be real which the economists consider to be only nominal and illusory-the freedom of the contracting parties. The Critical Proudhon finally reforms French society by as deep a transformation of the French proletarians as of the French bourgeoisie. He denies the French proletarians "strength" because the real Proudhon reproaches them with a lack of virtue (vertu). He makes their skill in work problematic "you are perhaps skilled in work" because the real Proudhon unconditionally recognizes it ("prompts au travail vous tes", etc.). He converts the French bourgeoisie into dull burghers whereas the real Proudhon counterposes the ignoble bourgeois (bourgeois ignobles) to the blemished nobles (nobles fl tris). He converts the bourgeois from happy-medium burghers (bourgeois juste-milieu) into "our good burghers", for which the French bourgeoisie can be grateful. Hence, where the real Proudhon says the "ill will" of the French bourgeoisie (la malveillance de nos bourgeois) is growing, the Critical Proudhon consistently makes the "carefreeness of our burghers" grow. The real Proudhon's bourgeois is so far from being carefree that he calls out to himself: "N'ayons pas peur! N'ayons pas peur!" Those are the words of a man who wishes to reason himself out of fear and worry. By creating the Critical Proudhon through its translation of the real Proudhon, Critical Criticism has revealed to the Mass what a Critically perfect translation is. It has given directions for "translation as it ought to be". It is therefore rightly against bad, mass-type translations. Critical Criticism has the fortunate instinct not to go into Proudhon's reasoning on the interest and profit system, etc., i.e., into the most important part of his argument. The reason is that on this point not even a semblance of criticism of Proudhon can be offered without absolutely positive knowledge of the movement of private property. Critical Criticism tries to make up for its impotence by observing that Proudhon has not proved the historical possibility of property. Why does Criticism, which has nothing but words to give, expect others to give it everything? Herr Edgar, in contrast to Proudhon's deduction, could have expressed himself still more exhaustively to the effect that the worker cannot buy back his product because in general he must buy it back. The definition of buying already implies that he regards his product as an object that is no longer his, an estranged object. Among other things, Herr Edgar's exhaustive argument does not exhaust the question why the capitalist, who himself is nothing but an individual man, and what is more, a man paid by profit and interest, can buy back not only the product of labour, but still more than this product. To explain this Herr Edgar would have to explain the relationship between labour and capital, that is, to expound the essence of capital. The above quotation from Criticism shows most palpably how Critical Criticism immediately makes use of what it has learnt from a writer to pass it off as wisdom it has itself discovered and use it with a Critical twist against the same writer. For it is from Proudhon himself that Critical Criticism drew the argument that it says Proudhon did not give and that Herr Edgar did. Proudhon says: Proudhon was the first to draw attention to the fact that the sum of the wages of the individual workers, even if each individual labour be paid for completely, does not pay for the collective power objectified in its product, that therefore the worker is not paid as a part of the collective labour power [gemeinschaftlichen Arbeitskraft]. Herr Edgar twists this into the assertion that the worker is nothing but an individual paid man. Critical Criticism thus opposes a general thought of Proudhon's to the further concrete development that Proudhon himself gives to the same thought. It takes possession of this thought after the fashion of Criticism and expresses the secret of Critical socialism in the following sentence: According to Critical Criticism, the whole evil lies only in the workers' "thinking". It is true that the English and French workers have formed associations in which they exchange opinions not only on their immediate needs as workers, but on their needs as human beings. In their associations, moreover, they show a very thorough and comprehensive consciousness of the "enormous" and "immeasurable" power which arises from their co-operation. But these mass-minded, communist workers, employed, for instance, in the Manchester or Lyons workshops, do not believe that by "pure thinking" they will be able to argue away their industrial masters and their own practical debasement. They are most painfully aware of the difference between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage-labour and the like are no ideal figments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their self-estrangement and that therefore they must be abolished in a practical, objective way for man to become man not only in thinking, in consciousness, but in mass being, in life. Critical Criticism, on the contrary, teaches them that they cease in reality to be wage-workers if in thinking they abolish the thought of wage-labour; if in thinking they cease to regard themselves as wage-workers and, in accordance with that extravagant notion, no longer let themselves be paid for their person. As absolute idealists, as ethereal beings, they will then naturally be able to live on the ether of pure thought. Critical Criticism teaches them that they abolish real capital by overcoming in thinking the category Capital, that they really change and transform themselves into real human beings by changing their "abstract ego" in consciousness and scorning as an un-Critical operation all real change of their real existence, of the real conditions of their existence, that is to say, of their real ego. The "spirit", which sees in reality only categories, naturally reduces all human activity and practice to the dialectical process of thought of Critical Criticism. That is what distinguishes its socialism from mass-type socialism and communism. After his great argumentation, Herr Edgar must, of course, declare Proudhon's criticism "devoid of consciousness". Later we shall also quote a few passages from the works of Critical Criticism (see the Bank for the Poor and the Model Farm) to show that it has not yet become acquainted with the most elementary economic relationships, let alone thought them out, and hence with its characteristic Critical tact has felt itself called upon to pass judgment on Proudhon. Now that Critical Criticism as the tranquillity of knowledge has "made" all the mass-type "antitheses its concern", has mastered all reality in the form of categories and dissolved all human activity into speculative dialectics, we shall see it produce the world again out of speculative dialectics. It goes without saying that if the miracles of the Critically speculative creation of the world are not to be "desecrated", they can be presented to the profane mass only in the form of mysteries. Critical Criticism therefore appears in the incarnation of Vishnu-Szeliga as a mystery-monger.

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm

Thus he proclaims as mysteries degeneracy (criminals) within civilisation and rightlessness and inequality in the state. This means that socialist literature, which has revealed these mysteries, is still a mystery to Herr Szeliga, or that he wants to convert the best-known findings of that literature into a private mystery of "Critical Criticism." We therefore need not go more deeply into Herr Szeliga's discourse on these mysteries; we shall merely draw attention to a few of the most brilliant points. If Eugene Sue depicts the taverns, hide-outs and language of criminals, Herr Szeliga discloses the "mystery that what the "author" wanted was not to depict that language or those hide-outs, but For Parisians in general and even for the Paris police the hide-outs of criminals are such a "mystery" that at this very moment broad light streets are being laid out in the Cit ' to give the police access to them. Finally, Eug ne Sue himself states that in the descriptions mentioned above he was counting "sur la curiosit , craintive" of his readers. M. Eug ne Sue has counted on the timid curiosity of his readers in all his novels. It is sufficient to recall Atar Gull, Salamandre, Plick and Plock, etc. If from real apples, pears, strawberries and almonds I form the general idea "Fruit , if I go further and imagine that my abstract idea "Fruit , derived from real fruit, is an entity existing outside me, is indeed the true essence of the pear, the apple, etc., then in the language of speculative philosophy I am declaring that "Fruit is the "Substance of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. I am saying, therefore, that to be a pear is not essential to the pear, that to be an apple is not essential to the apple; that what is essential to these things is not their real existence, perceptible to the senses, but the essence that I have abstracted from them and then foisted on them, the essence of my idea "Fruit . I therefore declare apples, pears, almonds, etc., to be mere forms of existence, modi, of "Fruit My finite understanding supported by my senses does of course distinguish an apple from a pear and a pear from an almond, but my speculative reason declares these sensuous differences inessential and irrelevant. It sees in the apple the same as in the pear, and in the pear the same as in the almond, namely "Fruit . Particular real fruits are no more than semblances whose true essence is "the substance" "Fruit . By this method one attains no particular wealth of definition. The mineralogist whose whole science was limited to the statement that all minerals are really "the Mineral" would be a mineralogist only in his imagination. For every mineral the speculative mineralogist Says "the Mineral", and his science is reduced to repeating this word as many times as there are real minerals. Having reduced the different real fruits to the one "fruit" of abstraction "the Fruit", speculation must, in order to attain some semblance of real content, try somehow to find its way back from "the Fruit", from the Substance to the diverse, ordinary real fruits, the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. It is as hard to produce real fruits from the abstract idea "the Fruit" as it is easy to produce this abstract idea from real fruits. Indeed, it is impossible to arrive at the opposite of an abstraction without relinquishing the abstraction. The speculative philosopher therefore relinquishes the abstraction "the Fruit", but in a speculative, mystical fashion with the appearance of not relinquishing it. Thus it is really only in appearance that he rises above his abstraction. He argues somewhat as follows: If apples, pears, almonds and strawberries are really nothing but "the Substance", "the Fruit", the question arises: Why does "the Fruit" manifest itself to me sometimes as an apple, sometimes as a pear, sometimes as an almond? Why this semblance of diversity which so obviously contradicts my speculative conception of Unity, "the Substance", "the Fruit"? This, answers the speculative philosopher, is because "the Fruit" is not dead, undifferentiated, motionless, but a living, self-differentiating, moving essence. The diversity of the ordinary fruits is significant not only for my sensuous understanding, but also for "the Fruit" itself and for speculative reason. The different ordinary fruits are different manifestations of the life of the "one Fruit"; they are crystallisations of "the Fruit" itself. Thus in the apple "the Fruit" gives itself an apple-like existence, in the pear a pear-like existence. We must therefore no longer say, as one might from the standpoint of the Substance: a pear is "the Fruit", an apple is "the Fruit", an almond is "the Fruit", but rather "the Fruit" presents itself as a pear, "the Fruit" presents itself as an apple, "the Fruit" presents itself as an almond; and the differences which distinguish apples, pears and almonds from one another are the self-differentiations of "the Fruit" and,.make the particular fiuits different members of the life-process of "the Fruit". Thus "the Fruit" is no longer an empty undifferentiated unity; it is oneness as allness, as "totality of fruits, which constitute an "organically linked series of members . In every member of that series "the Fruit" gives itself a more developed, more explicit existence, until finally, as the "summary of all fruits, it is at the same time the living unity which contains all those fruits dissolved in itself just as it produces them from within itself, just as, for instance, all the limbs of the body are constantly dissolved in and constantly produced out of the blood. We see that if the Christian religion knows only one Incarnation of God, speculative philosophy has as many incarnations as there are things, just as it has here in every fruit an incarnation of the Substance, of the Absolute Fruit. The main interest for the speculative philosopher is therefore to produce the existence of the real ordinary fruits and to say in some mysterious way that there are apples, pears, almonds and raisins. But the apples, pears, almonds and raisins that we rediscover in the speculative world are nothing but semblances of apples, semblances of pears, semblances of almonds and semblances of raisins, for they are moments in the life of "the Fruit", this abstract creation of the mind, and therefore themselves abstract creations of the mind. Hence what is delightful in this speculation is to rediscover all the real fruits there, but as fruits which have a higher mystical significance, which have grown out of the ether of your brain and not out of the material earth, which are incarnations of "the Fruit", of the Absolute Subject. When you return from the abstraction, the supernatural creation of the mind, "the Fruit", to real natural fruits, you give on the contrary the natural fruits a supernatural significance and transform them into sheer abstractions. Your main interest is then to point out the unity of "the Fruit" in all the manifestations of its life the apple, the pear, the almond that is, to show the mystical interconnection between these fruits, how in each one of them "the Fruit" realises itself by degrees and necessarily progresses, for instance, from its existence as a raisin to its existence as an almond. Hence the value of the ordinary fruits no longer consists in their natural qualities, but in their speculative quality, which gives each of them a definite place in the life-process of "the Absolute Fruit" The ordinary man does not think he is saying anything extraordinary when he states that there are apples and pears. But when the philosopher expresses their existence in the speculative way he says something extraordinary. He performs a miracle by producing the real natural objects, the apple, the pear, etc., out of the unreal creation of the mind "the Fruit", i.e., by creating those fruits out of his own abstract reason, which he considers as an Absolute Subject outside himself, represented here as "the Fruit". And in regard to every object the existence of which he expresses, he accomplishes an act of creation. It goes without saying that the speculative philosopher accomplishes this continuous creation only by presenting universally known qualities of the apple, the pear, etc., which exist in reality, as determining features invented by him, by giving the names of the real things to what abstract reason alone can create, to abstract formulas of reason, finally, by declaring his own activity, by which he passes from the idea of an apple to the idea of a pear, to be the self-activity of the Absolute Subject, "the Fruit" In the speculative way of speaking, this operation is called comprehending Substance as Subject, as an inner process, as an Absolute Person, and this comprehension constitutes the essential character of Hegel's method. These preliminary remarks were necessary to make Herr Szeliga intelligible. Only now, after dissolving real relations, e.g., law and civilisation, in the category of mystery and thereby making "Mystery (das Geheimnis) into Substance, does he rise to the true speculative, Hegelian height and transforms "Mystery into a self-existing Subject incarnating itself in real situations and persons so that the manifestations of its life are countesses, marquises, grisettes, porters, notaries, charlatans, and love intrigues, balls, wooden doors, etc. Having produced the category "Mystery out of the real world, he produces the real world out of this category. The mysteries of speculative construction in Herr Szeliga's presentation will be all the more visibly disclosed as he has an indisputable double advantage over Hegel. On the one hand, Hegel with masterly sophistry is able to present as a process of the imagined creation of the mind itself, of the Absolute Subject, the process by which the philosopher through sensory perception and imagination passes from one subject to another. On the other hand, however, Hegel very often gives a real presentation, embracing the thing itself, within the speculative presentation. This real development within the speculative development misleads the reader into considering the speculative development as real and the real as speculative. With Herr Szeliga both these difficulties vanish. His dialectics have no hypocrisy or dissimulation. He performs his tricks with the most laudable honesty and the most ingenuous straightforwardness. But then he nowhere develops any real content, so that his speculative construction is free from all disturbing accessories, from all ambiguous disguises, and appeals to the eye in its naked beauty. In Herr Szeliga we also see a brilliant illustration of how speculation on the one hand apparently freely creates its object a priori out of itself and, on the other hand, precisely because it wishes to get rid by sophistry of the rational and natural dependence on the object, falls into the most irrational and unnatural bondage to the object, whose most accidental and most individual attributes it is obliged to construe as absolutely necessary and general. This transition Herr Szeliga construes as follows: Before really following Eugene Sue where his heart leads him - to an aristocratic ball, Herr Szeliga resorts to the hypocritical twists of speculation which makes a priori constructions. In his unctuous naivety the Critical parson listens to the two "most beautiful among the beautiful", Clemence d'Harville and Countess Sarah MacGregor. One can guess what he wishes to "hear" from them: We get the following naive revelation about one of the ladies, Countess MacGregor: of the Countess, Herr Szeliga has sharp words for her: Here is what we learn about the character of two other ideals, the Marquise d'Harville and the Duchess of Lucenay: He, for example, who is not allowed to drink at home and yet feels the need to drink looks for the "object" of drinking "outside" the house, and "so" takes to secret drinking. Indeed, he will be driven to consider secrecy an essential ingredient of drinking, although he will not debase drink to a mere "external" indifferent thing, any more than those ladies did with love. For, according to Herr Szeliga himself, it is not love, but marriage without love, that they debase to what it really is, to something external, to a so-called affair. The parson immediately betrays his real meaning when he continues: Herr Szeliga makes Countess MacGregor a representative of the kind of sensuality which "is elevated to a semblance of spiritual power", but in Eugene Sue she is a person of abstract reason. Her "ambition" and her "pride", far from being forms of sensuality, are born of an abstract reason which is completely independent of sensuality. That is why Eugene Sue explicitly notes that After his outpourings against sensuality, our Critical saint deems it necessary to show why Eugene Sue introduces us to haute volee at a ball, a method which is used by nearly all French novelists, whereas the English do so more often at the chase or in a country mansion. The Critic introduces us to the ball for the sake of the essence of dancing. He encounters a great difficulty. True, there is dancing at this ball, but only in imagination. The fact is that Eugene Sue does not say a word describing the dancing. He does not mix among the throng of dancers. He makes use of the ball only as an opportunity for bringing together his characters from the upper aristocracy. In despair, "Criticism" comes to help out and supplement the author, and its own "fancy" easily provides a description of ball incidents, etc. If, as prescribed by Criticism, Eugene Sue was not directly interested in the criminals' hide-outs and language when he described them, the dance, on the other hand, which not he but his "fanciful" Critic describes, necessarily interests him infinitely. Let us continue. Cecily, as a slave, remains true to the Negro doctor David because she loves him "passionately" and because her owner, Mr. Willis, is "brutal" in courting her. The reason for her change to a dissolute life is a very simple one. Transported into the "European world", she "blushes" at being "married to a Negro". On arriving in Germany she is "at once seduced by a wicked man and her "Indian blood" comes into its own. This the hypocritical M. Sue, for the sake of douce morale and doux commerce, is bound to describe as "perversit naturelle"." The secret of Cecily is that she is a half-breed. The secret of her sensuality is the heat of the tropics. Parny sang praises of the half-breed in his beautiful lines to Eleonore. Over a hundred sea-faring tales tell us how dangerous she is to sailors. Herr Szeliga pursues two aims. Firstly, Mystery which has become incarnate in the exclusive circle of high society must be declared "common property of the world . Secondly, the notary Jacques Ferrand must be construed as a link in the life of Mystery. Here is the way Herr Szeliga reasons: Herr Szeliga transforms Christianity into an individual quality, "piety , and morality into another individual quality, "probity". He combines these two qualities in one individual whom he christens Jacques Ferrand, because Jacques Ferrand does not possess these two qualities but only pretends to. Thus Jacques Ferrand becomes the "mystery of probity and piety". His "testament", on the other hand, is "the mystery of seeming piety and probity", and therefore no longer of piety and probity themselves. If Critical Criticism had wanted speculatively to construe this testament as a mystery, it should have declared the seeming probity and piety to be the mystery of this testament, and not the other way round, this testament as the mystery of the seeming probity. Whereas the Paris college of notaries considered Jacques Ferrand as a malicious libel against itself and through the theatrical censorship had this character removed from the stage performance of the Mysteres de Paris, Critical Criticism, at the very time when it "polemises against the airy kingdom of conceptions , sees in a Paris notary not a Paris notary but religion and morality, probity and piety. The trial of the notary Lehon ought to have taught it better. The position held by the notary in Eugene Sue's novel is closely connected with his official position. With the notary Ferrand, whose whole mystery consists in his hypocrisy and his profession, we do not seem to have made a single step forward yet. But listen: All the mysteries that Polidori possesses are limited to a means for abortion and a poison for murder.- In a speculative frenzy Herr Szeliga makes the "murderer" resort to Polidori's poison "because he wants to be not a murderer, but respected, loved and honoured". As if in an act of murder it was a question of respect, love or honour and not of one's neck! But the Critical murderer does not bother about his neck, but only about "Mystery".- As not everyone commits murder or becomes pregnant illegitimately, how is Polidori to put everyone in the desired possession of Mystery? Herr Szeliga probably confuses the charlatan Polidori with the scholar Polydore Virgil who lived in the sixteenth century and who, although he did not discover any mysteries, tried to make the history of those who did, the inventors, the "common property of ~he world" (see Polidori Virgilii liber de rerum inventoribus, Lugduni MDCCVI). Mystery, Absolute Mystery, as it has finally established itself as the "common property of the world", consists therefore in the mystery of abortion and poisoning. Mystery could not make itself "the common property of the world" more skilfully than by turning itself into mysteries which are mysteries to no one. Herr Szeliga intends to depict the servants and the porter Pipelet and his wife as the incarnation of Absolute Mystery. He wants speculatively to construct the servant and the porter of "Mystery . How does he manage to make the headlong descent from pure category down to the "servant" who "spies at a locked door , from Mystery as the Absolute Subject, which is enthroned above the roof in the cloudy heavens of abstraction, down to the ground floor where the porter's lodge is situated? First he subjects the category Mystery to a speculative process. When by the aid of means for abortion and poisoning Mystery has become the common property of the world, it is After this brilliant dialectical feat of arms, Herr Szeliga naturally goes on from spying itself to the reasons for spying. Here he reveais the mystery that malicious gloating is the reason for it. From malicious gloating he goes on to the reason for malicious gloating. Thus it seems we have gone from Mystery that conceals itself to the ego that conceals it, from the ego to the locked door, from the locked door to spying, from spying to the reason for spying, malicious gloating; from malicious gloating to the reason for malicious gloating, the desire to be better than the others. We shall soon have the pleasure of seeing the servant standing at the locked door. For the general desire to be better than the others leads us directly to this: that "everyone is inclined to find out the mysteries of another", and this is followed easily by the witty remark: What "henceforth" annoys Herr Szeliga in servants is that they are not "disinterested" enough. This Critical misgiving leads him to the porter Pipelet and his wife. The following facts will enable the reader to form an opinion of the Critical fantasy concerning the relatively independent, disinterested position of the porter. The porter in Paris is the representative and spy of the landlord. He is generally paid not by the landlord but by the tenants. Because of that precarious position he often combines the functions of commission agent with his official duties. During the Terror, the Empire and the Restoration, the porter was one of the main agents of the secret police. General Foy, for instance, was watched by his porter, who took all the letters addressed to the general to be read by a police agent not far away (see Froment, La police d voil e). As a result "portier" and " picier" are considered insulting names and the porter prefers to be called "concierge . Far from being depicted as "disinterested" and harmless, Eugene Sue's Madame Pipelet immediately cheats Rudolph when giving him his change; she recommends to him the dishonest money-lender living in the house and describes Rigolette to him as an acquaintance who may be pleasant to him. She teases the major because he pays her badly and haggles with her - in her vexation she calls him a "commandant de deux liards" - "ca t'apprendra ne donner que douze francs par mois pour ton m nage." - and because he has the "petitesse as to keep a check on his firewood, etc. She herself gives the reason for her "independent" behaviour: the major only pays her twelve francs a month. According to Herr Szeliga, "Anastasia Pipelet has, to some extent, to declare a small war on Mystery". According to Eugene Sue, Anastasia Pipelet is a typical Paris Porti re. He wants "to dramatise the Porti re, whom Henri Monier portrayed with such mastery". But Herr Szeliga feels bound to transform one of Madame Pipelet's qualities - "m disance" - into a separate being and then to make her a representative of that being. Problem. You must give me the speculative construction showing how man becomes master over animals. Speculative solution. Given are half a dozen animals, such as the lion, the shark, the snake, the bull, the horse and the pug. From these six animals abstract the category: the "Animal". Imagine the "Animal" to be an independent being. Regard the lion, the shark, the snake, etc., as disguises, incarnations, of the "Animal". Just as you made your imagination, the "Animal" of your abstraction, into a real being, now make the real animals into beings of abstraction, of your imagination. You see that the "Animal", which in the lion tears man to pieces, in the shark swallows him up, in the snake stings him with venom, in the bull tosses him with its horns and in the horse kicks him, only barks at him when it presents itself as a pug, and converts the fight against man into the mere semblance of a fight. Through its own consistent development, the "Animal" is driven, as we have seen in the pug, to debase itself to a mere clown. When a child or a childish man runs away from a pug, the only thing is for the individual no longer to agree to play the silly comedy. The individual X takes this step in the most nonchalant way in the world by using his bamboo cane on the pug. You see how "Man", through the agency of the individual X and the pug, has become master over the "Animal", and consequently over animals, and in the Animal as a pug has defeated the lion as an animal. Similarly Herr Szeliga's "turtle-dove" defeats the mysteries of the present state of the world through the intermediary of Pipelet and Cabrion. More than that! She is herself a manifestation of the category "Mystery". It must be considered as a real confession, a revelation of Herr Szeliga's Critical Mystery, when he says that he wishes to pass ou to the "philosophical reproduction" of the epic event. He has so far been "philosophically reproducing" the world system. Herr Szeliga continues his confession: If we deal with Rudolph and his deeds only later, after diverting our attention from Herr Szeliga for some time, it can already be foreseen, and to a certain degree the reader can sense, indeed even surmise without presumption, that instead of treating him as a "mysterious vegetable existence , which he is in the Critical Literatur-Zeitung, we shall make him a "logical, obvious, free link" in the "organism of Critical Criticism."

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch05.htm

So far Critical Criticism has seemed to deal more or less with the Critical treatment of various mass-type objects. We now find it dealing with the absolutely Critical object, with itself. So far it has derived its relative glory from Critical debasement, rejection and transformation of definite mass-type objects and persons. It now derives its absolute glory from the Critical debasement, rejection and transformation of the Mass in general. Relative Criticism was faced with relative limits. Absolute Criticism is faced with an absolute limit, the limit of the Mass, the Mass as limit. Relative Criticism in its opposition to definite limits was itself necessarily a limited individual. Absolute Criticism, in its opposition to the general limit, to limit in general, is necessarily an absolute individual. As the various mass-type objects and persons have merged in the impure pulp of the Mass , so has still seemingly objective and personal Criticism changed into pure Criticism . So far Criticism has appeared to be more or less a quality of the Critical individuals: Reichardt, Edgar, Faucher, etc. Now it is the Subject and Herr Bruno is its incarnation. So far mass character has seemed to be more or less the quality of the objects and persons criticised; now objects and persons have become the Mass , and the Mass has become object and person. All previous Critical attitudes have been dissolved in the attitude of absolute Critical wisdom to absolute mass-type stupidity. This basic attitude appears as the meaning, the tendency and the keyword of Criticism s previous deeds and struggles. In accordance with its absolute character, pure Criticism, as soon as it appears, will pronounce the differentiating cue ; nevertheless, as Absolute Spirit it must go through a dialectical process. Only at the end of its heavenly motion will its original concept be truly realised (see Hegel, Enzyklop die). It was Herr Bruno Bauer, in Die gute Sache der Freiheit [The Good Cause of Freedom] (his own cause, of course), in Die Judenfrage, etc., who counted on his fingers the time until the approaching world mastery, although he admitted he could not give the exact date. To the record of the sins of the Mass he adds the mass of his own sins. For Herr Bauer, as for Hegel, truth is an automaton that proves itself. Man must follow it. As in Hegel, the result of real development is nothing but the truth proven, i.e., brought to consciousness. Absolute Criticism may therefore ask with the most narrow-minded theologian: Just as, according to the earlier teleologists, plants exist to be eaten by animals, and animals to be eaten by men, history exists in order to serve as the act of consumption of theoretical eating proving. Man exists so that history may exist, and history exists so that the proof of truths exists. In this Critically trivialised form is repeated the speculative wisdom that man exists, and history exists, so that truth may arrive at self-consciousness. That is why history, like truth, becomes a person apart, a metaphysical subject of which the real human individuals are merely the bearers. That is why Absolute Criticism uses phrases like these: If, as Absolute Criticism asserts, history has so far been occupied with only a few such truths the simplest of all which in the end are self-evident, this inadequacy to which Absolute Criticism reduces previous human experiences proves first of all only its own inadequacy. From the un-Critical standpoint the result of history is, on the contrary, that the most complicated truth, the quintessence of all truth, man, is self-evident in the end. In its holy zeal against the mass, Absolute Criticism pays it the finest compliment. If a truth is crystal-clear because it seems crystal-clear to the mass; if history s attitude to truths depends on the opinion of the mass, then the verdict of the mass is absolute, infallible, the law of history, and history proves only what does not seem crystal-clear to the mass, and therefore needs proof. It is the mass, then, that prescribes history s task and occupation . Absolute Criticism speaks of truths which are self-evident from the start. In its Critical naivety it invents an absolute from the start and an abstract, immutable mass . There is just as little difference, in the eyes of Absolute Criticism, between the from the start of the sixteenth-century mass and the from the start of the nineteenth-century mass as there is between those masses themselves. It is precisely the characteristic feature of a truth which has become true and obvious and is self-evident that it is self-evident from the start . Absolute Criticism s polemic against truths which are self-evident from the start is a polemic against truths which are self-evident in general. A truth which is self-evident has lost its savour, its meaning, its value for Absolute Criticism as it has for divine dialectic. It has become flat, like stale water. On the one hand, therefore, Absolute Criticism proves everything which is self-evident and, in addition, many things which have the luck to be incomprehensible and therefore will never be self-evident. On the other hand, it considers as self-evident everything which needs some elaboration. Why? Because it is self-evident that real problems are not self-evident. Since, the Truth , like history, is an ethereal subject separate from the material mass, it addresses itself not to the empirical man but to the innermost depths of the soul ; in order to be truly apprehended it does not act on his vulgar body, which may live deep down in an English cellar or at the top of a French block of flats; it stretches from end to end through his idealistic intestines. Absolute Criticism does certify that the mass has so far in its own way, i.e., superficially, been affected by the truths that history has been so gracious as to put forward ; but at the same time it prophesies that It will not be long before the mysterious meaning of this Critical prophecy becomes crystal-clear to us. It seems that the comprehension which suffices for, and therefore corresponds to, an idea ceases to be superficial. It is only for appearance s sake that Herr Bruno brings out a relation between an idea and its comprehension, just as it is only for appearance s sake that he brings out a relation between unsuccessful historical action and the mass. If, therefore, Absolute Criticism condemns something as superficial , it is simply previous history, the actions and ideas of which were those of the masses . It rejects mass-type history to replace it by Critical history (see Herr Jules Faucher on English problems of the day). According to previous un-Critical history, i.e., history not conceived in the sense of Absolute Criticism, it must further be precisely distinguished to what extent the mass was interested in aims and to what extent it was enthusiastic over them.. The idea always disgraced itself insofar as it differed from the interest . On the other hand, it is easy to understand that every mass-type interest that asserts itself historically goes far beyond its real limits in the idea or imagination when it-first comes on the scene and is confused with human interest in general. This illusion constitutes what Fourier calls the tone of each historical epoch. The interest of the bourgeoisie in the 1789 Revolution, far from having been a failure , won everything and had most effective success , however much its pathos has evaporated and the enthusiastic flowers with which that Interest adorned its cradle have faded. That interest was so powerful that it was victorious over the pen of Marat, the guillotine of the Terror and the sword of Napoleon as well as the crucifix and the blue blood of the Bourbons. The Revolution was a failure only for the mass which did not have in the political idea the idea of its real interest , i.e., whose true life-principle did not coincide with the life-principle of the Revolution, the mass whose real conditions for emancipation were essentially different from the conditions within which the bourgeoisie could emancipate itself and society. If the Revolution, which can exemplify all great historical actions , was a failure, it was so because the mass within whose living conditions it essentially came to a stop, was an exclusive, limited mass, not an all-embracing one. If the Revolution was a failure it was not because the mass was enthusiastic over it and interested in it, but because the most numerous part of the mass, the part distinct from the bourgeoisie, did not have its real interest in the principle of the Revolution, did not have a revolutionary principle of its own, but only an idea , and hence only an object of momentary enthusiasm and only seeming uplift. Together with the thoroughness of the historical action, the size of the mass whose action it is will therefore increase. In Critical history, according to which in historical actions it is not a matter of the acting masses, of empirical action, or of the empirical interest of this action, but instead is only a matter of an idea in them , things must naturally take a different course. The enemies of progress outside the mass are precisely those products of self-debasement, self-rejection and self-alienation of the mass which have been endowed with independent being and a life of their own. The mass therefore turns against its own deficiency when it turns against the independently existing products of its self-debasement, just as man, turning against the existence of God, turns against his own religiosity. But as those practical self-alienations of the mass exist in the real world in an outward way, the mass must fight them in an outward way. It must by no means hold these products of its self-alienation for mere ideal fantasies, mere alienations of self-consciousness, and must not wish to abolish material estrangement by purely inward spiritual action. As early as 1789 Loustalot s journal bore the motto: But to rise it is not enough to do so in thought and to leave hanging over one s real sensuously perceptible head the real sensuously perceptible yoke that cannot be subtilised away with ideas. Yet Absolute Criticism has learnt from Hegel s Ph nomenologie at least the art of converting real objective chains that exist outside me into merely ideal, merely subjective chains, existing merely in me and thus of converting all external sensuously perceptible struggles into pure struggles of thought. This Critical transformation is the basis of the pre-established harmony between Critical Criticism and the censorship. From the Critical point of view, the writer s fight against the censor is not a fight of man against man . The censor is nothing but my own tact personified for me by the solicitous police, my own tact struggling against my tactlessness and un-Criticalness. The struggle of the writer with the censor is only seemingly, only in the eyes of wicked sensuousness, anything else than the inner struggle of the writer with himself. Insofar as the censor is really individually different from myself, a police executioner who mishandles the product of my mind by applying an external standard alien to the matter in question, he is a mere mass-type fantasy, an un-Critical figment of the brain. When Feuerbach s Thesen zur Reform der Philosophy were prohibited by the censorship, it was not the official barbarity of the censorship that was to blame but the uncultured character of Feuerbach s Thesen. Pure Criticism, unsullied by mass or matter, too, has in the censor a purely ethereal form, divorced from all mass-type reality. Absolute Criticism has declared the Mass to be the true enemy of the Spirit. It develops this in more detail as follows: Absolute Criticism proceeds from the dogma of the absolute competency of the Spirit . Furthermore, it proceeds from the dogma of the extramundane existence of the Spirit, i.e., of its existence outside the mass of humanity. Finally, it transforms the Spirit , Progress , on the one hand, and the Mass , on the other, into fixed entities, into concepts, and then relates them to one another as such given rigid extremes. It does not occur to Absolute Criticism to investigate the Spirit itself, to find out whether it is not in its spiritualistic nature, in its airy pretensions, that the Phrase , self-deception and pithlessness are rooted. No, the Spirit is absolute, but unfortunately at the same time it continually turns into spiritlessness; it continually reckons without its host. Hence it must necessarily have an adversary that intrigues against it. That adversary is the Mass. The position is the same with Progress . In spite of the pretensions of Progress , continual retrogressions and circular movements occur. Far from suspecting that the category Progress is completely empty and abstract, Absolute Criticism is so profound as to recognise Progress as being absolute, so as to explain retrogression by assuming a personal adversary of Progress, the Mass. As the Mass is nothing but the opposite of the Spirit , of Progress, of Criticism , it can accordingly be defined only by this imaginary opposition; apart from that opposition all that Criticism can say about the meaning and the existence of the Mass is only something meaningless, because completely undefined: Also and so-called suffice for a Critical definition. The Mass is therefore distinct from the real masses and exists as the Mass only for Criticism . All communist and socialist writers proceeded from the observation that, on the one hand, even the most favourably brilliant deeds seemed to remain without brilliant results, to end in trivialities, and, on the other, all progress of the Spirit had so far been progress against the mass of mankind, driving it into an ever more dehumanised situation. They therefore declared progress (see Fourier) to be an inadequate, abstract phrase; they assumed (see Owen among others) a fundamental flaw in the civilised world; that is why they subjected the real foundations of contemporary society to incisive criticism. This communist criticism had practically at once as its counterpart the movement of the great mass, in opposition to which history had been developing so far. One must know the studiousness, the craving for knowledge, the moral energy and the unceasing urge for development of the French and English workers to be able to form an idea of the human nobility of this movement. How infinitely profound then is Absolute Criticism , which, in face of these intellectual and practical facts, sees in a one-sided way only one aspect of the relationship, the continual foundering of the Spirit, and, vexed at this, seeks in addition an adversary of the Spirit , which it finds in the Mass"! In the end this great Critical discovery amounts to a tautology. According to Criticism, the Spirit has so far had a limit, an obstacle, in other words, an adversary, because it has had an adversary. Who, then, is the adversary of the Spirit? Spiritlessness. For the Mass is defined only as the opposite of the Spirit, as spiritlessness or, to take the more precise definitions of spiritlessness, as indolence , superficiality , self-complacency . What a fundamental superiority over the communist writers it is not to have traced spiritlessness, indolence, superficiality and self-complacency to their places of origin, but to have denounced them morally and exposed them as the opposite of the Spirit, of Progress! If these qualities are proclaimed qualities of the Mass, as of a subject still distinct from them, that distinction is nothing but a Critical semblance of distinction. Only in appearance has Absolute Criticism a definite concrete subject besides the abstract qualities of spiritlessness, indolence, etc., for the Mass in the Critical conception is nothing but those abstract qualities, another word for them, a fantastic personification of them. . The relation between Spirit and Mass has, however, also a hidden meaning which will be completely revealed in the course of the reasoning. We only indicate it here. That relation discovered by Herr Bruno is, in fact, nothing but a Critically caricatured consummation of Hegel s conception of history, which, in turn, is nothing but the speculative expression of the Christian-Germanic dogma of the antithesis between Spirit and Matter, between God and the world-. This antithesis finds expression in history, in the human world itself in such a way that a few chosen individuals as the active Spirit are counterposed to the rest of mankind, as the spiritless Mass, as Matter. Hegel s conception of history presupposes an Abstract or Absolute Spirit which develops in such a way that mankind is a mere mass that bears the Spirit with a varying degree of consciousness or. unconsciousness. Within empirical, exoteric history, therefor e, Hegel makes a speculative, esoteric history, develop. The history of mankind becomes the history of the Abstract Spirit of mankind, hence a spirit far removed from the real man. Parallel with this doctrine of Hegel s there developed in France the theory of the Soctrinairians proclaiming the sovereignty of reason in opposition to the sovereignty of the people, in order to exclude the masses and rule alone. This was quite consistent. If the activity of real mankind is nothing but the activity of a mass of human individuals, then abstract generality, Reason, the Spirit, on the contrary, must have an abstract expression restricted to a few individuals. It then depends on the situation and imaginative power of each individual whether he will claim to be this representative of the Spirit . Already in Hegel the Absolute Spirit of history has its material in the Mass and finds its appropriate expression only in philosophy. The philosopher, however, is only the organ through which the maker of history, the Absolute Spirit, arrives at self-consciousness retrospectively after the movement has ended. The participation of the philosopher in history is reduced to this retrospective consciousness, for the real movement is accomplished by the Absolute Spirit unconsciously. Hence the philosopher appears on the scene post festum [after the event]. Hegel is guilty of being doubly half-hearted: firstly in that, while declaring that philosophy is the mode of existence of the Absolute Spirit, he refuses to recognise the actual philosophical individual as the Absolute Spirit; secondly, in that he lets the Absolute Spirit as Absolute Spirit make history only in appearance. For since the Absolute Spirit becomes conscious of itself as the creative World Spirit only post festum in the philosopher, its making of history exists only in the consciousness, in the opinion and conception of the philosopher, i.e., only in the speculative imagination. Herr Bruno Bauer overcomes Hegel s half-heartedness. Firstly, he proclaims Criticism to be the Absolute Spirit and himself to be Criticism. Just as the element of Criticism is banished from the Mass, so the element of the Mass is banished from Criticism. Therefore Criticism sees itself incarnate not in a mass, but exclusively in a handful of chosen men, in Herr Bauer and his disciples. Herr Bauer furthermore overcomes Hegel s other half-heartedness. No longer, like the Hegelian Spirit, does he make history post festum and in imagination. He consciously plays the part of the World Spirit in opposition to the mass of the rest of mankind; he enters into a contemporary dramatic relation with that mass; he invents and executes history with a purpose and after mature reflection. On the one side is the Mass as the passive, spiritless, unhistorical, material element of history. On the other is the Spirit, Criticism, Herr Bruno and Co. as the active element from which all historical action proceeds. The act of transforming society is reduced to the cerebral activity of Critical Criticism. Indeed, the relation of Criticism, and hence of Criticism incarnate, Herr Bruno and Co., to the Mass is in truth the only historical relation of the present time. The whole of present-day history is reduced to the movement of these two sides against each other. All antitheses have been dissolved in this Critical antithesis. Critical Criticism, which becomes objective to itself only in relation to its antithesis, to the Mass, to stupidity, is consequently obliged continually to produce this antithesis for itself, and Herren Faucher, Edgar and Szeliga have supplied sufficient proof of their Virtuosity in their speciality, the mass stupefaction of persons and things. Let us now accompany Absolute Criticism in its campaigns against the Mass. The Spirit , contrary to the Mass, behaves from the outset in a Critical way by considering its own narrow-minded work, Bruno Bauer s Die Judenfrage, as absolute, and only the opponents of that work as sinners. In Reply No. 1 to attacks on that treatise, he does not show any inkling of its defects; on the contrary, he declares he has set forth the true , general (!) significance of the Jewish question. In later replies we shall see him obliged to admit his oversights . On the occasion of a treatise by Absolute Criticism, the Mass must necessarily have begun to prove its antithesis to the Spirit; for it is its antithesis to Absolute Criticism that determines and proves its very existence. The polemic of a few liberal and rationalist Jews against Herr Bruno s Die Judenfrage has naturally a Critical meaning quite different from that of the mass-type polemic of the liberals against philosophy and of the rationalists against Strauss. Incidentally, the originality of the above-quoted remark can be judged by the following passage from Hegel: As for the rights of man , it has been proved to Herr Bruno ( On the Jewish Question , Deutsch-Franz sische Jahrb cher) that it is he himself , not the spokesmen of the Mass, who has misunderstood and dogmatically mishandled the essence of those rights. Compared to his discovery that the rights of man are not inborn a discovery which has been made innumerable times in England during the last 40-odd years Fourier s assertion that the right to fish, to hunt, etc., are inborn rights of men is one of genius. We give only a few examples of Herr Bruno s fight against Philippson, Hirsch and others. Even such poor opponents as these are not disposed of by Absolute Criticism. It is by no means preposterous of Herr Philippson, as Absolute Criticism maintains, to say: Herr Bruno, who confuses the state with humanity, the rights of man with man and political emancipation with human emancipation, was bound, if not to conceive, at least to imagine a peculiar kind of state, a philosophical ideal of a state. Had the rhetorician Hirsch really refuted Herr Bruno s proof and shown, as is done in the Deutsch-Franz sische Jahrb cher, that the state of social estates and of exclusive Christianity is not only an incomplete state but an incomplete Christian state, Herr Bruno would have answered as he does to that refutation: Something which has been an eyesore to me from birth, as the Jews have been to the Christian world, and which persists and develops with the eye is not an ordinary sore, but a wonderful one, one that really belongs to my eye and must even contribute to a highly original development of my eyesight. The Critical eyesore does not therefore hurt the rhetorician Hirsch . Incidentally, the criticism quoted above revealed to Herr Bruno the significance of Jewry in the making of modern times . The theological mind of Absolute Criticism feels so offended by a deputy of the Rhenish Landtag stating that the Jews are queer in their own Jewish way, not in our so-called Christian way , that it is still calling him to order for using that argument . Concerning the assertion of another deputy that civil equality of the Jews can be implemented only where Jewry no longer exists , Herr Bruno comments: We see that in its Reply No. 1 to the attacks upon Die Judenfrage, Absolute Criticism still regards the abolition of religion . atheism, as the condition for civil equality. In its first stage it has therefore not yet acquired any deeper insight into the essence of the state than into the oversights of its work . Absolute Criticism feels offended when one of its intended latest scientific discoveries is betrayed as something already generally recognised. A Rhenish deputy remarks: Absolute Criticism could have objected that that assertion transferred the present into the past by representing as traditional the now trivial view of the inadequacy of French political principles. Such a relevant objection would not be profitable for Absolute Criticism. On the contrary, it must assert the obsolete view to be that at present prevailing, and proclaim the now prevailing view a Critical mystery which its investigation still has to reveal to the Mass. Hence it must say: That means that a thorough investigation of history will not itself achieve the comprehension of the principles. It will only prove in its thoroughness that much still remains to be achieved . A great achievement, especially after the works of the Socialists! Nevertheless Herr Bruno already achieves much for the comprehension of the present social state of things by his remark: If Hegel says that the prevailing Chinese certainty is Being , that the prevailing Indian certainty is Nothing , etc., Absolute Criticism joins him in the pure way when it resolves the character of the present time in the logical category Uncertainty , and all the purer since Uncertainty , like Being and Nothing , belongs to the first chapter of speculative logic, the chapter on Quality . We cannot leave No. 1 of Die Judenfrage without a general remark. One of the chief pursuits of Absolute Criticism consists in first bringing all questions of the day into their right setting. For it does not answer the real questions it substitutes quite different ones. As it makes everything, it must also first make the questions of the day , make them its own questions, questions of Critical Criticism. If it were a question of the Code Napol on, it would prove that it is properly a question of the Pentateuch. Its setting of questions of the day is Critical distortion and misrepresentation of them. It thus distorted the Jewish question , too, in such a way that it did not need to investigate political emancipation, which is the subject-matter of that question, but could instead confine itself to a criticism of the Jewish religion and a description of the Christian-Germanic state. This method, too, like all Absolute Criticism s originalities, is the repetition of a speculative verbal trick. Speculative philosophy, namely, Hegel s philosophy, had to transpose all questions from the form of common sense to the form of speculative reason and convert the real question into a speculative one to be able to answer it. Having distorted my question on my lips and, like the catechism, put its own question into my mouth, it could, of course, like the catechism, have its ready answer to all my questions. Political! Absolute Criticism is literally horrified at the presence of this word in Professor Hinrichs lectures. A few months before the Critical Literatur-Zeitung began to be published, there appeared, as we know (!), Herr Bruno s fantastic political treatise: Staat, Religion und Parthei! If political movements have social significance, how can political interests appear insignificant in comparison with their own social significance? Criticism, which according to the opinion of the Mass carried on by no means political but in all respects theological work, is still content with the word social , even now when it has uttered this word for the first time, not just in the last four years, but since its literary birth. Since socialist writings spread in Germany the recognition that all human aspirations and actions without exception have social significance, Herr Bruno can call his theological works social too. But what a Critical demand it is that Professor Hinrichs should have derived socialism from an acquaintance with Bauer s works, considering that all Bruno Bauer s works published up to the appearance of Hinrichs lectures, when they do draw practical conclusions, draw political ones! It was impossible, un-Critically speaking, for Professor Hinrichs to supplement Herr Bruno s published works with his as yet unpublished ones. From the Critical point of view, the Mass is, of course, obliged to interpret all Absolute Criticism s mass-type movements , as well as political ones, from the angle of the future and of Absolute Progress! But in order that Herr Hinrichs, after becoming acquainted with the Literatur-Zeitung, may never again forget the word social or fail to recognise the social character of Criticism, Criticism prohibits the word political for the third time before the whole world and solemnly repeats the word social for the third time. Just as Professor Hinrichs is the scapegoat for the former political movements, so is he also for the Hegelian movements and expressions which Absolute Criticism used intentionally up to the publication of the Literatur-Zeitung, and continues to use unintentionally in it. Once real Hegelian and twice Hegelian philosopher are thrown in Hinrichs face as catchwords. Herr Bruno even hopes that the banal expressions so tiresomely circulated in all the books of the Hegelian school (in particular in his own books) will, in view of their great exhaustion as seen in Professor Hinrichs lectures, soon reach the end of their journey. From the exhaustion of Professor Hinrichs, Herr Bruno hopes for the dissolution of Hegel s philosophy and thereby his own redemption from it. Thus in its first campaign Absolute Criticism overthrows its own long-worshipped gods, Politics and Philosophy , declaring them idols of Professor Hinrichs. Glorious first campaign!

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06.htm

As the result of its first campaign, Absolute Criticism can regard philosophy as having been dealt with and term it outright an ally of the Mass . And philosophy fulfils this longing of the Mass ! Dizzy after its victories, Absolute Criticism breaks out in Pythian frenzy against philosophy. Feuerbach s Philosophie der Zukunft [L. Feuerbach, Grunds tze der Philosophie der Zukunft] is the concealed cauldron [Engels here makes a pun on Feuerbach (literally stream of fire) and Feuerkesser (boiler)] whose fumes inspire the frenzy of Absolute Criticism s victory-intoxicated head. It read Feuerbach s work in March. The fruit of that reading, and at the same time the criterion of the earnestness with which it was undertaken, is Article No. 2 against Professor Hinrichs. In this article Absolute Criticism, which has never freed itself from the cage of the Hegelian way of viewing things, storms at the iron bars and walls of its prison. The simple concept , the terminology, the whole mode of thought of philosophy, indeed, the whole of philosophy, is rejected with disgust. In its place we suddenly find the real wealth of human relations , the immense content of history , the significance of man , etc. The mystery of the system is declared revealed . But who, then, revealed the mystery of the system ? Feuerbach. Who annihilated the dialectics of concepts, the war of the gods that was known to the philosophers alone? Feuerbach. Who substituted for the old lumber and for infinite self-consciousness if not, indeed, the significance of man as though man had another significance than that of being man! at any rate Man"? Feuerbach, and only Feuerbach. And he did more. Long ago he did away with the very categories with which Criticism now operates the real wealth of human relations, the immense content of history, the struggle of history, the fight of the Mass against the Spirit , etc., etc. Once man is recognised as the essence, the basis of all human activity and situations, only Criticism can invent new categories and transform man himself into a category and into the principle of a whole series of categories, as it is doing now. It is true that in so doing it takes the only road to salvation that has remained for frightened and persecuted theological inhumanity. History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth , it wages no battles . It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; history is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims. If Absolute Criticism, after Feuerbach s brilliant expositions, still dares to reproduce all the old trash in a new form, at the same time abusing it as mass-type trash which it has all the less right to do as it never stirred a finger to dissolve philosophy that fact alone is sufficient to bring the mystery of Criticism to light and to assess the Critical naivety with which it says the following to Professor Hinrichs, whose exhaustion once did it such a great service: Absolute Criticism prides itself that, in contrast to Professor Hinrichs, it has solved the mystery of the faculty sciences . Has it then solved the mystery of philosophy, jurisprudence, politics, medicine, political economy and so forth? Not at all! It has be it noted! shown in Die gute Sache der Freiheit that science as a source of livelihood and free science, freedom of teaching and faculty statutes, contradict each other. If Absolute Criticism were honest it would have admitted where its pretended illumination on the Mystery of Philosophy Comes from. It is a good thing all the same that it does not put into Feuerbach s mouth such nonsense as the misunderstood and distorted propositions that it borrowed from him, as it has done with other people. By the way, it is characteristic of Absolute Criticism s theological viewpoint that, whereas the German philistines are now beginning to understand Feuerbach and to adopt his conclusions, it is unable to grasp a single sentence of his correctly or to use it properly. Criticism achieves a real advance over its feats of the first campaign when it defines the struggle of the Mass against the Spirit as the aim of all previous history, when it declares that the Mass is the pure nothing of misery ; when it calls the Mass purely and simply Matter and contrasts the Spirit as truth to Matter . Is not Absolute Criticism therefore genuinely Christian-Germanic? After the old antithesis between spiritualism and materialism has been fought out on all sides and overcome once for all by Feuerbach, Criticism again makes a basic dogma of it in its most loathsome form and gives the victory to the Christian-Germanic spirit . Finally, it must be considered as a development of Criticism s mystery concealed in its first campaign when it now identifies the antithesis between Spirit and Mass with the antithesis between Criticism and the Mass. Later it will go on to identify itself with Criticism and therefore to represent itself as the Spirit , the Absolute and Infinite, and the Mass, on the other hand, as finite, coarse, brutal, dead and inorganic for that is what Criticism understands by matter. How immense is the wealth of history that is exhausted in the relationship of humanity to Herr Bauer! To the material, mass-type Jews is preached the Christian doctrine of freedom of the Spirit, freedom in theory, that spiritualistic freedom which imagines itself to be free even in chains, and whose soul is satisfied with the idea and only embarrassed by any mass-type existence. From this proposition one can immediately measure the Critical gap which separates mass-type, profane communism and socialism from absolute socialism. The first proposition of profane socialism rejects emancipation in mere theory as an illusion and for real freedom it demands besides the idealistic will very tangible, very material conditions. How low the Mass is in comparison with holy Criticism, the Mass which considers material, practical Upheavals necessary even to win the time and means required merely to occupy itself with theory"! Let us leave purely spiritual socialism an instant for politics! Herr Riesser maintains against Bruno Bauer that his state (i.e., the Critical state) must exclude Jews and Christians . Herr Riesser is right. Since Herr Bauer confuses political emancipation with human emancipation, since the state can react to antagonistic elements and Christianity and Judaism are described as treasonable elements in Die Judenfrage only by forcible exclusion of the persons representing them (as the Terror, for instance, wished to do away with hoarding by guillotining the hoarders), Herr Bauer must have both Jews and Christians hanged in his Critical state . Having confused political emancipation with human emancipation, he had to be consistent and confuse the political means of emancipation with the human means. But as soon as Absolute Criticism is told the definite meaning of its deductions, it gives the answer that Schelling once gave to all his opponents who substituted real thoughts for his phrases: It is, of course, to adopt a dogmatic attitude to Absolute Criticism, as also to Herr Schelling, if one assumes it to have definite, real meaning, thoughts and views. In order to be accommodating and to prove to Herr Riesser its humanity, Criticism , however, decides to resort to dogmatic distinctions, definitions and especially to evasions . Thus we read: Here Absolute Criticism makes a dogmatic distinction between what it ought to have done, if it had not done the contrary, and what it actually did. It explains the narrowness of its work Die Judenfrage by the dogmatic evasions of having the will and the right which prohibited it from going beyond criticism . What? Criticism should go beyond criticism"? This quite mass-type notion occurs to Absolute Criticism because of the dogmatic necessity for, on the one hand, asserting its conception of the Jewish question as absolute, as Criticism , and on the other hand, admitting the possibility of a more comprehensive conception. The mystery of its not having the will and not having the right will later be revealed as the Critical dogma according to which all apparent limitations of Criticism are nothing but necessary adaptations to the powers of comprehension of the Mass. It had not the will! It had not the right to go beyond its narrow conception of the Jewish question! But what would it have done had it had the will or the right? It would have given a dogmatic definition. It would have spoken of society instead of the state , that is to say, it would not have studied the real relation of Jewry to present-day civil society! It would have given a dogmatic definition of society as distinct from the state , in the sense that if the state excludes, on the other hand they exclude themselves from society who do not wish to take part in its development! Society behaves just as exclusively as the state, only in a more polite form: it does not throw you out, but it makes it so uncomfortable for you that you go out of your own will. Basically, the state does not behave otherwise, for it does not exclude anybody who complies with all its demands and orders and its development. In its perfection it even closes its eyes and declares real contradictions to be non-political contradictions which do not disturb it. Besides, Absolute Criticism itself has argued that the state excludes Jew.. because and in so far as the Jews exclude the state and hence exclude themselves from the state. If this reciprocal relationship has a more polite, a more hypocritical, a more insidious form in Critical society , this only proves that Critical society is more hypocritical and less developed. Let us follow Absolute Criticism deeper in its dogmatic distinctions and definitions , and, in particular, in its evasions . Herr Riesser, for example, demands of the critic that he distinguish what belongs to the domain of law from what is beyond its sphere . The Critic is indignant at the impertinence of this juridical demand. The Critic forgets only that law, on the other hand, distinguishes itself quite explicitly from feeling and conscience , that this distinction is based on the one-sided essence of law as well as on its dogmatic form, and is even one of the main dogmas of law; that, finally, the practical implementation of that distinction is just as much the peak of the development of law as the separation of religion from all profane content makes it abstract, absolute religion. The fact that feeling and conscience interfere in law is sufficient reason for the Critic to speak of feeling and conscience when it is a matter of law, and of theological dogmatism when it is a matter of juridical dogmatism. The definitions and distinctions of Absolute Criticism have prepared us sufficiently to hear its latest discoveries on society and law . The world form that Criticism is preparing is defined as not merely legal, but social. This definition can be interpreted in two ways. The sentence quoted may be taken as not legal but social or as not merely legal, but also social . Let us consider its content according to both readings, beginning with the first. Earlier, Absolute Criticism defined the new world form distinct from the state as society . Now it defines the noun society by the adjective social . If Herr Hinrichs was three times given the word social in contrast to his political , Herr Riesser is now given social society in contrast to his legal society. If the Critical explanations for Herr Hinrichs reduced themselves to the formula social + social + social = 3a, Absolute Criticism in its second campaign passes from addition to multiplication and Herr Riesser is referred to society multiplied by itself, society to the second power, Social society = a2. In order to complete its deductions on society, all that now remains for Absolute Criticism to do is to go On to fractions, to extract the square root of society, and so forth. If, on the other hand, we take the second reading: the not merely legal, but also social world form, this hybrid world form is nothing but the world form existing today, the world form of present-day society. It is a great, a meritorious Critical miracle that Criticism in its pre-world thinking is only just preparing the future existence of the world form which exists today. But however matters stand with not merely legal but social society , Criticism can for the time being say no more about it than fabula docet ,[the fable teaches] the moral application. Those who do not live in that society with their feeling and their conscience will not feel at home in it. In the end, no one will live in that society except pure feeling and pure conscience , that is, the Spirit , Criticism and its supporters. The Mass will be excluded from it in one way or another so that mass-type society will exist outside social society . In a word, this society is nothing but the Critical heaven from which the real world is excluded as being the un-Critical hell. In its pure thinking, Absolute Criticism is preparing this transfigured world form of the contradiction between Mass and Spirit . Of the same Critical depth as these explanations on society are the explanations Herr Riesser is given on the destiny of nations. The Jews desire for emancipation and the desire of the Christian states to classify the Jews in their government scheme as though the Jews had not long ago been classified in the Christian government scheme! lead Absolute Criticism to prophecies on the decay of nationalities. See by what a complicated detour Absolute Criticism arrives at the present historical movement namely, by the detour of theology. The following illuminating oracle shows us what great results Criticism achieves in this way: But let the future of nationalities be as obscure as it may be, for Criticism s sake. The one essential thing is clear: the future is the work of Criticism. As God leaves his creation, man, his own will, so Criticism leaves destiny, which is its creation, its own will. Criticism, of which destiny is the work, is, like God, almighty. Even the resistance which it finds outside itself is its own work. Criticism makes its adversaries. The mass indignation against it is therefore dangerous only for the Mass itself. But if Criticism, like God, is almighty, it is also, like God, all-wise and is capable of combining its almightiness with the freedom, the will and the natural determination of human individuals. Leibniz could not have given a happier presentation of the re-established harmony between the almightiness of God and the p freedom and natural determination of man. If Criticism seems to clash with psychology by not distinguishing between the will to be something and the ability to be something, it must be borne in mind that it has decisive grounds to declare this distinction dogmatic . Let us steel ourselves for the third campaign! Let us recall once more that Criticism makes its adversary"! But how could it make its adversary, the. phrase , if it were not a phrase-monger?

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_2.htm

Absolute Criticism begins its third campaign against the Mass with the question: In the same number of the Literatur-Zeitung we find the information: According to this, all things are the object of Criticism. It would be senseless to inquire about some particular, definite object peculiar to Criticism. The contradiction is easily resolved when one remembers that all things merge into Critical things and all Critical things into the Mass, as the Object of Absolute Criticism . First of all, Herr Bruno describes his infinite pity for the Mass. He makes the gap that separates him from the crowd an object of persevering study. He wants to find out the significance of that gap for the future (this is what above was called knowing all things) and at the same time to abolish it . In truth he therefore already knows the significance of that gap. It consists in being abolished by him. As each man s self is nearest to him, Criticism first sets about abolishing its own mass nature, like the Christian ascetics who begin the campaign of the spirit against the flesh with the mortification of their own flesh. The flesh of Absolute Criticism is its really massive literary past, amounting to 20-30 volumes. Herr Bauer must therefore free the literary biography of Criticism which coincides exactly with his own literary biography from its mass-like appearance; he must retrospectively improve and explain it and by this apologetic commentary place its earlier works in safety . He begins by explaining by a double cause the error of the Mass, which until the end of the Deutsche Jahrb cher and the Rheinische Zeitung regarded Herr Bauer as one of its supporters. Firstly the mistake was made of regarding the literary movement as not purely literary . At the same time the opposite mistake was made, that of regarding the literary movement as a merely or purely literary movement. There is no doubt that the Mass was mistaken in any case, if only because it made two mutually incompatible errors at the same time. Absolute Criticism takes this opportunity of exclaiming to those who ridiculed the German nation as a blue stocking": In his Critical naivety Herr Bruno separates the pen from the subject who writes, and the subject who writes as abstract writer from the living historical man who wrote. This allows him to go into ecstasy over the wonder-working power of the pen . He might just as well have demanded to be told of a historical movement which was not outlined beforehand by poultry or the goose girl . Later we shall be told by the same Herr Bruno that so far not one historical epoch, not a single one, has become known. How could the pen , which so far has been unable to outline any single historical epoch after the event, have been able to outline them all beforehand? Nevertheless, Herr Bruno proves the correctness of his view by deeds, by himself outlining beforehand his own past with apologetic strokes of the pen . Criticism, which was involved on all sides not only in the general limitation of the world and of the epoch, but in quite particular and personal limitations, and which nevertheless assures us that it has been absolute, perfect and pure Criticism in all its works for as long as man can think, has only accommodated itself to the prejudices and power of comprehension of the Mass, as God is wont to do in his revelations to man. But because Criticism, here called Theory for a change, comes to nothing, but everything, on the contrary, comes from it; because it develops not inside but outside the world, and has predestined everything in its divine immutable consciousness, the breach with its former ally was a new turn only in appearance, only for others, not in itself and not for Criticism itself. The Christian theologian must tread cautiously. (Bruno Bauer, Das entdeckte Christenthum, p. 99.) How did it happen that cautious Criticism nevertheless did get ensnared and did not already at that time express its proper meaning clearly and audibly? Why did it not speak out bluntly? Why did it let the illusion of its brotherhood with the Mass persist? 'Away with reason and language! says the Critic. For had Herr Bauer really and not just apparently been ensnared with the Mass, Absolute Criticism would not be absolute in its revelations, it would be mortally insulted. Criticism s efforts had just not been noticed; therefore the Mass was to blame. On the other hand, Criticism admits that its efforts could not be noticed because it itself was not yet capable of making them noticeable. Criticism therefore appears to be to blame. God help us! Criticism was forced violence was used against it sincerely to consider its opponent s premises and to take them seriously for an instant . A fine sincerity, a truly theological sincerity, which does not really take a thing seriously but only takes it seriously for an instant ; which has always, therefore every instant, been careful not to get itself ensnared in its opponent s premises, and nevertheless, for an instant sincerely takes these very premises into consideration. Its sincerity is still greater in the closing part of the sentence. It was in the same instant when Criticism sincerely took into consideration the premises of the Mass that it was not yet fully capable of destroying the illusion about the unity of its cause and the cause of the Mass. It was not yet capable, but it already had the will and the thought of it. It could not yet outwardly break with the Mass but the break was already complete inside it, in its mind complete in the same instant when it sincerely sympathised with the Mass! In its involvement with the prejudices of the Mass, Criticism was not really involved in them; on the contrary, it was, properly speaking, free from its own limitation and was only not yet completely capable of informing the Mass of this. Hence all the limitation of Criticism was pure appearance; an appearance which without the limitation of the Mass would have been superfluous and would therefore not have existed at all. It is therefore again the Mass that is to blame. Insofar as this appearance, however, was supported by the inability , the impotence of Criticism to express its thought, Criticism itself was imperfect. This it admits in its own way, which is as sincere as it is apologetic. Criticism won its friends through its incomplete appearance of engaging in politics. Had it completely appeared to engage in politics, it would inevitably have lost its political friends. In its apologetic anxiety to wash itself free of all sin, it accuses the false appearance of having been an incomplete false appearance, not a complete false one. By substituting one appearance for the other, Criticism can console itself with the thought that if it had the complete appearance of wishing to engage in politics, it does not have, on the other hand, even the incomplete appearance of anywhere or at any time having dissolved politics. Not completely satisfied with the incomplete appearance , Absolute Criticism again asks itself: Bauer the theologian takes it as a matter of course that Criticism had to indulge endlessly in speculative theology for he, Criticism , is indeed a theologian ex professo. But to engage in politics? That must be motivated by very special, political, personal circumstances! Why, then, had Criticism to engage even in politics? It was accused that is the answer to the question. At least the mystery of Bauer s politics is thereby disclosed; at least the appearance, which in Bruno Bauer s Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Sache links its own cause to the mass-linked cause of freedom by means of an and , cannot be called non-political. But if Criticism pursued not its own cause in the interest of politics, but politics in the interest of its own cause, it must be admitted that not Criticism was taken in by politics, but politics by Criticism. So Bruno Bauer was to be dismissed from his chair of theology: he was accused; Criticism had to engage in politics, that is to say, to conduct its , i.e., Bruno Bauer s, suit. Herr Bauer did not conduct Criticism s suit, Criticism conducted Herr Bauer s suit. Why did Criticism have to conduct its suit? In order to justify itself! It may well be; only Criticism is far from limiting itself to such a personal, vulgar reason. It may well be; but not solely for that reason, but mainly in order to bring out the contradictions of its opponents , and, Criticism could add, in order to have bound together in a single book old essays against various theologians see among other things the wordy bickering with Planck, that family affair between Bauer-theology and Strauss-theology. Having got a load off its heart by admitting the real interest of its politics , Absolute Criticism remembers its suit and again chews the old Hegelian cud (see the struggle between Enlightenment and faith in the Ph nomenologie, see the whole of the Ph nomenologie) that the old which resists the new is no longer really the old , the cud which it has already chewed over at length in Die gute Sache der Freiheit. Critical Criticism is a ruminant animal. It keeps on warming up a few crumbs dropped by Hegel, like the above-quoted proposition about the old and the new , or again that about the development of the extreme out of its opposite extreme , and the like, without ever feeling the need to deal with speculative dialectic in any other way than by the exhaustion of Professor Hinrichs. Hegel, on the contrary, it continually transcends Critically by repeating him. For example: When I transform something I make it something essentially different. Since every form is also an external limitation , no form is susceptible of being transformed into an external limitation any more than an apple of being transformed into an apple. Admittedly, the form which Criticism gives to the investigation is not susceptible of being transformed into any external limitation for quite another reason. Beyond every external limitation it is blurred into an ash-grey, dark-blue vapour of nonsense. But why does not the old deal with this question theoretically? Because this, however, is least of all possible for it in the beginning, since at the moment of surprise (i.e., in the beginning) it knows neither itself nor the new , i.e., it deals theoretically neither with itself nor with the new. It would be quite impossible if impossibility , unfortunately, were not impossible! When the Critic from the theological faculty further admits that he erred intentionally, that he committed the mistake deliberately and after mature reflection (all that Criticism has experienced, learnt, and done is transformed for it into a free, pure and intentional product of its reflection) this confession of the Critic has only an incomplete appearance of truth. Since the Kritik der Synoptiker [B. Bauer, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker] has a completely theological foundation, since it is through and through theological criticism, Herr Bauer, university lecturer in theology, could write and teach it without mistake or error . The mistake and error were rather on the part of the theological faculties, which did not realise how strictly Herr Bauer had kept his promise, the promise he gave in Kritik der Synoptiker, Bd. 1, Foreword, p. xxiii. Herr Bauer intentionally separates the Lord Jesus and his principle in order to free the positive meaning of his promise from all semblance of ambiguity. And Herr Bauer has really made the creative power of the Lord Jesus and of his principle so evident that his infinite self-consciousness and the Spirit are nothing but creations of Christianity. If Critical Criticism s dispute with the Bonn theological faculty explained so well its politics at that time, why did Critical Criticism continue to engage in politics after the dispute had been settled? Listen to this: What a delightful apologetic phrase! Criticism should have come to a halt if only it had been possible ... to be able to come to a halt"! Who should come to a halt? And who should have done what it would not have been possible ... to be able to do"? On the other hand! Criticism should have proceeded if only, on the other hand, there had not been a far too strict historical law, etc. Historical laws are also far too strict with Absolute Criticism! If only they did not stand on the opposite side to Critical Criticism, how brilliantly the latter would proceed! But la guerre comme la guerre! In history, Critical Criticism must allow itself to be made a sorry story of! Criticism was forced into political weaknesses by the all too strict laws of history, but it entreats it will at the same time be admitted that it was above those weaknesses, if not in reality, at least in itself. Firstly, it had overcome them, in feeling , for it always felt uncertain in its demands ; it felt ill at ease in politics, it could not make out what was the matter with it. More- than that! It came into contradiction with its true elements. And finally the greatest thing of ally The contradiction with its true elements into which it came found its solution not in the course of Criticism s development, but had , on the contrary, already found its solution in Criticism s true elements existing independently of the contradiction! These Critical elements can claim with pride: before Abraham was, we were. Before the opposite to us was produced by development, it lay yet unborn in our chaotic womb, dissolved, dead, ruined. But since Criticism s contradiction with its true elements had already found its solution in the true elements of Criticism, and since a solved contradiction is not a contradiction, it found itself, to be precise, in no contradiction with its true elements, in no contradiction with itself, and the general aim of self-apology seems attained. Absolute Criticism s self-apology has a whole apologetical dictionary at its disposal: Not so very long ago Absolute Criticism said the following about apologetic phrases of this kind:

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3.htm

Absolute Criticism does not stop at proving by its autobiography its own singular almightiness which properly speaking, first creates the old, just as much as the new . It does not stop at writing in person the apology of its past. It now sets third persons, the rest of the secular world, the Absolute Task , the task which is much more important now , the apologia for Bauer s deeds and works . The Deutsch-Franz sische Jahrb cher published a criticism of Herr Bauer s Die Judenfrage [K. Marx, On the Jewish Question]. His basic error, the confusion of political with human emancipation , was revealed. True, the old Jewish question was not first brought into its correct setting ; the Jewish question was rather dealt with and solved in the setting which recent developments have given to old questions of the day, and as a result of which the latter have become questions of the present instead of questions of the past. Absolute Criticism s third campaign, it seems, is intended to reply to the Deutsch-Franz sische Jahrb cher. First of all, Absolute Criticism admits: The explanation why Herr Bauer even had to engage in politics is a matter of general interest only under certain conditions. If the infallibility, purity and absoluteness of Critical Criticism are assumed as basic dogma, then, of course, the facts contradicting that dogma turn into riddles which are just as difficult, profound and mysterious as the apparently ungodly deeds of God are for theologians. If, on the other hand, the Critic is considered as a finite individual, if he is not separated from the limitations of his time, one does not have to answer the question why he had to develop even within the world, because the question itself does not exist. If, however, Absolute Criticism insists on its demand, one can offer to provide a little scholastic treatise dealing with the following questions of the times": Why had the Virgin Mary s conception by the Holy Ghost to be proved by no other than Herr Bruno Bauer? Why had Herr Bauer to prove that the angel that appeared to Abraham was a real emanation of God, an emanation which, nevertheless, lacked the consistency necessary to digest food? Why had Herr Bauer to provide an apologia for the Prussian royal house and to raise the Prussian state to the rank of absolute state? Why had Herr Bauer, in his Kritik der Synoptiker, to substitute infinite self-consciousness for man? Why had Herr Bauer in his Das entdeckte Christenthum to repeat the Christian theory of creation in a Hegelian form? Why had Herr Bauer to demand of himself and others an explanation of the miracle that he was bound to be mistaken? While waiting for proofs of these necessities, which are just as Critical as they are Absolute , let us listen once more to Criticism s apologetic evasions. The point is that the Deutsch-Franz sische-Jahrb cher declares Bauer s treatment of the Jewish question to be really theological and fantastic-political. First, Criticism replies to the reproach of theological limitation. When we come to the political part of the Jewish question we shall see that in politics, too, Herr Bauer the theologian is not concerned with politics but with theology. But when the Deutsch-Franz sische-Jahrb cher attacked his treatment of the Jewish question as purely religious , it was concerned especially with his article in Einundzwanzig Bogen, the title of which was: This article has nothing to do with the old Enlightenment . It contains Herr Bauer s positive view on the ability of the present-day Jews to be emancipated, that is, on the possibility of their emancipation. The theologian will judge by appearances and see a religious question in a religious question. But Criticism must remember the explanation it gave Professor Hinrichs that the political interests of the present time have social significance, that it is no longer a question of political interests. The Deutsch-Franz sische Jahrb cher with equal right said to Criticism: Religious questions of the day have at the present time a social significance. It is no longer a question of religious interests as such. Only the theologian can believe it is a question of religion as religion. Granted, the Jahrb cher committed the error of not stopping at the word social . It characterised the real position of the Jews in civil society today. Once Jewry was stripped bare of the religious shell and its empirical, worldly, practical kernel was revealed, the practical, really social way in which this kernel is to be abolished could be indicated. Herr Bauer was content with a religious question being a religious question . It was by no means denied, as Herr Bauer makes out, that the Jewish question is also a religious question. On the contrary, it was shown that Herr Bauer grasps only the religious essence of Jewry, but not the secular, real basis of that religious essence. He combats religious consciousness as if it were something independent. Herr Bauer therefore explains the real Jews by the Jewish religion, instead of explaining the mystery of the Jewish religion by the real Jews. Herr Bauer therefore understands the Jew only insofar as he is an immediate object of theology or a theologian. Consequently Herr Bauer has no inkling that real secular Jewry, and hence religious Jewry too, is being continually produced by the present-day civil life and finds its final development in the money system. He could not have any inkling of this because he did not know Jewry as a part of the real world but only as a part of his world, theology; because he, a pious, godly man, considers not the active everyday Jew but the hypocritical Jew of the Sabbath to be the real Jew. For Herr Bauer, as a theologian of the Christian faith, the world-historic significance of Jewry had to cease the moment Christianity was born. Hence he had to repeat the old orthodox view that it has maintained itself in spite of history; and the old theological superstition that Jewry exists only as a confirmation of the divine curse, as a tangible proof of the Christian revelation had to recur with him in the Critical-theological form that it exists and has existed only as crude religious doubt about the supernatural origin of Christianity, i.e., as a tangible proof against Christian revelation. On the other hand, it was proved that Jewry has maintained. itself and developed through history, in and with history, and that this development is to be perceived not by the eye of the theologian, but only by the eye of the man of the world, because it is to be found, not in religious theory, but only in commercial and industrial practice. It was explained why practical Jewry attains its full development only in the fully developed Christian world, why indeed it is the fully developed practice of the Christian world itself. The existence of the present-day Jew was not explained by his religion as though this religion were something apart, independently existing but the tenacious survival of the Jewish religion was explained by practical features of civil society which are fantastically reflected in that religion. The emancipation of the Jews into human beings, or the human emancipation of Jewry, was therefore not conceived, as by Herr Bauer, as the special task of the Jews, but as a general practical task of the present-day world, which is Jewish to the core. It was proved that the task of abolishing the essence of Jewry is actually the task of abolishing the Jewish character of civil society, abolishing the inhumanity of the present-day practice of life, the most extreme expression of which is the money system. Herr Bauer, as a genuine, although Critical, theologian or theological Critic, could not get beyond the religious contradiction. In the attitude of the Jews to the Christian world he could see only the attitude of the Jewish religion to the Christian religion. He even had to restore the religious contradiction in a Critical way in the antithesis between the attitudes of the Jew and the Christian to Critical religion atheism, the last stage of theism, the negative recognition of God. Finally, in his theological fanaticism he had to restrict the ability of the present-day Jews and Christians , i.e., of the present-day world, to obtain freedom to their ability to grasp the Criticism of theology and apply it themselves. For the orthodox theologian the whole world is dissolved in religion and theology . (He could just as well dissolve it in politics, political economy, etc., and call theology heavenly political economy, for example, since it is the theory of the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of spiritual wealth and of the treasures of heaven!) Similarly, for the radical, Critical theologian, the ability of the world to achieve freedom, is dissolved in the single abstract ability to criticise religion and theology as religion and theology . The only struggle he knows is the struggle against the religious limitations of self-consciousness, whose Critical purity and infinity is just as much a theological limitation. Herr Bauer, therefore, dealt with the religious and theological question in the religious and theological way, if only because he saw in the religious question of the time a purely religious question. His correct setting of the question set the question correctly only in respect of his own ability to answer! Let us now go on to the political part of the Jewish question. The Jews (like the Christians) are fully politically emancipated in various states. Both Jews and Christians are far from being humanly emancipated. Hence there must be a difference between political and human emancipation. The essence of political emancipation, i.e., of the developed, modern state, must therefore be studied. On the other hand, states which cannot yet politically emancipate the Jews must be rated by comparison with the perfected political state and shown to be under-developed states. That is the point of view from which the political emancipation of the Jews should have been dealt with and is dealt with in the Deutsch-Franz sische Jahrb cher. Herr Bauer offers the following defence of Criticism s Die Judenfrage. Herr Bauer did show that the illusion of the German Jews was to demand the right to partake in the political community life in a land where there was no political community and to demand political rights where only political privileges existed. On the other hand, Herr Bauer was shown that he himself, no less than the Jews, laboured under illusions about the German political system . For he explained the position of the Jews in the German states as being due to the inability of the Christian state to emancipate the Jews politically. Flying in the face of the facts, he depicted the state of privilege, the Christian-Germanic state, as the Absolute Christian state. It was proved to him, on the contrary, that the politically perfected, modern state that knows no religious privileges is also the fully developed Christian state, and that therefore the fully developed Christian state, not only can emancipate the Jews but has emancipated them and by its very nature must emancipate them. Freedom! Recognition of free humanity! Special privilege! Edifying words by which to by-pass certain questions apologetically! Freedom? it was a question of political freedom. Herr Bauer was shown that when the Jew demands freedom and nevertheless refuses to renounce his religion, he is engaging in politics and sets no condition that is contrary to political freedom. Herr Bauer was shown that it is by no means contrary to political emancipation to divide man into the non-religious citizen and the religious private individual. He was shown that just as the state emancipates itself from religion by emancipating itself from state religion and leaving religion to itself within civil society, so the individual emancipates himself politically from religion by regarding it no longer as a public matter but as a private matter. Finally, it was shown that the terroristic attitude of the French Revolution to religion, far from refuting this conception, bears it out. Instead of studying the real attitude of the modern state to religion, Herr Bauer thought it necessary to imagine a Critical state, a state which is nothing but the Critic of theology inflated into a state in Herr Bauer s imagination. If Herr Bauer is caught up in politics he continually makes politics a prisoner of his faith, Critical faith. Insofar as he deals with the state he always makes out of it an argument against the adversary , un-Critical religion and theology. The state acts as executor of Critical-theological cherished desires. When Herr Bauer had first freed himself from orthodox, un-Critical theology, political authority took for him the place of religious authority. His faith in Jehovah changed into faith in the Prussian state. In Bruno Bauer s work Die evangelische Landeskirche [B. Bauer, Die evangelische Landeskirche Preussens und die Wissenschaft], not only the Prussian state, but, quite consistently, the Prussian royal house too, was made into an absolute. In reality Herr Bauer had no political interest in that state; its merit, in the eyes of Criticism , was rather that it abolished dogmas by means of the Unified Church and suppressed the dissenting sects with the help of the police. The political movement that began in the year 1840 redeemed Herr Bauer from his conservative politics and raised him for a moment to liberal politics. But here again politics was in reality only a pretext for theology. In his work Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit, the free state is the Critic of the theological faculty in Bonn and an argument against religion. In Die Judenfrage the contradiction between state and religion is the main interest, so that the criticism of political emancipation changes into a criticism of the Jewish religion. In his latest political work, Staat, Religion und Parthei, the most secret cherished desire of the Critic inflated into a state is at last expressed. Religion is sacrificed to the state or rather the state is only the means by which the opponent of Criticism , un-Critical religion and theology, is done to death. Finally, after Criticism has been redeemed, if only apparently, from all politics by the socialist ideas, which have been spreading in Germany from 1843 onwards, in the same way as it was redeemed from its conservative politics by the political movement after 1840, it is finally able to proclaim its writings against un-Critical theology to be social and to indulge unhindered in its own Critical theology, the contrasting of Spirit and Mass, as the annunciation of the Critical Saviour and Redeemer of the world. Let us return to our subject! Recognition of free humanity? Free humanity , recognition of which the Jews did not merely think they wanted, but really did want, is. the same free humanity which found classic recognition in the so-called universal rights of man. Herr Bauer himself explicitly treated the Jews efforts for recognition of their free humanity as their efforts to obtain the universal rights of man. In the Deutsch-Franz sische Jahrb cher it was demonstrated to Herr Bauer that this free humanity and the recognition of it are nothing but the recognition of the egoistic civil individual and of the unrestrained movement of the spiritual and material elements which are the content of his life situation, the content of present-day civil life; that the rights of man do not, therefore, free man from religion, but give him freedom of religion; that they do not free him from property, but procure for him freedom of property; that they do not free him from the filth of gain, but rather give him freedom of gainful occupation. It was shown that the recognition of the rights of man by the modern state has no other meaning than the recognition of slavery by the state of antiquity had. In other words, just as the ancient state had slavery as its natural basis, the modern state has as its natural basis civil society and the man of civil society, i.e., the independent man linked with other men only by the ties of private interest and unconscious natural necessity, the slave of labour for gain and of his own as well as other men s selfish need. The modern state has recognised this its natural basis as such in the universal rights of man. It did not create it. As it was the product of civil society driven beyond the old political bonds by its own development, the modern state, for its part, now recognised the womb from which it sprang and its basis by the declaration of the rights of man. Hence, the political emancipation of the Jews and the granting to them of the rights of man is an act the two sides of which are mutually dependent. Herr Riesser correctly expresses the meaning of the Jews desire for recognition of their free humanity when he demands, among other things, the freedom of movement. sojourn, travel, earning one s living, etc. These manifestations of free humanity are explicitly recognised as such in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Jew has all the more right to the recognition of his free humanity as free civil society is of a thoroughly commercial and Jewish nature, and the Jew is a necessary member of it. The Deutsch-Franz sische Jahrb cher further demonstrated why the member of civil society is called, par excellence, Man and why the rights of man are called inborn rights . The only Critical thing Criticism could say about the rights of man was that they are not inborn but arose in the course of history. That much Hegel had already told us. Finally, to its assertion that both Jews and Christians, in order to grant or receive the universal rights of man, must sacrifice the privilege of faith the Critical theologian supposes his one fixed idea at the basis of all things there was specially counterposed the fact contained in all un-Critical declarations of the rights of man that the right to believe what one wishes, the right to practise any religion, is explicitly recognised as a universal right of man. Besides, Criticism should have known that H bert s party in particular was defeated on the pretext that it attacked the rights of man by attacking freedom of religion, and that similarly the rights of man were invoked later when freedom of worship was restored. The contradiction that Criticism proved in the debates in the French Chamber was nothing but a contradiction of constitutionalism. Had Criticism grasped it as a general contradiction it would have grasped the general contradiction of constitutionalism. Had it gone still further than in its opinion it should have gone, had it, to be precise, gone as far as the abolition of this general contradiction, it would have proceeded correctly from constitutional monarchy to arrive at the democratic representative state, the perfected modern state. Far from having criticised the essence of political emancipation and proved its definite relation to the essence of man, it would have arrived only at the fact of political emancipation, at the fully developed modern state, that is to say, only at the point where the existence of the modern state conforms to its essence and where, therefore, not only the relative, but the absolute imperfections, those which constitute its very essence, can be observed and described. The above-quoted Critical passage is all the more valuable as it proves beyond any doubt that at the very moment when Criticism sees the political essence far below itself, it is, on the contrary, far below the political essence; it still needs to find in the latter the solution of its own contradictions and it still persists in not giving a thought to the modern principle of the state. To free theory Criticism contrasts the practical validity of privileges ; to the legal validity of privileges it contrasts the public system . In order not to misinterpret the opinion of Criticism, let us recall the contradiction it proved in the debates in the French Chamber, the very contradiction which should have been conceived as a general one. One of the questions dealt with was the fixing of a day in the week on which children would be freed from work. Sunday was suggested. One deputy moved to leave out mention of Sunday in the law as being unconstitutional. The Minister Martin (du Nord) saw in this motion an attempt to proclaim that Christianity had ceased to exist. Monsieur Cr mieux declared on behalf of the French Jews that the Jews, out of respect for the religion of the great majority of Frenchmen, did not object to Sunday being mentioned. Now, according to free theory, Jews and Christians are equal, but according to this practice Christians have a privilege over Jews; for otherwise how could the Sunday of the Christians have a place in a law made for all Frenchmen? Should not the Jewish Sabbath have the same right, etc.? Or in the practical life of the French too, the Jew is not really oppressed by Christian privileges; but the law does not dare to express this practical equality. All the contradictions in the political essence expounded by Herr Bauer in Die Judenfrage are of this kind contradictions of constitutionalism, which is, in general, the contradiction between the modern representative state and the old state of privileges. Herr Bauer is committing a very serious oversight when he thinks he is rising from the political to the human essence by conceiving and criticising this contradiction as a general one. He would thus only rise from partial political emancipation to full Political emancipation, from the constitutional state to the democratic representative state. Herr Bauer thinks that by the abolition of privilege the object of privilege is also abolished. Concerning the statement of Monsieur Martin (du Nord), he says: The modern public system , the developed modern state, is not based, as Criticism thinks, on a society of privileges, but on a society in which privileges have been abolished and dissolved, on developed civil society in which the vital elements which were still politically bound under the privilege system have been set free. Here no privileged exclusivity, stands opposed either to any other exclusivity or to the public system. Free industry and free trade abolish privileged exclusivity and thereby the struggle between the privileged exclusivities. They replace exclusivity with man freed from privilege which isolates from the general totality but at the same time unites in a smaller exclusive totality man no longer bound to other men even by the semblance of a common bond. Thus they produce the universal struggle of man against man, individual against individual. In the same way civil society as a whole is this war against one another of all individuals, who are no longer isolated from one another by anything but their individuality, and the universal unrestrained movement of the elementary forces of life freed from the fetters of privilege. the contradiction between the democratic representative state and civil society is the completion of the classic contradiction between public commonweal and slavery. In the modern world each person is at the same time a member of slave society and of the public commonweal. Precisely the slavery of civil society is in appearance the greatest freedom because it is in appearance the fully developed independence of the individual, who considers as his own freedom the uncurbed movement, no longer bound by a common bond or by man, of the estranged elements of his life, such as property, industry, religion, etc., whereas actually this is his fully developed slavery and inhumanity. Law has here taken the place of privilege. It is therefore only here, where we find no contradiction between free theory and the practical validity of privilege, but, on the contrary, the practical abolition of privilege, free industry, free trade, etc., conform to free theory , where the public system is not opposed by any privileged exclusivity, where the contradiction expounded by Criticism is abolished only here is the fully developed modern state to be found. Here also reigns the reverse of the law which Herr Bauer, on the occasion of the debates in the French Chamber, formulated in perfect agreement with Monsieur Martin (du Nord): It is just the opposite in the developed modern state. The state declares that religion, like the other elements of civil life, only begins to exist in its full scope when the state declares it to be non-political and therefore leaves it to itself. To the dissolution of the political existence of these elements, as for example, the: dissolution of property by the abolition of the property qualification for electors, the dissolution of religion by the abolition of the state church, to this proclamation of their civil death corresponds their most vigorous life, which henceforth obeys its own laws undisturbed and develops to its full scope. Anarchy is the law of civil society emancipated from divisive privileges, and the anarchy of. civil society is the basis of the modern public system, just as the public system in its turn is the guarantee of that anarchy. To the same great extent that the two are opposed to each other they also determine each other. h is clear how capable Criticism is of assimilating the new . But if we remain within the bounds of pure Criticism , the question arises: Why did Criticism not conceive as a universal contradiction the contradiction which it disclosed in connection with the debates in the French Chamber, although in its own opinion that is what it should have been done? It was impossible ... because ... it was impossible! Criticism assures us, moreover, that the fateful one step necessary .,to come to the point from which only one step remained to be taken was impossible. Who will dispute that? In order to be able to come to a point from which only one step remains to be taken, it is absolutely impossible to take that one step more which leads over the point beyond which still one step remains to be taken. All s well that ends well! At the end of the encounter with the Mass, which is hostile to Criticism s Die Judenfrage, Criticism admits that its conception of the rights of man , its We shall not deprive Criticism of the consolation that when it sinned politically it did so only at the conclusion and at the end of its works. A notorious drunkard used to console himself with the thought that he was never drunk before midnight. In the sphere of the Jewish question , Criticism has indisputably been winning more and more ground from the Enemy. In No. 1 of the Jewish question , the treatise of Criticism defended by Herr Bauer was still absolute and revealed the true and general significance of the Jewish question . In No. 2 Criticism had neither the will nor the right to go beyond Criticism. In No. 3 it had still to take one step , but that step was impossible because it was impossible . It was not its will or right but its involvement in its opposite that prevented it from taking that one step . It would very much have liked to clear the last obstacle, but unfortunately a last remnant of Mass stuck to its Critical seven-league boots.

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_b.htm

The narrow-mindedness of the Mass forced the Spirit , Criticism, Herr Bauer, to consider the French Revolution not as the time of the revolutionary efforts of the French in the prosaic sense but only as the symbol and fantastic expression of the Critical figments of his own brain. Criticism does penance for its oversight by submitting the Revolution to a fresh examination. At the same time it punishes the seducer of its innocence the Mass by communicating to it the results of this fresh examination . The chronological truth that an experiment of the eighteenth century like the French Revolution is still entirely an experiment of the eighteenth century, and not, for example, an experiment of the nineteenth, seems still entirely to be one of those truths which are self-evident from the start . But in the terminology of criticism, which is very prejudiced against crystal-clear truths, a truth like that is called an examination and therefore naturally has its place in a fresh examination of the Revolution . Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order. Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. In order to carry out ideas men are needed who can exert practical force. In its literal sense the Critical sentence is therefore another truth that is self-evident, and therefore another examination . Undeterred by this examination, the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle Social, which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeuf s conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf s friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order. The egoism of the nation is the natural egoism of the general state system, as opposed to the egoism of the feudal classes. The supreme being is the higher confirmation of the general state system, and hence also of the nation. Nevertheless, the supreme being is supposed to curb the egoism of the nation, that is, of the general state system! A really Critical task, to curb egoism by means of its confirmation and even of its religious confirmation, i.e., by recognising that it is of a superhuman nature and therefore free of human restraint! The creators of the supreme being were not aware of this, their Critical intention. Monsieur Buchez, who bases national fanaticism on religious fanaticism, understands his hero Robespierre better. Nationalism [Nationalit t] led to the downfall of Rome and Greece. Criticism therefore says nothing specific about the French Revolution when it maintains that nationalism caused its downfall, and it says just as little about the nation when it defines its egoism as pure. This pure egoism appears rather to be a very dark, spontaneous egoism, combined with flesh and blood, when compared, for example, with the pure egoism of Fichte s ego . But if, in contrast to the egoism of the feudal classes, its purity is only relative, no fresh examination of the revolution was needed to see that the egoism which has a nation as its content is more general or purer than that which has as its content a particular social class or a particular corporation. Criticism s explanations about the general state system are no less instructive. They are confined to saying that the general state system must hold together the individual self-seeking atoms. Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense, the members of civil society are not atoms. The specific property of the atom is that it has no properties and is therefore not connected with beings outside it by any relationship determined by its own natural necessity. The atom has no needs, it is self-sufficient., the world outside it is an absolute vacuum, i.e., is contentless, senseless, meaningless, just because the atom has all fullness in itself. The egoistic individual in civil society may in his non-sensuous imagination and lifeless abstraction inflate himself into an atom, i.e., into an unrelated, self-sufficient, wantless, absolutely full, blessed being. Unblessed sensuous reality does not bother about his imagination, each of his senses compels him to believe in the existence of the world and of individuals outside him, and even his profane stomach reminds him every day that the world outside him is not empty, but is what really fills. Every activity and property of his being, every one of his vital urges, becomes a need, a necessity, which his self-seeking transforms into seeking for other things and human beings outside him. But since the need of one individual has no self-evident meaning for another egoistic individual capable of satisfying that need, and therefore no direct connection with its satisfaction, each individual has to create this connection; it thus becomes the intermediary between the need of another and the objects of this need. Therefore, it is natural necessity, the essential human properties however estranged they may seem to be, and interest that hold the members of civil society together; civil, not political life is their real tie. It is therefore not the state that holds the atoms of civil society together, but the fact that they are atoms only in imagination in the heaven of their fancy, but in reality beings tremendously different from atoms, in other words, not divine egoists, but egoistic human beings. Only political superstition still imagines today that civil life must be held together by the state, whereas in reality, on the contrary, the state is held together by civil life. This phrase of Absolute Criticism, which describes a free people as a contradiction against which the elements of the popular community are bound to react, is absolutely hollow, for according to Robespierre and Saint-just liberty, justice and virtue could, on the contrary, be only manifestations of the life of the people and only properties of the popular community . Robespierre and Saint-just spoke explicitly of liberty, justice and virtue of ancient times, belonging only to the popular community . Spartans, Athenians and Romans at the time of their greatness were free, just and virtuous peoples . Robespierre then explicitly calls the Athenians and Spartans peuples libres . He continually recalls the ancient popular commune and quotes its heroes as well as its corrupters Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Miltiades, Aristides, Brutus and Catilina, Caesar, Clodius and Piso. In his report on Danton s arrest (referred to by Criticism) Saint-Just says explicitly: His accusation is composed in the ancient style and directed against Danton as against Catilina. In Saint-Just s other report, the one on the general police, the republican is described exactly in the ancient sense, as inflexible, modest, simple and so on. The police should be an institution of the same nature as the Roman censorship. He does not fail to mention Codrus, Lycurgus, Caesar, Cato, Catilina, Brutus, Antonius, and Cassius. Finally, Saint-Just describes the liberty, justice and virtue that he demands in a single word when he says: Robespierre, Saint-just and their party fell because they confused the ancient, realistic-democratic commonweal based on real slavery with the modern spiritualistic-democratic representative state, which is based on emancipated slavery, bourgeois society. What a terrible illusion it is to have to recognise and sanction in the rights of man modern bourgeois society, the society of industry, of universal competition, of private interest freely pursuing its aims, of anarchy, of self-estranged natural and spiritual individuality, and at the same time to want afterwards to annul the manifestations of the life of this society in particular individuals and simultaneously to want to model the political head of that society in the manner of antiquity! The illusion appears tragic when Saint-Just, on the day of his execution, pointed to the large table of the Rights of Man hanging in the hall of the Conciergerie and said with proud dignity: C'est pourtant moi qui ai fait cela [Yet it was I who made that] It was just this table that proclaimed the right of a man who cannot be the man of the ancient commonweal any more than his economic and industrial conditions are those of ancient times. This is not the place to vindicate the illusion of the Terrorists historically. Profane history, on the other hand, reports: After the fall of Robespierre, the political enlightenment, which formerly had been overreaching itself and had been extravagant, began for the first time to develop prosaically. Under the government of the Directory, bourgeois society, freed by the Revolution itself from the trammels of feudalism and officially recognised in spite of the Terror s wish to sacrifice it to an ancient form of political life, broke out in powerful streams of life. A storm and stress of commercial enterprise, a passion for enrichment, the exuberance of the new bourgeois life, whose first self-enjoyment is pert, light-hearted, frivolous and intoxicating; a real enlightenment of the land of France, the feudal structure of which had been smashed by the hammer of the Revolution and which, by the first feverish efforts of the numerous new owners, had become the object of all-round cultivation; the first moves of industry that had now become free these were some of the signs of life of the newly emerged bourgeois society. Bourgeois society is positively represented by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, therefore, begins its rule. The rights of man cease to exist merely in theory. It was not the revolutionary movement as a whole that became the prey of Napoleon on 18 Brumaire, as Criticism in its faith in a Herr von Rotteck or Welcker believes; it was the liberal bourgeoisie. One only needs to read the speeches of the legislators of the time to be convinced of this. One has the impression of coming from the National Convention into a modern Chamber of Deputies. Napoleon represented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the modern state; he understood that it is based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private interest, etc. He decided to recognise and protect this basis. He was no terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the same time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc., whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society the political idealism of its daily practice he showed no more consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn of industrial hommes d'affaires was the complement to his scorn of ideologists. In his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself. Thus he declared in the State Council that he would not suffer the owner of extensive estates to cultivate them or not as he pleased. Thus, too, he conceived the plan of subordinating trade to the state by appropriation of roulage [road haulage]. French businessmen took steps to anticipate the event that first shook Napoleon s power. Paris exchange- brokers forced him by means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by nearly two months and thus to launch it too late in the year. Just as the liberal bourgeoisie was opposed once more by revolutionary terror in the person of Napoleon, so it was opposed once more by counter-revolution in the Restoration in the person of the Bourbons. Finally, in 1830 the bourgeoisie put into effect its wishes of the year 1789, with the only difference that its political enlightenment was now completed, that it no longer considered the constitutional representative state as a means for achieving the ideal of the state, the welfare of the world and universal human aims but, on the contrary, had acknowledged it as the official expression of its own exclusive power and the political recognition of its own special interests. The history of the French Revolution, which dates from 1789, did not come to an end in 1830 with the victory of one of its components enriched by the consciousness of its own social importance.

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_c.htm

That is what Criticism says. To the Critical history of French materialism we shall oppose a brief outline of its ordinary, mass-type history. We shall acknowledge with due respect the abyss between history as it really happened and history as it takes place according to the decree of Absolute Criticism , the creator equally of the old and of the new. And finally, obeying the prescriptions of Criticism, we shall make the Why? , Whence? and Whither? of Critical history the object of a persevering study . Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense , the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and in particular French materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing political institutions and the existing religion and theology; it was just as much an open, clearly expressed struggle against the metaphysics of the seventeenth century, and against all metaphysics, in particular that of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz. Philosophy was counterposed to metaphysics, just as Feuerbach, in his first resolute attack on Hegel, counterposed sober philosophy to wild speculation. Seventeenth century metaphysics, driven from the field by the French Enlightenment, notably, by French materialism of the eighteenth century, experienced a victorious and substantial restoration in German philosophy, particularly in the speculative German philosophy of the nineteenth century. After Hegel linked it in a masterly fashion with all subsequent metaphysics and with German idealism and founded a metaphysical universal kingdom, the attack on theology again corresponded, as in the eighteenth century, to an attack on speculative metaphysics and metaphysics in general. It will be defeated for ever by materialism, which has now been perfected by the work of speculation itself and coincides with humanism. But just as Feuerbach is the representative of materialism coinciding with humanism in the theoretical domain, French and English socialism and communism represent materialism coinciding with humanism in the practical domain. Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense , there are two trends in French materialism; one traces its origin to Descartes, the other to Locke. The latter is mainly a French development and leads directly to socialism. The former, mechanical materialism, merges with French natural science proper. The two trends intersect in the course of development. We have no need here to go more deeply into the French materialism that derives directly from Descartes, any more than into the French school of Newton and the development of French natural science in general. We shall therefore merely say the following: Descartes in his physics endowed matter with self-creative power and conceived mechanical motion as the manifestation of its life. He completely separated his physics from his metaphysics. Within his physics, matter is the sole substance, the sole basis of being and of knowledge. Mechanical French materialism adopted Descartes physics in opposition to his metaphysics. His followers were by profession anti-metaphysicians, i.e., physicists. This school begins with the physician Le Roy, reaches its zenith with the physician Cabanis, and the physician La Mettrie is its centre. Descartes was still living when Le Roy, like La Mettrie in the eighteenth century, transposed the Cartesian structure of the animal to the human soul and declared that the soul is a modus of the body and ideas are mechanical motions. Le Roy even thought Descartes had kept his real opinion secret. Descartes protested. At the end of the eighteenth century Cabanis perfected Cartesian materialism in his treatise: Rapport du physique et du moral de 1'homme. Cartesian materialism still exists today in France. It has achieved great successes in mechanical natural science which, speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense , will be least of all reproached with romanticism. The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, represented in France by Descartes, had materialism as its antagonist from its very birth. The latter s opposition to Descartes was personified by Gassendi, the restorer of Epicurean materialism. French and English materialism was always closely related to Democritus and Epicurus. Cartesian metaphysics had another opponent in the English materialist Hobbes. Gassendi and Hobbes triumphed over their opponent long after their death at the very time when metaphysics was already officially dominant in all French schools. Voltaire pointed out that the indifference of the French of the eighteenth century to the disputes between the Jesuits and the Jansenists was due less to philosophy than to Law s financial speculations. So the downfall of seventeenth-century metaphysics can be explained by the materialistic theory of the eighteenth century only in so far as this theoretical movement itself is explained by the practical nature of French life at that time. This life was turned to the immediate present, to worldly enjoyment and worldly interests, to the earthly world. Its anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, materialistic practice demanded corresponding anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, materialistic theories. Metaphysics had in practice lost all credit. Here we have only to indicate briefly the theoretical course of events. In the seventeenth century metaphysics (cf. Descartes, Leibniz, and others) still contained a positive, secular element. It made discoveries in mathematics, physics and other exact sciences which seemed to come within its scope. This semblance was done away with as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century. The positive sciences broke away from metaphysics and marked out their independent fields. The whole wealth of metaphysics now consisted only of beings of thought and heavenly things, at the very time when real beings and earthly things began to be the centre of all interest. Metaphysics had become insipid. In the very year in which Malebranche and Arnauld, the last great French metaphysicians of the seventeenth century, died, Helv tius and Condillac were born. The man who deprived seventeenth-century metaphysics and metaphysics in general of all credit in the domain of theory was Pierre Bayle. His weapon was scepticism, which he forged out of metaphysics own magic formulas. He himself proceeded at first from Cartesian metaphysics. Just as Feuerbach by combating speculative theology was driven further to combat speculative philosophy, precisely because he recognised in speculation the last drop of theology, because he had to force theology to retreat from pseudo-science to crude, repulsive faith, so Bayle too was driven by religious doubt to doubt about the metaphysics which was the prop of that faith. He therefore critically investigated metaphysics in its entire historical development. He became its historian in order to write the history of its death. He refuted chiefly Spinoza and Leibniz. Pierre Bayle not only prepared the reception of materialism and of the philosophy of common sense in France by shattering metaphysics with his scepticism. He heralded the atheistic society which was soon to come into existence by proving that a society consisting only of atheists is possible, that an atheist can be a man worthy of respect, and that it is not by atheism but by superstition and idolatry that man debases himself. To quote a French writer, Pierre Bayle was the last metaphysician in the sense of the seventeenth century and the first philosopher in the sense of the eighteenth century . Besides the negative refutation of seventeenth-century theology and metaphysics, a positive, anti-metaphysical system was required. A book was needed which would systematise and theoretically substantiate the life practice of that time. Locke s treatise An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding came from across the Channel as if in answer to a call. It was welcomed enthusiastically like a long-awaited guest. The question arises: Is Locke perhaps a disciple of Spinoza? Profane history can answer: Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain. Already the British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, whether it was impossible for matter to think? In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God s omnipotence, i.e., he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist. Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolmen. The real progenitor of English materialism and all modern experimental science is Bacon. To him natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy. Anaxagoras and his homoeomeriae, Democritus and his atoms, he often quotes as his authorities. According to him the senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge. All science is based on experience, and consists in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment, are the principal forms of such a rational method. Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension or a Qual , to use a term of Jakob B hme s of matter. The primary forms of matter are the living, individualising forces of being inherent in it and producing the distinctions between the species. In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still holds back within itself in a naive way the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand, matter, surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamour, seems to attract man s whole entity by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology. In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is the man who systematises Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract experience of the geometrician. Physical motion is sacrificed to mechanical or mathematical motion; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of sciences. Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent, misanthropic, fleshless spiritualism, and that on the latter s own ground, materialism has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus it passes into an intellectual entity; but thus, too, it evolves all the consistency, regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect. Hobbes, as Bacon s continuator, argues thus: if all human knowledge is furnished by the senses, then our concepts, notions, and ideas are but the phantoms of the real world, more or less divested of its sensual form. Philosophy can but give names to these phantoms. One name may be applied to more than one of them. There may even be names of names. But it would imply a contradiction if, on the one hand, we maintained that all ideas had their origin in the world of sensation, and, on the other, that a word was more than a word; that besides the beings known to us by our senses, beings which are one and all individuals, there existed also beings of a general, not individual, nature. An unbodily substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body. Body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same reality. It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world. The word infinite is meaningless, unless it states that our mind is capable of performing an endless process of addition. Only material things being perceptible, knowable to us, we cannot know anything about the existence of God. My own existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical movement which has a beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are what we call good. Man is subject to the same laws as nature. Power and freedom are identical. Hobbes had systematised Bacon without, however, furnishing a proof for Bacon s fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge and ideas from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay on the Humane Understanding, supplied this proof. Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism; Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, similarly shattered the last theological bars that still hemmed in Locke s sensationalism. At all events, for materialists, deism is but an easy-going way of getting rid of religion. We have already mentioned how opportune Locke s work was for the French. Locke founded the philosophy of bon sens, of common sense; i.e., he said indirectly that there cannot be any philosophy at variance with the healthy human senses and reason based on them. Locke s immediate pupil, Condillac, who translated him into French, at once applied Locke s sensualism against seventeenth-century metaphysics. He proved that the French had rightly rejected this metaphysics as a mere botch work of fancy and theological prejudice. He published a refutation of the systems of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Malebranche. In his Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines he expounded Locke s ideas and proved that not only the soul, but the senses too, not only the art of creating ideas, but also the art of sensuous perception, are matters of experience and habit. The whole development of man therefore depends on education and external circumstances. It was only by eclectic philosophy that Condillac was ousted from the French schools. The difference between French and English materialism reflects the difference between the two nations. The French imparted to English materialism wit, flesh and blood, and eloquence. They gave it the temperament and grace that it lacked. They civilised it. In Helv tius, who also based himself on Locke, materialism assumed a really French character. Helv tius conceived it immediately in its application to social life (Helv tius, De 1'homme). The sensory qualities and self-love, enjoyment and correctly understood personal interest are the basis of all morality. The natural equality of human intelligences, the unity of progress of reason and progress of industry, the natural goodness of man, and the omnipotence of education, are the main features in his system. In Lamettrie s works we find a synthesis of Cartesian and English materialism. He makes use of Descartes physics in detail. His Man Machine is a treatise after the model of Descartes animal-machine. The physical part of Holbach s Syst me de la nature is also a result of the combination of French and English materialism, while the moral part is based essentially on the morality of Helv tius. Robinet (De la nature), the French materialist who had the most connection with metaphysics and was therefore praised by Hegel, refers explicitly to Leibniz. We need not dwell on Volney, Dupuis, Diderot and others, any more than on the physiocrats, after we have proved the dual origin of French materialism from Descartes physics and English materialism, and the opposition of French materialism to seventeenth-century metaphysics, to the metaphysics of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz. This opposition only became evident to the Germans after they themselves had come into opposition to speculative metaphysics. Just as Cartesian materialism passes into natural science proper, the other trend of French materialism leads directly to socialism and communism. There is no need for any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is unfree in the materialistic sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social sources of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power of the separate individual but by the power of society. These and similar propositions are to be found almost literally even in the oldest French materialists. This is not the place to assess them. The apologia of vices by Mandeville, one of Locke s early English followers, is typical of the socialist tendencies of materialism. He proves that in modern society vice is indispensable and useful. [Bernard de. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits] This was by no means an apologia for modern society. Fourier proceeds directly from the teaching of the French materialists. The Babouvists were crude, uncivilised materialists, but developed communism, too, derives directly from French materialism. The latter returned to its mother-country, England, in the form Helv tius gave it. Bentham based his system of correctly understood interest on Helv tius morality, and Owen proceeded from Bentham s system to found English communism. Exiled to England, the Frenchman Cabet came under the influence of communist ideas there and on his return to France became the most popular, if the most superficial, representative of communism. Like Owen, the more scientific French Communists, D zamy, Gay and others, developed the teaching of materialism as the teaching of real humanism and the logical basis of communism. Where, then, did Herr Bauer or, Criticism, manage to acquire the documents for the Critical history of French materialism? 1) Hegel s [Vorlesungen ber die] Geschichte der Philosophie presents French materialism as the realisation of the Substance of Spinoza, which at any rate is far more comprehensible than the French school of Spinoza . 2) Herr Bauer read Hegel s Geschichte dear Philosophie as saying that French materialism was the school of Spinoza. Then, as he found in another of Hegel s works that deism and materialism are two parties representing one and the same basic principle, he concluded that Spinoza had two schools which disputed over the meaning of his system. Herr Bauer could have found the supposed explanation in Hegel s Ph nomenologie, where it is said: 3) Finally Herr Bauer could find, again in Hegel, that when Substance does not develop into a concept and self-consciousness, it degenerates into romanticism . The journal Hallische Jahrb cher at one time developed a similar theory. But at all costs the Spirit had to decree a foolish destiny for its adversary , materialism. Note. French materialism s connection with Descartes and Locke and the opposition of eighteenth-century philosophy to seventeenth-century metaphysics are presented in detail in most recent French histories of philosophy. In this respect, we had only to repeat against Critical Criticism what was already known. But the connection of eighteenth-century materialism with English and French communism of the nineteenth century still needs to be presented in detail. We confine ourselves here to quoting a few typical passages from Helv tius, Holbach and Bentham. As, according to Helv tius, it is education, by which he means (cf. loc. cit., p. 390) not only education in the ordinary sense but the totality of the individual s conditions of life, which forms man, if a reform is necessary to abolish the contradiction between particular interests and those of society, so, on the other hand, a transformation of consciousness is necessary to carry out such a reform:

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_d.htm

Actually, the French and the English have proved, and proved in great detail, that the present social system organises the mass as it is and is therefore its organisation. Criticism, following the example of the Allgemeine Zeitung, disposes of all socialist and communist systems by means of the fundamental word fantasy . Having thus shattered foreign socialism and communism, Criticism transfers its war-like operations to Germany. Criticism has obviously so exhausted its entire provision of well meaning motives in the apologia for Bauer s literary past that it can find no other explanation for the German socialist movement than the embarrassment of the Enlighteners in 1842. Fortunately they received news of the recent French systems. Why not of the English? For the decisive Critical reason that Herr Bauer received no news of the recent English systems through Stein s book: Der Communismus und Socialismus des heutigen Frankreichs. This is also the decisive reason why only French systems ever exist for Criticism in all its talk about socialist systems. The German Enlighteners, Criticism goes on to explain, committed a sin against the Holy Ghost. They busied themselves with the lower classes of the people , already in existence in 1842, in order to get rid of the question, which did not yet exist then, as to what rank they were destined to occupy in the Critical world system that was to be instituted in anno 1843: sheep or goat, Critical Critic or impure Mass, Spirit or Matter. But above all they should have thought seriously of the Critical salvation of their own souls, for of what profit is it to me if I gain the whole world, including the lower classes of the people, and suffer the loss of my own soul? Were Criticism better acquainted with the movement of the lower classes of the people it would know that the extreme resistance that they have experienced from practical life is changing them every day. Modern prose and poetry emanating in England and France from the lower classes of the people would show it that the lower classes of the people know how to raise themselves spiritually even without being directly overshadowed by the Holy Ghost of Critical Criticism. A lot has been said about organisation of labour , although even this catchword came not from the Socialists themselves but from the politically radical party in France, which tried to be an intermediary between politics and socialism. But nobody before Critical Criticism spoke of organisation of the mass as of a question yet to be solved. It was proved, on the contrary, that bourgeois society, the dissolution of the old feudal society, is this organisation of the mass. Criticism puts its discovery in quotation marks [G nsef sse (=goose-feet) is a German word for quotation marks]. The goose that cackled to Herr Bauer the watchword for saving the Capitol is none but his own goose, Critical Criticism. It organised the mass anew by speculatively constructing it as the Absolute Opponent of the Spirit. The antithesis between spirit and mass is the Critical organisation of society , in which the Spirit, or Criticism, represents the organising work, the mass the raw material, and history the product. After Absolute Criticism s great victories over revolution, materialism and socialism in its third campaign, we may ask: What is the final result of these Herculean feats? Only that these movements perished without any result because they were still criticism adulterated by mass or spirit adulterated by matter. Even in Herr Bauer s own literary past Criticism discovered manifold adulterations of criticism by the mass. But here it writes an apologia instead of a criticism, places in safety instead of surrendering; instead of seeing in the adulteration of the spirit by the flesh the death of the spirit too, it reverses the case and finds in the adulteration of the flesh by the spirit the life even of Bauer s flesh. On the other hand, it is all the more ruthless and decisively terroristic as soon as imperfect criticism still adulterated by mass is no longer the work of Herr Bauer but of whole peoples and of a number of ordinary Frenchmen and Englishmen; as soon as imperfect criticism is no longer entitled Die Judenfrage, or Die gute Sache der Freiheit, or Staat, Religion und Parthei, but revolution, materialism, socialism or communism. Thus Criticism did away with the adulteration of spirit by matter and of criticism by mass by sparing its own flesh and crucifying the flesh of others. One way or the other, the spirit adulterated by flesh or Criticism adulterated by mass has been cleared out of the way. Instead of this un-Critical adulteration, there appears absolutely Critical disintegration of spirit and flesh, criticism and mass, their pure opposition. This opposition in its world-historic form in which it constitutes the true historical interest of the present time, is the opposition of Herr Bauer and Co., or the Spirit, to the rest of the human race as Matter. Revolution, materialism and communism therefore have fulfilled their historic mission. By their downfall they have prepared the way for the Critical Lord. Hosanna!

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_e.htm

Criticism, having supposedly attained perfection and purity in one domain, therefore committed only one oversight only one inconsistency , that of not being pure and perfect in all domains. The one Critical domain is none other than that of theology. The pure area of this domain extends from the Kritik der Synoptiker by Bruno Bauer to Das entdeckte Christenthum by Bruno Bauer, as the farthest frontier post. Criticism s earlier admission that it had been involved in political prejudice was immediately followed by the extenuating circumstance that this involvement had been basically so slight! Now the admission of inconsistency is tempered by the parenthesis that it committed only in individual, falsely expounded points. It was not Herr Bauer who was to blame, but the false points which ran away with Criticism like recalcitrant mounts. A few quotations will show that by overcoming Spinozism Criticism ended up in Hegelian idealism, that from Substance it arrived at another metaphysical monster, the Subject , Substance as a process , infinite self-consciousness , and that the final result of perfect and pure Criticism is the restoration of the Christian theory of creation in a speculative, Hegelian form. Let us first open the Kritik der Synoptiker. Let us leave to their fate the universality which attains certitude , the oneness and infinity (the Hegelian Notion). Instead of saying that the view put forward in Strauss theory on the power of the community and tradition has its abstract expression, its logical and metaphysical hieroglyphic, in the Spinozist conception of Substance, Herr Bauer makes Substance emerge from its logical simplicity and assume a definite form of existence in the power of the community . He applies the Hegelian miracle apparatus by which the metaphysical categories abstractions extracted out of reality emerge from logic, where they are dissolved in the simplicity of thought, and assume a definite form of physical or human existence; he makes them become incarnate. Help, Hinrichs! According to Hegel, Substance must be conceived as an internal process. He characterises development from the viewpoint of Substance as follows: Bauer s self-consciousness, too, is Substance raised to self-consciousness or self-consciousness as Substance; self-consciousness is transformed from an attribute of man into a self-existing subject. This is the metaphysical-theological caricature of man in his severance from nature. The being of this self-consciousness is therefore not man, but the idea of which self-consciousness is the real existence. It is the idea become man, and therefore it is infinite. All human qualities are thus transformed in a mysterious way into qualities of imaginary infinite self-consciousness . Hence, Herr Bauer says expressly that everything has its origin and its explanation in this infinite selfconsciousness , i.e., finds in it the basis of its existence. Help, Hinrichs! It seems comic in the extreme when Herr Bauer says in his Literatur-Zeitung: It was not a complete criticism of Hegel s system that Herr Bauer himself thought he was giving in his Kritik der Synoptiker but at the most the completion of Hegel s system, at least in its application to theology. He describes his criticism (Kritik der Synoptiker, Preface, p. xxi) as the last act of a definite system , which is no other than Hegel s system. The dispute between Strauss and Bauer over Substance and Self-Consciousness is a dispute within Hegelian speculation. In Hegel there are three elements, Spinoza s Substance, Fichte s Self-Consciousness and Hegel s necessarily antagonistic unity of the two, the Absolute Spirit. The first element is metaphysically disguised nature separated from man; the second is metaphysically disguised spirit separated from nature; the third is the metaphysically disguised unity of both, real man and the real human species. Within the domain of theology, Strauss expounds Hegel from Spinoza s point of view, and Bauer does so from Fichte s point of view, both quite consistently. They both criticised Hegel insofar as with him each of the two elements was falsified by the other, whereas they carried each of these elements to its one-sided and hence consistent development. Both of them therefore go beyond Hegel in their criticism, but both also remain within his speculation and each represents only one side of his system. Feuerbach, who completed and criticised Hegel from Hegel s point of view by resolving the metaphysical Absolute Spirit into real man on the basis of nature , was the first to complete the criticism of religion by sketching in a grand and masterly manner the basic features of the criticism of Hegel s speculation and hence of all metaphysics. With Herr Bauer it is, admittedly, no longer the Holy Ghost, but nevertheless infinite self-consciousness that dictates the writings of the evangelist. This philosophy of Herr Bauer, the philosophy of self-consciousness, like the results he achieved by his criticism of theology, must be characterised by a few extracts from Das entdeckte Christenthum, his last work on the philosophy of religion. Speaking of the French materialists, he says: In plain language the first extract means: the truth of materialism is the opposite of materialism, absolute, i.e., exclusive, unmitigated idealism. Self-consciousness, the Spirit, is the Universe. Outside of it there is nothing. Self-consciousness , the Spirit , is the almighty creator of the world, of heaven and earth. The world is a manifestation of the life of self-consciousness which has to alienate itself and take on the form of a slave, but the difference between the world and self-consciousness is only an apparent difference. Self-consciousness distinguishes nothing real from itself. The world is, rather, only a metaphysical distinction, a phantom of its ethereal brain and an imaginary product of the latter. Hence selfconsciousness does away again with the appearance, which it conceded for a moment, that something exists outside of it, and it recognises in what it has produced no real object, i.e., no object which in reality, is distinct from it. By this movement, however, self-consciousness first produces itself as absolute, for the absolute idealist, in order to be an absolute idealist, must necessarily constantly go through the sophistical process of first transforming the world outside himself into an appearance, a mere fancy of his brain, and afterwards declaring this fantasy to be what it really is, i.e., a mere fantasy, so as finally to be able to proclaim his sole, exclusive existence, which is no longer disturbed even by the semblance of an external world. In plain language the second extract means: The French materialists did, of course, conceive the movements of matter as movements involving spirit, but they were not yet able to see that they are not material but ideal movements, movements of selfconsciousness, consequently pure movements of thought. They were not yet able to see that the real movement of the universe became true and real only as the ideal movement of selfconsciousness free and freed from matter, that is, from reality; in other words, that a material movement distinct from ideal brain movement exists only in appearance. Help, Hinrichs! This speculative theory of creation is almost word for word in Hegel; it can be found in his first work, his Ph nomenologie. Herr Bauer therefore defends materialism against un-Critical theology, at the same time as he reproaches it with not yet being Critical theology, theology of reason, Hegelian speculation. Hinrichs! Hinrichs! Herr Bauer, who in all domains carries through his opposition to Substance, his philosophy of self-consciousness or of the Spirit, must therefore in all domains have only the figments of his own brain to deal with. In his hands, Criticism is the instrument to sublimate into mere appearance and pure thought all that affirms a finite material existence outside infinite self-consciousness. What he combats in Substance is not the metaphysical illusion but its mundane kernel nature; nature both as it exists outside man and as man s nature. Not to presume Substance in any domain he still uses this language means therefore for him not to recognise any being distinct from thought, any natural energy distinct from the spontaneity of the spirit, any power of human nature distinct from reason, any passivity distinct from activity, any influence of others distinct from one s own action any feeling or willing distinct from knowing, any heart distinct from the head, any object distinct from the subject, any practice distinct from theory, any man distinct from the Critic, any real community distinct from abstract generality, any Thou distinct from I. Herr Bauer is therefore consistent when he goes on to identify himself with infinite self-consciousness, with the Spirit, i.e., to replace these creations of his by their creator. He is just as consistent in rejecting as stubborn mass and matter the rest of the world which obstinately insists on being something distinct from what he, Herr Bauer, has produced. And so he hopes: His own ill-humour at so far being unable to master the something of this clumsy world he interprets equally consistently as the self-discontent of this world, and the indignation of his Criticism at the development of mankind as the mass-type indignation of mankind against his Criticism, against the Spirit, against Herr Bruno Bauer and Co. Herr Bauer was a theologian from the very beginning, but no ordinary one; he was a Critical theologian or a theological Critic. While still the extreme representative of old Hegelian orthodoxy who put in a speculative form all religious and theological nonsense, he constantly proclaimed Criticism his private domain. At that time he called Strauss criticism human criticism and expressly asserted the right of divine criticism in opposition to it. He later stripped the great self-reliance or self-consciousness, which was the hidden kernel of this divinity, of its religious shell, made it self-existing as an independent being, and raised it, under the trade-mark Infinite Self-consciousness , to the rank of the principle of Criticism. Then he accomplished in his own movement the movement that the philosophy of self-consciousness describes as the absolute act of life. He abolished anew the distinction between the product , infinite self-consciousness, and the producer, himself, and acknowledged that infinite self-consciousness in its movement was only he himself , and that therefore the movement of the universe only becomes true and real in his ideal self-movement. Divine criticism in its return into itself is restored in a rational, conscious, Critical way; being in-itself is transformed into being in-and-for-itself and only at the end does the fulfilled, realised, revealed beginning take place. Divine criticism, as distinct from human criticism, reveals itself as Criticism, pure Criticism, Critical Criticism. The apologia for the Old and the New Testament is replaced by the apologia for the old and new works of Herr Bauer. The theological antithesis of God and man, spirit and flesh, infinity and finiteness is transformed into the Critical-theological antithesis of the Spirit, Criticism, or Herr Bauer, and the matter of the mass, or the secular world. The theological antithesis of faith and reason has been resolved into the Critical-theological antithesis of common sense and pure Critical thought. The Zeitschrift f r spekulative Theologie has been transformed into the Critical Literatur-Zeitung. The religious redeemer of the world has finally become a reality in the Critical redeemer of the world, Herr Bauer. Herr Bauer s last stage is not an anomaly in his development; it is the return of his development into itself from its alienation. Naturally, the point at which divine Criticism alienated itself and came out of itself coincided with the point at which it became partly untrue to itself and created something human. Returning to its starting-point, Absolute Criticism has ended the speculative cycle and thereby its own life s career. Its further movement is pure, lofty circling within itself, above all interest of a mass nature and therefore devoid of any further interest for the Mass.

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_f.htm

In its Absolute existence as Herr Bruno, Critical Criticism has declared the mass of mankind, the whole of mankind that is not Critical Criticism, to be its opposite, its essential object; essential, because the Mass exists ad majorem gloriam dei [For the greater glory of God], the glory of Criticism, of the Spirit; its object, because it is only the matter on which Critical Criticism operates. Critical Criticism has proclaimed its relationship to the Mass as the world-historic relationship of the present time. No world-historic opposition is formed, however, by the statement that one is in opposition to the whole world. One can imagine that one is a stumbling-block for the world because one is clumsy enough to stumble everywhere. But for a world-historic opposition it is not enough for me to declare the world my opposite; the world for its part must declare me to be its essential opposite, and must treat and recognise me as such. Critical Criticism ensures itself this recognition by its correspondence, which is called upon to bear witness before the world to Criticism s function of redeemer and equally to the general irritation of the world at the Critical gospel. Critical Criticism is its own object as the object of the world. The correspondence is intended to show it as such, as the world interest of the present time. Critical Criticism is in its own eyes the Absolute Subject. The Absolute Subject requires a cult. A real cult requires other believing individuals. The Holy Family of Charlottenburg therefore receives from its correspondents the cult due to it. The correspondents tell it what it is and what its adversary, the Mass, is not. However, Criticism falls into an inconsistency by thus having its opinion of itself represented as the opinion of the world and by its concept being converted into reality. Within Criticism itself a sort of Mass is forming, a Critical Mass whose simple function is untiringly to echo the stock phrases of Criticism. For consistency s sake this inconsistency may be forgiven. Not feeling at home in the sinful world, Critical Criticism must set up a sinful world in its own home. The path of Critical Criticism s correspondent, a member of the Critical Mass, is not a rosy one. It is a difficult, thorny path, a Critical path. Critical Criticism is a spiritualistic lord, pure spontaneity, actus purus, intolerant of any influence from without. The correspondent can therefore be a subject only in appearance, can only seem to behave independently towards Critical Criticism, can only seemingly want to communicate something new and of his own to it. In reality he is Critical Criticism s own product, its perception of its own voice made for an instant objective and self-existing. That is why the correspondents do not fail to assert incessantly that Critical Criticism itself knows, realises, understands, grasps, and experiences what at the same moment is being communicated to it for appearance s sake. Thus Zerrleder, for instance, uses the expressions: Do you grasp it? You know. You know for the second and third time. You have probably heard enough to be able to see for yourself. So too the Breslau correspondent Fleischammer says: But the fact, etc., will be as little of a puzzle to you as to me. Or the Zurich correspondent Hirzel: You will probably find out for yourself. The Critical correspondent has such anxious respect for the absolute understanding of Critical Criticism that he attributes understanding to it even where there is absolutely nothing to understand. For example, Fleischhammer says: Indeed, in their fear the correspondents hear Critical Criticism saying, answering, exclaiming, deriding! Zeerleder, for example, says: But you say. Well, then, listen. And Fleischhammer. Yes, I hear what you say I only mean that... And Hirzel: Good for you, you will exclaim! And a T bingen correspondent: Do not laugh at me! The correspondents, therefore, also express themselves as though they were communicating facts to Critical Criticism and expect from it the spiritual interpretation; they provide it with premises and leave the conclusion to it, or they even apologise for repeating things Criticism has known for a long time. Zerrleder, for example, says: And Hirzel says: Sometimes, too, the experiences of the correspondents are merely the fulfilment and confirmation of Criticism s prophecies. Fleischhammer, for example, says: And Zerrleder: Critical Criticism sometimes feels urged to express the condescension involved by its participation in the correspondence and motivates this condescension by the fact that the correspondent has successfully carried out some task. Thus Herr Bruno writes to the T bingen correspondent: Critical Criticism has letters written to it from the provinces; not the provinces in the political sense, which, as we know, do not exist anywhere in Germany, but from the Critical provinces of which. Berlin is the capital, Berlin, the seat of the Critical patriarchs and of the Holy Critical Family, whereas the provinces are where the Critical Mass resides. The Critical provincials dare not engage the attention of the supreme Critical authority without bows and apologies. Thus, someone writes anonymously to Herr Edgar, who, being a member of the Holy Family, is also an eminent personage: The coeval of Herr Edgar describes himself incidentally as the essence of modern philosophy. Is it not in the nature of things that Criticism should correspond with the essence of philosophy? If Herr Edgar s coeval affirms that he has already lost his teeth, that is only an allusion to his allegorical essence. This essence of modern philosophy has learned from Feuerbach to set the factor of education in objective view . It at once gives a sample of its education and views by assuring Herr Edgar that it has acquired a complete view of his short story , Es leben feste Grunds tze! [Long Live firm principles! A. Weill und E. Bauer, Berliner Novellen] At the same time it openly admits that Herr Edgar s point of view is by no means quite clear to it, and finally invalidates the assurance concerning the complete view by the question: Or have I completely misunderstood you? After this sample it will be found quite normal that the essence of modern philosophy, referring to the Mass, should say: In order to get a complete view of the Critical Mass one should read the correspondence of Herr Hirzel from Zurich (Heft V). This unfortunate man memorises the stock phrases of Criticism with really touching docility and praiseworthy power of recall, not omitting Herr Bruno s favourite phrases about the battles he has waged and the campaigns he has planned and led. But Herr Hirzel exercises his profession as a member of the Critical Mass especially by raging against. the profane Mass and its attitude to Critical Criticism. He speaks of the Mass claiming a part in history, of the pure Mass , of pure Criticism , of the purity of this contradiction a contradiction purer than any that history has provided of the discontented being , of the perfect emptiness, ill humour, dejection, heartlessness, timidity, fury and bitterness of the Mass towards Criticism ; of the Mass which only exists in order by its resistance to make Criticism sharper and more vigilant . He speaks of creation from the extreme opposite , of how Criticism is above hate and similar profane sentiments. The whole of Herr Hirzel s contribution to the Literatur-Zeitung is confined to this profusion of Critical stock phrases. While reproaching the Mass for being satisfied with mere disposition , good will , the phrase , faith , etc., he himself, as a member of the Critical Mass, a content with phrases, expressions of his Critical disposition , his Critical faith , his Critical good will and leaves action, work, struggle and works to Herr Bruno and Co. Despite the terrible picture of the world-historic tension between the profane world and Critical Criticism which the members of the Critical Mass outline, for the non-believer at least not even the fact of the matter is stated, the factual existence of this world-historic tension. The obliging and un-Critical repetition of Criticism s imaginations and pretensions by the correspondents only proves that the fixed ideas of the master are the fixed ideas of the servant as well. It is true that one of the Critical correspondents [The reference is to the author of an anonymous report published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VI, May 1844, in the section Correspondenz aus der Provinz"] makes an attempt at a proof based on fact. The jingling of hackneyed phrases of a whole janissary band of current categories It is evident that the Critical correspondent does his best to keep pace with non-"current hackneyed phrases. But his explanation of the fact that the Literatur-Zeitung meets with no approval must he rejected as purely apologetic. This fact could be better explained in just the opposite way by saying that Critical Criticism is in unison with the great mass, to be precise, the great mass of scribblers who meet with no approval. It is therefore not enough for the Critical correspondent to address Critical hackneyed phrases to the Holy Family as prayers and at the same time to the Mass as anathemas . Un-Critical, mass-type correspondents, real delegates of the Mass to Critical Criticism, are needed to show the real tension between the Mass and Criticism. That is why Critical Criticism also assigns a place to the un-Critical Mass. It makes unbiased representatives of the latter correspond with it, acknowledge the opposition to itself, Criticism, as important and absolute, and utter a fearful cry for redemption from this opposition.

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch07.htm

Critical Criticism, feeling itself hit and, moreover, being as sensitive as an old maid in all matters of faith, is not taken in by these distinctions and this semi-homage. All respect for natural science! All respect for James Watt and (a really noble turn!) no respect at all for the millions that he made for his relatives. All respect for the respect of Critical Criticism! In the same letter in which Critical Criticism reproaches the above-mentioned Berlin Couleur with too easily disposing of thorough and solid works without studying them and having finished with a work when they have merely remarked that it is epoch-making, etc. in that same letter Criticism itself disposes of the whole of natural science and industry by merely declaring its respect for them. The clause which it appends to its declaration of respect for natural science reminds one of the first fulminations of the deceased knight Krug against natural philosophy. Critical Criticism knows this much about the individual products of nature that we eat and drink them . All respect for the natural science of Critical Criticism! Criticism is consistent in countering the embarrassingly importunate demand to study nature and industry with the following indisputably witty rhetorical exclamation: Or does Critical Criticism believe that it has reached even the beginning of a knowledge of historical reality so long as it excludes from the historical movement the theoretical and practical relation of man to nature, i.e., natural science and industry? Or does it think that it actually knows any period without knowing, for example, the industry of that period, the immediate mode of Production of life itself? Of course, spiritualistic, theological Critical Criticism only knows (at least it imagines it knows) the main political, literary and theological acts of history. Just as it separates thinking from the senses, the soul from the body and itself from the world, it separates history from natural science and industry and sees the origin of history not in vulgar material production on the earth but in vaporous clouds in the heavens. The representative of the obdurate and hard-hearted Mass with his trenchant reproofs and counsels is disposed of as a mass-type materialist. Another correspondent, not so malicious or mass-like, who places his hopes in Critical Criticism but finds them unsatisfied fares no better. The representative of the unsatisfied Mass writes: The Critical patriarch answers in person: In his vexation at the undue demands of the Mass , which demands something, indeed everything, from Criticism, which by principle and disposition gives nothing , the Critical patriarch relates an anecdote in the way that old men do. Not long ago a Berlin acquaintance complained bitterly of the verbosity and profusion of detail of his works Herr Bruno is known to make a bulky work out of the tiniest semblance of a thought. He was consoled with the promise of being sent the ink necessary for the printing of the book in a small pellet so that he could easily absorb it. The patriarch explains the length of his works by the bad spreading of the ink, as he explains the nothingness of his Literatur-Zeitung by the emptiness of the profane Mass , which, in order to be full, wants to swallow everything and nothing at the same time. Just as it is difficult to deny the importance of what has so far been related, it is equally difficult to see a world-historic contradiction in the fact that a mass-type acquaintance of Critical Criticism considers Criticism empty, while Criticism, for its part, declares him to be un-Critical; that a second acquaintance does not find that the Literatur-Zeitung satisfies his expectations, and that a third acquaintance and friend of the family finds Criticism s works too bulky. However, acquaintance No. 2, who entertains expectations, and friend of the family No. 3, who wishes at least to find out the secrets of Critical Criticism, constitute the transition to a more substantial and tenser relationship between Criticism and the .un-Critical Mass . Cruel as Criticism is to the hard-hearted Mass which has only common human reason , we shall find it condescending to the Mass that is pining for redemption from contradiction. The Mass which approaches Criticism with a contrite heart, a spirit of repentance and a humble mind will be rewarded for its honest striving with many a wise, prophetic and outspoken word. The criticism of the French and the English is not an abstract, preternatural personality outside mankind; it is the real human activity of individuals who are active members of society and who suffer, feel, think and act as human beings. That is why their criticism is at the same time practical, their communism a socialism in which they give practical, concrete measures, and in which they not only think but even more act, it is the living, real criticism of existing society, the recognition of the causes of the decay . After Critical Criticism s explanations for the inquisitive member of the Mass, it is entitled to say of its Literatur-Zeitung: The soft-hearted correspondent whose instruction we have just witnessed stood in a comfortable relationship to Criticism. In his case there was only an idyllic hint of the tension between the Mass and Criticism. Both sides of the world-historic contradiction behaved kindly and politely, and therefore exoterically, to each other. Critical Criticism, in its unhealthy, soul-shattering effect on the Mass, is seen first in regard to a correspondent who has one foot already in Criticism and the other still in the profane world. He represents the Mass in its inner struggle with Criticism. At times it seems to him that Herr Bruno and his friends do not understand mankind , that they are the ones who are really blinded . Then he immediately corrects himself:

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch07_2.htm

In general, the Mass is an indefinite object, and therefore can neither carry out a definite action nor enter into a definite relationship. The Mass, as the object of Critical Criticism, has nothing in common with the real masses who, for their part, form among themselves oppositions of a pronounced mass nature. Critical Criticism s mass is made by Criticism itself, as would be the case if a naturalist, instead of speaking of definite classes, contrasted the Class to himself. Hence, in order to have an opposite of a really mass nature, Critical Criticism needs, besides this abstract Mass which is the figment of its own brain, a definite Mass that can be empirically demonstrated and not just conjured up. This Mass must see in Critical Criticism both its essence and the annihilation of its essence. It must wish to be Critical Criticism, non-Mass, without being able to. This Critically un-Critical Mass is the above-mentioned Berlin Couleur . The mass of humanity which is seriously concerned with Critical Criticism is confined to a Berlin Couleur. The Berlin Couleur , the essential object of Critical Criticism, of which it is always thinking and which, Critical Criticism imagines, is always thinking of Critical Criticism, consists, as far as we know, of a few ci-devant [former] Young Hegelians in whom Critical Criticism claims to inspire partly a horror vacui [horror of emptiness] and partly a feeling of futility. We are not investigating the actual state of affairs, we rely on what Criticism says. The Correspondence is mainly intended to expound at length to the public this world-historic relation of Criticism to the Berlin Couleur , to reveal its profound significance, to show why Criticism must necessarily be cruel towards this Mass , and finally to make it appear that the whole world is in fearful agitation over this opposition, expressing itself now in favour of, and then against the actions of Criticism. For example, Absolute Criticism writes to a correspondent who sides with the Berlin Couleur": Herr Edgar s short story, Die drei Biedermdnner he found lacking in polish and exaggerated. He could not understand that censorship is not so much a fight of man against man, an external fight, as an internal one. They do not take the trouble to bethink themselves and to replace the phrase the censor okects to by a cleverly expressed and thoroughly developed Critical thought. He found Herr Edgar s essay on B raud lacking in thoroughness. The Critical reporter thinks it was thorough. True he admitted himself: I have not read B raud s book. But he believes that Herr Edgar has succeeded, etc., and belief, we know, is bhss. In general, the Critical believer continues, he (the one from the Berlin Couleur) is not at all satisfied with Herr Edgar s works. He also finds that Proudhon is not dealt with thoroughly enough . And here the reporter gives Herr Edgar a testimonial: Another correspondent begins by describing one of the members of the Berlin Couleur , whom he saw and spoke with, as gloomy , depressed , no longer able to open his mouth (although he was formerly always ready with a quite impudent word ), and despondent . This member of the Berlin Couleur related the following to the correspondent, who in turn reported it to Criticism: There are various standpoints on criticism. The members of the Berlin Couleur thought they had criticism in their pocket , but Criticism really knows and applies the force of criticism , i.e., does not keep it in its pocket. For the former, criticism is pure form, whereas for Criticism, on the other hand, it is the most substantial or rather the only substantial thing . Just as Absolute Thought considers itself the whole of reality, so does Critical Criticism. That is why it sees no content outside itself and is therefore not the criticism of real objects existing outside the Critical subject; on the contrary, it makes the object, it is the Absolute Subject-Object. Further! The former kind of criticism disposes of everything, of the investigation of things, by means of phrases. The latter isolates itself from everything by means of phrases. The former is clever in ignorance , the latter is learning . The latter, at any rate, is not clever, it learns par a, par l [here and there], but only in appearance, only in order to be able to fling what it has superficially learnt from the Mass back at the Mass in the form of a catchword , as wisdom that it itself has discovered, and to resolve it into the nonsense of Critical Criticism. Hence it can at the most treat its opponent, the Berlin Couleur, with Olympic laughter . This laughter it explains with its customary thoroughness what it is and what it is not this laughter is not arrogance . By no means! It is the negation of the negation. It is only the process that the Critic must apply in all ease and equanimity against a subordinate standpoint which thinks itself equal to him (what conceit!). When the Critic laughs, therefore, he is applying a process! And in all equanimity he applies the process of laughter not against persons, but against a standpoint! Even laughter is a category which he applies and even must apply! Extramundane Criticism is not an essential activity of the human subject who is real and therefore lives and suffers in present-day society, sharing in its pains and pleasures. The real individual is only an accidental feature, an earthly vessel of Critical Criticism, which reveals itself in it as eternal Substance. The subject is not the human individual s criticism, but the non-human individual of Criticism. Criticism is not a manifestation of man, but man is an alienation of Criticism, and that is why the Critic lives completely outside society. That is why he creates for himself a Holy Family, just as the solitary God endeavours in the Holy Family to end his tedious isolation from society. If the Critic wants to free himself from bad society he must first of all free himself from his own society. However, there should be no misunderstanding. Having waged a Herculean struggle to free itself from the uncritical profane Mass and everything , Critical Criticism has at last succeeded in achieving its solitary, god-like, self-sufficient, absolute existence. If in its first pronouncement in this, its new phase , the old world of sinful feelings seems still to have some power over it, we shall now see Criticism find aesthetic relaxation and transfiguration in an artistic form and complete its penance so it can finally as a second triumphant Christ accomplish the Critical last judgment and after its victory over the dragon ascend calmly to heaven.

The Holy Family by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch07_3.htm

Chourineur has become such a respectable moral being that he rejects the Negro doctor David s suggestion to sit on the floor, for fear of dirtying the carpet. He is indeed too shy to sit on a chair. He first lays the chair on its back and then sits on the front legs. He never fails to apologise when he addresses Rudolph, whom he saved from a mortal danger, as friend or Monsieur instead of Monseigneur . What a wonderful training of the ruthless son of nature! Chourineur expresses the innermost secret of his Critical transformation when he admits to Rudolph that he has the same attachment for him as a bulldog for its master: Je me sens pour vous, comme qui dirait l'attachement d'un bouledogue pour son ma tre. The former butcher is transformed into a dog. Henceforth all his virtues will be reduced to the virtue of a dog, pure d vouement to its master. His independence, his individuality will disappear completely. But just as bad painters have to label their pictures to say what they are supposed to represent, Eug ne Sue has to put a label on bulldog Chourineur, who constantly affirms: The two words, You still have heart and honour , made a man out of me. Until his very last breath, Chourineur will find the motive for his actions, not in his human individuality, but in that label. As proof of his moral reformation he will often reflect on his own excellence and the wickedness of other individuals. And every time he throws out moral sentences, Rudolph will say to him: I like to hear you speak like that. Chourineur has not become an ordinary bulldog but a moral one.

The Holy Family Chapter VIII

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch08.htm

On one side is the divine element (Rudolph) to, which all power and freedom are attributed, the only active principle. On the other side is the passive world system and the human beings belonging to it. The world system is the ground of reality . If this ground is not to be entirely abandoned or the last remnant of the natural condition is not to be abolished ; if the world itself is to have some share in the principle of development that Rudolph, in contrast to the world, concentrates in himself; if the human element is not to be represented simply as unfree and inactive , Herr Szeliga is bound to fall into the contradiction of religious consciousness . Although he tears apart the world system and its activity as the dualism of a dead Mass and Criticism (Rudolph), he is nevertheless obliged to concede some attributes of divinity to the world system and the mass and to give in Marguerite a speculative construction of the unity of the two, Rudolph and the world (see Kritik der Synoptiker, Band 1, p. 39). Besides the real relations of the house-owner, the acting individual force , to his house (the objective basis ), mystical speculation, and speculative aesthetics too, need a third concrete, speculative unity, a Subject-Object which is the house and the house-owner in one. As speculation does not like natural mediations in their extensive circumstantiality, it does not realise that the same bit of world system , the house, for example, which for one, the house-owner, for example, is an objective basis , is for the other, the builder of the house, an epic event . In order to get a really single whole and real unity" Critical Criticism, which reproaches romantic art with the dogma of unity , replaces the natural and human connection between the world system and world events by a fantastic connection, a mystical Subject-Object, just as Hegel replaces the real connection between man and nature by an absolute Subject-Object which is at one and the same time the whole of nature and the whole of humanity, the Absolute Spirit. In the Critical Marguerite the universal guilt of the time, the guilt of mystery , becomes the mystery of guilt , just as the universal debt [a pun on the word Schuld which means guilt and debt"] of mystery becomes the mystery of debts in the indebted Epicier [grocer]. After proving that according to the logical sequence Marguerite ought to have been Rudolph s mother, Herr Szeliga proves the opposite: This shows at least that the idea of our epic and Herr Szeliga s logical sequence are mutually contradictory. The speculative Marguerite is nothing but the embodiment of an idea . But what idea? She is the representation of an allegorical tear, and even this little that she is, is only as it were . We shall not follow Herr Szeliga in his further description of Marguerite. We shall leave her the satisfaction, according to Herr Szeliga s prescription, of constituting the most decisive antithesis to everyone , a mysterious antithesis, as mysterious as the attributes of God. Neither shall we delve into the true mystery that is deposited by God in the breast of man and at which the speculative Marguerite as it were hints. We shall pass from Herr Szeliga s Marguerite to Eug ne Sue s Fleur de Marie and to the Critical miraculous cures Rudolph accomplishes on her. We meet Marie surrounded by criminals, as a prostitute in bondage to the proprietress of the criminals tavern. In this debasement she preserves a human nobleness of soul, a human unaffectedness and a human beauty that impress those around her, raise her to the level of a poetical flower of the criminal world and win for her the name of Fleur de Marie. We must observe Fleur de Marie attentively from her first appearance in order to be able to compare her original form with her Critical transformation. In spite of her frailty, Fleur de Marie at once gives proof of vitality, energy, cheerfulness, resilience of character qualities which alone explain her human development in her inhuman situation. When Chourineur ill-treats her, she defends herself with her scissors. That is the situation in which we first find her. She does not appear as a defenceless lamb who surrenders without any resistance to overwhelming brutality; she is a girl who can vindicate her rights and put up a fight. In the criminals tavern in the Rue aux F ves she tells Chourineur and Rudolph the story of her life. As she does so she laughs at Chourineur s wit. She blames herself because on being released from prison she spent the 300 francs she had earned there on amusements instead of looking for work. But, she said, I had no one to advise me. The memory of the catastrophe of her life her selling herself to the proprietress of the criminals tavern puts her in a melancholy mood. It is the first time since her childhood that she has recalled these events. Good and evil, as Marie conceives them, are not the moral abstractions of good and evil. She is good because she has never caused suffering to anyone, she has always been human towards her inhuman surroundings. She is good because the sun and the flowers reveal to her her own sunny and blossoming nature. She is good because she is still young, full of hope and vitality. Her situation is not good, because it puts an unnatural constraint on her, because it is not the expression of her human impulses, not the fulfilment of her human desires; because it is full of torment and without joy. She measures her situation in life by her own individuality, her essential nature, not by the ideal of what is good. In natural surroundings, where the chains of bourgeois life fall away and she can freely manifest her own nature, Fleur de Marie bubbles over with love of life, with a wealth of feeling, with human joy at the beauty of nature; these show that her social position has only grazed the surface of her and is a mere misfortune, that she herself is neither good nor bad, but human. Rudolph tells her that he is going to take her to Madame George s farm. There she can see dove-cotes, cow-stalls and so forth; there they have milk, butter, fruit, etc. Those are real blessings for this child. She will be merry, that is her main thought. You can t believe how I am longing for some fun! She explains to Rudolph in the most unaffected way her own share of responsibility for her misfortune. My whole fate is due to the fact that I did not save up my money. She therefore advises him to be thrifty and to put money in the savings-bank. Her fancy runs wild in the castles in the air that Rudolph builds for her. She becomes sad only because she So far we have seen Fleur de Marie in her original un-Critical form. Eug ne Sue has risen above the horizon of his narrow world outlook. He has slapped bourgeois prejudice in the face. He will hand over Fleur de Marie to the hero Rudolph to atone for his temerity and to reap applause from all old men and women, from the whole of the Paris police, from the current religion and from Critical Criticism . Madame George, to whom Rudolph entrusts Fleur de Marie, is an unhappy, hypochondriacal religious woman. She immediately welcomes the child with the unctuous words: God blesses those who love and fear him, who have been unhappy and who repent. Rudolph, the man of pure Criticism , has the wretched priest Laporte, whose hair has greyed in superstition, called in. He has the mission of accomplishing Fleur de Marie s Critical reform. Joyfully and unaffectedly Marie approaches the old priest. In his Christian brutality, Eug ne Sue makes a marvellous instinct at once whisper in her ear that shame ends where repentance and penance begin , that is, in the church, which alone saves. He forgets the unconstrained merriness of the outing, a merriness which nature s grace and Rudolph s friendly sympathy had produced, and which was troubled only by the thought of having to go back to the criminals landlady. As Laporte, when he receives the girl, bestows on her the consciousness of her sins, so Rudolph, when he leaves her, presents her with a gold cross, the symbol of the Christian crucifixion awaiting her. So Rudolph first changed Fleur de Marie into a repentant sinner, then the repentant sinner into a nun and finally the nun into a corpse. At her funeral not only the Catholic priest, but also the Critical priest Szeliga preaches a sermon over her grave.

The Holy Family Chapter VIII

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch08_2.htm

Rudolph captures this criminal. He wants to reform him critically and set him up as an example for the world of law. He quarrels with the world of law not over punishment itself, but over kinds and methods of punishment. He invents, as the Negro doctor David aptly expresses it, a penal theory which would be worthy of the greatest German criminal expert , and which has since had the good fortune to be defended by a German criminal expert with German earnestness and German thoroughness. Rudolph has not the slightest idea that one can rise above criminal experts: his ambition is to be the greatest criminal expert , primus inter pares [first among equals]. He has the ma tre d' cole blinded by the Negro doctor David. At first Rudolph repeats all the trivial objections to capital punishment: that it has no effect on the criminal and no effect on the people, for whom it seems to be an entertaining spectacle. Further Rudolph establishes a difference between the ma tre d' cole and the soul of the ma tre d' cole. It is not the man, not the real ma tre d' cole whom he wishes to save; he wants the spiritual salvation of his soul. What Rudolph, the man of pure Criticism, objects to in profane criminal justice is the too swift transition from the court to the scaffold. He, on the other hand, wants to link vengeance on the criminal with penance and consciousness of sin in the criminal, corporal punishment with spiritual punishment, sensuous torture with the non-sensuous torture of remorse. Profane punishment must at the same time be a means of Christian moral education, This penal theory, which links jurisprudence with theology, this revealed mystery of the mystery , is no other than the penal theory of the Catholic Church, as already expounded at length by Bentham in his work Punishments and Rewards [Th orie des peines et des r compenses] In that book Bentham also proved the moral futility of the punishments of today. He calls legal penalties legal parodies . The punishment that Rudolph imposed on the ma tre d' cole is the same as that which Origen imposed on himself. He emasculates him, robs him of a productive organ, the eye. The eye is the light of the body. [New Testament, Matthew, 6:22] It does great credit to Rudolph s religious instinct that he should hit, of all things, upon the idea of blinding. This punishment was current in the thoroughly Christian empire of Byzantium and came to full flower in the vigorous youthful period of the Christian-Germanic states of England and France. Cutting man off from the perceptible outer world, throwing him back into his abstract inner nature in order to correct him blinding is a necessary consequence of the Christian doctrine according to which the consummation of this cutting off, the pure isolation of man in his spiritualistic ego , is good itself. If Rudolph does not shut the ma tre d' cole up in a real monastery, as was the case in Byzantium and in Franconia, he at least shuts him up in an ideal monastery, in the cloister of an impenetrable night which the light of the outer world cannot pierce, the cloister of an idle conscience and consciousness of sin filled with nothing but the phantoms of memory. A certain speculative bashfulness prevents Herr Szeliga from discussing openly the penal theory of his hero Rudolph that worldly punishment must be linked with Christian repentance and atonement. Instead he imputes to him naturally as a mystery which is only just being revealed to the world the theory that punishment must make the criminal the judge of his own crime. The mystery of this revealed mystery is Hegel s penal theory. According to Hegel, the criminal in his punishment passes sentence on himself. Gans developed this theory at greater length. In Hegel this is the speculative disguise of the old jus talionis [the right of retaliation-an eye for an eye], which Kant expounded as the only juridical penal theory. For Hegel, self-judgment of the criminal remains a mere Idea , a mere speculative interpretation of the current empirical punishments for criminals. He thus leaves the mode of application to the respective stage of development of the state, i.e., he leaves punishment as it is. Precisely in that he shows himself more critical than his Critical echo. A penal theory which at the same time sees in the criminal the man can do so only in abstraction, in imagination, precisely because punishment, coercion, is contrary to human conduct. Moreover, this would be impossible to carry out. Purely subjective arbitrariness would take the place of the abstract law because it would always depend on the official, honourable and decent men to adapt the penalty to the individuality of the criminal. Plato long ago realised that the law must be one-sided and take no account of the individual. On the other hand, under human conditions punishment will really be nothing but the sentence passed by the culprit on himself. No one will want to convince him that violence from without, done to him by others, is violence which he had done to himself. On the contrary, he will see in other men his natural saviours from the punishment which he has imposed on himself; in other words, the relation will be reversed. Rudolph expresses his innermost thought the purpose of blinding the ma tre d' cole when he says to him: This is, of course, the way in which all reality emerges simply out of pure Criticism , namely, as a distortion and senseless abstraction of reality. The first result of Rudolph s Criticism is this spontaneous prayer. It is followed immediately by an involuntary atonement at Bouqueval farm, where the ghosts of those whom the ma tre d' cole murdered appear to him in a dream. His first words are a frank expression of his desire for vengeance. He wants to give torture for torture. He wants to murder Chouette and he wants to prolong her agony by a long sermon. And delightful sophistry!-the speech with which he tortures her is a sermon on morals. He asserts that his dream at Bouqueval has improved him. At the same time he reveals the real effect of the dream by admitting that it almost drove him mad and that it will actually do so. He gives as a proof of his reform that he prevented Fleur de Marie from being tortured. Eug ne Sue s personages -earlier Chourineur and now the ma tre d' cole must express, as the result of their thoughts, as the conscious. motive of their actions, his own intention as a writer, which causes him to make them behave in a certain way and no other. They must continually say: I have reformed myself in this, in that, etc. Since their life has no real content, their words must give vigorous tones to insignificant features like the protection of Fleur de Marie. Having reported the salutary effect of his Bouqueval dream, the ma tre d' cole must explain why Eug ne Sue had him locked up in a cellar. He must find the novelist s procedure reasonable. He must say to Chouette: by locking me up in a cellar, causing me to be gnawed by rats and to suffer hunger and thirst, you have completed my reform. Solitude has Purified me. The beastly roar, the wild fury, the terrible lust for vengeance with which the ma tre d' cole welcomes Chouette are in complete contradiction to this moralising talk. They betray what kind of thoughts occupied him in his dungeon. The ma tre d' cole himself seems to realise this, but being a Critical moralist, he will know how to reconcile the contradictions. He declares that the infinite joy of having Chouette in his power is precisely a sign of his reform, for his lust for vengeance is not a natural one but a moral one. He wants to avenge, not himself, but the common victims of Chouette and himself. If he murders her, he does not commit murder, he fulfils a duty. He does not avenge himself on her, he punishes his accomplice like an impartial judge. He shudders at his past murders and, nevertheless, marvelling at his own casuistry, he asks Chouette: Don t you find it strange? Without fear and quite calmly I am going to kill you. On moral grounds that he does not reveal, he gloats at the same time over the picture of the murder that he is going to commit, as being terrible murder ... murder with terrible refinements. It is in accord with the character of the ma tre d' cole that he should murder Chouette, especially after the cruelty with which she treated him. But that he should commit murder on moral grounds, that he should give a moral interpretation to his savage pleasure in the terrible murder and the terrible refinements that he should show his remorse for the past murders precisely by committing a fresh one, that from a simple murderer he should become a murderer in a double sense, a moral murderer all this is the glorious result of Rudolph s Critical cure. Chouette tries to get away from the ma tre d' cole. He notices it and holds her fast. The ma tre d' cole describes correctly the condition to which isolation from the outer world reduces a man. For one to whom the sensuously perceptible world becomes a mere idea, for him mere ideas are transformed into sensuously perceptible beings. The figments of his brain assume corporeal form. A world of tangible, palpable ghosts is begotten within his mind. That is the secret of all pious visions and at the same time it is the general form of insanity. When the ma tre d' cole repeats Rudolph s words about the power of repentance and atonement linked with terrible torments , he does so in a state of semi-madness, thus proving in fact the connection between Christian consciousness of sin and insanity. Similarly, when the ma tre d' cole considers the transformation of life into a night of dream filled with ghosts as the real result of repentance and atonement, he is expressing the true mystery of pure Criticism and of Christian reform, which consists in changing man into a ghost and his life into a life of dream. But Eug ne Sue has not yet consummated the repentance and atonement linked with a terrible revenge . The ma tre d' cole recovers his reason, but fearing to be delivered to justice he remains in Bic tre and pretends to be mad. Monsieur Sue forgets that every word he said was to be a prayer , whereas finally it is much more like the inarticulate howling and raving of a madman. Or does Monsieur Sue perhaps ironically put these manifestations of life on the same level as praying? Monsieur Sue shares the opinion of the worthy people who explain the spread of crime by the organisation of prisons. To remove the criminal from bad society he is left to his own society. Had Messieurs Tocqueville and Beaumont studied Eug ne Sue s novel thoroughly they would certainly have secured complete and absolute application of solitary confinement. The pupil is white after the operation, so it is a case of cataract of the crystalline lens. So far, this could, of course, he caused by injury to the envelope of the lens without causing much pain, though not entirely without pain. But as doctors achieve this result only by natural, not by Critical means, the only resort was to wait until inflammation set in after the injury and the exudation dimmed the lens. A still greater miracle and greater mystery befall the ma tre d' cole in the third chapter of the third book. It could be considered as a new revelation that Eug ne Sue makes rewards derive from the judiciary from a new appendix to the Penal Code and not satisfied with one jurisdiction he invents a second. Unfortunately this revealed mystery, too, is the repetition of an old theory expounded in detail by Bentham in his work already mentioned [Th orie des peines et des r compenses]. On the other hand, we cannot deny Monsieur Eug ne Sue the honour of having motivated and developed Bentham s suggestion in an incomparably more Critical way than the latter. Whereas the mass-type Englishman keeps his feet on the ground, Sue s deduction rises to the Critical region of the heavens. His argument is as follows: In depicting his Critical rewarding justice, Monsieur Sue gives an example of the feminine dogmatism that must have a formula and forms it according to the categories of what exists , dogmatism which was censured with all the tranquillity of knowledge by Herr Edgar in Flora Tristan. For each point of the present penal code, which he retains, Monsieur Sue projects the addition of a counterpart in a reward code copied from it to the last detail. For easier survey we shall give his description of the complementary pairs in tabular form: Name: Criminal Justice Description: holds in its hand a sword to shorten the wicked by a head. Purpose: Punishment of the wicked imprisonment, infamy, deprivation of life. The people is notified of the terrible chastisements for the wicked. Means of discovering the wicked: Police spying, mouchards, to keep watch over the wicked. Method of ascertaining whether someone is wicked: Les assists du crime, criminal assizes. The public ministry points out and indicts the crimes of the accused for public vengeance. Condition of the criminal after sentence: Under surveillance de la haute police. Is fed in prison. The state defrays expenses. Execution: The criminal stands on the scaffold. Name: Virtuous Justice Description: holds in its hand a crown to raise the good by a head. Purpose: Reward of the good, free board, honour, maintenance of life. The people is notified of the brilliant triumphs for the good. Means of discovering the Good: Espionnage de vertu, mouchards to keep watch over the virtuous. Method of ascertaining whether someone is good: Assises de la vertu, virtue assizes. The public ministry points out and proclaims the noble deeds of the accused for public recognition. Condition of the virtuous after sentence: Under surveillance de la haute charit morale. Is fed at home. The state defrays expenses. Execution: Immediately opposite the scaffold of the criminal a pedestal is erected on which the grand homme de bien stands. A pillory of virtue. As far as spying on virtue and the supervision of supreme moral charity are concerned, they were organised long ago by the Jesuits. Moreover, the Journal des D bats, Si cle, Petites affiches de Paris, etc., point out and proclaim the virtues, noble acts and merits of all the Paris stockjobbers daily and at cost price not counting the pointing out and proclamation of political noble acts, for which each party has its own organ. Old Voss remarked long ago that Homer is better than his gods. The revealed mystery of all mysteries , Rudolph, can therefore be made responsible for Eug ne Sue s ideas. Monsieur Sue abolishes rightlessness in the state by reforming the section of the Code p nal on confidence tricks, and especially by the institution of paid lawyers for the poor. He finds that in Piedmont, Holland, etc., where there are lawyers for the poor, rightlessness in the state has been abolished. The only failing of French legislation is that it does not provide for payment of lawyers for the poor, has no lawyers restricted to serving the poor, and makes the legal limits of poverty too narrow. As if rightlessness did not begin in the very lawsuit itself, and as if it had not already been known for a long time in France that the law gives nothing, but only sanctions what exists. The already trivial differentiation between droit and fait seems still to be a myst re de Paris for the Critical novelist. If we add to the Critical revelation of the mysteries of law the great reforms which Eug ne Sue wants to institute in respect of huissiers [bailiffs], we shall understand the Paris Journal Satan. There we see the residents of a district in the city write to the grand r formateur tant la ligne [great reformer at so much a line], that there is no gaslight yet in their streets. Monsieur Sue replies that he will deal with this shortcoming in the sixth volume of his Wandering Jew. Another part of the city complains of the shortcomings of preliminary education. He promises a preliminary education reform for that district of the city in the tenth volume of the Wandering Jew.

The Holy Family Chapter VIII

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch08_3.htm

Nothing is easier than to see through the mystery of the standpoint when one has seen through the general mystery of Critical Criticism, that of warming up old speculative trash. First of all, let Criticism itself expound its theory of the standpoint in the words of its patriarch, Herr Bruno Bauer. The mystery of this courage of Bauer s is Hegel s Ph nomenologie. Because Hegel here substitutes self-consciousness for man, the most varied manifestations of human reality appear only as definite forms, as determinateness of self-consciousness. But mere determinateness of self-consciousness is a pure category , a mere thought , which I can consequently also transcend in pure thought and overcome through pure thought. In Hegel s Ph nomenologie the material, sensuously perceptible, objective foundations of the various estranged forms of human self-consciousness are allowed to remain. The whole destructive work results in the most conservative philosophy because it thinks it has overcome the objective world, the sensuously perceptible real world, by transforming it into a Thing of Thought , a mere determinateness of self-consciousness, and can therefore also dissolve its opponent, which has become ethereal, in the ether of pure thought . The Ph nomenologie is therefore quite consistent in that it ends by replacing human reality by absolute knowledge knowledge, because this is the only mode of existence of self-consciousness, and because selfconsciousness is considered the only mode of existence of man absolute knowledge for the very reason that selfconsciousness knows only itself and is no longer disturbed by any objective world. Hegel makes man the man of self-consciousness instead of making self-consciousness the self-consciousness of man, of real man, i.e., of man living also in a real, objective world and determined by that world. He stands the world on its head and can therefore in his head also dissolve all limitations, which nevertheless remain in existence for bad sensuousness, for real man. Moreover, everything that betrays the limitations of general self-consciousness all sensuousness, reality, individuality of men and of their world is necessarily held by him to be a limit. The whole of the Ph nomenologie is intended to prove that self-consciousness is the only reality and all reality. Herr Bauer has recently re-christened absolute knowledge Criticism, and given the more profane sounding name standpoint to the determinateness of self-consciousness. In the Anekdota both names are still to be found side by side, and standpoint is still explained as the determinateness of self-consciousness. Since the religious world as such exists only as the world of self-consciousness, the Critical Critic the theologian ex professo cannot by any means entertain the thought that there is a world in which consciousness and being are distinct; a world which continues to exist when I merely abolish its existence in thought, its existence as a category or as a standpoint; i.e., when I modify my own subjective consciousness without altering the objective reality in a really objective way, that is to say, without altering my own objective reality and that of other men. Hence the speculative mystical identity of being and thinking is repeated in Criticism as the equally mystical identity of practice and theory. That is why Criticism is so vexed with practice which wants to be something distinct from theory, and with theory which wants to be something other than the dissolution of a definite category in the boundless generality of self-consciousness . Its own theory is confined to stating that everything determinate is an opposite of the boundless generality of self-consciousness and is, therefore, of no significance; for example, the state, private property, etc. It must be shown, on the contrary, how the state, private property, etc., turn human beings into abstractions, or are products of abstract man, instead of being the reality of individual, concrete human beings. Finally, it goes without saying that whereas Hegel s Ph nomenologie, in spite of its speculative original sin, gives in many instances the elements of a true description of human relations, Herr Bruno and Co., on the other hand, provide only an empty caricature, a caricature which is satisfied with deriving any determinateness out of a product of the spirit or even out of real relations and movements, changing this determinateness into a determinateness of thought, into a category, and making out that this category is the standpoint of the product, of the relation and the movement, in order then to be able to look down on this determinateness triumphantly with old-man s wisdom from the standpoint of abstraction, of the general category and of general self-consciousness. Just as in Rudolph s opinion all human beings maintain the standpoint of good or bad and are judged by these two immutable conceptions, so for Herr Bauer and Co. all human beings adopt the standpoint of Criticism or that of the Mass. But both turn real human beings into abstract standpoints.

The Holy Family Chapter VIII

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch08_4.htm

The application is again just as much Rudolph s Critical own as is the exposition of Bentham s theory given above. It is not in charity as such that the young marquise is to find the satisfaction of her essential human nature, a human content and purpose of her activity, and hence entertainment. Charity offers rather only the external occasion, only the pretext, only the material, for a kind of entertainment that could just as well use any other material as its content. Misery is exploited consciously to procure the charitable person the piquancy of a novel, the satisfaction of curiosity, adventure, disguise, enjoyment of his or her own excellence, violent nervous excitement , and the like. Rudolph has thereby unconsciously expressed the mystery which was revealed long ago, that human misery itself, the infinite abjectness which is obliged to receive alms, must serve the aristocracy of money and education as a plaything to satisfy its self-love, tickle its arrogance and amuse it. The numerous charitable associations in Germany, the numerous charitable societies in France and the great number of charitable quixotic societies in England, the concerts, balls, plays, meals for the poor, and even the public subscriptions for victims of accidents, have no other object. It seems then that along these lines charity, too, has long been organised as entertainment. The sudden, unmotivated transformation of the marquise at the mere word amusant makes us doubt the durability of her cure; or rather this transformation is sudden and unmotivated only in appearance and is caused only in appearance by the description of charit as an amusement. The marquise loves Rudolph and Rudolph wants to disguise himself along with her, to intrigue and to indulge in charitable adventures. Later, when the marquise pays a charity visit to the prison of Saint-Lazare, her jealousy of Fleur de Marie becomes apparent and out of charity towards her jealousy she conceals from Rudolph the fact of Marie s detention. At the best, Rudolph has succeeded in teaching an unhappy woman to play a silly comedy with unhappy beings. The mystery of the philanthropy he has hatched is betrayed by the Paris fop who invites his partner to supper after the dance in the following words:

The Holy Family Chapter VIII

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch08_5.htm

Rudolph has only to take a look at the existing legislation in other countries. English laws fulfil all his wishes. In their delicacy, which Blackstone so highly praises, they go so far as to declare it a felony to seduce even a prostitute.

The Holy Family Chapter VIII

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch08_6.htm

It must give support during periods of unemployment to honest workers with families. It must replace alms and pawnshops. It has at its disposal an annual income of 12,000 francs and distributes interest-free assistance loans of 20 to 40 francs. At first it extends its activity only to the seventh arrondissement of Paris, where most of the workers live. Working men and women applying for relief must have a certificate from their last employer vouching for their good behaviour and giving the cause and date of the interruption of work. These loans are to be paid off in monthly instalments of one-sixth or one-twelfth of the sum at the choice of the borrower, counting from the day on which he finds employment again. The loan is guaranteed by a the borrower s word of honour. Moreover, the latter s parole jur e [sworn sword] must be guaranteed by two other workers. As the Critical purpose of the Bank for the Poor is to remedy one of the most grievous misfortunes in the life of the worker interruption in employment assistance would be given only to unemployed manual workers. Monsieur Germain, the manager of this institution, draws a yearly salary of 10,000 francs. Let us now cast a mass-type glance at the practice of Critical political economy. The annual income is 12,000 francs. The amount loaned per person is from 20 to 40 francs, hence an average of 30 francs. The number of workers in the seventh arrondissement who are officially recognised as needy is at least 4,000. Hence, in a year only 400, or one-tenth, of the neediest workers in the seventh arrondissement can receive relief. If we estimate the average length of unemployment in Paris at 4 months, i.e., 16 weeks, we shall be considerably below the actual figure. Thirty francs divided over 16 weeks gives somewhat less than 37 sous and 3 centimes a week, not even 27 centimes a day. The daily expense on one prisoner in France is on the average a little over 47 centimes, somewhat over 30 centimes being spent on food alone. But the worker to whom Monsieur Rudolph pays relief has a family. Let us take the average family as consisting of man, wife and only two children; that means that 27 centimes must be divided among four persons. From this we must deduct rent a minimum of 15 centimes a day so that 12 centimes remain. The average amount of bread eaten by a single prisoner costs about 14 centimes. Therefore, even disregarding all other needs, the worker and his family will not be able to buy even a quarter of the bread they need with the help obtained from the Critical Bank for the Poor. They will certainly starve if they do not resort to the means that the bank is intended to obviate the pawnshop, begging, thieving and prostitution. The manager of the Bank for the Poor, on the other hand, is all the more brilliantly provided for by the man of ruthless Criticism. The income he administers is 12,000 francs, his salary is 10,000. The management therefore costs 85 per cent of the total, nearly three times as much as the mass-type administration of poor relief in Paris, which costs about 17 per cent of the total. Let us suppose for a moment that the assistance that the Bank for the Poor provides is real, not just illusory. In that case the institution of the revealed mystery of all mysteries rests on the illusion that only a different distribution of wages is required to enable the workers to live through the year. Speaking in the prosaic sense, the income of 7,500,000 French workers averages no more than 91 francs per head, that of another 7,500,000 is only 120 francs per head; hence for at least 15,000,000 it is less than is absolutely necessary for life. The idea of the Critical Bank for the Poor, if it is rationally conceived, amounts to this: during the time the worker is employed as much will be deducted from his wages as he needs for his living during unemployment. It comes to the same thing whether I advance him a certain sum during his unemployment and he gives it back when he has employment, or he gives up a certain sum when he has employment and I give it back to him when he is unemployed. In either case he gives me when he is working what he gets from me when he is unemployed. Thus, the Pure Bank for the Poor differs from the mass-type savings-banks only in two very original, very Critical qualities. The first is that the Bank for the Poor lends money fonds perdus [not to be repaid], on the senseless assumption that the worker could pay back if he wanted to and that he would always want to pay back if he could. The second is that it pays no interest on the sum put aside by the worker. As this sum is given the form of an advance, the Bank for the Poor thinks it is doing the worker a favour by not charging him any interest. The difference between the Critical Bank for the Poor and the mass-type savings-banks is therefore that the worker loses his interest and the Bank its capital. Each of the six men employed on this farm is paid 150 cus, or 450 francs a year, while the women get 60 cus, or 180 francs. Moreover they get board and lodging free. The ordinary daily fare of the people at Bouqueval consists of a formidable plate of ham, an equally formidable plate of mutton and, finally, a no less massive piece of veal supplemented by two kinds of winter salad, two large cheeses, potatoes, cider, etc. Each of the six men does twice the work of the ordinary French agricultural labourer. As the total annual income produced by France, if divided equally, would come to no more than 93 francs per person, and as the total number of inhabitants employed directly in agriculture is two-thirds of the population of France, it will be seen what a revolution the general imitation of the German caliph s model farm would cause not only in the distribution, but also in the production of the national wealth. According to what has been said, Rudolph achieved this enormous increase in production solely by making each labourer work twice as much and eat six times as much as before. Since the French peasant is very industrious, labourers who work twice as much must be superhuman athletes, as the formidable meat dishes also seem to indicate. Hence we may assume that each of the six men eats at least a pound of meat a day. If all the meat produced in France were distributed equally there would not be even a quarter of a pound per person per day. It is therefore obvious what a revolution Rudolph s example would cause in this respect too. The agricultural population alone would consume more meat than is produced in France, so that as a result of this Critical reform France would be left without any livestock. The fifth part of the gross product which Rudolph, according to the report of the manager of Bouqueval, Father Chatelain, allows the labourers, in addition to the high wage and sumptuous board, is nothing else than his rent. It is assumed that, on the average, after deduction of all production costs and profit on the working capital, one-fifth of the gross product remains for the French landowner, that is to say, the ratio of the rent to the gross product is one to five. Although it is beyond doubt that Rudolph decreases the profit on his working capital beyond all proportion by increasing the expenditure for the labourers beyond all proportion according to Chaptal (De l'industrie fran aise, t. 1, p. 2 39) the average yearly income of the French agricultural labourer is 120 francs although Rudolph gives his whole rent away to the labourers, Father Chatelain nevertheless reports that the prince thereby increases his revenue and thus inspires un-Critical landowners to farm in the same way. The Bouqueval model farm is nothing but a fantastic illusion; its hidden fund is not the natural land of the Bouqueval estate, it is a magic purse of Fortunatus that Rudolph has!

The Holy Family Chapter VIII

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch08_7.htm

Moral is impotence in action . Every time it fights a vice it is defeated. And Rudolph does not even rise to the standpoint of independent morality, which is based at least on the consciousness of human dignity. His morality, on the contrary, is based on the consciousness of human weakness. His is the theological morality. We have investigated in detail the heroic feats that he accomplished with his fixed, Christian ideas, by which he measures the world, with his charit , d vouement , abn gation , repentir , bons and m chants , r compense and punition , ch timents terribles , isolement , salut de l' me [charity, devotion, self-denial, repentance , the good and the wicked people, reward and punishment, terrible chastisements, isolation, salvation of the soul] etc. We have proved that they are mere Eulenspiegel tricks. All that we still have to deal with here is the personal character of Rudolph, the revealed mystery of all mysteries or the revealed mystery of pure Criticism . The antithesis of good and evil confronts the Critical Hercules when he is still a youth in two personifications, Murph and Polidori, both of them Rudolph s teachers. The former educates him in good and is the Good One . The latter educates him in evil and is the Evil One . So that this conception should by no means be inferior in triviality to similar conceptions in other novels, Murph, the personification of the good , cannot be savant or particularly endowed intellectually . But he is honest, simple, and laconic; he feels himself great when he applies to evil such monosyllabic words as foul or vile , and he has a horreur of anything which is base. To use Hegel s expression, he honestly sets the melody of the good and the true in an equality of tones, i.e., on one note. Polidori, on the contrary, is a prodigy of cleverness, knowledge and education, and at the same time of the most dangerous immorality , having, in particular, what Eug ne Sue, as a member of the young pious French bourgeoisie, could not forget Le plus effrayant scepticisme [the most frightful scepticism]. We can judge the spiritual energy and education of Eug ne Sue and his hero by their panic fear of scepticism. Herr Rudolph indulges in charity and extravagance like the Caliph of Baghdad in the Arabian Nights. He cannot possibly lead that kind of life without sucking the blood out of his little principality in Germany to the last drop like a vampire. As Monsieur Sue tells us, he would have been among the German princes who were victims of mediation had he not been saved from involuntary abdication by the protection of a French marquis. This gives us an idea of the size of his territory. We can form a further idea of how Critically Rudolph appraises his own situation by the fact that he, a minor German Serenissimus, thinks it necessary to live semi-incognito in Paris in order not to attract attention. He specially takes with him one of his chancellors for the Critical purpose of the latter representing for him le c t th tral et pu ril du pouvoir souverain [the theatrical and childish side of sovereign power], as though a minor German Serenissimus needed another representative of the theatrical and childish side of sovereign power besides himself and his mirror. Rudolph has succeeded in imposing on his suite the same Critical self-delusion. Thus his servant Murph and his envoy Graun do not notice that the Parisian homme d'affaires [household manager], Monsieur Badinot, makes fun of them when he pretends to take their private instructions as matters of state and sarcastically chatters about Let us first recall a scene from Rudolph s domestic life. Rudolph tells Murph he was having moments of pride and bliss . Immediately afterwards he becomes furious because Murph will not answer a question of his. Je vous ordonne de parier. [I order you to speak] Murph will not let himself be ordered. Rudolph says: Je n'aime pas les r ticences [I do not like reticences] He forgets himself so far as to be base enough to remind Murph that he pays him for all his services. He will not be calmed until Murph reminds him of January 13. Murph s servile nature reasserts itself after its momentary abeyance. He tears out his hair , which he luckily has not got, and is desperate at having been somewhat rude to his exalted master who calls him a model servant , his good old faithful Murph . After these samples of evil in him, Rudolph repeats his fixed ideas on good and evil and reports the progress he is making in regard to the good. He calls alms and compassion the chaste and pious consolers of his wounded soul. It would be horrible, impious, a sacrilege, to prostitute them to abject, unworthy beings. Of course alms and compassion are the consolers of his soul. That is why it would be a sacrilege to desecrate them. It would be to inspire doubt in God, and he who gives must make people believe in Him . To give alms to one abject is unthinkable! Rudolph considers every motion of his soul as infinitely important. That is why he constantly observes and appraises them. Thus the simpleton consoles himself as far as his outburst against Murph is concerned by the fact that he was moved by Fleur de Marie. I was moved to tears, and I am accused of being blas , hard and inflexible! After thus proving his own goodness, he waxes furious over evil , over the wickedness of Marie s unknown mother, and says with the greatest possible solemnity to Murph: The explanation of the adventures and situations in which Rudolph finds himself involved is to be found above all in Rudolph s adventurous disposition. He loves the piquancy of novels, distractions, adventures, disguise ., his curiosity is insatiable , he feels a need for vigorous, stimulating sensations , he is eager for violent nervous excitement . This disposition of Rudolph is reinforced by his craze for playing the role of Providence and arranging the world according to his fixed ideas. His attitude to other persons is determined either by an abstract fixed idea or by quite personal, fortuitous motives. He frees the Negro doctor David and his beloved, for example, not because of the direct human sympathy which they inspire, not to free them, but to play Providence to the slave-owner Willis and to punish him for not believing in God. In the same way the ma tre d' cole seems to him a god-sent opportunity for applying the penal theory that he invented so long ago. Murph s conversation with the envoy Graun enables us from another aspect to see deeply into the purely personal motives that determine Rudolph s noble acts. The prince s interest in Fleur de Marie is based, as Murph says, apart from the pity which the poor girl inspires, on the fact that the daughter whose loss caused him such bitter grief would now be of the same age. Rudolph s sympathy for the Marquise d'Harville has, apart from his philanthropic idiosyncrasies, the personal ground that without the old Marquise d'Harville and his friendship with the Emperor Alexander, Rudolph s father would have been deleted from the line of German sovereigns. The whole of Rudolph s character is finally summed up in the pure hypocrisy by which he manages to see and make others see the outbursts of his evil passions as outbursts against the passions of the wicked, in a way similar to that in which Critical Criticism represents its own stupidities as the stupidities of the Mass, its spiteful rancour at the progress of the world outside itself as the rancour of the world outside itself at progress, and finally its egoism, which thinks it has absorbed all Spirit in itself, as the egoistic opposition of the Mass to the Spirit. We shall prove Rudolph s pure hypocrisy in his attitude to the ma tre d' cole, to Countess Sarah MacGregor and to the notary Jacques Ferrand. In order to lure the ma tre d' cole into a trap and seize him, Rudolph persuades him to break into his apartment. The interest he has in this is a purely personal one, not a general human one. The fact is that the ma tre d' cole has a portfolio belonging to Countess MacGregor, and Rudolph is greatly interested in gaining possession of it. Speaking of Rudolph s t te- -t te with the ma tre d' cole, the author says explicitly: With the ma tre d' cole, Rudolph obtains possession of Countess MacGregor s portfolio; he seizes the ma tre d' cole out of purely personal interest; he has him blinded out of personal passion. When Chourineur tells Rudolph of the struggle of the ma tre d' cole with Murph and gives as the reason for his resistance the fact that he knew what was in store for him, Rudolph replies: He did not know , and he says with a sombre mien, his features contracted by the almost ferocious expression of which we have spoken. The thought of vengeance flashes across his mind, he anticipates the savage pleasure that the barbarous punishment of the ma tre d' cole will afford him. On the entrance of the Negro doctor David, whom he intends to make the instrument of his revenge, Rudolph cries out: A cold and concentrated fury is seething in him. Then he whispers his plan in the doctor s ear, and when the latter recoils at it, he immediately finds a pure theoretical motive to substitute for personal vengeance. It is only a case, he says, of applying an idea that has often flashed across his noble mind, and he does not forget to add unctuously: He will still have before him the boundless horizon of atonement. He follows the example of the Spanish Inquisition which, when handing over to civil justice the victim condemned to be burnt at the stake, added a hypocritical request for mercy for the repentant sinner. Of course, when the interrogation and sentencing of the ma tre d' cole is to take place, His Highness is seated in a most comfortable study in a long, deep black dressing-gown, his features impressively pale, and in order to copy the court of justice more faithfully, he is sitting at a long table on which are the exhibits of the case. He must now discard the expression of rage and revenge with which he told Chourineur and the doctor of his plan for blinding the ma tre d' cole. He must show himself calm, sad and composed , and display the extremely comic, solemn attitude of a self-styled world judge. In order to leave no doubt as to the pure motive of the blinding, the silly Murph admits to the envoy Graun: At the same time, however, he betrays that this growth of moral hatred is nothing but a hypocritical justification to excuse the growth of his personal aversion for Sarah. The vague moral idea of his increasing hatred of the wicked is only a mask for the definite immoral fact of his increased aversion for Sarah. This aversion has a very natural and a very personal basis, his personal grief, which is also the measure of his aversion. Sans doute! [doubtless] Still more repugnant is the hypocrisy to be seen in Rudolph s meeting with the dying Countess MacGregor. In the end, Rudolph himself discards his Catholic penal theory. He wanted to abolish capital punishment, to change punishment into penance, but only as long as the murderer murdered strangers and spared members of Rudolph s family. He adopts the death penalty as soon as one of his kin is murdered; he needs a double set of laws, one for his own person and one for ordinary persons. The good Rudolph! Burning with desire for revenge, thirsting for blood, with calm, deliberate rage, with a hypocrisy which excuses every evil impulse with its casuistry, he has all the evil passions for which he gouges out the eyes of others. Only accidental strokes of luck, money and rank in society save this good man from the penitentiary. The power of Criticism , to compensate for the otherwise complete nullity of this Don Quixote, makes him bon locataire , bon voisin , bon ami , bon p re , bon bourgeois , bon citoyen , bon prince , [A good tenant , a good neighbour , a good friend , a good father , a good bourgeois , a good citizen , a good prince"] and so on, according to Herr Szeliga s gamut of eulogy. That is more than all the results that mankind in its entire history has achieved. That is enough for Rudolph to save the world twice from downfall"!

The Holy Family Chapter VIII

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch08_8.htm

And I saw and heard a mighty angel, Herr Hirzel, flying from Zurich across the heavens. And he had in his hand a little book open like the fifth number of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung., and he set his right foot upon the Mass and his left foot upon Charlottenburg; and he cried with a loud voice as when a lion roareth, and his words rose like a dove chirp! chirp! to the regions of pathos and thunder-like aspects of the Critical Last judgment. Ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars. All this must first of all come to pass. For there shall rise false Christs and false prophets, Messieurs Buchez and Roux from Paris, Herr Friedrich Rohmer and Theodor Rohmer from Zurich, and they will say: Here is Christ! But then the sign of the Bauer brothers will appear in Criticism and the words of the Scripture on Bauer s work [Bauernwerk peasant s work"]will be accomplished:

The Holy Family Chapter IX by Karl Marx

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch09.htm

French materialism of the eighteenth century exhibits two currents, one having its origin in Descartes, the other in Locke. The latter exercised a dominating influence on the French mind and led directly to socialism. The former, the mechanical materialism, dominated French science. Both currents crossed in their courses.... Descartes, in his physics, endowed matter with creative power and conceived mechanical motion as its manifestation of life. He completely severed his physics from his metaphysics. Within his physics, matter is the only substance, the only reason of its existence and cognition. The French mechanical materialism adopted the physics of Descartes and rejected his metaphysics. His disciples were anti-metaphysicians by profession, namely, physicians. This school begins with the physician Leroy, reaches its culmination with the physician Cabanis, while the physician Lamettrie was its centre.... But the man who destroyed the credit of the metaphysics of the seventeenth century was Pierre Bayle. The negative refutation of theology and metaphysics, however, sharpened the desire for a positive, anti-metaphysical system. And it was Locke who supplied it. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding came in the nick of time for the other side of the Channel. It was enthusiastically acclaimed as a long-expected guest. Materialism is the born son of Britain. Even one of his great schoolmen, Duns Scotus, asked himself whether matter cannot think. In performing this wonder, Duns had recourse to God s omnipotence, that is, he made theology itself preach materialism. He was, moreover, Nominalist. Nominalism is one of the main elements of the English materialists, as it is indeed the first expression of materialism in Christian Europe. The real progenitor of English materialism is Francis Bacon. Natural science is to him the true science, and sensuous physics the foremost part of science. Anaxagoras with his homoimeries and Democritus with his atoms are often his authorities. According to Bacon the senses arc unerring and the source of all knowledge. Science is experimental and consists in the application of a rational method to sensuous data. Observation, experiment, induction, analysis, are the main conditions of a rational method. Of the qualities inherent in matter the foremost is motion, not only as mechanical and mathematical motion, but more as impulse, vital force, tension, or as Jacob Boehme said, pain of matter. The primitive forms of the latter are living, individualising, inherent, and essential forces, which produce specific variations. With Bacon as its pioneer, materialism contains in a na ve manner the germs of universal development. Matter is still smiling upon us in its poetic-sensuous charm. The aphoristic doctrine, on the other hand, teems with theological inconsistencies. In its further development, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is the systematiser of Baconian materialism. Sensuousness loses its bloom and is turned into the abstract sensuousness of geometry. The physical motion is sacrificed to the mechanical and mathematical one. Geometry is proclaimed the cardinal science.... Materialism is rationalised, and it develops also the ruthless logicality of reason. Hobbes, starting from Bacon, argues that if all knowledge is supplied by the senses, then.... only the corporeal is perceptible and knowable, therefore we can know nothing of the existence of God. Only my own existence is certain.... Hobbes systematised Bacon, but did not establish the main principle, the origin of the ideas and knowledge of the sensuous world. It was Locke who accomplished that work in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. If Hobbes removed the theistic prejudices from Baconian naterialism, Collins, Toland, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, & c., broke down the last theological barrier of Locke s sensualism. Theism is, for those materialists, merely a comfortable, lackadaisical way to get rid of religion.... The direct French disciple and interpreter of Locke was Condillac, who pitted Locke s sensualism against the metaphysics of the seventeenth century. He published a refutation of the system of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Malebranche. In his Essai sur l origine des connaissances humaines he follows up the ideas of Locke and argues that not only the mind, but also the senses, not only the capacity for forming ideas, but also the capacity for sensuous perception, are a matter of experience and habit. On education and external circumstances depends the whole development of man. The difference between French and English materialism is the difference between the two nationalities. The French endowed English materialism with esprit and eloquence, with flesh and blood, with temperament and grace. In Helvetius, who likewise starts from Locke, materialism receives its proper French character. He envisages it in relation to social life. The sensuous qualities and self-love, enjoyment, and the well-understood personal interest are made into the foundations of morality. The natural equality of the human intelligence, the harmony between the progress of reason and the progress of manufactures, the natural goodness of man, the omnipotence of education, are the main points of his system.... It needs no special ingenuity to discover in the doctrines of materialism (concerning the natural goodness and the equal mental endowments of man, the omnipotence of experience, habit, and education, the influence of external circumstances on man, the great importance of manufactures, the legitimacy of enjoyment) the necessary connection with Communism and Socialism. If man receives from the external world and from his experience in the external world all his feelings, ideas, & c., then it is evidently our business to reorganise the empirical world in such a manner that man should only experience the really humane and acquire the habit of it. If the well-understood personal interest is the principle of all morality, then we must arrange society in such a manner as to make private interest fit in with social interest. If man is subject to the same laws as Nature: if man is not free in a materialistic sense, that is, he is not free to do this or to avoid that, but that he is only free to assert his true individuality, then there is no sense in punishing the criminal, but we must rather destroy the antisocial breeding-places of vice and to allow to everybody social scope for his activities. If man is formed by circumstances, then we must humanise the circumstances. If man is social by nature, then man develops his true nature in society only, and we must not measure the power of his nature by the power of a single individual, by the power of society. These and similar views we find even literally in the works of the older French materialists. It is not the proper place here to sit in judgment upon them. Characteristic of the social-critical tendency of materialism is Mandeville s apology of vice. Mandeville, one of the earlier followers of Locke, demonstrates that in the present-day society vice is indispensable and useful. This was by no means an apology for present-day society. Fourier starts directly from the doctrines of French materialism. The Babouvistes were raw, uncivilised materialists, but also the more advanced Communism is based on French materialism. The latter, in the French garb, returned to its native country. Godwin and Bentham established their systems on the ethical philosophy of Helvetius, and Owen took it from Bentham and based upon it English Communism. Etienne Corbet, banished to England, brought those ideas back to France and became here the most commonplace representative of Communism. But also the more advanced of French Communists, such as Dezamy, Gay, & c., developed, like Robert Owen, the materialist doctrine into real humanism and the logical basis of Communism.

England and Materialist Philosophy by Karl Marx 1845

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/english-materialism.htm

The publisher Leske has just been to see me. He is bringing out a quarterly in Darmstadt which is not subject to censorship. Engels, Hess, Herwegh, Jung and I, etc., are collaborating with him. He has asked me to solicit your cooperation -- poetry or prose. Since we must make use of every opportunity to establish ourselves in Germany, you will surely not decline. Of all the people I am leaving behind here, those I leave with most regret are the Heines. I would gladly include you in my luggage! Best regards to your wife from mine and myself. Yours K. Marx

Letters: Letters: Marx to Heine, Feb 1845

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/letters/45_02_02.htm

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is hence obliged:

Theses on Feuerbach

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/engels.htm

Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in The Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of revolutionary , of practical-critical , activity. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled:

Theses on Feuerbach

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

Secondly, on the fact that in the consciousness or feeling of every individual there exist certain irrefutable basic principles which, being the result of the whole of historical development, require no proof. In the name and on the mandate of the Congress. Secretary: Heide [Alias of Wilhelm Wolff in the League of the Just] President: Karl Schill [Alias of Karl Schapper in the League of the Just] London, June 9, 1847

Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith by Frederick Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/06/09.htm

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century. No. There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today; in other words, there have not always been proletarians, any more than there has always been free unbridled competitions. The Proletariat originated in the industrial revolution, which took place in England in the last half of the last (18th) century, and which has since then been repeated in all the civilized countries of the world. This industrial revolution was precipitated by the discovery of the steam engine, various spinning machines, the mechanical loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines, which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the whole mode of production and displaced the former workers, because the machines turned out cheaper and better commodities than the workers could produce with their inefficient spinning wheels and handlooms. The machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists and rendered entirely worthless the meagre property of the workers (tools, looms, etc.). The result was that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers. This marked the introduction of the factory system into the textile industry. Once the impulse to the introduction of machinery and the factory system had been given, this system spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and book-printing, pottery, and the metal industries. Labor was more and more divided among the individual workers so that the worker who previously had done a complete piece of work now did only a part of that piece. This division of labor made it possible to produce things faster and cheaper. It reduced the activity of the individual worker to simple, endlessly repeated mechanical motions which could be performed not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell, one after another, under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and weaving had already done. But at the same time, they also fell into the hands of big capitalists, and their workers were deprived of whatever independence remained to them. Gradually, not only genuine manufacture but also handicrafts came within the province of the factory system as big capitalists increasingly displaced the small master craftsmen by setting up huge workshops, which saved many expenses and permitted an elaborate division of labor. This is how it has come about that in civilized countries at the present time nearly all kinds of labor are performed in factories and, in nearly all branches of work, handicrafts and manufacture have been superseded. This process has, to an ever greater degree, ruined the old middle class, especially the small handicraftsmen; it has entirely transformed the condition of the workers; and two new classes have been created which are gradually swallowing up all the others. These are: Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition as we shall see, the two come to the same thing the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor. But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life. However, since business is sometimes better and sometimes worse, it follows that the worker sometimes gets more and sometimes gets less for his commodities. But, again, just as the industrialist, on the average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commodities than what they cost, similarly on the average the worker gets no more and no less than his minimum. This economic law of wages operates the more strictly the greater the degree to which big industry has taken possession of all branches of production. The working classes have always, according to the different stages of development of society, lived in different circumstances and had different relations to the owning and ruling classes. In antiquity, the workers were the slaves of the owners, just as they still are in many backward countries and even in the southern part of the United States. In the Middle Ages, they were the serfs of the land-owning nobility, as they still are in Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In the Middle Ages, and indeed right up to the industrial revolution, there were also journeymen in the cities who worked in the service of petty bourgeois masters. Gradually, as manufacture developed, these journeymen became manufacturing workers who were even then employed by larger capitalists. The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole. The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries. The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave. The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general. The serf possesses and uses an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he gives up a part of his product or part of the services of his labor. The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it. The serf liberates himself in one of three ways: either he runs away to the city and there becomes a handicraftsman; or, instead of products and services, he gives money to his lord and thereby becomes a free tenant; or he overthrows his feudal lord and himself becomes a property owner. In short, by one route or another, he gets into the owning class and enters into competition. The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences. In contrast to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman, as he still existed almost everywhere in the past (eighteenth) century and still exists here and there at present, is a proletarian at most temporarily. His goal is to acquire capital himself wherewith to exploit other workers. He can often achieve this goal where guilds still exist or where freedom from guild restrictions has not yet led to the introduction of factory-style methods into the crafts nor yet to fierce competition. But as soon as the factory system has been introduced into the crafts and competition flourishes fully, this perspective dwindles away and the handicraftsman becomes more and more a proletarian. The handicraftsman therefore frees himself by becoming either bourgeois or entering the middle class in general, or becoming a proletarian because of competition (as is now more often the case). In which case he can free himself by joining the proletarian movement, i.e., the more or less communist movement. The manufacturing worker of the 16th to the 18th centuries still had, with but few exception, an instrument of production in his own possession his loom, the family spinning wheel, a little plot of land which he cultivated in his spare time. The proletarian has none of these things. The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian. First, the lower and lower prices of industrial products brought about by machine labor totally destroyed, in all countries of the world, the old system of manufacture or industry based upon hand labor. In this way, all semi-barbarian countries, which had hitherto been more or less strangers to historical development, and whose industry had been based on manufacture, were violently forced out of their isolation. They bought the cheaper commodities of the English and allowed their own manufacturing workers to be ruined. Countries which had known no progress for thousands of years for example, India were thoroughly revolutionized, and even China is now on the way to a revolution. We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year s time. In this way, big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries. It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off revolution in all other countries revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the liberation of their respective working class. Second, wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital. The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society. Free competition is necessary for the establishment of big industry, because it is the only condition of society in which big industry can make its way. Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois equality before the law and the recognition of free competition, and in European countries takes the form of constitutional monarchy. In these constitutional monarchies, only those who possess a certain capital are voters that is to say, only members of the bourgeoisie. These bourgeois voters choose the deputies, and these bourgeois deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government. Third, everywhere the proletariat develops in step with the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the bourgeoisie grows in wealth, the proletariat grows in numbers. For, since the proletarians can be employed only by capital, and since capital extends only through employing labor, it follows that the growth of the proletariat proceeds at precisely the same pace as the growth of capital. Simultaneously, this process draws members of the bourgeoisie and proletarians together into the great cities where industry can be carried on most profitably, and by thus throwing great masses in one spot it gives to the proletarians a consciousness of their own strength. Moreover, the further this process advances, the more new labor-saving machines are invented, the greater is the pressure exercised by big industry on wages, which, as we have seen, sink to their minimum and therewith render the condition of the proletariat increasingly unbearable. The growing dissatisfaction of the proletariat thus joins with its rising power to prepare a proletarian social revolution. Big industry created in the steam engine, and other machines, the means of endlessly expanding industrial production, speeding it up, and cutting its costs. With production thus facilitated, the free competition, which is necessarily bound up with big industry, assumed the most extreme forms; a multitude of capitalists invaded industry, and, in a short while, more was produced than was needed. As a consequence, finished commodities could not be sold, and a so-called commercial crisis broke out. Factories had to be closed, their owners went bankrupt, and the workers were without bread. Deepest misery reigned everywhere. After a time, the superfluous products were sold, the factories began to operate again, wages rose, and gradually business got better than ever. But it was not long before too many commodities were again produced and a new crisis broke out, only to follow the same course as its predecessor. Ever since the beginning of this (19th) century, the condition of industry has constantly fluctuated between periods of prosperity and periods of crisis; nearly every five to seven years, a fresh crisis has intervened, always with the greatest hardship for workers, and always accompanied by general revolutionary stirrings and the direct peril to the whole existing order of things. First: It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions. We see with the greatest clarity: Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society. It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association. Moreover, since the management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods. In fact, the abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand. No. Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations. Private property has not always existed. When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which could not be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture, which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property. And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property was the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order. So long as it is not possible to produce so much that there is enough for all, with more left over for expanding the social capital and extending the forces of production so long as this is not possible, there must always be a ruling class directing the use of society s productive forces, and a poor, oppressed class. How these classes are constituted depends on the stage of development. The agrarian Middle Ages give us the baron and the serf; the cities of the later Middle Ages show us the guildmaster and the journeyman and the day laborer; the 17th century has its manufacturing workers; the 19th has big factory owners and proletarians. It is clear that, up to now, the forces of production have never been developed to the point where enough could be developed for all, and that private property has become a fetter and a barrier in relation to the further development of the forces of production. Now, however, the development of big industry has ushered in a new period. Capital and the forces of production have been expanded to an unprecedented extent, and the means are at hand to multiply them without limit in the near future. Moreover, the forces of production have been concentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois, while the great mass of the people are more and more falling into the proletariat, their situation becoming more wretched and intolerable in proportion to the increase of wealth of the bourgeoisie. And finally, these mighty and easily extended forces of production have so far outgrown private property and the bourgeoisie, that they threaten at any moment to unleash the most violent disturbances of the social order. Now, under these conditions, the abolition of private property has become not only possible but absolutely necessary. It would be desirable if this could happen, and the communists would certainly be the last to oppose it. Communists know only too well that all conspiracies are not only useless, but even harmful. They know all too well that revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily, but that, everywhere and always, they have been the necessary consequence of conditions which were wholly independent of the will and direction of individual parties and entire classes. But they also see that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries has been violently suppressed, and that in this way the opponents of communism have been working toward a revolution with all their strength. If the oppressed proletariat is finally driven to revolution, then we communists will defend the interests of the proletarians with deeds as we now defend them with words. No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity. Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority of the people. Indirect in France and Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians, but also of small peasants and petty bourgeois who are in the process of falling into the proletariat, who are more and more dependent in all their political interests on the proletariat, and who must, therefore, soon adapt to the demands of the proletariat. Perhaps this will cost a second struggle, but the outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat. Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat. The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, are the following: It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will always bring others in its wake. Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country s productive forces. Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain. No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries that is to say, at least in England, America, France, and Germany. It will develop in each of these countries more or less rapidly, according as one country or the other has a more developed industry, greater wealth, a more significant mass of productive forces. Hence, it will go slowest and will meet most obstacles in Germany, most rapidly and with the fewest difficulties in England. It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world, and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while greatly stepping up its pace. It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range. Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished. There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is overproduction and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done in the past. Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development of industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of everyone. The same will be true of agriculture, which also suffers from the pressure of private property and is held back by the division of privately owned land into small parcels. Here, existing improvements and scientific procedures will be put into practice, with a resulting leap forward which will assure to society all the products it needs. In this way, such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members. The division of society into different, mutually hostile classes will then become unnecessary. Indeed, it will be not only unnecessary but intolerable in the new social order. The existence of classes originated in the division of labor, and the division of labor, as it has been known up to the present, will completely disappear. For mechanical and chemical processes are not enough to bring industrial and agricultural production up to the level we have described; the capacities of the men who make use of these processes must undergo a corresponding development. Just as the peasants and manufacturing workers of the last century changed their whole way of life and became quite different people when they were drawn into big industry, in the same way, communal control over production by society as a whole, and the resulting new development, will both require an entirely different kind of human material. People will no longer be, as they are today, subordinated to a single branch of production, bound to it, exploited by it; they will no longer develop one of their faculties at the expense of all others; they will no longer know only one branch, or one branch of a single branch, of production as a whole. Even industry as it is today is finding such people less and less useful. Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety. The form of the division of labor which makes one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factory worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communist society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other. A corollary of this is that the difference between city and country is destined to disappear. The management of agriculture and industry by the same people rather than by two different classes of people is, if only for purely material reasons, a necessary condition of communist association. The dispersal of the agricultural population on the land, alongside the crowding of the industrial population into the great cities, is a condition which corresponds to an undeveloped state of both agriculture and industry and can already be felt as an obstacle to further development. The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country these are the main consequences of the abolition of private property. It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents. And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moral philistines against the community of women . Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact abolishes it. The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property. All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance The so-called socialists are divided into three categories. The first category consists of adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already been destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation, bourgeois society. This category concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal and patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils. In one way or another, all their proposals are directed to this end. This category of reactionary socialists, for all their seeming partisanship and their scalding tears for the misery of the proletariat, is nevertheless energetically opposed by the communists for the following reasons: The second category consists of adherents of present-day society who have been frightened for its future by the evils to which it necessarily gives rise. What they want, therefore, is to maintain this society while getting rid of the evils which are an inherent part of it. To this end, some propose mere welfare measures while others come forward with grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society. Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow. Finally, the third category consists of democratic socialists who favor some of the same measures the communists advocate, as described in Question 18, not as part of the transition to communism, however, but as measures which they believe will be sufficient to abolish the misery and evils of present-day society. These democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently clear about the conditions of the liberation of their class, or they are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, a class which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives rise, has many interests in common with the proletariat. It follows that, in moments of action, the communists will have to come to an understanding with these democratic socialists, and in general to follow as far as possible a common policy with them provided that these socialists do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack the communists. It is clear that this form of co-operation in action does not exclude the discussion of differences. This attitude is different in the different countries. In England, France, and Belgium, where the bourgeoisie rules, the communists still have a common interest with the various democratic parties, an interest which is all the greater the more closely the socialistic measures they champion approach the aims of the communists that is, the more clearly and definitely they represent the interests of the proletariat and the more they depend on the proletariat for support. In England, for example, the working-class Chartists are infinitely closer to the communists than the democratic petty bourgeoisie or the so-called Radicals. In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists must make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat that is, with the agrarian National Reformers. In Switzerland, the Radicals, though a very mixed party, are the only group with which the communists can co-operate, and, among these Radicals, the Vaudois and Genevese are the most advanced. In Germany, finally, the decisive struggle now on the order of the day is that between the bourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy. Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it. Against the governments, therefore, the communists must continually support the radical liberal party, taking care to avoid the self-deceptions of the bourgeoisie and not fall for the enticing promises of benefits which a victory for the bourgeoisie would allegedly bring to the proletariat. The sole advantages which the proletariat would derive from a bourgeois victory would consist In the name and on the mandate of the Congress.

The Principles of Communism

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

Dear Citizen! I arrived yesterday evening just in time to attend the public meeting called to celebrate the anniversary of the Polish revolution of 1830. I have been present at many similar celebrations but I have never seen such general enthusiasm, such perfect and cordial agreement between men of all nations. The chairmanship was given to Mr. Arnott, an English workman. The first speech was by Mr. Ernest Jones, editor of The Northern Star, who, while speaking against the behaviour of the Polish aristocracy during the insurrection of 1830, gave much praise to the efforts made by Poland to escape from the yoke of her oppressors. His brilliant and powerful speech was loudly applauded. After him, M. Michelot gave a speech in French. Mr. Schapper from Germany followed him. He told the meeting that the Brussels Democratic Association had delegated to London Mr. Marx, German democrat and one of its vice-presidents, to establish relations of correspondence between the Brussels society and the London society of Fraternal Democrats, and also to prepare for a democratic congress of the different European nations. Mr. Marx was received with prolonged applause, when he came forward to address the assembly. In a speech in German, translated by Mr. Schapper, Mr. Marx declared that England would give the signal for the deliverance of Poland. Poland, he said, would be free only when the civilised nations of Western Europe had won democracy. Now, of all the democracies of Europe, the strongest and most numerous was that of England, organised throughout the whole country. It was in England that the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was most developed, that the decisive struggle between these two classes became more and more inevitable. It was therefore in England that in all probability the fight would begin which would end with the universal triumph of democracy and which would also break the Polish yoke. The success of other European democrats depended on the victory of the English Chartists; therefore Poland would be saved by England. Mr. Harney, chief editor of The Northern Star, followed by thanking the democrats of Brussels for having immediately approached the democrats of London, taking no account of the advances made to them by the bourgeoisie of the London International League, a society founded by the free traders in order to exploit foreign democrats in the interests of free trade and to compete with the society of Fraternal Democrats which was almost exclusively composed of workers. Mr. Engels, from Paris, a German democrat, then declared that Germany had a special interest in the freedom of Poland because the German governments exercised their despotism over a part of Poland. German democracy ought to have at heart the ending of this tyranny which shamed Germany. Mr. Tedesco, from Li ge, in a vigorous speech, thanked the Polish fighters of 1830 for having loudly proclaimed the principle of insurrection. His speech, translated by Mr. Schapper, was warmly applauded. After some remarks by Mr. Charles Keen, Colonel Oborski replied for Poland. Mr. Wilson, an English workman who by his vigorous opposition recently almost brought about the break-up of a meeting of the International League, was the last to address the assembly. On the proposal of Messrs Harney and Engels, three cheers were given for the three great European democratic newspapers: the R forme, The Northern Star, and the Deutsche-Br sseler-Zeitung; on the proposal of Mr. Schapper, three groans were given for the three anti-democratic papers: the Journal des D bats, The Times and the Augsburg Zeitung. The meeting ended with the singing of the Marseillaise, in which everybody joined, standing and with hats off.

The Anniversary of the Polish Revolution of 1830 by Frederick Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/12/05.htm

The first point over which the bourgeois democrats will come into conflict with the workers will be the abolition of feudalism as in the first French revolution, the petty bourgeoisie will want to give the feudal lands to the peasants as free property; that is, they will try to perpetrate the existence of the rural proletariat, and to form a petty-bourgeois peasant class which will be subject to the same cycle of impoverishment and debt which still afflicts the French peasant. The workers must oppose this plan both in the interest of the rural proletariat and in their own interest. They must demand that the confiscated feudal property remain state property and be used for workers colonies, cultivated collectively by the rural proletariat with all the advantages of large-scale farming and where the principle of common property will immediately achieve a sound basis in the midst of the shaky system of bourgeois property relations. Just as the democrats ally themselves with the peasants, the workers must ally themselves with the rural proletariat. The democrats will either work directly towards a federated republic, or at least, if they cannot avoid the one and indivisible republic they will attempt to paralyze the central government by granting the municipalities and provinces the greatest possible autonomy and independence. In opposition to this plan the workers must not only strive for one and indivisible German republic, but also, within this republic, for the most decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state authority. They should not let themselves be led astray by empty democratic talk about the freedom of the municipalities, self-government, etc. In a country like Germany, where so many remnants of the Middle Ages are still to be abolished, where so much local and provincial obstinacy has to be broken down, it cannot under any circumstances be tolerated that each village, each town and each province may put up new obstacles in the way of revolutionary activity, which can only be developed with full efficiency from a central point. A renewal of the present situation, in which the Germans have to wage a separate struggle in each town and province for the same degree of progress, can also not be tolerated. Least of all can a so-called free system of local government be allowed to perpetuate a form of property which is more backward than modern private property and which is everywhere and inevitably being transformed into private property; namely communal property, with its consequent disputes between poor and rich communities. Nor can this so-called free system of local government be allowed to perpetuate, side by side with the state civil law, the existence of communal civil law with its sharp practices directed against the workers. As in France in 1793, it is the task of the genuinely revolutionary party in Germany to carry through the strictest centralization. [It must be recalled today that this passage is based on a misunderstanding. At that time thanks to the Bonapartist and liberal falsifiers of history it was considered as established that the French centralised machine of administration had been introduced by the Great Revolution and in particular that it had been used by the Convention as an indispensable and decisive weapon for defeating the royalist and federalist reaction and the external enemy. It is now, however, a well-known fact that throughout the revolution up to the eighteenth Brumaire c the whole administration of the d partements, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by, the respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted with complete freedom within the general state laws; that precisely this provincial and local self-government, similar to the American, became the most powerful lever of the revolution and indeed to such an extent that Napoleon, immediately after his coup d tat of the eighteenth Brumaire, hastened to replace it by the still existing administration by prefects, which, therefore, was a pure instrument of reaction from the beginning. But no more than local and provincial self-government is in contradiction to political, national centralisation, is it necessarily bound up with that narrow-minded cantonal or communal self-seeking which strikes us as so repulsive in Switzerland, and which all the South German federal republicans wanted to make the rule in Germany in 1849. Note by Engels to the 1885 edition.] We have seen how the next upsurge will bring the democrats to power and how they will be forced to propose more or less socialistic measures. it will be asked what measures the workers are to propose in reply. At the beginning, of course, the workers cannot propose any directly communist measures. But the following courses of action are possible: Although the German workers cannot come to power and achieve the realization of their class interests without passing through a protracted revolutionary development, this time they can at least be certain that the first act of the approaching revolutionary drama will coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will thereby be accelerated. But they themselves must contribute most to their final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organized party of the proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution.

Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm

The main purpose of this letter is to present a report on the state of the League. For a while, following the defeats sustained by the revolutionary party last summer, the League s organization almost completely disintegrated. The most active League members involved in the various movements were dispersed, contacts were broken off and addresses could no longer be used; because of this and because of the danger of letters being opened, correspondence became temporarily impossible. The Central Committee was thus condemned to complete inactivity until around the end of last year. As the immediate after-effects of our defeats gradually passed, it became clear that the revolutionary party needed a strong secret organization throughout Germany. The need for this organization, which led the Central Committee to decide to send an emissary to Germany and Switzerland, also led to an attempt by the Cologne commune to organize the League in Germany itself. Around the beginning of the year several more or less well-known refugees from the various movements formed an organization in Switzerland which intended to overthrow the governments at the right moment and to keep men at the ready to take over the leadership of the movement and even the government itself. This association did not possess any particular party character; the motley elements which it comprised made this impossible. The members consisted of people from all groups within the movement, from resolute Communists and even former League members to the most faint-hearted petty-bourgeois democrats and former members of the Palatinate government. In the eyes of the Baden-Palatinate careerists and lesser ambitious figures who were so numerous in Switzerland at this time, this association presented an ideal opportunity for them to advance themselves. The instructions which this association sent to its agents and which the Central Committee has in its possession give just as little cause for confidence. The lack of a definite party standpoint and the attempt to bring all available opposition elements together in a sham association is only badly disguised by a mass of detailed questions concerning the industrial, agricultural, political and military situations in each locality. Numerically, too, the association was extremely weak; according to the complete list of members which we possess, the whole society in Switzerland consisted, at the height of its strength, of barely thirty members. It is significant that workers are hardly represented at all among the membership. From its very beginning, it was an army of officers and N.C.O. s without any soldiers. Its members include A. Fries and Greiner from the Palatinate, Korner from Elberfeld, Sigel, etc. They sent two agents to Germany. The first agent, Bruhn, a member of the League, managed by false pretences to persuade certain League members and communes to join the new association for the time being, as they believed it to be the resurrected League. While reporting on the League to the Swiss Central Committee in Zurich, he simultaneously sent us reports on the Swiss association. He cannot have been content with his role as an informer, for while he was still corresponding with us, he wrote outright slanders to the people in Frankfurt, who had been won over to the Swiss association, and he ordered them not to enter into any contacts whatsoever with London. For this he was immediately expelled from the League. Matters in Frankfurt were settled by an emissary from the League. It may be added that Bruhn s activities on behalf of the Swiss Central Committee remained fruitless. The second agent, the student Schurz from Bonn, achieved nothing because, as he wrote to Zurich, he found that all the people of any use were already in the hands of the League. He then suddenly left Germany and is now hanging around Brussels and Paris, where he is being watched by the League. The Central Committee does not see this new association as a danger, particularly as a completely reliable member of the League is on the committee, with instructions to observe and report on the actions and plans of these people, in so far as they operate against the League. Furthermore, we have sent an emissary to Switzerland in order to recruit the people who will be of value to the League, with the help of the aforementioned League member, and in order to organize the League in Switzerland in general. This information is based on fully authentic documents. Another attempt of a similar nature had already been made earlier by Struve, Sigel and others, at the time that they joined forces in Geneva. These people had no compunction about claiming quite flatly that the association they were attempting to found was the League, nor about using the names of League members for precisely this end. Of course, they deceived nobody with this lie. Their attempt was so fruitless in every respect that the few members of this abortive association who stayed in Switzerland eventually had to join the organization previously mentioned. But the more impotent this coterie became, the more it showed off with pretentious titles like the Central Committee of European Democracy etc. Struve, together with a few other disappointed great men, has continued these attempts here in London. Manifestoes and appeals to join the Central Bureau of German Refugees and the Central Committee of European Democracy have been sent to all parts of Germany, but this time, too, without the least success. The contacts which this coterie claims to have made with French and other non-German revolutionaries do not exist. Their whole activity is limited to a few petty intrigues among the German refugees here in London, which do not affect the League directly and which are harmless and easy to keep under surveillance. All these attempts have either the same purpose as the League, namely the revolutionary organization of the workers party, in which case they are undermining the centralization and strength of the party by fragmenting it and are therefore of a decidedly harmful, separatist character, or else they can only serve to misuse the workers party for purposes which are foreign or straightforwardly hostile to it. Under certain circumstances the workers party can profitably use other parties and groups for its own purposes, but it must not subordinate itself to any other party. Those people who were in government during the last movement, and used their position only to betray the movement and to crush the workers party were it tried to operate independently, must be kept at a distance at all costs. The following is a report on the state of the League: In Germany the league has its main centres in Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Hanau, Mainz, Wiesbaden, Hamburg, Schwerin, Berlin, Breslau, Liegnitz, Glogau, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Munich, Bamberg, Wurzburg, Stuttgart and Baden. The following towns have been chosen as central districts: Hamburg for Schleswig-Holstein; Schwerin for Mecklenburg; Breslau for Silesia; Leipzig for Saxony and Berlin; Nuremberg for Bavaria, Cologne for the Rhineland and Westphalia. The communes in Gottingen, Stuttgart and Brussels will remain in direct contact with the Central Committee for the time being, until they have succeeded in widening their influence to the extent necessary to form new central districts. A decision will not be made on the position of the League in Baden until the report has been received from the emissary sent there and to Switzerland. Wherever peasant and agricultural workers association exist, as in Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg, members of the League have succeeded in exercising a direct influence upon them and, in some cases, in gaining complete control. For the most part, the workers and agricultural workers associations in Saxony, Franconia, Hesse and Nassau are also under the leadership of the League. The most influential members of the Workers Brotherhood also belong to the League. The Central Committee wishes to point out to all communes and League members that it is of the utmost importance to win influence in the workers , sports, peasants and agricultural workers associations, etc. everywhere. It requests the central districts and the communes corresponding directly with the Central Committee to give a special report in their subsequent letters on what has been achieved in this connection. The emissary to Germany, who as received a vote of commendation from the Central Committee for his activities, has everywhere recruited only the most reliable people into the League and left the expansion of the League to their greater local knowledge. It will depend upon the local situation whether convinced revolutionaries can be enlisted. Where this is not possible a second class of League members must be created for those people who are reliable and make useful revolutionaries but who do not yet understand the full communist implications of the present movement. This second class, to whom the association must be represented as a merely local or regional affair, must remain under the continuous leadership of actual League members and committees. With the help of these further contacts the League s influence on the peasants and sports associations in particular can be very firmly organized. Detailed arrangements are left to the central districts; the Central Committee hopes to receive their reports on these matters, too, as soon as possible. One commune has proposed to the Central Committee that a Congress of the League be convened, indeed in German itself. The communes and districts will certainly appreciate that under the present circumstances even regional congresses of the central districts are not everywhere advisable, and that a general Congress of the League at this moment is a sheer impossibility. However, the Central Committee will convene a Congress of the Communist League in a suitable place just as soon as circumstances allow. Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia recently received a visit from an emissary of the Cologne central district. The report on the result of this trip has not yet reached Cologne. We request all central districts to send similar emissaries round their regions and to report on their success as soon as possible. Finally we should like to report that in Schleswig-Holstein, contacts have been established with the army: we are still awaiting the more detailed report on the influence which the League can hope to gain here. The Central Committee is in touch with the decisively revolutionary parties of the French, English and Hungarians by way of members delegated for this purpose. Of all the parties involved in the French revolution it is in particular the genuine proletarian party headed by Blanqui which has joined us. The delegates of the Blanquist secret society are in regular and official contact with the delegates of the League, to whom they have entrusted important preparatory work for the next revolution. The leaders of the revolutionary wing of the Chartists are also in regular and close contact with the delegates of the Central Committee. Their journals are being made available to us. The break between this revolutionary, independent workers party and the faction headed by O'Connor, which tends more towards a policy of reconciliation, has been considerably accelerated by the delegates of the League. The Central Committee is similarly in contact with the most progressive section of the Hungarian refugees. This party is important because it includes many excellent military experts, who would be at the League s disposal in the event of revolution. The Central Committee requests the central districts to distribute this letter among their members as soon as possible and to submit their own reports soon. It urges all League members to the most intense activity, especially now that the situation has become so critical that it cannot be long before another revolution breaks out.

Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League by Marx and Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad2.htm

With the sentence of the Cologne Communists in 1852, the curtain falls on the first period of the independent German workers movement. Today this period is almost forgotten. Yet it lasted from 1836 to 1852 and, with the spread of German workers abroad, the movement developed in almost all civilized countries. Nor is that all. The present-day international workers movement is in substance a direct continuation of the German workers movement of that time, which was the first international workers movement of all time, and which brought forth many of those who took the leading role in he International Working Men s Association. And the theoretical principles that the Communist League had inscribed on its banner in the Communist Manifesto of 1847 constitute today the strongest international bond of the entire proletarian movement of both Europe and America. Up to now there has been only one source for a coherent history of that movement. This is the so-called Black Book, The Communist Conspiracies of the Nineteenth Century, by Wermuth and Stieber, Erline, two parts, 1853 and 1854. This crude compilation, which bristles with deliberate falsifications, fabricated by two of the most contemptible police scoundrels of our century, today still serves as the final source for all non-communist writings about that period. What I am able to give here is only a sketch, and even this only in so far as the League itself is concerned; only what is absolutely necessary to understand the Revelations. I hope that some day I shall have the opportunity to work up the rich material collected by Marx and myself on the history of that glorious period of the youth of the international workers movement. * In 1836 the most extreme, chiefly proletarian elements of the secret democratic-republican Outlaws League, which was founded by German refugees in Paris in 1834, split off and formed the new secret League of the Just. The parent League, in which only sleepy-headed elements la Jakobus Venedey were left, soon fell asleep altogether; when in 1840 the police scented out a few sections in Germany, it was hardly even a shadow of its former self. The new League, on the contrary, developed comparatively rapidly. Originally it was a German outlier of the French worker-Communism, reminiscent of Babouvism and taking shape in Paris at about this time; community of goods was demanded as the necessary consequence of equality . The aims were those of the Parisian secret societies of the time: half propaganda association, half conspiracy, Paris, however, being always regarded as the central point of revolutionary action, although the preparation of occassional putsches in Germany was by no means excluded. But as Paris remained the decisive battleground, the League was at that time actually not much more than the German branch of the French secret societies, especially the Societe des saisons led by Blanqui and Barbes, with which a close connections was maintained. The French went into action on May 12, 1839; the sections of the League marched with them and thus were involved in the common defeat. Among the Germans arrested were Karl Schapper and Heinrich Bauer; Louis Philippe s government contented itself with deporting them after a fairly long imprisonment. Both went to London. Schapper came from Weilburg in Nassau and while a student of forestry at Giessen in 1832 was a member of the conspiracy organized by Georg Buchner; he took part in the storming of the Frankfort constable station on April 3, 1833, escaped abroad and in February 1834 joined Mazzini s march on Savoy. Of gigantic stature, resolute and energetic, always ready to risk civil existence and life, he was a model of the professional revolutionist that played an important role in the thirties. In spite of a certain sluggishness of thought, he was by no means incapable of profound theoretical understanding, as is proved by his development from demagogue to Communist, and he held then all the more rigidly to what he had once come to recognize. Precisely on that account his revolutionary passion sometimes got the better of understanding, but he always afterwards realized his mistake and openly acknowledged it. He was fully a man and what he did for the founding of the German workers movement will not be forgotten. Heinrich Bauer, from Franconia, was a shoemaker; a lively, alert, witty little fellow, whose little body, however, also contained much shrewdness and determination. Arrived in London, where Schapper, who had been a compositor in Paris, now tried to earn his living as a teacher of languages, they both set to work gathering up the broken threads and made London the centre of the League. They were joined over here, if not already earlier in Paris, by Joseph Moll, a watchmaker from Cologne, a medium-sized Hercules how often did Schapper and he victoriously defend the entrance to a hall against hundreds of onrushing opponents! a man who was at least the equal of his two comrades in energy and determination, and intellectually superior to both of them. Not only was he a born diplomat, as the success of his numerous trips on various mission proved; he was also more capable of theoretical insight. I came to know all three of them in London in 1843. There were the first revolutionary proletarians whom I met, and however far apart our views were at that time for I still owned, as against their narrow-minded equalitarian Communism [by equalitarian Communism I understand, as stated, only that Communism which bases itself exclusively or predominantly on the demand for equality], a goodly does of just as narrow-minded philosophical arrogance I shall never forget the deep impression that these three real men made upon me, who was then still only wanting to become a man. In London, as in a lesser degree in Switzerland, they had the benefit of freedoms of association and assembly. As early as February 7, 1840, the legally functioning German Workers Educational Association, which still exists, was founded. This Association served the League as a recruiting ground for new members, and since, as always, the Communists were the most active and intelligent members of the Association, it was a matter of course that its leadership lay entirely in the hands of the League. The League soon had several communities, or, as they were then still called, lodges , in London. The same obvious tactics were followed in Switzerland and elsewhere. Where workers associations could be founded, they were utilized in like manner. Where this was forbidden by law, one joined choral societies, athletic clubs, and the like. Connections were to a large extent maintained by members who were continually travelling back and forth; they also, when required, served as emissaries. In both respects the League obtained lively support through the wisdom of the governments which, by resorting to deportation, converted any objectionable worker and in nine cases our of ten he was a member of the League into an emissary. The extent to which the restored League was spread was considerable. Notably in Switzerland, Weitling, August Becker (a highly gifted man who, however, like so many Germans, came to grief because of innate instability of character) and others created a strong organization more or less pledged to Weitling s communist system. This is not the place to criticize the Communism of Weitling. But as regards its significance as the first independent theoretical stirring of the German proletariat, I still today subscribe to Marx s words in the Paris Vorwarts of 1844: Where could the (German) bourgeoisie including its philosophers and learned scribes point to a work relating to the emancipation of the bourgeoisie its political emancipation comparable to Weitlings Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom? If one compares the drab mealy-mouthed mediocrity of German political literature with this immeasurable and brilliant debut of the German workers, if one compares these gigantic children s shoes of the proletariat with the dwarf proportions of the worn-out political shows of the bourgeoisie, one must prophesy an athlete s figure for this Cinderella. This athlete s figure confronts us today, although still far from being fully grown. Numerous sections existed also in Germany; in the nature of things they were of a transient character, but those coming into existence more than made up for those passing away. Only after seven years, at the end of 1846, did the police discover traces of the League in Berlin (Mentel) and Magdeburg (Beck), without being in a position to follow them further. In Paris, Weitling, who was still there in 1840, likewise gathered the scattered elements together again before he left for Switzerland. The tailors formed the central force of the League. German tailors were everywhere: in Switzerland, in London, in Paris. In the last-named city, German was so much the prevailing tongue in this trade that I was acquainted there in 1846 with a Norwegian tailor who had travelled directly by sea from Trondhjem to France and in the space of eighteen months had learned hardly a word of French but had acquired an excellent knowledge of German. Two of the Paris communities in 1847 consisted predominantly of tailors, one of cabinetmakers. After the centre of gravity had shifted from Paris to London, a new feature grew conspicuous: from being German, the League gradually became international. In the workers society there were to be found, besides German and Swiss, also members of all those nationalities for whom German served as the chief means of communication with foreigners, notably, therefore, Scandinavians, Dutch, Hungarians, Czechs, Southern Slavs, and also Russians and Alsatians. In 1847 the regular frequenters included a British grenadier of the Guards in uniform. The society soon called itself the Communist Workers Educational Association, and the membership cards bore the inscription All Men Are Brothers , in at least twenty languages, even if not without mistakes here and there. Like the open Association, so also the secret League soon took on a more international character; at first in a restricted sense, practically through the varied nationalities of its members, theoretically through the realization that any revolution to be victorious must be a European one. One did not go any further as yet; but the foundations were there. Close connections were maintained with the French revolutionists through t he London refugees, comrades-in-arms of May 12, 1839. Similarly with the more radical Poles. The official Polish emigres, as also Mazzini, were, of course, opponents rather than allies. The English Chartists, on account of the specific English character of their movement, were disregarded as not revolutionary. The London leaders of the League came in touch with them only later, through me. In other ways, too, the character of the League had altered with events. Although Paris was still and at that time quite rightly looked upon as the mother city of the revolution, one had nevertheless emerged from the state of dependence on the Paris conspirators. The spread of the League raised its self-consciousness. It was felt that roots were being struck more and more in the German working class and that these German workers were historically called upon to be the standard-bearers of the workers of the North and East of Europe. In Weitling was to be found a communist theoretician who could be boldly placed at the side of his contemporary French rivals. Finally, the experience of May 12th had taught us that for the time being there was nothing to be gained by attempts at putsches. And if one still continued to explain every event as a sign of the approaching storm, if one still preserved intact the old, semi-conspiratorial rules, that was mainly the fault of the old revolutionary defiance, which had already begun to collide with the sounder views that were gaining headway. However, the social doctrine of the League, indefinite as it was, contained a very great defect, but one that had its roots in the conditions themselves. The members, in so far as they were workers at all, were almost exclusively artisans. Even in the big metropolises, the man who exploited them was usually only a small master. The exploitation of tailoring on a large scale, what is now called the manufacture of ready-made clothes, by the conversion of handicraft tailoring into a domestic industry working for a big capitalist, was at that time even in London only just making it appearance. On the one hand, the exploiters of these artisans was a small master; on the other hand, they all hoped ultimately to become small masters themselves. In addition, a mass of inherited guild notions still clung to the German artisan at that time. The greatest honor is due to them, in that they, who were themselves not yet full proletarians but only an appendage of the petty bourgeoisie, an appendage which was passing into the modern proletariat and which did not yet stand in direct opposition to the bourgeoisie, that is, to big capital in that these artisans were capable of instinctively anticipating their future development and of constituting themselves, even if not yet with full consciousness, the party of the proletariat. But it was also inevitable that their old handicraft prejudices should be a stumbling block to them at every moment, whenever it was a question of criticizing existing society in detail, that is, of investigating economic facts. And I do not believe there was a single man in the whole League at that time who had ever read a book on political economy. But that mattered little; for the time being equality , brotherhood and justice helped them to surmount every theoretical obstacle. Meanwhile a second, essentially different Communism was developed alongside that of the League and of Weitling. While I was in Manchester, it was tangibly brought home to me that the economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that they form the basis of the origination of the present-day class antagonisms; that these class antagonisms, in the countries where they have become fully developed, thanks to large-scale industry, hence especially in England, are in their turn the basis of the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all political history. Marx had not only arrived at the same view, but had already, in the Deutsche-Franz sische Jahrb cher (1844), generalized it to the effect that, speaking generally, it is not the state which conditions and regulates the civil society at all, but civil society which conditions and regulates the state, and, consequently, that policy and its history are to be explained from the economic relations and their development, and not vice versa. When I visited Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844, our complete agreement in all theoretical fields became evident and our joint work dates from that time. When, in the spring of 1845, we met again in Brussels, Marx had already fully developed his materialist theory of history in its main features form the above-mentioned basis and we now applied ourselves to the detailed elaboration of the newly-won mode of outlook in the most varied directions. This discovery, which revolutionized the science of history and, as we have seen, is essentially the work of Marx a discovery in which I can claim for myself only a very insignificant share was, however, of immediate importance for the contemporary workers movement. Communism among the French and Germans, Chartism among the English, now no longer appeared as something accidental which could just as well not have occurred. These movements now presented themselves as a movement of the modern oppressed class, the proletariat, as the more or less developed forms of its historically necessary struggle against the ruling class, the bourgeoisie; as forms of the class struggle, but distinguished from all earlier class struggles by this one thing, that the present-day oppressed class the proletariat, cannot achieve its emancipation without at the same time emancipating society as a whole from division into classes and, therefore, from class struggles. And Communism now no longer meant the concoction, by means of the imagination, of an ideal society as perfect as possible, but insight into the nature, the conditions and the consequent general aims of the struggle waged by the proletariat. Now, we were by no means of the opinion that the new scientific results should be confided in large tomes exclusively to the learned world. Quite the contrary. We were both of us already deeply involved in the political movement, and possessed a certain following in the educated world, especially of Western Germany, and abundant contact with the organized proletariat. It was our duty to provide a scientific foundation for our view, but it was equally important for us to win over the European and in the first place the German proletariat to our conviction. As soon as we had become clear in our own minds, we set about the task. We founded a German workers society in Brussels and took over the Deutsche Br sseler Zeitung, which served us as an organ up to the February Revolution. We kept in touch with the revolutionary section of the English Chartists through Julian Harney, the editor of the central organ of the movement, The Northern Star, to which I was a contributor. We entered likewise into a sort of cartel with the Brussels democrats (Marx was vice-president of the Democratic Society) and with the French social-democrats of the R forme, which I furnished with news of the English and German movements. In short, our connections with the radical and proletarian organizations and press organs were quite what one could wish. Our relations with the League of the Just were as follows: The existence of the League was, of course, known to us; in 1843 Schapper had suggested that I join it, which I at that time naturally refused to do. But we not only kept up our continuous correspondence with the Londoners but remained on still closer terms with Dr Ewerbeck, then the leader of the Paris communities. Without going into the League s internal affairs, we learnt of every important happening. On the other hand, we influenced the theoretical views of the most important members of the League by word of mouth, by letter and through the press. For this purpose we also made us of various lithographed circulars, which we dispatched to our friends and correspondents throughout the world on particular occasions, when it was a question of the internal affairs of the Communist Party in process of formation. In these, the League itself sometimes came to be dealt with. Thus, a young Westphalian student, Hermann Kriege, who went to America, came forward there as an emissary of the League and associated himself with the crazy Harro Harring for the purpose of using the League to turn South America upside down. He founded a paper in which, in the name of the League, he preached an extravagant Communism of love dreaming, based on love and overflowing with love. Against this we let fly with a circular that did not fail of its effect. Kriege vanished from the League scene. Later, Weitling came to Brussels. But he was no loner the naive young journeyman-tailor who, astonished at his own talents, was trying to clarify in his own mind just what a communist society would look like. He was now the great man, persecuted by the environs on account of his superiority, who scented rivals, secret enemies and traps everywhere the prophet, driven from country to country, who carried a recipe for the realization of heaven on earth ready-made in his pocket, and who was was possessed with the idea that everybody intended to steal it from him. He had already fallen out with the members of the League in London; and in Brussels, where Marx and his wife welcomed him with almost superhuman forbearance, he also could not get along with anyone. So he soon afterwards went to America to try out his role of prophet there. All these circumstance contributed to the quiet revolution that was taking place in the League, and especially among the leaders in London. The inadequacy of the previous conception of Communism, both the simple French equalitarian Communism and that of Weitling, became more and more clear to them. The tracing of Communism back to primitive Christianity introduced by Weitling no matter how brilliant certain passages to be found in his Gospel of Poor Sinners had resulted in delivering the movement in Switzerland to a large extent into the hands, first of fools like Albrecht, and then of exploiting fake prophets like Kuhlmann. The true Socialism dealt in by a few literary writers a translation of French socialist phraseology into corrupt Hegelian German, and sentimental love dreaming (see the section on German of True Socialism in the Communist Manifesto that Kriege and the study of the corresponding literature introduced in the League was found soon to disgust the old revolutionaries of the league, if only because of its slobbering feebleness. As against the untenability of the previous theoretical views, and as against the practical aberrations resulting therefrom, it was realized more and more in London that Marx and I were right in our new theory. This understanding was undoubtedly promoted by the fact that among the London leaders there were now two men who were considerably superior to those previously mentioned in capacity for theoretical knowledge: the miniature painter Karl Pfander from Heilbronn and the tailor Georg Eccarius from Thuringia. [Engels footnote: Pfander died about eight years ago in London. he was a man of peculiarly fine intelligence, witty, ironical and dialectical. Eccarius, as we know, was later for many years Secretary of the General Council of the International Working Men s Association, in the General Council of which the following old League members were to be found, among others: Eccarius, Pfander, Lessner, Lochner, Marx and myself. Eccarius subsequently devoted himself exclusively to the English trade union movement.] It suffices to say that in the spring of 1847 Moll visited Marx in Brussels and immediately afterwards me in Paris, and invited us repeatedly, in the name of his comrades, to enter the League. He reported that they were as much convinced of the general correctness of our mode of outlook as of the necessity of freeing the League from the old conspiratorial traditions and forms. Should we enter, we would be given an opportunity of expounding our critical Communism before a congress of the League in a manifesto, which would then be published as the manifesto of the League; we would likewise be able to contribute our quota towards the replacement of the obsolete League organization by one in keeping with the new times and aims. We entertained no doubt that an organization within the German working class was necessary, if only for propaganda purposes, and that this organization, in so far as it would not be merely local in character, could only be a secret one, even outside Germany. Now, there already existed exactly such an organization in the shape of the League. What we previously objected to in this League was now relinquished as erroneous by the representatives of the League themselves; we were even invited to co-operate in the work of reorganization. Could we say no? Certainly not. Therefore, we entered the League; Marx founded a League community in Brussels from among our close friends, while I attended the three Paris communities. In the summer of 1847, the first league Congress took place in London, at which W. Wolff represented the Brussels and I the Paris communities. At this congress the reorganization of the League was carried through first of all. Whatever remained of the old mystical names dating back to the conspiratorial period was now abolished; the League now consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a Central Committee and a Congress, and henceforth called itself the Communist League . thus ran the first article. The organization itself was thoroughly democratic, with elective and always removable boards. This alone barred all hankering after conspiracy, which requires dictatorship, and the League was converted for ordinary peace times at least into a pure propaganda society. These new Rules were submitted to the communities for discussion so democratic was the procedure now followed then once again debated at the Second Congress and finally adopted by the latter on December 8, 1847. They are to be found reprinted in Wermuth and Stieber, vol.I, p.239, Appendix X. The Second Congress took place during the end of November and beginning of December of the same year. Marx also attended this time and expounded the new theory in a fairly long debate the congress lasted at least ten days. All contradiction and doubt were finally set at rest, the new basic principles were unanimously adopted, and Marx and I were commissioned to draw up the Manifesto. This was done immediately afterwards. A few weeks before the February Revolution it was sent to London to be printed. Since then it has travelled round the world, has been translated into almost all languages and today still serves in numerous countries as a guide for the proletarian movement. In place of the old League motto, All Men Are Brothers , appeared the new battle cry, Working Men of All Countries, Unite! which openly proclaimed the international character of the struggle. Seventeen years later this battle cry resounded throughout the world as the watchword of the International Working Men s Association, and today the militant proletariat of all countries has inscribed it in its banner. The February Revolution broke out. The London Central Committee functioning hitherto immediately transferred its powers to the Brussels leading circle. But this decision came at a time when an actual state of siege already existed in Brussels, and the Germans in particular could no longer assemble anywhere. We were all of us just on the point of going to Paris, and so the new Central Committee decided likewise to dissolve, to hand over all its powers to Marx and to empower him immediately to constitute a new Central Committee in Paris. Hardly had the five persons who adopted this decision (March 3, 1848) separated, before police forced their way into Marx s house, arrested him and compelled him to leave for France the following day, which was just where he was wanting to go. In Paris we all soon came together again. There the following document was drawn up and signed by all the members of the new Central Committee. It was distributed throughout Germany and many a one can still learn something from it even today: It is in the interest of the German proletariat, of the petite Bourgeoisie and peasantry, to work with all possible energy to put the above measures through. For only by their education can the millions in Germany, who up to now have been exploited by a small number of people and whom it will be attempted to keep in further subjection, get their rights and the power that are their due as the producers of all wealth. The Committee: Karl Marx, Karl Schapper, H. Bauer, F. Engels, J. Moll, W. Wolff At that time the craze for revolutionary legions prevailed in Paris. Spaniards, Italians, Belgians, Dutch, Poles and Germans flocked together in crowds to liberate their respective fatherlands. The German legion was led by Herwegh, Bornsted, Bornstein. Since immediately after the revolution all foreign workers not only lost their jobs but in addition were harassed by the public, the influx into these legions was very great. the new government saw in them a means of getting rid of foreign workers and granted them l'etape du soldat, that is, quarters along their line of march and a marching allowance of 50 centimes per day up to the frontier, whereafter the eloquent Lamartine, the Foreign Minister who was so readily moved to tears, quickly found an opportunity of betraying them to their respective governments. We opposed this playing with revolution in the most decisive fashion. To carry an invasion, which was to import the revolution forcibly from outside, into the midst of the ferment then going on in Germany, meant to undermine the revolution in Germany itself, to strengthen the governments and to deliver the legionnaires Lamartine guaranteed for that defenceless into the hands of the German troops. When subsequently the revolution was victorious in Vienna and Berlin, the legion became all the more purposeless; but once begun, the game was continued. We founded a German communist club, in which we advised the workers to keep away from the legion and to return instead to their homes singly and work there for the movement. Our old friend Flocon, who had a seat in the Provisional Government, obtained for the workers sent by us the same travel facilities as had been granted to the legionnaires. In this way we returned three or four hundred workers to Germany, including the great majority of the League members. As could easily be foreseen, the League proved to be much too weak a lever as against the popular mass movement that had now broken out. Three-quarters of the League members who had previously lived abroad had changed their domicile by returning to their homeland; their previous communities were thus to a great extent dissolved and they lost all contact with the League. One part, the more ambitious among them, did not even try to resume this contact, but each one began a small separate movement on his own account in his own locality. Finally, the conditions in each separate petty state, each province and each town were so different that the League would have been incapable of giving more than the most general directives; such directives were, however, much better disseminated through the press. In short, from the moment when the causes which had made the secret League necessary ceased to exist, the secret League as such ceased to mean anything. But this could least of all surprise the persons who had just stripped this same secret League of the last vestige of its conspiratorial character. That, however, the League had been an excellent school for revolutionary activity was now demonstrated. On the Rhine, where the Neue Rheinische Zeitung provided a firm centre, in Nassau, in Rhenish Hesse, etc., everywhere members of the League stood at the head of the extreme democratic movement. The same was the case in Hamburg. In South Germany the predominance of petty-bourgeois democracy stood in the way. In Breslau, Wilhelm Wolff was active with great success until the summer of 1848; in addition he received a Silesian mandate as an alternate representative in the Frankfort parliament. Finally, the compositor Stephan Born, who had worked in Brussels and Paris as an active member of the League, founded a Workers Brotherhood in Berlin which became fairly widespread and existed until 1850. Born, a very talented young man, who, however, was a bit too much in a hurry to become a political figure, fraternized with the most miscellaneous ragtag and bobtail in order to get a crowd together, and was not at all the man who could bring unity into the conflicting tendencies, light into the chaos. Consequently, in the official publications of the association the views represented in the Communist Manifesto were mingled hodge-podge with guild recollections and guild aspirations, fragments of Louis Blanc and Proudhon, protectionism, etc.; in short, they wanted to please everybody [allen alles sein]. In particular, strikes, trade unions and producers co-operatives were set going and it was forgotten that above all it was a question of first conquering, by means of political victories, the field in which alone such things could be realized on a lasting basis. When, afterwards, the victories of the reaction made the leaders of the Brotherhood realize the necessity of taking a direct part in the revolutionary struggle, they were naturally left in the lurch by the confused mass which they had grouped around themselves. Born took part in the Dresden uprising in May, 1849 and had a lucky escape. But, in contrast to the great political movement of the proletariat, the Workers Brotherhood proved to be a pure Sonderbund [separate league], which to a large extent existed only on paper and played such a subordinate role that the reaction did not find it necessary to suppress it until 1850, and its surviving branches until several years later. Born, whose real name was Buttermilch, has not become a big political figure but a petty Swiss professor, who no longer translates Marx into guild language but the meek Renan into his own fulsome German. With June 13, 1849, the defeat of the May insurrections in Germany and the suppression of the Hungarian revolution by the Russians, a great period of the 1848 Revolution came to a close. But the victory of the reaction was as yet by no means final. A reorganziation of the scattered revolutionary forces was required, and hence also of the League. The situation again forbade, as in 1848, any open organization of the proletariat; hence one had to organize again in secret. In the autumn of 1849, most of the member of the previous central committees and congresses gathered again in London. The only ones still missing were Schapper, who was jailed in Wiesbaden but came after his acquittal, in the spring of 1850, and Moll, who, after he had accomplished a series of most dangerous missions and agitational journeys in the end he recruited mounted gunners for the Palatinate artillery right in the midst of the Prussian army in the Rhine Province joined the Besancon workers company of Willich s corps and was killed by a shot in the head during the encounter at the Murg in front of the Rotenfels Bridge. On the other hand, Willich now entered upon the scene. Willich was one of those sentimental Communists so common in Western Germany since 1845, who on that account alone was instinctively, furtively antagonistic to our critical tendency. More than that, he was entirely the prophet, convinced of his personal mission as the predestined liberator of the German proletariat and as such a direct claimant as much to political as to military dictatorship. Thus, to the primitive Christian Communism previously preached by Weitling was added a kind of communist Islam. However, the propaganda of this new religion was for the first time being restricted to the refugee barracks under Willich s command. Hence, the League was organized afresh; the Address of march 1850 was issued and Heinrich bauer sent as an emissary to Germany. The Address, composed by Marx and myself, is still of interest today, because petite-bourgeois democracy is even now the party which must certainly be the first to come to power in Germany as the savior of society from the communist workers on the occasion of the next European upheaval now soon due (the European revolutions, 1815, 1830, 1848-52, 1870, have occurred at intervals of 15 to 18 years in our century). Much of what is said there is, therefore, still applicable today. Heinrich Bauer s mission was crowned with complete success. The trusty little shoemaker was a born diplomat. He brought the former members of the League, who had partly become laggards and partly were acting on their own account, back into the active organization, and particularly also the then leaders of the Workers Brotherhood. The League began to play the dominant role in the workers , peasants and athletic associations to a far greater extent than before 1848, so that the next quarterly address to the communities, in June 1850, could already report that the student Schurz from Bonn (later on American ex-minister), who was touring Germany in the interest of petty-bourgeois democracy, had found all fit forces already in the hands of the League . The League was undoutbedly the only revolutionary organization that had any significance in Germany. But what purpose this organization should serve depended very substantially on whether the prospects of a renewed upsurge of the revolution were realized. And in the course of the year 1850 this became more and more improbable, indeed impossible. The industrial crisis of 1847, which had paved the way for the Revolution of 1848, had been overcome; a new, unprecedented period of industrial prosperity had set in; whoever had eyes to see and used them must have clearly realized that the revolutionary storm of 1848 was gradually spending itself. Thus Marx and I wrote in the Revue of May to October 1850 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Politisch-okonomische Revue, Nos.V and VI, Hamburg, 1850, p.153. This cool estimation of the situation, however, was regarded as heresy among many persons, at a time when Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Mazzini, Kossuth and, among the lesser German lights, Ruge, Kinkel, Gogg and the rest of them crowded in London to form provisional governments of the future not only for their respective fatherlands but for the whole of Europe, and when the only still still necessary was to obtain the requisite money from America as a loan for the revolution to realize at a moment s notice the European revolution and the various republics which went with it was a matter of course. Can anyone be surprised that a man like Willich was taken in by this, that Schapper, acting on his old revolutionary impulse, also allowed himself to be fooled, and that the majority of the London workers, to a large extent refugees themselves, followed them into the camp of the bourgeois-democratic artificers of revolution? Suffice it to say that the reserve maintained by us was not to the mind of these people; one was to enter into the game of making revolutions. We most decidedly refused to do so. A split ensued; more about this is to be read in the Revelations. Then came the arrest of Nothjung, followed by that of Haupt, in Hamburg. The latter turned traitor by divulging the names of the Cologne Central Committee and being slated as the chief witness in the trial; but his relatives had no desires to be thus disgraced and bundled him off to Rio de Janerio, where he later established himself as a businessman and in recognition of his services was appointed first Prussian and then German Consul General. He is now again in Europe. [Engels footnote: Schapper in London at the end of the sixties. Willich took part in the American Civil War with distinction; he became Brigadier-General and was shot in the chest during the battle of Murfreesboro (Tennessee) but recovered and died about ten years ago in America. Of the other persons mentioned above, I will only remark that Heinrich Bauer was lost track of in Australia, and that Weitling and Ewerbeck died in America.] For a better understanding of the Revelations, I give the list of the Cologne accused: (1) P. G. Roser, cigarmaker; (2) Heinrich Burgers, who later died a progressive deputy to the Landtag; (3) Peter Nothjung, tailor, who died a few years ago a photographer in Breslau; (4) W. J. Reiff; (5) Dr. Hermann Becker, now chief burgomaster of Cologne and member of the Upper House; (6) Dr. Roland Daniels, physician, who died a few years after the trial as a result of tuberculosis contracted in prison; (7) Karl Otto, chemist; (8) Dr. Abraham Jacoby, now physician in New York; (9) Dr. I. J. Klein, now physician and town councillor in Cologne; (10) Ferdinand Freiligrath, who, however, was at that time already in London; (11) I. L. Ehrhard, clerk; (12) Friedrich Lessner, tailor, now in London. After a public trail before a jury lasting from October 4 to November 12, 1852, the following were sentenced for attempted high treason: Roser, Burgers and Nothjung to six, Reiff, Otto and Becker to five, and Lessner to three years confinement in a fortress; Daniels, Klein, Jacoby and Ehrhard were acquitted. With the Cologne trial the first period of the German communist workers movement comes to an end. Immediately after the sentence we dissolved our League; a few months later the Willich-Schapper separate league was also laid to eternal rest. * A whole generation lies between then and now. At that time Germany was a country of handicraft and of domestic industry based on hand labor; now it is a big industrial country still undergoing continual industrial transformation. At that time one had to seek out one by one the workers who had an understanding of their position as workers and of their historico-economic antagonism to capital, because this antagonism itself was only just beginning to develop. Today the entire German proletariat has to be placed under exceptional laws, merely in order to slow down a little the process of its development to full consciousness of its position as an oppressed class. At that time the few persons whose minds had penetrated to the realization of the historical role of the proletariat had to forgather in secret, to assemble clandestinely in small communities of 3 to 20 persons. Today the German proletariat no longer needs any official organization, either public or secret. The simple self-evident interconnection of like-minded class comrades suffices, without any rules, boards, resolutions or other tangible forms, to shake the whole German Empire to its foundations. Bismarck is the arbiter of Europe beyond the frontiers of Germany, but within them there grows daily more threatening the athletic figure of the German proletariat that Marx foresaw already in 1844, the giant for whom the cramped imperial edifice designed to fit the philistine is even now becoming inadequate and whose mighty stature and broad shoulder are growing until the moment comes when by merely rising from his seat he will shatter the whole structure of the imperial constitution into fragments. And still more. The international movement of the European and American proletariat has become so much strengthened that not merely its first narrow form the secret League but even its second, infinitely wider form the open International Working Men s Association has become a fetter for it, and that the simple feeling of solidarity based on the understanding of the identity of class position suffices to create and to hold together one and the same great party of the proletariat among the workers of all countries and tongues. The doctrine which the League represented from 1847 to 1852, and which at that time could be treated by the wise philistines with a shrug of the shoulders as the hallucinations of utter madcaps, as the secret doctrine of a few scattered sectarians, has now innumerable adherents in all civilized countries of the world, among those condemned to the Siberian mines as much as among the gold diggers of California; and the founder of this doctrine, the most hated, most slandered man of his time, Karl Marx, was, when he died, the ever-sought-for and ever-willing counsellor of the proletariat of both the old and the new world.

On The History of the Communist League by Frederick Engels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1885hist.htm

M. Proudhon undertakes to explain to us first of all the double nature of value, the distinction in value, the process by which use value is transformed into exchange value. It is necessary for us to dwell with M. Proudhon upon this act of transubstantiation. The following is how this act is accomplished, according to our author. A very large number of products are not to be found in nature, they are products of industry. If man s needs go beyond nature s spontaneous production, he is forced to have recourse to industrial production. What is this industry in M. Proudhon s view? What is its origin? A single individual, feeling the need for a very great number of things, cannot set his hand to so many things. So many things to produce presuppose at once more than one man s hand helping to produce them. Now, the moment you postulate more than one hand helping in production, you at once presuppose a whole production based on the division of labour. Thus need, as M. Proudhon presupposes it, itself presupposes the whole division of labour. In presupposing the division of labour, you get exchange, and, consequently, exchange value. One might as well have presupposed exchange value from the very beginning. But M. Proudhon prefers to go the roundabout way. Let us follow him in all his detours, which always bring him back to his starting point. In order to emerge from the condition in which everyone produces in isolation and to arrive at exchange, I turn to my collaborators in various functions, says M. Proudhon. I, myself, then, have collaborators, all with different function. And yet, for all that, I and all the others, always according to M. Proudhon s supposition, have got no farther than the solitary and hardly social position of the Robinsons. The collaborators and the various functions, the division of labour and the exchange it implies, are already at hand. To sum up: I have certain needs which are founded on the division of labour and on exchange. In presupposing these needs, M. Proudhon has thus presupposed exchange, exchange value, the very thing of which he purposes to note the genesis with more care than other economists. M. Proudhon might just as well have inverted the order of things, without in any way affecting the accuracy of his conclusions. To explain exchange value, we must have exchange. To explain exchange, we must have the division of labour. To explain the division of labour, we must have needs which render necessary the division of labour. To explain these needs, we must presuppose them, which is not to deny them contrary to the first axiom in M. Proudhon s prologue: To presuppose God is to deny him. (Prologue, p.1) How does M. Proudhon, who assumes the division of labour as the known, manage to explain exchange value, which for him is always the unknown? A man sets out to propose to other men, his collaborators in various functions, that they establish exchange, and make a distinction between ordinary value and exchange value. In accepting this proposed distinction, the collaborators have left M. Proudhon no other care than that of recording the fact, or marking, of noting in his treatise on political economy the genesis of the idea of value. But he has still to explain to us the genesis of this proposal, to tell us finally how this single individual, this Robinson [Crusoe], suddenly had the idea of making to his collaborators a proposal of the type known and how these collaborators accepted it without the slightest protest. M. Proudhon does not enter into these genealogical details. He merely places a sort of historical stamp upon the fact of exchange, by presenting it in the form of a motion, made by a third party, that exchange be established. That is a sample of the historical and descriptive method of M. Proudhon, who professes a superb disdain for the historical and descriptive methods of the Adam Smiths and Ricardos. Exchange has a history of its own. It has passed through different phases. There was a time, as in the Middle Ages, when only the superfluous, the excess of production over consumption, was exchanged. There was again a time, when not only the superfluous, but all products, all industrial existence, had passed into commerce, when the whole of production depended on exchange. How are we to explain this second phase of exchange marketable value at its second power? M. Proudhon would have a reply ready-made: Assume that a man has proposed to other men, his collaborators in various functions, to raise marketable value to its second power. Finally, there came a time when everything that men had considered as inalienable became an object of exchange, of traffic and could be alienated. This is the time when the very things which till then had been communicated, but never exchanged; given, but never sold; acquired, but never bought virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc. when everything, in short, passed into commerce. It is the time of general corruption, of universal venality, or, to speak in terms of political economy, the time when everything, moral or physical, having become a marketable value, is brought to the market to be assessed at its truest value. How, again, can we explain this new and last phase of exchange marketable value at its third power? M. Proudhon would have a reply ready-made: Assume that a person has proposed to other persons, his collaborators in various functions, to make a marketable value out of virtue, love, etc., to raise exchange value to its third and last power. We see that M. Proudhon s historical and descriptive method" is applicable to everything, it answers everything, explains everything. If it is a question above all of explaining historically the genesis of an economic idea, it postulates a man who proposes to other men, his collaborators in various functions, that they perform this act of genesis and that is the end of it. We shall hereafter accept the genesis of exchange value as an accomplished act; it now remains only to expound the relation between exchange value and use value. Let us hear what M. Proudhon has to say: If we have thoroughly grasped M. Proudhon s thought the following are the four points which he sets out to establish: We, too, shall begin at the end, and, in order to clear the economists from M. Proudhon s accusations, we shall let two sufficiently well-known economists speak for themselves. Sismondi founded on the opposition between use value and exchange value his principal doctrine, according to which diminution in revenue is proportional to the increase in production. Lauderdale founded his system on the inverse ratio of the two kinds of value, and his doctrine was indeed so popular in Ricardo s time that the latter could speak of it as of something generally known. We have just seen that the economists before M. Proudhon had drawn attention" to the profound mystery of opposition and contradiction. Let us now see how M. Proudhon explains this mystery after the economists. The exchange value of a product falls as the supply increases, the demand remaining the same; in other words, the more abundant a product is relatively to the demand, the lower is its exchange value, or price. Vice versa: The weaker the supply relatively to the demand, the higher rises the exchange value or the price of the product supplied: in other words, the greater the scarcity in the products supplied, relatively to the demand, the higher the prices. The exchange value of a product depends upon its abundance or its scarcity; but always in relation to the demand. Take a product that is more than scarce, unique of its kind if you will: this unique product will be more than abundant, it will be superfluous, if there is no demand for it. On the other hand, take a product multiplied into millions, it will always be scarce if it does not satisfy the demand, that is, if there is too great a demand for it. These are what we should almost call truisms, yet we have had to repeat them here in order to render M. Proudhon s mysteries comprehensible. What caps M. Proudhon s difficulty? That he has simply forgotten about demand, and that a thing can be scarce or abundant only in so far as it is in demand. The moment he leaves out demand, he identifies exchange value with scarcity and use value with abundance. In reality, in saying that things whose utility is nil and scarcity extreme are of incalculable worth, he is simply declaring that exchange value is merely scarcity. Scarcity extreme and utility nil means pure scarcity. Incalculable worth is the maximum of exchange value, it is pure exchange value. He equates these two terms. Therefore exchange value and scarcity are equivalent terms. In arriving at these alleged extreme consequences, M. Proudhon has in fact carried to the extreme, not the things, but the terms which express them, and, in so doing, he shows proficiency in rhetoric rather than in logic. He merely rediscovers his first hypotheses in all their nakedness, when he thinks he has discovered new consequences. Thanks to the same procedure he succeeds in identifying use value with pure abundance. After having equated exchange value and scarcity, use value and abundance, M. Proudhon is quite astonished not to find use value in scarcity and exchange value, nor exchange value in abundance and use value; and seeing that these extremes are impossible in practice, he can do nothing but believe in mystery. Incalculable worth exists for him, because buyers do not exist, and he will never find any buyers, so long as he leaves out demand. On the other hand, M. Proudhon s abundance seems to be something spontaneous. He completely forgets that there are people who produce it, and that it is to their interest never to lose sight of demand. Otherwise, how could M. Proudhon have said that things which are very useful must have a very low price, or even cost nothing? On the contrary, he should have concluded that abundance, the production of very useful things, should be restricted if their price, their exchange value is to be raised. The old vine-growers of France in petitioning for a law to forbid the planting of new vines; the Dutch in burning Asiatic spices, in uprooting clove trees in the Moluccas, were simply trying to reduce abundance in order to raise exchange value. During the whole of the Middle Ages this same principle was acted upon, in limiting by laws the number of journeymen a single master could employ and the number of implements he could use. (See Anderson, History of Commerce.) [A. Anderson, An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time. First edition appeared in London in 1764. p. 33] After having represented abundance as use value and scarcity as exchange value nothing indeed is easier than to prove that abundance and scarcity are in inverse ratio M. Proudhon identifies use value with supply and exchange value with demand. To make the antithesis even more clear-cut, he substitutes a new term, putting estimation value instead of exchange value. The battle has now shifted its ground, and we have on one side utility (use value, supply), on the other side, estimation (exchange value, demand). Who is to reconcile these two contradictory forces? What is to be done to bring them into harmony with each other? Is it possible to find in them even a single point of comparison? M. Proudhon goes on to develop this antithesis. And as demand, or exchange value, is identical with estimation, M. Proudhon is led to say: Thus there is no possible way out. There is a struggle between two as it were incommensurable powers, between utility and estimation, between the free buyer and the free producer. Let us look at things a little more closely. Supply does not represent exclusively utility, demand does not represent exclusively estimation. Does not the demander also supply a certain product or the token representing all products viz., money; and as supplier, does he not represent, according to M. Proudhon, utility or use value? Again, does not the supplier also demand a certain product or the token representing all product viz., money? And does he not thus become the representative of estimation, of estimation value or of exchange value? Demand is at the same time a supply, supply is at the same time a demand. Thus M. Proudhon s antithesis, in simply identifying supply and demand, the one with utility, the other with estimation, is based only on a futile abstraction. What M. Proudhon calls use value is called estimation value by other economists, and with just as much right. We shall quote only Storch (Cours d economie politique, Paris 1823, pp.48 and 49). According to him, needs are the things for which we feel the need; values are things to which we attribute value. Most things have value only because they satisfy needs engendered by estimation. The estimation of our needs may change; therefore the utility of things, which expresses only the relation of these things to our needs, may also change. Natural needs themselves are continually changing. Indeed, what could be more varied than the objects which form the staple food of different peoples! The conflict does not take place between utility and estimation; it takes place between the marketable value demanded by the supplier and the marketable value supplied by the demander. The exchange value of the product is each time the resultant of these contradictory appreciations. In final analysis, supply and demand bring together production and consumption, but production and consumption based on individual exchanges. The product supplied is not useful in itself. It is the consumer who determines its utility. And even when its quality of being useful is admitted, it does not exclusively represent utility. In the course of production, it has been exchanged for all the costs of production, such as raw materials, wages of workers, etc., all of which are marketable values. The product, therefore, represents, in the eyes of the producer, a sum total of marketable values. What he supplies is not only a useful object, but also and above all a marketable value. As to demand, it will only be effective on condition that it has means of exchange at its disposal. These means are themselves products, marketable value. In supply and demand, then, we find on the one hand a product which has cost marketable values, and the need to sell; on the other, means which have cost marketable values, and the desire to buy. M. Proudhon opposes the free buyer to the free producer. To the one and to the other he attributes purely metaphysical qualities. It is this that makes him say: The producer, the moment he produces in a society founded on the division of labour and on exchange (and that is M. Proudhon s hypothesis), is forced to sell. M. Proudhon makes the producer master of the means of production; but he will agree with us that his means of production do not depend on free will. Moreover, many of these means of production are products which he gets from the outside, and in modern production he is not even free to produce the amount he wants. The actual degree of development of the productive forces compels him to produce on such or such a scale. The consumer is no freer than the producer. His judgment depends on his means and his needs. Both of these are determined by his social position, which itself depends on the whole social organisation. True, the worker who buys potatoes and the kept woman who buys lace both follow their respective judgments. But the difference in their judgements is explained by the difference in the positions which they occupy in the world, and which themselves are the product of social organisation. Is the entire system of needs on estimation or on the whole organisation of production? Most often, needs arise directly from production or from a state of affairs based on production. Thus, to choose another example, does not the need for lawyers suppose a given civil law which is but the expression of a certain development of property, that is to say, of production? It is not enough for M. Proudhon to have eliminated the elements just mentioned from the relation of supply and demand. He carries abstraction to the furthest limits when he fuses all producers into one single producer, all consumers into one single consumer, and sets up a struggle between these two chimerical personages. But in the real world, things happen otherwise. The competition among the suppliers and the competition among the demanders form a necessary part of the struggle between buyers and sellers, of which marketable value is the result. After having eliminated competition and the cost of production, M. Proudhon can at his ease reduce the formula of supply and demand to an absurdity. One might as well say that exchange is merely a ceremonial form for introducing the consumer to the object of consumption. One might as well say that all economic relations are ceremonial forms serving immediate consumption as go-betweens. Supply and demand are neither more nor less relations of a given production than are individual exchanges. What, then, does all M. Proudhon s dialectic consist in? In the substitition for use value and exchange value, for supply and demand, of abstract and contradictory notions like scarcity and abundance, utility and estimation, one producer and one consumer, both of them knights of free will. And what was he aiming at? At arranging for himself a means of introducing later on one of the elements he had set aside, the cost of production, as the synthesis of use value and exchange value. And it is thus that in his eyes the cost of production constitutes synthetic value or constituted value.

The Poverty of Philosophy - Chpt 1.1

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch01.htm

Value (marketable value) is the corner-stone of the economic structure. Constituted value is the corner-stone of the system of economic contradictions. What then is this constituted value which is all M. Proudhon has discovered in political economy? Once utility is admitted, labor is the source of all value. The measure of labor is time. The relative value of products is determined by the labor time required for their production. Price is the monetary expression of the relative value of a product. Finally, the the constituted value of a product is purely and simply the value which is constituted by the labor time incorporated in it. Just as Adam Smith discovered the division of labor, so he, M. Proudhon, claims to have discovered constituted value. This is not exactly something unheard of, but then it must be admitted that there is nothing unheard of in any discovery of economic science. M. Proudhon, who fully appreciates the importance of his own invention, seeks nevertheless to tone down the merit therefore in order to reassure the reader to as his claims to originality, and to win over minds whose timidity renders them little favorable to new ideas. But in apportioning the contribution made by each of his predecessors to the understanding of value, he is forced to confess openly that the largest portion, the lion s share, of the merit falls to himself. Here, in a nutshell, is the history of the discovery of synthetic value: Adam Smith vague intuition; J. B. Say antinomy; M. Proudhon constituting and constituted truth. And let there be no mistake about it: all the other economists, from Say to Proudhon, have merely been trudging along in the rut of antimony. Posterity, so abruptly invoked, will begin by getting muddled over the chronology. It is bound to ask itself: are not Ricardo and his school economists of the 19th century? Ricardo s system, putting as a principle that the relative value of commodities corresponds exclusively to their production", dates from 1817. Ricardo is the head of a whole school dominant in England since the Restoration. [The Restoration began after the termination of the Napoleonic wars and the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in France in 1815.] The Ricardian doctrine summarizes severely, remorselessly, the whole of the English bourgeoisie. What will posterity say about it? It will not say that M. Proudhon did not know Ricardo, for he talks about him, he talks at length about him, he keeps coming back to him, and concludes by calling his system trash". If ever posterity does interfere, it will say perhaps that M. Proudhon, afraid of offending his readers Anglophobia, preferred to make himself the responsible editor of Ricardo s ideas. In any case, it will think it very naive that M. Proudhon should give as a "revolutionary theory of the future what Ricardo expounded scientifically as the theory of present-day society, of bourgeois society, and that he should thus take for the solution of the antinomy between utility and exchange value what Ricardo and his school presented long before him as the scientific formula of one single side of this antinomy, that of exchange value. But let us leave posterity alone once and for all, and confront M. Proudhon with his predecessor Ricardo. Here are some extracts from this author which summarize his doctrine on value: Ricardo quotes Adam Smith, who, according to him, so accurately defined the original source of exchangeable value (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chap 5 [An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, first edition appearing in London, 1776]), and he adds: Ricardo goes on to reproach Smith: Ricardo sets out to prove that the ownership of land, that is, ground rent, cannot change the relative value of commodities and that the accumulation of capital has only a passing and fluctuation effect on the relative values determined by the comparative quantity of labor expended on their production. In support of this thesis, he gives his famous theory of ground rent, analyses capital, and ultimately finds nothing in it but accumulated labor. Then he develops a whole theory of wages and profits, and proves that wages and profits rise and fall in inverse ratio to each other, without affecting the relative value of the product. He does not neglect the influence that the accumulation of capital and its different aspects (fixed capital and circulating capital), as also the rate of wages, can have on the proportional value of products. In fact, they are the chief problems with which Ricardo is concerned. Lord Lauderdale had developed the variations of exchange value according to the law of supply and demand, or of scarcity and abundance relatively to demand. In his opinion the value of a thing can increase when its quantity decreases or when the demand for it increases; it can decrease owing to an increase of its quantity or owing to the decrease in demand. Thus the value of a thing can change through eight different causes, namely, four causes that apply to money or to any other commodity which serves as a measure of its value. Here is Ricardo s refutation: We shall leave it to the reader to make the comparison between this simple, clear, precise language of Ricardo s and M. Proudhon s rhetorical attempts to arrive at the determination of relative value by labor time. Ricardo shows us the real movement of bourgeois production, which constitutes value. M. Proudhon, leaving the real movement out of account, fumes and frets in order to invent new processes and to achieve the reorganization of the world on a would-be new formula, which formula is no more than the theoretical expression of the real movement which exists and which is so well described by Ricardo. Ricardo takes his starting point from present-day society to demonstrate to us how it constitutes value M. Proudhon takes constituted value as his starting point to construct a new social world with the aid of this value. For him, M. Proudhon, constituted value must move around and become once more the constituting factor in a world already completely constituted according to this mode of evaluation. The determination of value by labor time, is, for Ricardo, the law of exchange value; for M. Proudhon. it is the synthesis of use value and exchange value. Ricardo s theory of values is the scientific interpretation of actual economic life; M. Proudhon s theory of values is the utopian interpretation of Ricardo s theory. Ricardo establishes the truth of his formula by deriving it from all economic relations, and by explaining in this way all phenomena, even those like ground rent, accumulation of capital and the relation of wages to profits, which at first sight seems to contradict it; it is precisely that which makes his doctrine a scientific system: M. Proudhon, who has rediscovered this formula of Ricardo s by means of quite arbitrary hypotheses, is forced thereafter to seek out isolated economic facts which he twists and falsifies to pass them off as examples, already existing applications, beginning of realization of his regenerating idea. (See our S.3. Application of Constituted Value) Now let us pass on to the conclusions M. Proudhon draws from value constituted (by labor time). Are these conclusions the strict, natural consequences of value constituted" or determined by labor time? If the relative value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor required to produce it, it follows naturally that the relative value of labor, or wages, is likewise determined by the quantity of labor needed to produce the wages. Wages, that is, the relative value or the price of labor, are thus determined by the labor time needed to produce all that is necessary for the maintenance of the worker. Doubtless, Ricardo s language is as cynical as can be. To put the cost of manufacture of hats and the cost of maintenance of men on the same plane is to turn men into hats. But do not make an outcry at the cynicism of it. The cynicism is in the facts and not in the words which express the facts. French writers like M.M. Droz, Blanqui, Rossi and others take an innocent satisfaction in proving their superiority over the English economists, by seeking to observe the etiquette of a humanitarian phraseology; if they reproach Ricardo and his school for their cynical language, it is because it annoys them to see economic relations exposed in all their crudity, to see the mysteries of the bourgeoisie unmasked. To sum up: Labor, being itself a commodity, is measured as such by the labor time needed to produce the labor-commodity. And what is needed to produce this labor-commodity? Just enough labor time to produce the objects indispensable to the constant maintenance of labor, that is, to keep the worker alive and in a condition to propagate his race. The natural price of labor is no other than the wage minimum. [*2] If the current rate of wages rises above this natural price, it is precisely because the law of value put as a principle by M. Proudhon happens to be counterbalanced by the consequences of the varying relations of supply and demand. But the minimum wage is nonetheless the centre towards which the current rates of wages gravitate. Thus relative value, measured by labor time, is inevitably the formula of the present enslavement of the worker, instead of being, as M. Proudhon would have it, the revolutionary theory of the emancipation of the proletariat. Let us now see to what extent the application of labor time as a measure of value is incompatible with the existing class antagonism and the unequal distribution of the product between the immediate worker and the owner of accumulated labor. Let us take a particular product: broadcloth, which has required the same quantity of labor as the linen. If there is an exchange of these two products, there is an exchange of equal quantities of labor. In exchanging these equal quantities of labor time, one does not change the reciprocal position of the producers, any more than one changes anything in the situation of the workers and manufacturers among themselves. To say that this exchange of products measured by labor time results in an equality of payment for all the producers is to suppose that equality of participation in the product existed before the exchange. When the exchange of broadcloth for linen has been accomplished, the producers of broadcloth will share in the linen in a proportion equal to that in which they previously shared in the broadcloth. M. Proudhon s illusion is brought about by his taking for a consequence what could be at most but a gratuitous supposition. Let us go further. Does labor time, as the measure of value, suppose at least that the days are equivalent, and that one man s day is worth as much as another s? No. Let us suppose for a moment that a jeweller s day is equivalent to three days of a weaver; the fact remains that any change in the value of jewels relative to that of woven materials, unless it be the transitory result of the fluctuations of supply and demand, must have as its cause a reduction or an increase in the labor time expended in the production of one or the other. If three working days of different workers be related to one another in the ratio of 1:2:3, then every change in the relative value of their products will be a change in this same proportion of 1:2:3. Thus values can be measured by labor time, in spite of the inequality of value of different working days; but to apply such a measure we must have a comparative scale of the different working days: it is competition that sets up this scale. Is your hour s labor worth mine? That is a question which is decided by competition. Competition, according to an American economist, determines how many days of simple labor are contained in one day s compound labor. Does not this reduction of days of compound labor to days of simple labor suppose that simple labor is itself taken as a measure of value? If the mere quantity of labor functions as a measure of value regardless of quality, it presupposes that simple labor has become the pivot of industry. It presupposes that labor has been equalized by the subordination of man to the machine or by the extreme division of labor; that men are effaced by their labor; that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man s hour is worth another man s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time s carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day; but this equalizing of labor is not by any means the work of M. Proudhon s eternal justice; it is purely and simply a fact of modern industry. In the automatic workshop, one worker s labor is scarely distinguishable in any way from another worker s labor: workers can only be distinguished one from another by the length of time they take for their work. Nevertheless, this quantitative difference becomes, from a certain point of view, qualitative, in that the time they take for their work depends partly on purely material causes, such as physical constitution, age and sex; partly on purely negative moral causes, such as patience, imperturbability, diligence. In short, if there is a difference of quality in the labor of different workers, it is at most a quality of the last kind, which is far from being a distinctive speciality. This is what the state of affairs in modern industry amounts to in the last analysis. It is upon this equality, already realized in automatic labor, that M. Proudhon wields his smoothing-plane of equalization, which he means to establish universally in time to come! All the equalitarian consequences which M. Proudhon deduces from Ricardo's doctrine are based on a fundamental error. He confounds the value of commodities measured by the quantity of labor embodied in them with the value of commodities measured by the value of labor. If these two ways of measuring the value of commodities were equivalent, it could be said indifferently that the relative value of any commodity is measured by the quantity of labor embodied in it; or that it is measured by the quantity of labor it can buy; or again that it is measured by the quantity of labor which can acquire it. But this is far from being so. The value of labor can no more serve as a measure of value than the value of any other commodity. A few examples will suffice to explain still better what we have just stated. If a quarter of corn cost two days' labor instead of one, it would have twice its original value; but it would not set in operation double the quantity of labor, because it would contain no more nutritive matter than before. Thus the value of the corn, measured by the quantity of labor used to produce it, would have doubled; but measured either by the quantity of labor it can buy or the quantity of labor with which it can be bought, it would be far from having doubled. On the other hand, if the same labor produced twice as many clothes as before, their relative value would fall by half; but, nevertheless, this double quantity of clothing would not thereby be reduced to disposing over only half the quantity of labor, nor could the same labor command the double quantity of clothing; for half the clothes would still go on rendering the worker the same service as before. Thus it is going against economic facts to determine the relative value of commodities by the value of labor. It is moving in a vicious circle, it is to determine relative value by a relative value which itself needs to be determined. It is beyond doubt that M. Proudhon confuses the two measures, measure by the labor time needed for the production of a commodity and measure by the value of the labor. Any man's labor, he says, can buy the value it represents. Thus, according to him, a certain quantity of labor embodied in a product is equivalent to the worker's payment, that is, to the value of labor. It is the same reasoning that makes him confuse cost of production with wages. Let us go still further. Adam Smith takes as the measure of value, now the time of labor needed for the production of a commodity, now the value of labor. Ricardo exposes this error by showing clearly the disparity of these two ways of measuring. M. Proudhon goes one better than Adam Smith in error by identifying the two things which the latter had merely put in juxtaposition. It is in order to find the proper proportion in which workers should share in the products, or, in other words, to determine the relative value of labor, that M. Proudhon seeks a measure for the relative value of commodities. To find out the measure for the relative value of commodities he can think of nothing better than to give as the equivalent of a certain quantity of labor the sum total of the products it has created, which is as good as supposing that the whole of society consists merely of workers who receive their own produce as wages. In the second place, he takes for granted the equivalence of the working days of different workers. In short, he seeks the measure of the relative value of commoditiesin order to arrive at equal payment for the workers, and he takes the equality of wages as an already established fact, in order to go off on the search for the relative value of commodities. What admirable dialectics! We have seen that M. Proudhon makes the value of labor the determining cause of the value of products to such an extent that for him wages, the official name for the value of labor, form the integral price of all things: that is why Say's objection troubles him. In labor as a commodity, which is a grim reality, he sees nothing but a grammatical ellipsis. Thus the whole of existing society, founded on labor as a commodity, is henceforth founded on a poetic licence, a figurative expression. If society wants to eliminate all the drawbacks that assail it, well, let it eliminate all the ill-sounding terms, change the language; and to this end it has only to apply to the Academy for a new edition of its dictionary. After all that we have just seen, it is easy for us to understand why M. Proudhon, in a work on political economy, has to enter upon long dissertations on etymology and other parts of grammar. Thus he is still learnedly discussing the antiquated derivation of servus [a slave, servant] from servare [To preserve]. These philological dissertations have a deep meaning, an esoteric meaning they form an essential part of M. Proudhon's argument. Labor , inasmuch as it is bought and sold, is a commodity like any other commodity, and has, in consequence, an exchange value. But the value of labor, or labor as a commodity, produces as little as the value of wheat, or wheat as a commodity, serves as food. Labor is worth more or less, according to whether food commodities are more or less dear, whether the supply and demand of hands exist to such or such a degree, etc., etc. Labor is not a vague thing"; it is always some definite labor, it is never labor in general that is bought and sold. It is not only labor that is qualitatively defined by the object; but also the object which is determined by the specific quality of labor. Labor, in so far as it is bought and sold, is itself a commodity. Why is it bought? Because of the values it is supposed potentially to contain. But if a certain thing is said to be a commodity, there is no longer any question as to the reason why it is bought, that is, as to the utility to be derived from it, the application to be made of it. It is a commodity as an object of traffic. All M. Proudhon's arguments are limited to this: labor is not bought as an immediate object of consumption. No, it is bought as an instrument of production, as a machine would be bought. As a commodity, labor has no value and does not produce. M. Proudhon might just as well have said that there is no such thing as a commodity, since every commodity is obtained merely for some utilitarian purpose, and never as a commodity in itself. In measuring the value of commodities by labor, M. Proudhon vaguely glimpses the impossibility of excluding labor from this same measure, in so far as labor has a value, as labor is a commodity. He has a misgiving that it is turning the wage minimum into the natural and normal price of immediate labor, that it is accepting the existing state of society. So, to get away from this fatal consequence, he faces about and asserts that labor is not a commodity, that it cannot have value. He forgets that he himself has taken the value of labor as a measure, he forgets that his whole system rests on labor as a commodity, on labor which is bartered, bought, sold, exchanged for produce, etc., on labor, in fact, which is an immediate source of income for the worker. He forgets everything. To save his system, he consents to sacrifice its basis. Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas! We now come to a new definition of constituted value. Let us note in the first place that the single phrase relative or exchange value implies the idea of some relation in which products are exchanged reciprocally. By giving the name proportional relation to this relation, no change is made in the relative value, except in the expression. Neither the depreciation nor the enhancement of the value of a product destroys its quality of being in some proportional relation with the other products which constitute wealth. Why then this new term, which introduces no new idea? Proportional relation suggests many other economic relations, such as proportionality in production, the true proportion between supply and demand, etc., and M. Proudhon is thinking of all that when he formulates this didactic paraphrase of marketable value. In the first place, the relative value of products being determined by the comparative amount of labor used in the production of each of them, proportional relations, applied to this special case, stand for the respective quota of products which can be manufactured in a given time, and which in consequence are given in exchange for one another. Let us see what advantage M. Proudhon draws from this proportional relation. Everyone knows that when supply and demand are evenly balanced, the relative value of any product is accurately determined by the quantity of labor embodied in it, that is to say, that this relative value expresses the proportional relation precisely in the sense we have just attached to it. M. Proudhon inverts the order of things. Begin, he says, by measuring the relative value of a product by the quantity of labor embodied in it, and supply and demand will infallibly balance one another. Production will correspond to consumption, the product will always be exchangeable. Its current price will express exactly its true value. Instead of saying like everyone else: when the weather is fine, a lot of people are to be seen going out for a walk. M. Proudhon makes his people go out for a walk in order to be able to ensure them fine weather. What M. Proudhon gives as the consequence of marketable value determined a priori by labor time could be justified only by a law couched more or less in the following terms: Products will in future be exchanged in the exact ratio of the labor time they have cost. Whatever may be the proportion of supply to demand, the exchange of commodities will always be made as if they had been produced proportionately to the demand. Let M. Proudhon take it upon himself to formulate and lay down such a law, and we shall relieve him of the necessity of giving proofs. If, on the other hand, he insists on justifying his theory, not as a legislator, but as an economist, he will have to prove that the time needed to create a commodity indicates exactly the degree of its utility and marks its proportional relation to the demand, and in consequence, to the total amount of wealth. In this case, if a product is sold at a price equal to its cost of production, supply and demand will always be evenly balanced; for the cost of production is supposed to express the true relation between supply and demand. Actually, M. Proudhon sets out to prove that labor time needed to create a product indicates its true proportional relation to needs, so that the things whose production costs the least time are the most immediately useful, and so on, step by step. The mere production of a luxury object proves at once, according to this doctrine, that society has spare time which allows it to satisfy a need for luxury. M. Proudhon finds the very proof of his thesis in the observation that the most useful things cost the least time to produce, that society always begins with the easiest industries and successively starts on the production of objects which cost more labor time and which correspond to a higher order of needs. M. Proudhon borrows from M. Dunoyer the example of extractive industry fruit-gathering, pasturage, hunting, fishing, etc. which is the simplest, the least costly of industries, and the one by which man began the first day of his second creation. The first day of his first creation is recorded in Genesis, which shows God as the world's first manufacturer. Things happen in quite a different way from what M. Proudhon imagines. The very moment civilization begins, production begins to be founded on the antagonism of orders, estates, classes, and finally on the antagonism of accumulated labor and actual labor. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilization has followed up to our days. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system of class antagonisms. To say now that, because all the needs of all the workers were satisfied, men could devote themselves to the creation of products of a higher order to more complicated industries would be to leave class antagonism out of account and turn all historical development upside down. It is like saying that because, under the Roman emperors, muraena were fattened in artificial fishponds, therefore there was enough to feed abundantly the whole Roman population. Actually, on the contrary, the Roman people had not enough to buy bread with, while the Roman aristocrats had slaves enough to throw as fodder to the muraena. The price of food has almost continuously risen, while the price of manufactured and luxury goods has almost continuously fallen. Take the agricultural industry itself; the most indispensable objects, like corn, meat, etc., rise in price, while cotton, sugar, coffee, etc., fall in a surprising proportion. And even among comestibles proper, the luxury articles, like artichokes, asparagus, etc., are today relatively cheaper than foodstuffs of prime necessity. In our age, the superfluous is easier to produce than the necessary. Finally, at different historical epochs, the reciprocal price relations are not only different, but opposed to one another. In the whole of the Middle Ages, agricultural products were relatively cheaper than manufactured products; in modern times they are in inverse ratio. Does this mean that the utility of agricultural products has diminished since the Middle Ages? The use of products is determined by the social conditions in which the consumers find themselves placed, and these conditions themselves are based on class antagonism. Cotton, potatoes and spirits are objects of the most common use. Potatoes have engendered scrofula; cotton has to a great extent driven out flax and wool, although wool and flax are, in many cases, of greater utility, if only from the point of view of hygiene; finally, spirits have got the upper hand of beer and wine, although spirits used as an alimentary substance are everywhere recognized to be poison. For a whole century, governments struggled in vain against the European opium; economics prevailed, and dictated its orders to consumption. Why are cotton, potatoes and spirits the pivots of bourgeois society? Because the least amount of labor is needed to produce them, and, consequently, they have the lowest price. Why does the minimum price determine the maximum consumption? Is it by any chance because of the absolute utility of these objects, their intrinsic utility, their utility insomuch as they correspond, in the most useful manner, in the needs of the worker as a man, and not to the man as a worker? No, it is because in a society founded on poverty the poorest products have the fatal prerogative of being used by the greatest number. To say now that because the least costly things are in greater use, they must be of greater utility, is saying that the wide use of spirits, because of their low cost of production, is the most conclusive proof of their utility; it is telling the proletarian that potatoes are more wholesome for him than meat; it is accepting the present state of affairs; it is, in short, making an apology, with M. Proudhon, for a society without understanding it. In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility. To return to M. Proudhon's thesis: the moment the labor time necessary for the production of an article ceases to be the expression of its degree of utility, the exchange value of this same article, determined beforehand by the labor time embodied in it, becomes quite usable to regulate the true relation of supply to demand, that is, the proportional relation in the sense M. Proudhon at the moment attributes to it. It is not the sale of a given product at the price of its cost of production that constitutes the proportional relation of supply to demand, or the proportional quota of this product relatively to the sum total of production; it is the variations in supply and demand that show the producer what amount of a given commodity he must produce in order to receive in exchange at least the cost of production. And as these variations are continually occurring, there is also a continual movement of withdrawl and application of capital in the different branches of industry. If M. Proudhon admits that the value of products is determined by labor time, he should equally admit that it is the fluctuating movement alone that in society founded on individual exchanges make labor the measure of value. There is no ready-made constituted proportional relation, but only a constituting movement. We have just seen in what sense it is correct to speak of proportion as of a consequence of value determined by labor time. We shall see now how this measure by time, called by M. Proudhon the law of proportion, becomes transformed into a law of disproportion. Every new invention that enables the production in one hour of that which has hitherto been produced in two hours depreciates all similar products on the market. Competition forces the producer to sell the product of two hours as cheaply as the product of one hour. Competition carries into effect the law according to which the relative value of a product is determined by the labor time needed to produce it. Labor time serving as the measure of marketable value becomes in this way the law of the continual depreciation of labor. We will say more. There will be depreciation not only of the commodities brought into the market, but also of the instruments of production and of whole plants. This fact was already pointed out by Ricardo when he said: Sismondi goes further. He sees in this value constituted by labor time, the source of all the contradictions of modern industry and commerce. It is important to emphasize the point that what determines value is not the time taken to produce a thing, but the minimum time it could possibly be produced in, and the minimum is ascertained by competition. Suppose for a moment that there is no more competition and consequently no longer any means to ascertain the minimum of labor necessary for the production of a commodity; what will happen? It will suffice to spend six hours' work on the production of an object, in order to have the right, according to M. Proudhon, to demand in exchange six times as much as the one who has taken only one hour to produce the same object. Instead of a proportional relation, we have a disproportional relation, at any rate if we insist on sticking to relations, good or bad. The continual depreciation of labor is only one side, one consequence of the evaluation of commodities by labor time. The excessive raising of prices, overproduction and many other features of industrial anarchy have their explanation in this mode of evaluation. But does labor time used as a measure of value give rise at least to the proportional variety of products that so delights M. Proudhon? On the contrary, monopoly in all its monotony follows in its wake and invades the world of products, just as to everybody's knowledge monopoly invades the world of the instruments of production. It is only in a few branches of industry, like the cotton industry, that very rapid progress can be made. The natural consequence of this progress is that the products of cotton manufacture, for instance, fall rapidly in price: but as the price of cotton goes down, the price of flax will be replaced by cotton. In this way, flax has been driven out of almost the whole of North America. And we have obtained, instead of the proportional variety of products, the dominance of cotton. What is left of this proportional relation"? Nothing but the pious wish of an honest man who would like commodities to be produced in proportions which would permit of their being sold at an honest price. In all ages good-natured bourgeois and philanthropic economists have taken pleasure in expressing this innocent wish. Let us hear what old Boisguillebert says: Let us listen also to a modern economist: Fuit Troja. [Troy is no more.] This true proportion between supply and demand, which is beginning once more to be the object of so many wishes, ceased long ago to exist. It has passed into the stage of senility. It was possible only at a time when the means of production were limited, when the movement of exchange took place within very restricted bounds. With the birth of large-scale industry this true proportion had to come to an end, and production is inevitably compelled to pass in continuous succession through vicissitudes of prosperity, depression, crisis, stagnation, renewed prosperity, and so on. Those who, like Sismondi, wish to return to the true proportion of production, while preserving the present basis of society, are reactionary, since, to be consistent, they must also wish to bring back all the other conditions of industry of former times. What kept production in true, or more or less true, proportions? It was demand that dominated supply, that preceded it. Production followed close on the heels of consumption. Large-scale industry, forced by the very instruments at its disposal to produce on an ever-increasing scale, can no longer wait for demand. Production precedes consumption, supply compels demands. In existing society, in industry based on individual exchange, anarchy of production, which is the source of so much misery, is at the same time the source of all progress. Thus, one or the other: Or you want progress without anarchy: in which case, in order to preserve the productive forces, you must abandon individual exchange. Individual exchange is suited only to the small-scale industry of past centuries with its corollary of true proportion, or else to large-scale industry with all its train of misery and anarchy. After all, the determination of value by labor time the formula M. Proudhon gives us as the regenerating formula of the future is therefore merely the scientific expression of the economic relations of present-day society, as was clearly and precisely demonstrated by Ricardo long before M. Proudhon. But does the equalitarian application of this formula at least belong to M. Proudhon? Was he the first to think of reforming society by transforming all men into actual workers exchanging equal amounts of labor? Is it really for him to reproach the Communists these people devoid of all knowledge of political economy, these obstinately foolish men, these paradise dreamers with not having found, before him, this solution of the problem of the proletariat ? Anyone who is in any way familiar with the trend of political economy in England cannot fail to know that almost all the Socialists in that country have, at different periods, proposed the equalitarian application of the Ricardian theory. We quote for M. Proudhon: Hodgskin, Political Economy, 1827; William Thompson, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness, 1824; T. R. Edmonds, Practical Moral and Political Economy, 1828 , etc., etc., and four pages more of etc. We shall content ourselves with listening to an English Communist, Mr. Bray. We shall give the decisive passages in his remarkable work, Labor's Wrongs and Labor's Remedy, Leeds, 1839, and we shall dwell some time upon it, firstly, because Mr. Bray is still little known in France, and secondly, because we think that we have discovered in him the key to the past, present and future works of M. Proudhon. After having refuted the objections of the economists to communism, Mr. Bray goes on to say: We now only need to reply in a few words to Mr. Bray who without us and in spite of us had managed to supplant M. Proudhon, except that Mr. Bray, far from claiming the last word on behalf of humanity, proposes merely measures which he thinks good for a period of transition between existing society and a community regime. One hour of Peter's labor exchanges for one hour of Paul's labor. That is Mr. Bray's fundamental axiom. Let us suppose Peter has 12 hours' labor before him, and Paul only six. Peter will consequently have six hours' labor left over. What will he do with these six hours' labor? Either he will do nothing with them in which case he will have worked six hours for nothing; or else he will remain idle for another six hours to get even; or else, as a last resource, he will give these six hours' labor, which he has no use for, to Paul into the bargain. What in the end will Peter have earned more than Paul? Some hours of labor? No! He will have gained only hours of leisure; he will be forced to play the loafer for six hours. And in order that this new right to loaf might be not only relished but sought after in the new society, this society would have to find in idleness its highest bliss, and to look upon labor as a heavy shackle from which it must break free at all costs. And indeed, to return to our example, if only these hours of leisure that Peter had gained in excess of Paul were really a gain! Not in the least. Paul, beginning by working only six hours, attains by steady and regular work a result that Peter secures only by beginning with an excess of work. Everyone will want to be Paul, there will be a competition to occupy Paul's position, a competition in idleness. Well, then! What has the exchange of equal quantities of labor brought us? Overproduction, depreciation, excess of labor followed by unemployment; in short, economic relations such as we see in present-day society, minus the competition of labor. No! We are wrong! These is still an expedient which may save this new society of Peters and Pauls. Peter will consume by himself the product of the six hours' labor which he has left. But from the moment he has no longer to exchange because he has produced, he has no need to produce for exchange; and the whole hypothesis of a society founded on the exchange and division of labor will fall to the ground. Equality of exchange will have been saved by the simple fact that exchange will have ceased to be: Paul and Peter would arrive at the position of Robinson. Thus, if all the members of society are supposed to be actual workers, the exchange of equal quantities of hours of labor is possible only on condition that the number of hours to be spent on material production is agreed on before hand. But such an agreement negates individual exchange. We still come to the same result, if we take as our starting point not the distribution of the products created but the act of production. In large-scale industry, Peter is not free to fix for himself the time of his labor, for Peter's labor is nothing without the co-operation of all the Peters and all the Pauls who make up the workshop. This explains very well the dogged resistance which the English factory owners put up to the Ten Hours' Bill. They knew only too well that a two-hours' reduction of labor granted to women and children would carry with it an equal reduction of working hours for adult men. It is in the nature of large-scale industry that working hours should be equal for all. What is today the result of capital and the competition of workers among themselves will be tomorrow, if you sever the relation between labor and capital, an actual agreement based upon the relation between the sum of productive forces and the sum of existing needs. But such an agreement is a condemnation of individual exchange, and we are back again at our first conclusion! In principle, there is no exchange of products but there is the exchange of the labor which co-operated in production. The mode of exchange of products depends upon the mode of exchange of the productive forces. In general, the form of exchange of products corresponds to the form of production. Change the latter, and the former will change in consequence. Thus in the history of society we see that the mode of exchanging products is regulated by the mode of producing them. Individual exchange corresponds also to a definite mode of production which itself corresponds to class antagonism. There is thus no individual exchange without the antagonism of classes. But the respectable conscience refuses to see this obvious fact. So long as one is a bourgeois, one cannot but see in this relation of antagonism a relation of harmony and eternal justice, which allows no one to gain at the expense of another. For the bourgeois, individual exchange can exist without any antagonism of classes. For him, these are two quite unconnected things. Individual exchange, as the bourgeois conceives it, is far from resembling individual exchange as it actually exists in practice. Mr. Bray turns the illusion of the respectable bourgeois into an ideal he would like to attain. In a purified individual exchange, freed from all the elements of antagonism he finds in it, he sees an equalitarian" relation which he would like society to adopt generally. Mr. Bray does not see that this equalitarian relation, this corrective ideal that he would like to apply to the world, is itself nothing but the reflection of the actual world; and that therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on the basis of what is merely an embellished shadow of it. In proportion as this shadow takes on substance again, we perceive that this substance, far from being the transfiguration dreamt of, is the actual body of existing society. [*3] It is known that Proudhon did not take this warning to heart. In 1849 he himself made an attempt with a new Exchange Bank in Paris. The bank, however, failed before it had got going properly: a court case against Proudhon had to serve to cover its collapse. [Note by Engels, 1885 German Edition]

The Poverty of Philosophy - Chapter 1.2

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch01b.htm

Thus, gold and silver are the first applications of value constituted ... by M. Proudhon. And as M. Proudhon constitutes the value of products determining it by the comparative amount of labour embodied in them, the only thing he had to do was to prove that variations in the value of gold and silver are always explained by variations in the labour time taken to produce them. M. Proudhon has no intention of doing so. He speaks of gold and silver not as commodities, but as money. His only logic, if logic it be, consists in juggling with the capacity of gold and silver to be used as money for the benefit of all the commodities which have the property of being evaluated by labour time. Decidedly there is more na vet than malice in this jugglery. A useful product, once it has been evaluated by the labour time needed to produce it, is always acceptable in exchange; witness, cries M. Proudhon, gold and silver, which exist in my desired conditions of exchangeability"! Gold and silver, then, are value which has reached a state of constitution: they are the incorporation of M. Proudhon's idea. He could not have been happier in his choice of an example. Gold and silver, apart from their capacity of being commodities, evaluated like other commodities, in labour time, have also the capacity of being the universal agents of exchange, of being money. By now considering gold and silver as an application of value constituted by labour time, nothing is easier than to prove that all commodities whose value is constituted by labour time will always be exchangeable, will be money. A very simple question occurs to M. Proudhon. Why have gold and silver the privilege of typifying constituted value ? Straight away, by formulating the question in these terms, M. Proudhon has presupposed the existence of money. The first question he should have asked himself was, why, in exchanges as they are actually constituted, it has been necessary to individualize exchangeable value, so to speak, by the creation of a special agent of exchange. Money is not a thing, it is a social relation. Why is the money relation a production relation like any other economic relation, such as the division of labour, etc.? If M. Proudhon had properly taken account of this relation, he would not have seen in money an exception, an element detached from a series unknown or needing reconstruction. He would have realised, on the contrary, that this relation is a link, and, as such, closely connected with a whole chain of other economic relations; that this relation corresponds to a definite mode of production neither more nor less than does individual exchange. What does he do? He starts off by detaching money from the actual mode of production as a whole, and then makes it the first member of an imaginary series, of a series to be reconstructed. Once the necessity for a specific agency of exchange, that is, for money, has been recognized, all that remains to be explained is why this particular function has developed upon gold and silver rather than upon any commodity. This is a secondary question, which is explained not by the chain of production relations, but by the specific qualities inherent in gold and silver as substances. If all this has made economists for once "go outside the domains of their own science, to dabble in physics, mechanics, history and so on, as M. Proudhon reproaches them with doing, they have merely done what they were compelled to do. The question was no longer within the domain of political economy. This economic reason which nobody with good ground indeed has seen or understood, M. Proudhon has seen, understood and bequeathed to posterity. To say that, of all commodities, gold and silver were the first to have their value constituted, is to say, after all that has gone before, that gold and silver were the first to attain the status of money. This is M. Proudhon's great revelation, this is the truth that none had discovered before him. If, by these words, M. Proudhon means that of all commodities, gold and silver are the ones whose time of production was known the earliest, this would be yet another of the suppositions with which he is so ready to regale his readers. If we wished to harp on this patriarchal erudition, we would inform M. Proudhon that it was the time needed to produce objects of prime necessity, such as iron, etc., which was the first to be known. We shall spare him Adam Smith's classic bow. But, after all that, how can M. Proudhon go on talking about the constitution of a value, since a value is never constituted by itself? It is constituted, not by the time needed to produce it by itself, but in relation to the quota of each and every other product which can be created in the same time. Thus the constitution of the value of gold and silver presupposes an already completed constitution of a number of other products. It is then not the commodity that has attained, in gold and silver, the status of constituted value, it is M. Proudhon's constituted value that has attained, in gold and silver, the status of money. Let us now make a closer examination of these economic reasons which, according to M. Proudhon, have bestowed upon gold and silver the advantage of being raised to the status of money sooner than other products, thanks to their having passed through the constitutive phase of value. These economic reasons are: the visible tendency to become dominant, the marked preferences even in the patriarchal period, and other circumlocutions about the actual fact which increase the difficulty, since they multiply the fact by multiplying the incidents which M. Proudhon brings in to explain the fact. M. Proudhon has not yet exhausted all the so-called economic reasons. Here is one of sovereign, irresistible force: Thus, the whim of sovereigns is for M. Proudhon the highest reason in political economy. Truly, one must be destitute of all historical knowledge not to know that it is the sovereigns who in all ages have been subject to economic conditions, but they have never dictated laws to them. Legislation, whether political or civil, never does more than proclaim, express in words, the will of economic relations. Was it the sovereign who took possession of gold and silver to make them the universal agents of exchange by affixing his seal to them? Or was it not, rather, these universal agents of exchange which took possession of the sovereign and forced him to affix his seal to them and thus give them a political consecration? The impress which was and is still given to money is not that of its value but of its weight. The stability and authenticity M. Proudhon speaks of apply only to the standard of the money ; and this standard indicates how much metallic matter there is in a coined piece of money. But the question: how much is an ounce of gold or silver worth, remains nonetheless. If a cashmere from the Grand Colbert stores bore the trademark pure wool, this trademark would not tell you the value of the cashmere. There would still remain the question: how much is wool worth? It has been proved times without number that, if a prince takes into his head to debase the currency, it is he who loses. What he gains once at the first issue he loses every time the falsified coinage returns to him in the form of taxes, etc. But Philip and his successors were able to protect themselves more or less against this loss, for, once the debased coinage was put into circulation, they hastened to order a general re-minting of money on the old footing. And besides, if Philip I had really reasoned like M. Proudhon, he would not have reasoned well from the commercial point of view. Neither Philip I nor M. Proudhon displays any mercantile genius in imagining that it is possible to alter the value of gold as well as that of every other commodity merely because their value is determined by the relation between supply and demand. If King Philip had decreed that one quarter of corn was in future to be called two quarters of wheat, he would have been a swindler. He would have deceived all the rentiers, all the people who were entitled to receive 100 quarters of corn. He would have been the cause of all these people receiving only 50 quarters of corn; he would have had to pay only 50. But in commerce 100 such quarters would never have been worth more than 50. By changing the name we do not change the thing. The quantity of corn, whither supplied or demanded, will be neither decreased nor increased by this mere change of name. Thus, the relation between supply and demand being just the same in spite of this change of name, the price of corn will undergo no real change. When we speak of the supply and demand of things, we do not speak of the supply and demand of the name of things. Philip I was not a maker of gold and silver, as M. Proudhon says; he was a maker of names for coins. Pass off your French cashmeres as Asiatic cashmeres, and you may deceive a buyer or two; but once the fraud becomes known, your so-called Asiatic cashmeres will drop to the price of French cashmeres. When he put a false label on gold and silver, King Philip could deceive only so long as the fraud was not known. Like any other shopkeeper, he deceived his customers by a false description of his wares, which could not last for long. He was bound sooner or later to suffer the rigour of commercial laws. Is this what M. Proudhon wanted to prove? No. According to him, it is from the sovereign and not from commerce that money gets its value. And what has he really proved? That commerce is more sovereign than the sovereign. Let the sovereign decree that one mark shall in future be two marks, commerce will keep on saying that these two marks are worth no more than one mark was formerly. But, for all that, the question of value determined by the quantity of labour has not been advanced a step. It still remains to be decided whether the value of these two marks (which have become what one mark was once) is determined by the cost of production or by the law of supply and demand. If this opinion, which M. Proudhon shares with the other economists, is valid, it argues in favor of the latter's doctrine of supply and demand, and in no way in favor of M. Proudhon's proportionality. For, whatever the quantity of labour embodied in the doubled bulk of gold and silver, its value would have dropped by half, the demand having remained the same and the supply having doubled. Or can it be, by any chance, that the law of proportionality would have become confused this time with the so much disdained law of supply and demand? This true proportion of M. Proudhon's is indeed so elastic, is capable of so many variations, combinations and permutations, that it might well coincide for once with the relation between supply and demand. To make every commodity acceptable in exchange, if not in practice then at least by right, on the basis of the role of gold and silver is, then, to misunderstand this role. Gold and silver are acceptable by law only because they are acceptable in practice; and they are acceptable in practice because the present organization of production needs a universal medium of exchange. Law is only the official recognition of fact. We have seen that the example of money as an application of value which has attained constitution was chosen by M. Proudhon only to smuggle through his whole doctrine of exchangeability, that is to say, to prove that every commodity assessed by its cost of production must attain the status of money. All this would be very fine, were it not for the awkward fact that precisely gold and silver, as money, are of all commodities the only ones not determined by their cost of production; and this is so true that in circulation they can be replaced by paper. So long as there is a certain proportion observed between the requirements of circulation and the amount of money issued, be it paper, gold, platinum, or copper money, there can be no question of a proportion to be observed between the intrinsic value (cost of production) and the nominal value of money. Doubtless, in international trade, money is determined, like any other commodity, by labour time. But it is also true that gold and silver in international trade are means of exchange as products and not as money. In other words, they lose this characteristic of stability and authenticity, of sovereign consecration, which, for M. Proudhon, forms their specific characteristic. Ricardo understood the truth so well that, after basing his whole system on value determined by labour time, and after saying: He adds, nevertheless, that the value of money is not determined by the labour time its substance embodies, but by the law of supply and demand only. This is what J. B. Say observes on this passage of Ricardo's: Thus money, which for Ricardo is no longer a value determined by labour time, and which J. B. Say therefore takes as an example to convince Ricardo that the other values could not be determined by labour time either, this money, I say, taken by J. B. Say as an example of a value determined exclusively by supply and demand, becomes for M. Proudhon the example par excellence of the application of value constituted... by labour time. To conclude, if money is not a value constituted by labour time, it is all the less likely that it could have anything in common with M. Proudhon's true proportion. Gold and silver are always exchangeable, because they have the special function of serving as the universal agent of exchange, and in no wise because they exist in a quantity proportional to the sum total of wealth; or, to put it still better, they are always proportional because, alone of all commodities, they serve as money, the universal agent of exchange, whatever their quantity in relation to the sum total of wealth. What an imbroglio this political economy is! cries M. Proudhon. [Vol. I, p. 72] The idea of making sheep and vines attain the status of money is not new. In France, it belongs to the age of Louis XIV. At that period, money having begun to establish its omnipotence, the depreciation of all other commodities was being complained of, and the time when every commercial value might attain its strictly exact determination, the status of money, was being eagerly invoked. Even in the writings of Boisguillebert, one of the oldest of French economists, we find: One sees that the first illusions of the bourgeoisie are also their last. Economists have fallen into this error through not knowing how to apply the law of proportionality and of constituted value." Unfortunately in the very same work by M. Proudhon, Volume I, p.110, we read the absurd hypothesis that, if wages rose generally, the price of every thing else would rise. Furthermore, if we find the phrase in question in works on political economy, we also find an explanation of it. Let us pass now to the second application of constituted value, and of other proportions whose only defect is their lack of proportion. And let us see whether M. Proudhon is happier here than in the monetarization of sheep. To prove that all labour must leave a surplus, M. Proudhon personifies society; he turns it into a person, Society a society which is not by any means a society of persons, since it has its law apart, which have nothing in common with the persons of which society is composed, and its own intelligence, which is not the intelligence of common men, but an intelligence devoid of common sense. M. Proudhon reproaches the economists with not having understood the personality of this collective being. We have pleasure in confronting him with the following passage from an American economist, who accuses the economists of just the opposite: Does M. Proudhon mean thereby merely that the production of the social individual exceeds that of the isolated individual? Is M. Proudhon referring to this excess of the production of associated individuals over that of non-associated individuals? If so, we could quote for him a hundred economists who have expressed this simple truth without any of the mysticism with which M. Proudhon surrounds himself. This, for example, is what Mr. Sadler says: To return to M. Proudhon. Surplus labour, he says, is explained by the person, Society. The life of this person is guided by laws, the opposite of those which govern the activities of man as an individual. He desires to prove this by facts. Now, we may even overlook the fact that M. Proudhon expresses a quadrupled speed as 400 per cent of the original speed; but that he should bring into relation the percentage of speed and the percentage of profit and establish a proportion between two relations which, although measured separately by percentages, are nevertheless incommensurate with each other, is to establish a proportion between the percentages without reference to denominations. Percentages are always percentages, 10 per cent and 400 per cent are commensurable; they are to each other as 10 is to 400. Therefore, concludes M. Proudhon, a profit of 10 per cent is worth 40 times less than a quadrupled speed. To save appearances, he says that, for society, time is money. This error arises from his recollecting vaguely that there is a connection between labour value and labour time, and he hastens to identify labour time with transport time; that is, he identifies the few firemen, drivers and others, whose labour time is actually transport time, with the whole of society. Thus at one blow, speed has become capital, and in this case he is fully right in saying: A profit of 400 per cent will be sacrificed to a loss of 35 per cent. After establishing this strange proposition as a mathematician, he gives us the explanation of it as an economist. Agreed; but we are dealing not with 400, but with 400 per cent, and a profit of 400 per cent represents for the individual 400 per cent, neither more nor less. Whatever be the capital, the dividends will always be in the ratio of 400 per cent. What does M. Proudhon do? He takes percentages for capital, and, as if he were afraid of his confusion not being manifest enough, pointed enough, he continues: A loss of 33 per cent for the consumer remains a loss of 33 per cent for a million consumers. How then can M. Proudhon say pertinently that the social deficit in the case of a 33 per cent loss amounts to 33 million, when he knows neither the social capital nor even the capital of a single one of the persons concerned? Thus it was not enough for M. Proudhon to have confused capital with percentage; he surpasses himself by identifying the capital sunk in an enterprise with the number of interested parties. To bring the matter home still more pointedly let us suppose in fact a given capital. A social profit of 400 per cent divided among a million participants, each of them interested to the extent of 1 franc, would give 4 francs profit per head and not 0.0004, as M. Proudhon alleges. Likewise a loss of 33 per cent for each of the participants represents a social deficit of 330,000 francs and not of 33 million (100:33 = 1,000,000:330,000). M. Proudhon, preoccupied with his theory of the person, Society, forgets to divide by 100, which entails a loss of 330,000 francs; but 4 francs profit per head make 4 million francs profit for society. There remains for society a net profit of 3,670,000 francs. This accurate calculation proves precisely the contrary of what M. Proudhon wanted to prove: namely, that the profits and losses of society are not in inverse ratio to the profits and losses of individuals. Having rectified these simple errors of pure calculation, let us take a look at the consequences which we would arrive at, if we admitted this relation between speed and capital in the case of railways, as M. Proudhon gives it minus the mistakes in calculation. Let us suppose that a transport four times as rapid costs four times as much; this transport would not yield less profit than cartage, which is four times slower and costs a quarter the amount. Thus, if cartage takes 18 centimes, rail transport could take 72 centimes. This would be, according to the rigor of mathematics, the consequence of M. Proudhon's suppositions always minus his mistakes in calculation. But here he is all of a sudden telling us that if, instead of 72 centimes, rail transport takes only 25, it would instantly lose all its consignments. Decidedly we should have to go back to the van, to the primitive waggon even. Only, if we have any advice to give M. Proudhon, it is not to forget, in his Programme of the Progressive Association, to divide by 100. But, alas! it is scarcely to be hoped that our advice will be listened to, for M. Proudhon is so delighted with his progressive association, that he cries most emphatically: Let us return to the fiction of the person, Society, a fiction which has no other aim than that of proving this simple truth that a new invention which enables a given amount of labour to produce a greater number of commodities, lowers the marketable value of the product. Society, then, makes a profit, not by obtaining more exchange values, but by obtaining more commodities for the same value. As for the inventor, competition makes his profit fall successively to the general level of profits. Has M. Proudhon proved this proposition as he wanted to? No. This does not prevent him from reproaching the economists with failure to prove it. To prove to him on the contrary that they have proved it, we shall cite only Ricardo and Lauderdale Ricardo, the head of the school which determines value by labour time, and Lauderdale, one of the most uncompromising defenders of the determination of value by supply and demand. Both have expounded the same proposition: Lauderdale, in his turn, says: If such a privilege is given for the invention of a machine, which performs, by the labour of one man, a quantity of work that used to take the labour of four; as the possession of the exclusive privilege prevents any competition in doing the work, but what proceeds from the labour of the workmen, their wages, as long as the patent continues, must obviously form the measure of the patentee's charge; that is to secure employment, he has only to charge a little less than the wages of the labour which the machine supplants. But when the patent expires, other machines of the same nature are brought into competition; and then his charge must be regulated on the same principle as every other, according to the abundance of machines.... The profit of capital employed..., though it arises from supplanting labour, comes to be regulated, not by the value of the labour it supplants but, as in all other cases, by the competition among the proprietors of capital that presents itself for performing the duty, and the demand for it. Finally, then, so long as the profit is greater than in other industries, capital will be thrown into the new industry until the rate of profit falls to the general level. We have just seen that the example of the railway was scarcely suited to throw any light on his fiction of the person, Society. Nevertheless, M. Proudhon boldly resumes his discourse: What now follows belongs to classical antiquity. It is a poetical narrative intended to refresh the reader after the fatigue which the rigor of the preceding mathematical demonstrations must have caused him. M. Proudhon gives the person, Society, the name of Prometheus, whose high deeds he glorifies in these terms: This Prometheus of M. Proudhon's is a queer character, as weak in logic as in political economy. So long as Prometheus merely teaches us the division of labour, the application of machinery, the exploitation of natural forces and scientific power, multiplying the productive forces of men and giving a surplus compared with the produce of labour in isolation, this new Prometheus has the misfortune only of coming too late. But the moment Prometheus starts talking about production and consumption he becomes really ludicrous. To consume, for him, is to produce; he consumes the next day what he produced the day before, so that he is always one day in advance; this day in advance is his surplus labour. But, if he consumes the next day what he has produced the day before, he must, on the first day, which had no day before, have done two days' work in order to be one day in advance later on. How did Prometheus earn this surplus on the first day, when there was neither division of labour, nor machinery, nor even any knowledge of physical forces other than fire? Thus the question, for all its being carried back to the first day of the second creation, has not advanced a single step forward. This way of explaining things savours both of Greek and of Hebrew, it is at once mystical and allegorical. It gives M. Proudhon a perfect right to say: The facts are the famous progressive calculation; the theory is the myth of Prometheus. In 1770 the population of the United Kingdom of Great Britain was 15 million, and the productive population was 3 million. The scientific power of production equalled a population of about 12 million individuals more. Therefore there were, altogether, 15 million of productive forces. Thus the productive power was to the population as 1 is to 1; and the scientific power was to the manual power as 4 is to 1. In 1840 the population did not exceed 30 million: the productive population was 6 million. But the scientific power amounted to 650 million; that is, it was to the whole population as 21 is to 1, and to manual power as 108 is to 1. In English society the working day thus acquired in 70 years a surplus of 2,700 per cent productivity; that is, in 1840 it produced 27 times as much as in 1770. According to M. Proudhon, the following question should be raised: why was not the English worker of 1840 27 times as rich as the one of 1770? In raising such a question one would naturally be supposing that the English could have produced this wealth without the historical conditions in which it was produced, such as: private accumulation of capital, modern division of labour, automatic workshops, anarchical competition, the wage system in short, everything that is based upon class antagonism. Now, these were precisely the necessary conditions of existence for the development of productive forces and of surplus labour. Therefore, to obtain this development of productive forces and this surplus labour, there had to be classes which profited and classes which decayed. What then, ultimately, is this Prometheus resuscitated by M. Proudhon? It is society, social relations based on class antagonism. These relations are not relations between individual and individual, but between worker and capitalist, between farmer and landlord, etc. Wipe out these relations and you annihilate all society, and your Prometheus is nothing but a ghost without arms or legs; that is, without automatic workshops, without division of labour in a word, without everything that you gave him to start with in order to make him obtain this surplus labour. If then, in theory, it sufficed to interpret, as M. Proudhon does, the formula of surplus labour in the equalitarian sense, without taking into account the actual conditions of production, it should suffice, in practice, to share out equally among the workers all the wealth at present acquired, without changing in any way the present conditions of production. Such a distribution would certainly not assure a high degree of comfort to the individual participants. But M. Proudhon is not so pessimistic as one might think. As proportion is everything for him, he has to see in his fully equipped Prometheus, that is, in present-day society, the beginnings of a realisation of his favorite idea. What is, exactly, collective wealth, public fortune? It is the wealth of the bourgeoisie not that of each bourgeois in particular. Well, the economists have done nothing but show how, in the existing relations of production, the wealth of the bourgeoisie has grown and must grow still further. As for the working classes, it still remains a very debatable question whether their condition has improved as a result of the increase in so-called public wealth. If economists, in support of their optimism, cite the example of the English workers employed in the cotton industry, they see the condition of the latter only in the rare moments of trade prosperity. These moments of prosperity are to the periods of crisis and stagnation in the true proportion of 3 to 10. But perhaps also, in speaking of improvement, the economists were thinking of the millions of workers who had to perish in the East Indies so as to procure for the million and a half workers employed in England in the same industry three years' prosperity out of ten. As for the temporary participation in the increase of public wealth, that is a different matter. The fact of temporary participation is explained by the theory of the economists. It is the confirmation of this theory and not its condemnation, as M. Proudhon calls it. If there were anything to be condemned, it would surely be the system of M. Proudhon, who would reduce the worker, as we have shown, to the minimum wage, in spite of the increase of wealth. It is only by reducing the worker to the minimum wage that he would be able to apply the true proportion of values, of value constituted by labour time. It is because wages, as a result of competition, oscillate now above, now below, the price of food necessary for the sustenance of the worker, that he can participate to a certain extent in the development of collective wealth, and can also perish from want. This is the whole theory of the economists who have no illusions on the subject. After his lengthy digressions on railways, on Prometheus, and on the new society to be reconstituted on constituted value, M. Proudhon collects himself; emotion overpowers him and he cries in fatherly tones:

The Poverty of Philosophy - Chapter 1.3

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch01c.htm

Here we are, right in Germany! We shall now have to talk metaphysics while talking political economy. And in this again we shall but follow M. Proudhon's contradictions. Just now he forced us to speak English, to become pretty well English ourselves. Now the scene is changing. M. Proudhon is transporting us to our dear fatherland and is forcing us, whether we like it or not, to become German again. If the Englishman transforms men into hats, the German transforms hats into ideas. The Englishman is Ricardo, rich banker and distinguished economist; the German is Hegel, simple professor at the University of Berlin. Louis XV, the last absolute monarch and representative of the decadence of French royalty, had attached to his person a physician who was himself France's first economist. This doctor, this economist, represented the imminent and certain triumph of the French bourgeoisie. Doctor Quesnay made a science out of political economy; he summarized it in his famous Tableau conomique. Besides the thousand and one commentaries on this table which have appeared, we possess one by the doctor himself. It is the Analysis of the Economic Table, followed by seven important observations. M. Proudhon is another Dr. Quesnay. He is the Quesnay of the metaphysics of political economy. Now metaphysics indeed all philosophy can be summed up, according to Hegel, in method. We must, therefore, try to elucidate the method of M. Proudhon, which is at least as foggy as the Economic Table. It is for this reason that we are making seven more or less important observations. If Dr. Proudhon is not pleased with our observations, well, then, he will have to become an Abbe Baydeau and give the explanation of the economico-metaphysical method himself. M. Proudhon most certainly wanted to frighten the French by flinging quasi-Hegelian phrases at them. So we have to deal with two men: firstly with M. Proudhon, and then with Hegel. How does M. Proudhon distinguish himself from other economists? And what part does Hegel play in M. Proudhon's political economy? Economists express the relations of bourgeois production, the division of labour, credit, money, etc., as fixed, immutable, eternal categories. M. Proudhon, who has these ready-made categories before him, wants to explain to us the act of formation, the genesis of these categories, principles, laws, ideas, thoughts. Economists explain how production takes place in the above-mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historical movement which gave them birth. M. Proudhon, taking these relations for principles, categories, abstract thoughts, has merely to put into order these thoughts, which are to be found alphabetically arranged at the end of every treatise on political economy. The economists' material is the active, energetic life of man; M. Proudhon's material is the dogmas of the economists. But the moment we cease to pursue the historical movement of production relations, of which the categories are but the theoretical expression, the moment we want to see in these categories no more than ideas, spontaneous thoughts, independent of real relations, we are forced to attribute the origin of these thoughts to the movement of pure reason. How does pure, eternal, impersonal reason give rise to these thoughts? How does it proceed in order to produce them? If we had M. Proudhon's intrepidity in the matter of Hegelianism we should say: it is distinguished in itself from itself. What does this mean? Impersonal reason, having outside itself neither a base on which it can pose itself, nor an object to which it can oppose itself, nor a subject with which it can compose itself, is forced to turn head over heels, in posing itself, opposing itself and composing itself position, opposition, composition. Or, to speak Greek we have thesis, antithesis and synthesis. For those who do not know the Hegelian language, we shall give the ritual formula: affirmation, negation and negation of the negation. That is what language means. It is certainly not Hebrew (with due apologies to M. Proudhon); but it is the language of this pure reason, separate from the individual. Instead of the ordinary individual with his ordinary manner of speaking and thinking we have nothing but this ordinary manner purely and simply without the individual. Is it surprising that everything, in the final abstraction for we have here an abstraction, and not an analysis presents itself as a logical category? Is it surprising that, if you let drop little by little all that constitutes the individuality of a house, leaving out first of all the materials of which it is composed, then the form that distinguishes it, you end up with nothing but a body; that, if you leave out of account the limits of this body; you soon have nothing but a space that if, finally, you leave out of the account the dimensions of this space, there is absolutely nothing left but pure quantity, the logical category? If we abstract thus from every subject all the alleged accidents, animate or inanimate, men or things, we are right in saying that in the final abstraction, the only substance left is the logical category. Thus the metaphysicians who, in making these abstractions, think they are making analyses, and who, the more they detach themselves from things, imagine themselves to be getting all the nearer to the point of penetrating to their core these metaphysicians in turn are right in saying that things here below are embroideries of which the logical categories constitute the canvas. This is what distinguishes the philosopher from the Christian. The Christian, in spite of logic, has only one incarnation of the Logos; the philosopher has never finished with incarnations. If all that exists, all that lives on land, and under water, can be reduced by abstraction to a logical category if the whole real world can be drowned thus in a world of abstractions, in the world of logical categories who need be astonished at it? All that exists, all that lives on land and under water, exists and lives only by some kind of movement. Thus, the movement of history produces social relations; industrial movement gives us industrial products, etc. Just as by means of abstraction we have transformed everything into a logical category, so one has only to make an abstraction of every characteristic distinctive of different movements to attain movement in its abstract condition purely formal movement, the purely logical formula of movement. If one finds in logical categories the substance of all things, one imagines one has found in the logical formula of movement the absolute method, which not only explains all things, but also implies the movement of things. It is of this absolute method that Hegel speaks in these terms: All things being reduced to a logical category, and every movement, every act of production, to method, it follows naturally that every aggregate of products and production, of objects and of movement, can be reduced to a form of applied metaphysics. What Hegel has done for religion, law, etc., M. Proudhon seeks to do for political economy. So what is this absolute method? The abstraction of movement. What is the abstraction of movement? Movement in abstract condition. What is movement in abstract condition? The purely logical formula of movement or the movement of pure reason. Wherein does the movement of pure reason consist? In posing itself, opposing itself, composing itself; in formulating itself as thesis, antithesis, synthesis; or, yet, in affirming itself, negating itself, and negating its negation. How does reason manage to affirm itself, to pose itself in a definite category? That is the business of reason itself and of its apologists. But once it has managed to pose itself as a thesis, this thesis, this thought, opposed to itself, splits up into two contradictory thoughts the positive and the negative, the yes and no. The struggle between these two antagonistic elements comprised in the antithesis constitutes the dialectical movement. The yes becoming no, the no becoming yes, the yes becoming both yes and no, the no becoming both no and yes, the contraries balance, neutralize, paralyze each other. The fusion of these two contradictory thoughts constitutes a new thought, which is the synthesis of them. This thought splits up once again into two contradictory thoughts, which in turn fuse into a new synthesis. Of this travail is born a group of thoughts. This group of thoughts follows the same dialectic movement as the simple category, and has a contradictory group as antithesis. Of these two groups of thoughts is born a new group of thoughts, which is the antithesis of them. Just as from the dialectic movement of the simple categories is born the group, so from the dialectic movement of the groups is born the series, and from the dialectic movement of the series is born the entire system. Apply this method to the categories of political economy and you have the logic and metaphysics of political economy, or, in other words, you have the economic categories that everybody knows, translated into a little-known language which makes them look as if they had never blossomed forth in an intellect of pure reason; so much do these categories seem to engender one another, to be linked up and intertwined with one another by the very working of the dialectic movement. The reader must not get alarmed at these metaphysics with all their scaffolding of categories, groups, series, and systems. M. Proudhon, in spite of all the trouble he has taken to scale the heights of the system of contradictions, has never been able to raise himself above the first two rungs of simple thesis and antithesis; and even these he has mounted only twice, and on one of these two occasions he fell over backwards. Up to now we have expounded only the dialectics of Hegel. We shall see later how M. Proudhon has succeeded in reducing it to the meanest proportions. Thus, for Hegel, all that has happened and is still happening is only just what is happening in his own mind. Thus the philosophy of history is nothing but the history of philosophy, of his own philosophy. There is no longer a history according to the order in time, there is only the sequence of ideas in the understanding. He thinks he is constructing the world by the movement of thought, whereas he is merely reconstructing systematically and classifying by the absolute method of thoughts which are in the minds of all. Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production, M. Proudhon, holding this upside down like a true philosopher, sees in actual relations nothing but the incarnation of the principles, of these categories, which were slumbering so M. Proudhon the philosopher tells us in the bosom of the impersonal reason of humanity. M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement mors immortalis. [Marx quotes these words from the following passage of Lucretius's poem On The Nature of Things (Book III, line 869): mortalem vitam mors cum immortalis ademit ("when mortal life has been taken away by immortal death").] The production relations of every society form a whole. M. Proudhon considers economic relations as so many social phases, engendering one another, resulting one from the other like the antithesis from the thesis, and realizing in their logical sequence the impersonal reason of humanity. The only drawback to this method is that when he comes to examine a single one of these phases, M. Proudhon cannot explain it without having recourse to all the other relations of society; which relations, however, he has not yet made his dialectic movement engender. When, after that, M. Proudhon, by means of pure reason, proceeds to give birth to these other phases, he treats them as if they were new-born babes. He forgets that they are of the same age as the first. Thus, to arrive at the constitution of value, which for him is the basis of all economic evolutions, he could not do without division of labour, competition, etc. Yet in the series, in the understanding of M. Proudhon, in the logical sequence, these relations did not yet exist. In constructing the edifice of an ideological system by means of the categories of political economy, the limbs of the social system are dislocated. The different limbs of society are converted into so many separate societies, following one upon the other. How, indeed, could the single logical formula of movement, of sequence, of time, explain the structure of society, in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another? Let us see now to what modifications M. Proudhon subjects Hegel's dialectics when he applies it to political economy. For him, M. Proudhon, every economic category has two sides one good, the other bad. He looks upon these categories as the petty bourgeois looks upon the great men of history: Napoleon was a great man; he did a lot of good; he also did a lot of harm. The good side and the bad side, the advantages and drawbacks, taken together form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in every economic category. The problem to be solved: to keep the good side, while eliminating the bad. Slavery is an economic category like any other. Thus it also has its two sides. Let us leave alone the bad side and talk about the good side of slavery. Needless to say, we are dealing only with direct slavery, with Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America. Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.[*1] Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World. What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad. Hegel has no problems to formulate. He has only dialectics. M. Proudhon has nothing of Hegel's dialectics but the language. For him the dialectic movement is the dogmatic distinction between good and bad. Let us for a moment consider M. Proudhon himself as a category. Let us examine his good and bad side, his advantages and his drawbacks. If he has the advantage over Hegel of setting problems which he reserves the right of solving for the greater good of humanity, he has the drawback of being stricken with sterility when it is a question of engendering a new category by dialectical birth-throes. What constitutes dialectical movement is the coexistence of two contradictory sides, their conflict and their fusion into a new category. The very setting of the problem of eliminating the bad side cuts short the dialectic movement. It is not the category which is posed and opposed to itself, by its contradictory nature, it is M. Proudhon who gets excited, perplexed and frets and fumes between the two sides of the category. Caught thus in a blind alley, from which it is difficult to escape by legal means, M. Proudhon takes a real flying leap which transports him at one bound into a new category. Then it is that, to his astonished gaze, is revealed the serial relation in the understanding. He takes the first category that comes handy and attributes to it arbitrarily the quality of supplying a remedy for the drawbacks of the category to be purified. Thus, if we are to believe M. Proudhon, taxes remedy the drawbacks of monopoly; the balance of trade, the drawbacks of taxes; landed property, the drawbacks of credit. By taking the economic categories thus successively, one by one, and making one the antidote to the other, M. Proudhon manages to make with this mixture of contradictions and antidotes to contradictions, two volumes of contradictions, which he rightly entitles: Le Syst me des contradictions conomiques. [The System of Economic Contradictions] Here all of a sudden, by a kind of switch-over of which we now know the secret, the metaphysics of political economy has become an illusion! Never has M. Proudhon spoken more truly. Indeed, from the moment the process of the dialectic movement is reduced to the simple process of opposing good to bad, and of administering one category as an antidote to another, the categories are deprived of all spontaneity; the idea ceases to function"; there is no life left in it. It is no longer posed or decomposed into categories. The sequence of categories has become a sort of scaffolding. Dialectics has ceased to be the movement of absolute reason. There is no longer any dialectics but only, at the most, absolutely pure morality. When M. Proudhon spoke of the serial relation in understanding, of the logical sequence of categories, he declared positively that he did not want to give history according to the order in time, that is, in M. Proudhon's view, the historical sequence in which the categories have manifested themselves. Thus for him everything happened in the pure ether of reason. Everything was to be derived from this ether by means of dialectics. Now that he has to put this dialectics into practice, his reason is in default. M. Proudhon's dialectics runs counter to Hegel's dialectics, and now we have M. Proudhon reduced to saying that the order in which he gives the economic categories is no longer the order in which they engender one another. Economic evolutions are no longer the evolutions of reason itself. What then does M. Proudhon give us? Real history, which is, according to M. Proudhon's understanding, the sequence in which the categories have manifested themselves in order of time? No! History as it takes place in the idea itself? Still less! That is, neither the profane history of categories, nor their sacred history! What history does he give us then? The history of his own contradictions. Let us see how they go, and how they drag M. Proudhon in their train. Before entering upon this examination, which gives rise to the sixth important observation, we have yet another, less important observation to make. Let us admit with M. Proudhon that real history, history according to the order in time, is the historical sequence in which ideas, categories and principles have manifested themselves. Each principle has had its own century in which to manifest itself. The principle of authority, for example, had the 11th century, just as the principle of individualism had the 18th century. In logical sequence, it was the century that belonged to the principle, and not the principle which belonged to the century. When, consequently, in order to save principles as much as to save history, we ask ourselves why a particular principle was manifested in the 11th century or in the 18th century rather than in any other, we are necessarily forced to examine minutely what men were like in the 11th century, what they were like in the 18th, what were their respective needs, their productive forces, their mode of production, the raw materials of their production in short, what were the relations between man and man which resulted from all these conditions of existence. To get to the bottom of all these questions what is this but to draw up the real, profane history of men in every century and to present these men as both the authors and the actors of their own drama? But the moment you present men as the actors and authors of their own history, you arrive by detour at the real starting point, because you have abandoned those eternal principles of which you spoke at the outset. M. Proudhon has not even gone far enough along the crossroad which an ideologist takes to reach the main road of history. Let us take the crossroad with M. Proudhon. We shall concede that economic relations, viewed as immutable laws, eternal principles, ideal categories, existed before active and energetic men did; we shall concede further that these laws, principles and categories had, since the beginning of time, slumbered in the impersonal reason of humanity. We have already seen that, with all these changeless and motionless eternities, there is no history left; there is at most history in the idea, that is, history reflected in the dialectic movement of pure reason. M. Proudhon, by saying that, in the dialectic movement ideas are no longer differentiated, has done away with both the shadow of movement and the movement of shadows, by means of which one could still have created at least a semblance of history. Instead of that, he imputes to history his own impotence. He lays the blame on everything, even the French language. So great is the productive force of the contradictions which function and which made M. Proudhon function, that, in trying to explain history, he is forced to deny it; in trying to explain the successive appearance of social relations, he denies that anything can appear: in trying to explain production, with all its phases, he questions whether anything can be produced! Thus, for M. Proudhon, there is no longer any history: no longer any sequence of ideas. And yet his book still exists; and it is precisely that book which is, to use his own expression, history according to the sequence of ideas. How shall we find a formula, for M. Proudhon is a man of formulas, to help him to clear all these contradictions in one leap? To this end he has invented a new reason, which is neither the pure and virgin absolute reason, nor the common reason of men living and acting in different periods, but a reason quite apart the reason of the person, Society of the subject, Humanity which under the pen of M. Proudhon figures at times also as social genius, general reason, or finally as human reason. This reason, decked out under so many names, betrays itself nevertheless, at every moment, as the individual reason of M. Proudhon, with its good and its bad side, its antidotes and its problems. Human reason does not create truth, hidden in the depths of absolute, eternal reason. It can only unveil it. But such truths as it has unveiled up to now are incomplete, insufficient, and consequently contradictory. Hence, economic categories, being themselves truths discovered, revealed by human reason, by social genius, are equally incomplete and contain within themselves the germ of contradictions. Before M. Proudhon, social genius saw only the antagonistic elements, and not the synthetic formula, both hidden simultaneously in absolute reason. Economic relations, which merely realize on earth these insufficient truths, these incomplete ideas, are consequently contradictory in themselves, and present two sides, one good, the other bad. To find complete truth, the idea, in all its fullness, the synthetic formula that is to annihilate the contradiction, this is the problem of social genius. This again is why, in M. Proudhon's illusion, this same social genius has been harried from one category to another without ever having been able, despite all its battery of categories, to snatch from God or from absolute reason, a synthetic formula. Just as the antithesis was before turned into an antidote, so now the thesis becomes a hypothesis. This change of terms, coming from M. Proudhon, has no longer anything surprising for us! Human reason, which is anything but pure, having only incomplete vision, encounters at every step new problems to be solved. Every new thesis which it discovers in absolute reason and which is the negation of the first thesis, becomes for it a synthesis, which it accepts rather naively as the solution of the problem in question. It is thus that this reason frets and fumes in ever renewing contradictions until, coming to the end of the contradictions, it perceives that all its theses and syntheses are merely contradictory hypotheses. In its perplexity, human reason, social genius, returns in one leap to all its former positions, and in a single formula, solves all its problems. This unique formula, by the way, constitutes M. Proudhon's true discovery. It is constituted value. Hypotheses are made only in view of a certain aim. The aim that social genius, speaking through the mouth of M. Proudhon, set itself in the first place, was to eliminate the bad in every economic category, in order to have nothing left but the good. For it, the good, the supreme well-being, the real practical aim, is equality. And why did the social genius aim at equality rather than inequality, fraternity, Catholicism, or any other principle? Because humanity has successively realized so many separate hypotheses only in view of a superior hypothesis, which precisely is equality. In other words: because equality is M. Proudhon's ideal. He imagines that the division of labour, credit, the workshop all economic relations were invented merely for the benefit of equality, and yet they always ended up by turning against it. Since history and the fiction of M. Proudhon contradict each other at every step, the latter concludes that there is a contradiction. If there is a contradiction, it exists only between his fixed idea and real movement. Henceforth, the good side of an economic relation is that which affirms equality; the bad side, that which negates it and affirms inequality. Every new category is a hypothesis of the social genius to eliminate the inequality engendered by the preceding hypothesis. In short, equality is the primordial intention, the mystical tendency, the providential aim that the social genius has constantly before its eyes as it whirls in the circle of economic contradictions. Thus, Providence is the locomotive which makes the whole of M. Proudhon's economic baggage move better than his pure and volatized reason. He has devoted to Providence a whole chapter, which follows the one on taxes. Providence, providential aim, this is the great word used today to explain the movement of history. In fact, this word explains nothing. It is at most a rhetorical form, one of the various ways of paraphrasing facts. It is a fact that in Scotland landed property acquired a new value by the development of English industry. This industry opened up new outlets for wool. In order to produce wool on a large scale, arable land had to be transformed into pasturage. To effect this transformation, the estates had to be concentrated. To concentrate the estates, small holdings had first to be abolished, thousands of tenants had to be driven from their native soil and a few shepherds in charge of millions of sheep to be installed in their place. Thus, by successive transformations, landed property in Scotland has resulted in the driving out of men by sheep. Now say that the providential aim of the institution of landed property in Scotland was to have men driven out by sheep, and you will have made providential history. Of course, the tendency towards equality belongs to our century. To say now that all former centuries, with entirely different needs, means of production, etc., worked providentially for the realization of equality is, firstly, to substitute the means and the men of our century for the men and the means of earlier centuries and to misunderstand the historical movement by which the successive generations transformed the results acquired by the generations that preceded them. Economists know very well that the very thing that was for the one a finished product was for the other but the raw material for new production. Suppose, as M. Proudhon does, that social genius produced, or rather improvised, the feudal lords with the providential aim of transforming the settlers into responsible and equally-placed workers: and you will have effected a substitution of aims and of persons worthy of the Providence that instituted landed property in Scotland, in order to give itself the malicious pleasure of driving out men by sheep. But since M. Proudhon takes such a tender interest in Providence, we refer him to the Histoire de l conomie politique of M. de Villeneuve-Bargemont, who likewise goes in pursuit of a providential aim. This aim, however, is not equality, but Catholicism. Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations the relations of bourgeois production are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and as such, eternal. Feudalism also had its proletariat serfdom, which contained all the germs of the bourgeoisie. Feudal production also had two antagonistic elements which are likewise designated by the name of the good side and the bad side of feudalism, irrespective of the fact that it is always the bad side that in the end triumphs over the good side. It is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing a struggle. If, during the epoch of the domination of feudalism, the economists, enthusiastic over the knightly virtues, the beautiful harmony between rights and duties, the patriarchal life of the towns, the prosperous condition of domestic industry in the countryside, the development of industry organized into corporations, guilds and fraternities, in short, everything that constitutes the good side of feudalism, had set themselves the problem of eliminating everything that cast a shadow on the picture serfdom, privileges, anarchy what would have happened? All the elements which called forth the struggle would have been destroyed, and the development of the bourgeoisie nipped in the bud. One would have set oneself the absurd problem of eliminating history. After the triumph of the bourgeoisie, there was no longer any question of the good or the bad side of feudalism. The bourgeoisie took possession of the productive forces it had developed under feudalism. All the old economic forms, the corresponding civil relations, the political state which was the official expression of the old civil society, were smashed. Thus, feudal production, to be judged properly, must be considered as a mode of production founded on antagonism. It must be shown how wealth was produced within this antagonism, how the productive forces were developed at the same time as class antagonisms, how one of the classes, the bad side, the drawback of society, went on growing until the material conditions for its emancipation had attained full maturity. Is not this as good as saying that the mode of production, the relations in which productive forces are developed, are anything but eternal laws, but that they correspond to a definite development of men and of their productive forces, and that a change in men's productive forces necessarily brings about a change in their relations of production? As the main thing is not to be deprived of the fruits of civilization, of the acquired productive forces, the traditional forms in which they were produced must be smashed. From this moment, the revolutionary class becomes conservative. The bourgeoisie begins with a proletariat which is itself a relic of the proletariat of feudal times. In the course of its historical development, the bourgeoisie necessarily develops its antagonistic character, which at first is more or less disguised, existing only in a latent state. As the bourgeoisie develops, there develops in its bosom a new proletariat, a modern proletariat; there develops a struggle between the proletarian class and the bourgeoisie class, a struggle which, before being felt, perceived, appreciated, understood, avowed, and proclaimed aloud by both sides, expresses itself, to start with, merely in partial and momentary conflicts, in subversive acts. On the other hand, if all the members of the modern bourgeoisie have the same interests inasmuch as they form a class as against another class, they have opposite, antagonistic interests inasmuch as they stand face-to-face with one another. This opposition of interests results from the economic conditions of their bourgeois life. From day to day it thus becomes clearer that the production relations in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a simple, uniform character, but a dual character; that in the selfsame relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is also produced; that in the selfsame relations in which there is a development of the productive forces, there is also a force producing repression; that these relations produce bourgeois wealth i.e., the wealth of the bourgeois class only by continually annihilating the wealth of the individual members of this class and by producing an ever-growing proletariat. The more the antagonistic character comes to light, the more the economists, the scientific representatives of bourgeois production, find themselves in conflict with their own theory; and different schools arise. We have the fatalist economists, who in their theory are as indifferent to what they call the drawbacks of bourgeois production as the bourgeois themselves are in practice to the sufferings of the proletarians who help them to acquire wealth. In this fatalist school, there are Classics and Romantics. The Classics, like Adam Smith and Ricardo, represent a bourgeoisie which, while still struggling with the relics of feudal society, works only to purge economic relations of feudal taints, to increase the productive forces and to give a new upsurge to industry and commerce. The proletariat that takes part in this struggle and is absorbed in this feverish labour experiences only passing, accidental sufferings, and itself regards them as such. Economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo, who are the historians of this epoch, have no other mission than that of showing how wealth is acquired in bourgeois production relations, of formulating these relations into categories, into laws, and of showing how superior these laws, these categories, are for the production of wealth to the laws and categories of feudal society. Poverty is in their eyes merely the pang which accompanies every childbirth, in nature as in industry. The romantics belong to our own age, in which the bourgeoisie is in direct opposition to the proletariat; in which poverty is engendered in as great abundance as wealth. The economists now pose as blas fatalists, who, from their elevated position, cast a proudly disdainful glance at the human machines who manufacture wealth. They copy all the developments given by their predecessors, and the indifference which in the latter was merely na vet becomes in them coquetry. Next comes the humanitarian school, which sympathizes with the bad side of present-day production relations. It seeks, by way of easing its conscience, to palliate even if slightly the real contrasts; it sincerely deplores the distress of the proletariat, the unbridled competition of the bourgeois among themselves; it counsels the workers to be sober, to work hard and to have few children; it advises the bourgeois to put a reasoned ardor into production. The whole theory of this school rests on interminable distinctions between theory and practice, between principles and results, between ideas and application, between form and content, between essence and reality, between right and fact, between the good side and the bad side. The philanthropic school is the humanitarian school carried to perfection. It denies the necessity of antagonism; it wants to turn all men into bourgeois; it wants to realize theory in so far as it is distinguished from practice and contains no antagonism. It goes without saying that, in theory, it is easy to make an abstraction of the contradictions that are met with at every moment in actual reality. This theory would therefore become idealized reality. The philanthropists, then, want to retain the categories which express bourgeois relations, without the antagonism which constitutes them and is inseparable from them. They think they are seriously fighting bourgeois practice, and they are more bourgeois than the others. Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the Socialists and Communists are the theoreticians of the proletarian class. So long as the proletariat is not yet sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class, and consequently so long as the struggle itself of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a political character, and the productive forces are not yet sufficiently developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie itself to enable us to catch a glimpse of the material conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat and for the formation of a new society, these theoreticians are merely utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science. But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece. So long as they look for science and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society. From this moment, science, which is a product of the historical movement, has associated itself consciously with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary. Let us return to M. Proudhon. Every economic relation has a good and a bad side; it is the one point on which M. Proudhon does not give himself the lie. He sees the good side expounded by the economists; the bad side he sees denounced by the Socialists. He borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations; he borrows from the Socialists the illusion of seeing in poverty nothing but poverty. He is in agreement with both in wanting to fall back upon the authority of science. Science for him reduces itself to the slender proportions of a scientific formula; he is the man in search of formulas. Thus it is that M. Proudhon flatters himself on having given a criticism of both political economy and communism: he is beneath them both. Beneath the economists, since, as a philosopher who has at his elbow a magic formula, he thought he could dispense with going into purely economic details; beneath the socialists, because he has neither courage enough nor insight enough to rise, be it even speculatively, above the bourgeois horizon. He wants to be the synthesis he is a composite error. He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and proletarians; he is merely the petty bourgeois, continually tossed back and forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism.

The Poverty of Philosophy - Chapter 2.1

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm

The division of labour, according to M. Proudhon, opens the series of economic evolutions. The division of labour is, according to M. Proudhon, an eternal law, a simple, abstract category. Therefore the abstraction, the idea, the word must suffice for him to explain the division of labour at different historical epochs. Castes, corporations, manufacture, large-scale industry, must be explained by the single word divide. First study carefully the meaning of "divide", and you will have no need to study the numerous influences which give the division of labour a definitive character in every epoch. Certainly, things would be made much too easy if they were reduced to M. Proudhon s categories. History does not proceed so categorically. It took three whole centuries in Germany to establish the first big division of labour, the separation of the towns from the country. In proportion, as this one relation of town and country was modified, the whole of society was modified. To take only this one aspect of the division of labour, you have the old republics, and you have Christian feudalism; you have old England with its barons and you have modern England with its cotton lords. In the 14th and 15th centuries, when there were as yet no colonies, when America did not yet exist for Europe, when Asia existed only through the intermediary of Constantinople, when the Mediterranean was the centre of commercial activity, the division of labour had a very different form, a very different aspect from that of the 17th century, when the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and the French had colonies established in all parts of the world. The extent of the market, its physiognomy, give to the division of labour at different periods a physiognomy, a character, which it would be difficult to deduce from the single word divide, from the idea, from the category. Adam Smith goes further than M. Proudhon thinks. He saw clearly that In principle, a porter differs less from a philosopher than a mastiff from a greyhound. It is the division of labour which has set a gulf between them. All this does not prevent M. Proudhon from saying elsewhere that Adam Smith has not the slightest idea of the drawbacks produced by the division of labour. It is this again that makes him say that J. B. Say was the first to recognize that in the division of labour the same cause that produces the good engenders the bad. [Vol. I, p. 96] But let us listen to Lemontey; Suum cuique. Let us do him this justice: Lemontey wittily exposed the unpleasant consequences of the division of labour as it is constituted today, and M. Proudhon found nothing to add to it. But now that, through the fault of M. Proudhon, we have been drawn into this question of priority, let us say again, in passing, that long before M. Lemontey, and 17 years before Adam Smith, who was a pupil of A. Ferguson, the last-named gave a clear exposition of the subject in a chapter which deals specifically with the division of labour. To bring this literary survey to a close, we expressly deny that all economists have insisted far more on the advantages than on the drawbacks of the division of labour. It suffices to mention Sismondi. Thus, as far as the advantages of the division of labour are concerned, M. Proudhon had nothing further to do than to paraphrase the general phrases known to everybody. Let us now see how he derives from the division of labour, taken as a general law, as a category, as a thought, the drawbacks which are attached to it. How is it that this category, this law implies an unequal distribution of labour to the detriment of M. Proudhon s equalitarian system? The division of labour created castes. Now, castes are the drawbacks of the division of labour; thus, it is the division of labour that has engendered the drawbacks. Quod erat demonstrandum. [Which was to be proved.] Will you go further and ask what made the division of labour create castes. hierarchical constitutions and privileged persons? M. Proudhon will tell you: Progress. And what made progress? Limitation. Limitation, for M. Proudhon, is acceptance of persons on the part of progress. After philosophy comes history. It is no longer either descriptive history or dialectical history, it is comparative history. M. Proudhon establishes a parallel between the present-day printing worker and the printing worker of the Middle Ages; between the man of letters of today and the man of letters of the Middle Ages, and he weighs down the balance on the side of those who belong more or less to the division of labour as the Middle Ages constituted or transmitted it. He opposes the division of labour of one historical epoch. Was that what M. Proudhon had to prove? No. He should have shown us the drawbacks of the division of labour in general, of the division of labour as a category. Besides, why stress this part of M. Proudhon s work, since a little later we shall see him formally retract all these alleged developments? We pass over the logical value of these syllogisms, which Kant would call paralogisms which lead astray. This is the substance of it: The division of labour reduces the worker to a degrading function; to this degrading function corresponds a depraved soul; to the depravation of the soul is befitting an ever-increasing wage reduction. And to prove that this reduction is befitting to a depraved soul, M. Proudhon says, to relieve his conscience, that the universal conscience wills it thus. Is M. Proudhon s soul to be reckoned as a part of the universal conscience? Machinery is, for M. Proudhon, the logical antithesis of the division of labour, and with the help of his dialectics, he begins by transforming machinery into the workshop. After presupposing the modern workshop, in order to make poverty the outcome of the division of labour, M. Proudhon presupposes poverty engendered by the division of labour, in order to come to the workshop and be able to represent it as the dialectical negation of that poverty. After striking the worker morally by a degrading function, physically by the meagreness of the wage; after putting the worker under the dependence of the foreman, and debasing his work to the labour of a mechanic s assistant, he lays the blame again on the workshop and the machinery for degrading the worker by giving him a master, and he completes his abasement by making him sink from the rank of artisan to that of common labourer. Excellent dialectics! And if he only stopped there! But no, he has to have a new history of the division of labour, not any longer to derive the contradictions from it, but to reconstruct the workshop after his own fashion. To attain this end he finds himself compelled to forget all he has just said about division. labour is organized, is divided differently according to the instruments it disposes over. The hand-mill presupposes a different division of labour from the steam-mill. Thus, it is slapping history in the face to want to begin by the division of labour in general, in order to get subsequently to a specific instrument of production, machinery. Machinery is no more an economic category than the bullock that drags the plough. Machinery is merely a productive force. The modern workshop, which depends on the application of machinery, is a social production relation, an economic category. Let us see now how things happen in M. Proudhon s brilliant imagination. Just a simple remark to M. Proudhon. The separation of the different parts of labour, leaving to each one the opportunity of devoting himself to the speciality best suited to him a separation which M. Proudhon dates from the beginning of the world exists only in modern industry under the rule of competition. M. Proudhon goes on to give us a most interesting genealogy, to show how the workshop arose from the division of labour and the wage worker from the workshop. That is another example of M. Proudhon s historical and descriptive method. Let us now examine, from the historical and economic point of view, whether the workshop of the machine really introduced the principle of authority in society subsequently to the division of labour; whether it rehabilitated the worker on the one hand, while submitting him to authority on the other; whether the machine is the recomposition of divided labour, the synthesis of labour as opposed to its analysis. Society as a whole has this in common with the interior of a workshop, that it too has its division of labour. If one took as a model the division of labour in a modern workshop, in order to apply it to a whole society, the society best organized for the production of wealth would undoubtedly be that which had a single chief employer, distributing tasks to different members of the community according to a previously fixed rule. But this is by no means the case. While inside the modern workshop the division of labour is meticulously regulated by the authority of the employer, modern society has no other rule, no other authority for the distribution of labour than free competition. Under the patriarchal system, under the caste system, under the feudal and corporative system, there was division of labour in the whole of society according to fixed rules. Were these rules established by a legislator? No. Originally born of the conditions of material production, they were raised to the status of laws only much later. In this way, these different forms of the division of labour became so many bases of social organization. As for the division in the workshop, it was very little developed in all these forms of society. It can even be laid down as a general rule that the less authority presides over the division of labour inside society, the more the division of labour develops inside the workshop, and the more it is subjected there to the authority of a single person. Thus authority in the workshop and authority in society, in relation to the division of labour, are in inverse ratio to each other. The question now is what kind of workshop it is in which the occupations are very much separated, where each worker s task is reduced to a very simple operation, and where the authority, capital, groups and directs the work. How was this workshop brought into existence? In order to answer this question, we shall have to examine how manufacturing industry, properly so-called, has developed. I am speaking here of that industry which is not yet industry, with its machinery, but which is already no longer the industry of the artisans of the Middle Ages, nor domestic industry. We shall not go into great detail: we shall merely give a few main points to show that history is not to be made with formulas. One of the most indispensable conditions for the formation of manufacturing industry was the accumulation of capital, facilitated by the discovery of America and the import of its precious metals. It is sufficiently proved that the increase in the means of exchange resulted in the depreciation of wages and land rents, on the one hand, and the growth of industrial profits on the other. In other words: to the extent that the propertied class and the working class, the feudal lords and the people, sank, to that extent the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, rose. There were yet other circumstances which contributed simultaneously to the development of manufacturing industry: the increase of commodities put into circulation from the moment that trade had penetrated to the East Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope; the colonial system; the development of maritime trade. Another point which has not yet been sufficiently appreciated in the history of manufacturing industry is the disbanding of the numerous retinues of feudal lords, whose subordinate ranks became vagrants before entering the workshop. The creation of the workshop was preceded by an almost universal vagrancy in the 15th and 16th centuries. The workshop found, besides, a powerful support in the many peasants who, continually driven from the country owing to the transformation of the fields into pastures and to the progress in agriculture which necessitated fewer hands for the tillage of the soil, went on congregating in the towns during whole centuries. The growth of the market, the accumulation of capital, the modification in the social position of the classes, a large number of persons being deprived of their sources of income, all these are historical preconditions for the formation of manufacture. It was not, as M. Proudhon says, friendly agreements between equals that brought men into the workshop. It was not even in the bosom of the old guilds that manufacture was born. It was the merchant that became head of the modern workshop, and not the old guildmaster. Almost everywhere there was a desperate struggle between manufacture and crafts. The accumulation and concentration of instruments and workers preceded the development of the division of labour inside the workshop. Manufacture consisted much more in the bringing together of many workers and many crafts in one place, in one room under the command of one capital, than in the analysis of labour and the adaptation of a special worker to a very simple task. The utility of a workshop consisted much less in the division of labour as such than in the circumstances that work was done on a much larger scale, that many unnecessary expenses were saved, etc. At the end of the 16th and at the beginning of the 17th century, Dutch manufacture scarcely knew any division of labour. The development of the division of labour supposes the assemblage of workers in a workshop. There is not one single example, whether in the 16th or in the 17th century, of the different branches of one and the same craft being exploited separately to such an extent that it would have sufficed to assemble them all in one place so as to obtain a complete, ready-made workshop. But once the men and the instruments had been brought together, the division of labour, such as it had existed in the form of the guilds, was reproduced, necessarily reflected inside the workshop. For M. Proudhon, who sees things upside down, if he sees them at all, the division of labour, in Adam Smith s sense, precedes the workshop, which is a condition of its existence. Machinery, properly so-called, dates from the end of the 18th century. Nothing is more absurd than to see in machinery the antithesis of the division of labour, the synthesis restoring unity to divided labour. The machine is a unification of the instruments of labour, and by no means a combination of different operations for the worker himself. Simple tools; accumulation tools; composite tools; setting in motion of a composite tool by a single hand engine, by man; setting in motion of these instruments by natural forces, machines; system of machines having one motor; system of machines having one automatic motor this is the progress of machinery. The concentration of the instruments of production and the division of labour are as inseparable one from the other as are, in the political sphere, the concentration of public authority and the division of private interests. England, with the concentration of the land, this instrument of agricultural labour, has at the same time division of agricultural labour and the application of machinery to the exploitation of the soil. France, which has the division of the instruments, the small holdings system, has, in general, neither division of agricultural labour nor application of machinery to the soil. For M. Proudhon the concentration of the instruments of labour is the negation of the division of labour. In reality, we find again the reverse. As the concentration of instruments develops, the division develops also, and vice versa. This is why every big mechanical invention is followed by a greater division of labour, and each increase in the division of labour gives rise in turn to new mechanical inventions. We need not recall the fact that the great progress of the division of labour began in England after the invention of machinery. Thus, the weavers and spinners were for the most part peasants like those one still meets in backward countries. The invention of machinery brought about the separation of manufacturing industry from agricultural industry. The weaver and the spinner, united but lately in a single family, were separated by the machine. Thanks to the machine, the spinner can live in England while the weaver resides in the East Indies. Before the invention of machinery, the industry of a country was carried on chiefly with raw materials that were the products of its own soil; in England wool, in Germany flax, in France silks and flax, in the East Indies and the Levant cottons, etc. Thanks to the application of machinery and of steam, the division of labour was about to assume such dimensions that large-scale industry, detached from the national soil, depends entirely on the world market, on international exchange, on an international division of labour. In short the machine has so great an influence on the division of labour, that when, in the manufacture of some object, a means has been found to produce parts of it mechanically, the manufacture splits up immediately into two works independent of each other. Need we speak of the philanthropic and providential aim that M. Proudhon discovers in the invention and first application of machinery? When in England the market had become so far developed that manual labour was no longer adequate, the need for machinery was felt. Then came the idea of the application of mechanical science, already quite developed in the 18th century. The automatic workshop opened its career with acts which were anything but philanthropic. Children were kept at work at the whip s end; they were made an object of traffic and contracts were undertaken with the orphanages. All the laws on the apprenticeship of workers were repealed, because, to use M. Proudhon s phraseology, there was no further need for synthetic workers. Finally, from 1825 onwards, almost all the new inventions were the result of collisions between the worker and the employer who sought at all costs to depreciate the worker s specialized ability. After each new strike of any importance, there appeared a new machine. So little indeed did the worker see in the application of machinery a sort of rehabilitation, restoration as M. Proudhon would say that in the 18th century he stood out for a very long time against the incipient domination of the automaton. In short, by the introduction of machinery, the division of labour inside society has grown up, the task of the worker inside the workshop has been simplified, capital has been concentrated, human beings have been further dismembered. When M. Proudhon wants to be an economist, and to abandon for a moment the evolution of ideas in serial relation in the understanding, then he goes and draws erudition from Adam Smith, from a time when the automatic workshop was only just coming into existence. Indeed, what a difference between the division of labour as it existed in Adam Smith s day and as we see it in the automatic workshop! In order to make this properly understood, we need only quote a few passages from Dr. Ure s The Philosophy of Manufactures. What characterizes the division of labour inside modern society is that it engenders specialized functions, specialists, and with them craft-idiocy. What characterizes the division of labour in the automatic workshop is that labour has there completely lost its specialized character. But the moment every special development stops, the need for universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the individual begins to be felt. The automatic workshop wipes out specialists and craft-idiocy. M. Proudhon, not having understood even this one revolutionary side of the automatic workshop, takes a step backward and proposes to the worker that he make not only the 12th part of a pin, but successively all 12 parts of it. The worker would thus arrive at the knowledge and the consciousness of the pin. This is M. Proudhon s synthetic labour. Nobody will contest that to make a movement forward and another movement backward is to make a synthetic movement. To sum up, M. Proudhon has not gone further than the petty-bourgeois ideal. And to realize this ideal, he can think of nothing better than to take us back to the journeyman or, at most, to the master craftsman of the Middle Ages. It is enough, he says somewhere in his book, to have created a masterpiece once in one s life, to have felt oneself just once to be a man. Is not this, in form as in content, the masterpiece demanded by the trade guild of the Middle Ages?

The Poverty of Philosophy - Chapter 2.2

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02b.htm

M. Proudhon begins by defending the eternal necessity of competition against those who wish to replace it by emulation [Engels: The Fourierists]. Competition is emulation with a view to profit. Is industrial emulation necessarily emulation with a view to profit, that is, competition?? M. Proudhon proves it by affirming it. We have seen that, for him, to affirm is to prove, just as to suppose is to deny. If the immediate object of the lover is the woman, the immediate object of industrial emulation is the product and not the profit. Competition is not industrial emulation, it is commercial emulation. In our time industrial emulation exists only in view of commerce. There are even phases in the economic life of modern nations when everybody is seized with a sort of craze for making profit without producing. This speculation craze, which recurs periodically, lays bare the true character of competition, which seeks to escape the need for industrial emulation. If you had told an artisan of the 14th century that the privileges and the whole feudal organization of industry were going to be abrogated in favor of industrial emulation, called competition, he would have replied that the privileges of the various corporations, guilds and fraternities were organized competition. M. Proudhon does not impose upon this when he affirms that emulation is nothing but competition itself. Instead of a supposition, an affirmation and a negation, we have now a decree that M. Proudhon issues purposely to prove the necessity of competition, its eternity as a category, etc. If we imagine that decrees are all that is needed to get away from competition, we shall never get away from it. And if we go so far as to propose to abolish competition while retaining wages, we shall be proposing nonsense by royal decree. But nations do not proceed by royal decree. Before framing such ordinances, they must at least have changed from top to bottom the conditions of their industrial and political existence, and consequently their whole manner of being. M. Proudhon will reply, with his imperturbable assurance, that it is the hypothesis of a transformation of our nature without historical antecedents, and that he would be right in excluding is from the discussion, we know not in virtue of which ordinance. M. Proudhon does not know that all history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature. So, since the French of the 18th century abolished corporations, guilds, and fraternities instead of modifying them, the French of the 19th century must modify competition instead of abolishing it. Since competition was established in France in the 18th century as a result of historical needs, this competition must not be destroyed in the 19th century because of other historical needs. M. Proudhon, not understanding that the establishment of competition was bound up with the actual development of the men of the 18th century, makes of competition a necessity of the human soul, in partibus infidelium [literally, territory of the infidels ; here, meaning, beyond the realm of reality. ] What would he have made of the great Colbert for the 17th century?? After the revolution comes the present state of affairs. M. Proudhon equally draws facts from it to show the eternity of competition, by proving that all industries in which this category is not yet sufficiently developed, as in agriculture, are in a state of inferiority and decrepitude. To say that there are industries which have not yet reached the stage of competition, that others gains are below the level of bourgeois production, is drivel which gives not the slightest proof of the eternity of competition. All M. Proudhon s logic amounts to is this: competition is a social relation in which we are now developing our productive forces. To this truth, he gives no logical development, but only forms, often very well developed, when he says that competition is industrial emulation, the present-day mode of freedom, responsibility in labor, constitution of value, a condition for the advent of equality, a principle of social economy, a decree of fate, a necessity of the human soul, an inspiration of eternal justice, liberty in division, division on liberty, an economic category. Whoever says competition says common aim, and that proves, on the one hand, that competition is association; on the other, that competition is not egoism. And whoever says egoism, does he not say common aim?? Every egoism operates in society and by the fact of society. Hence it presupposes society, that is to say, common aims, common needs, common means of production, etc., etc. Is it, then, be mere chance that the competition and association which the Socialists talk about are not even divergent?? Socialists know well enough that present-day society is founded on competition. How could they accuse competition of overthrowing present-day society which they want to overthrow themselves?? And how could they accuse competition of overthrowing the society to come, in which they see, on the contrary, the overthrow of competition?? M. Proudhon says, later on, that competition is the opposite of monopoly, and consequently cannot be the opposite of association. Feudalism was, from its origins, opposed to patriarchal monarchy; it was thus not opposed to competition, which was not yet in existence. Does it follow that competition is not opposed to feudalism?? In actual fact, society, association are denominations which can be given to every society, to feudal society as well as to bourgeois society which is association founded on competition. How then can there be Socialists, who, by the single word association, think they can refute competition?? And how can M. Proudhon himself wish to defend competition against socialism by describing competition by the single word association?? All we have just said makes up the beautiful side of competition as M. Proudhon sees it. Now let us pass on to the ugly side, that is the negative side, of competition, its drawbacks, its destructive, subversive elements, its injurious qualities. There is something dismal about the picture M. Proudhon draws of it. Competition engenders misery, it foments civil war, it changes natural zones, mixes up nationalities, causes trouble in families, corrupts the public conscience, subverts the notion of equity, of justice, of morality, and what is worse, it destroys free, honest trade, and does not even give in exchange synthetic value, fixed, honest price. It disillusions everyone, even economists. It pushes things so far as to destroy its very self. After all the ill M. Proudhon says of it, can there be for the relations of bourgeois society, for its principles and its illusions, a more disintegrating, more destructive element than competition?? It must be carefully noted that competition always becomes the more destructive for bourgeois relations in proportion as it urges on a feverish creation of new productive forces, that is, of the material conditions of a new society. In this respect at least, the bad side of competition would have its good points. For M. Proudhon, the circulation of the blood must be a consequence of Harvey s theory. We rejoice with M. Proudhon that he can for once at least properly apply his formula to thesis and antithesis. Everyone knows that modern monopoly is engendered by competition itself. As for the content, M. Proudhon clings to poetic images. Competition made of every subdivision of labor a sort of sovereignty in which each individual stood with his power and his independence. Monopoly is the seat of every competing individuality. The sovereignty is worth at least as much as the seat. M. Proudhon talks of nothing but modern monopoly engendered by competition. But we all know that competition was engendered by feudal monopoly. Thus competition was originally the opposite of monopoly and not monopoly the opposite of competition. So that modern monopoly is not a simple antithesis, it is on the contrary the true synthesis. Thesis: Feudal monopoly, before competition. Antithesis: Competition. Synthesis: Modern monopoly, which is the negation of feudal monopoly, in so far as it implies the system of competition, and the negation of competition in so far as it is monopoly. Thus modern monopoly, bourgeois monopoly, is synthetic monopoly, the negation of the negation, the unity of opposites. It is monopoly in the pure, normal, rational state. M. Proudhon is in contradiction with his own philosophy when he turns bourgeois monopoly into monopoly in the crude, primitive, contradictory, spasmodic state. M. Rossi, whom M. Proudhon quotes several times on the subject of monopoly, seems to have a better grasp of the synthetic character of bourgeois monopoly. In his Cours d economie politique, he distinguishes between artificial monopolies and natural monopolies. Feudal monopolies, he says, are artificial, that is, arbitrary; bourgeois monopolies are natural, that is, rational. Monopoly is a good thing, reasons M. Proudhon, since it is an economic category, an emanation from the impersonal reason of humanity. Competition, again, is a good thing since it also is an economic category. But what is not good is the reality of monopoly and the reality of competition. What is still worse is that competition and monopoly devour each other. What is to be done?? Look for the synthesis of these two eternal thoughts, wrest it from the bosom of God, where is has been deposited from time immemorial. In practical life we find not only competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists. If the monopolists restrict their mutual competition by means of partial associations, competition increases among the workers; and the more the mass of the proletarians grows as against the monopolists of one nation, the more desperate competition becomes between the monopolists of different nations. The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition. To make the dialectical transition to the taxes which come after monopoly, M. Proudhon talks to us about the social genius which, after zigzagging intrepidly onward, What can we say of this genius, which, while fasting, walks about in a zigzag?? And what can we say of this walking which has no other object in view than that of destroying the bourgeois by taxes, whereas taxes are the very means of giving the bourgeois the wherewithal to preserve themselves as the ruling class?? Merely to give a glimpse of the manner in which M. Proudhon treats economic details, it suffices to say that, according to him, the tax on consumption was established with a view to equality, and to relieve the proletariat. The tax on consumption has assumed its true development only since the rise of the bourgeoisie. In the hands of industrial capital, that is, of sober and economical wealth, which maintains, reproduces, and increases itself by the direct exploitation of labor, the tax on consumption was a means of exploiting the frivolous, gay, prodigal wealth of the fine lords who did nothing but consume, James Steuart clearly developed this original purpose of the tax on consumption in his Recherches des principes de l economie politique, which he published 10 years before Adam Smith. As for the logical sequence of taxes, of the balance of trade, of credit in the understanding of M. Proudhon we could only remark that the English bourgeoisie, on attaining its political constitution under William of Orange, created all at once a new system of taxes, public credit, and the system of protective duties, as soon as it was in a position freely to develop its conditions of existence. This brief summary will suffice to give the reader a true idea of M. Proudhon s lubrications on the police or on taxes, the balance of trade, credit, communism, and population. We defy the most indulgent criticism to treat these chapters seriously.

Karl Marx. The Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter 2.3

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02c.htm

In each historical epoch, property has developed differently and under a set of entirely different social relations. Thus to define bourgeois property is nothing else than to give an exposition of all the social relations of bourgeois production. To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea, can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence. M. Proudhon, while seeming to speak of property in general, deals only with landed property, with ground rent. So M. Proudhon declares himself incapable of understanding the economic origin of rent and of property. He admits that this incapacity obliges him to resort to psychological and moral considerations, which, indeed, while only distantly connected with the production of wealth, have yet a very close connection with the narrowness of his historical views. M. Proudhon affirms that there is something mystical and mysterious about the origin of property. Now, to see mystery in the origin of property that is, to make a mystery of the relation between production itself and the distribution of the instruments of production is not this, to use M. Proudhon s language, a renunciation of all claims to economic science? L homme aux quarante cus foresaw a M. Proudhon of the future: In your world, where credit was a means of losing oneself in empty space, it is very possible that property became necessary in order to bind man to nature. In the world of real production, where landed property always precedes credit, M. Proudhon s horror vacui [horror of a vacuum] could not exist. The existence of rent once admitted, whatever its origin, it becomes a subject of mutually antagonistic negotiations between the farmer and the landed proprietor. What is the ultimate result of these negotiations, in other words, what is the average amount of rent? This is what M. Proudhon says: All this tumult of words may be reduced firstly to this: Ricardo says that the excess of the price of agricultural products over their cost of production, including the ordinary profit and interest on the capital, gives the measure of the rent. M. Proudhon does better. He makes the landowner intervene, like a Deus ex machina, and snatch from the colonus all the surplus of his production over the cost of production. He makes use of the intervention of the landowner to explain property, of the intervention of the rent-receiver to explain rent. He answers the problem by formulating the same problem and adding an extra syllable. Let us note also that in determining rent by the difference in fertility of the soil, M. Proudhon assigns a new origin to it, since land, before being assessed according to different degrees of fertility, was not, in his view, an exchange value, but was common. What, then, has happened to the fiction about rent having come into being through the necessity of bringing back to the land man who was about to lose himself in the infinity of empty space? Now let us free Ricardo s doctrine from the providential, allegorical, and mystical phrases in which M. Proudhon has been careful to wrap it. Rent, in the Ricardian sense, is property in land in its bourgeois state; that is, feudal property which has become subject to the conditions of bourgeois production. We have seen that, according to the Ricardian doctrine, the price of all objects is determined ultimately by the cost of production, including the industrial profit; in other words, by the labour time employed. In manufacturing industry, the price of the product obtained by the minimum of labour regulates the price of all other commodities of the same kind, seeing that the cheapest and most productive instruments of production can be multiplied to infinity and that competition necessarily gives rise to a market price that is, a common price for all products of the same kind. In agricultural industry, on the contrary, it is the price of the product obtained by the greatest amount of labour which regulates the price of all products of the same kind. In the first place, one cannot, as in manufacturing industry, multiply at will the instruments of production possessing the same degree of productivity, that is, plots of land with the same degree of fertility. Then, as population increases, land of an inferior quality begins to be exploited, or new outlays of capital, proportionately less productive than before, are made upon the same plot of land. In both cases a greater amount of labour is expended to obtain a proportionately smaller product. The needs of the population having rendered necessary this increase of labour, the product of the land whose exploitation is the more costly has as certain a sale as that of a piece of land whose exploitation is cheaper. As competition levels the market price, the product of the better soil will be paid for as dearly as that of the inferior. It is the excess of the price of the products of the better soil over the cost of their production that constitutes rent. If one could always have at one s disposal plots of land of the same degree of fertility; if one could, as in manufacturing industry, have recourse continually to cheaper and more productive machines, or if the subsequent outlays of capital produced as much as the first, then the price of agricultural products would be determined by the price of commodities produced by the best instruments of production, as we have seen with the price of manufactured products. But, from this moment rent would have disappeared also. For the Ricardian doctrine once the premises granted to be generally true, it is moreover essential that capital should be freely applicable to different branches of industry; that a strongly developed competition among the capitalists should have brought profits to an equal level; that the farmer should be no more than an industrial capitalist claiming for the use of his capital on the land, a profit equal to that which he would draw from his capital if it were applied in any kind of manufacture; that agricultural exploitation should be subjected to the regime of large-scale industry; and finally, that the landowner himself should aim at nothing beyond the money return. It may happen, as in Ireland, that rent does not yet exist, although the letting of land has reached an extreme development there. Rent being the excess not only over wages, but also over industrial profit, it cannot exist where the landowner s revenue is nothing but a mere levy on wages. Thus, far from converting the exploiter of the land, the farmer, into a simple labourer, and snatching from the cultivator the surplus of his product, which he cannot help regarding as his own, rent confronts the landowner, not with the slave, the serf, the payer of tribute, the wage labourer, but with the industrial capitalist. Once constituted as ground rent, ground property has in its possession only the surplus over production costs, which are determined not only by wages but also by industrial profit. It is therefore from the landowner that ground rent snatched a part of his income. Thus, there was a big lapse of time before the feudal farmer was replaced by the industrial capitalist. In Germany, for example, this transformation began only in the last third of the 18th century. It is in England alone that this relation between the industrial capitalist and the landed proprietor has been fully developed. So long as there was only M. Proudhon s colonus, there was no rent. The moment rent exists, the colonus is no longer the farmer, but the worker, the farmer s colonus. The abasement of the labourer, reduced to the role of a simple worker, day labourer, wage-earner, working for the industrial capitalist; the invention of the industrial capitalist, exploiting the land like any other factory; the transformation of the landed proprietor from a petty sovereign into a vulgar usurer; these are the different relations expressed by rent. Rent, in the Ricardian sense, is patriarchal agriculture transformed into commercial industry, industrial capital applied to land, the town bourgeoisie transplanted into the country. Rent, instead of binding man to nature, has merely bound the exploitation of the land to competition. Once established as rent, landed property itself is the result of competition, since from that time onwards it depends on the market value of agricultural produce. As rent, landed property is mobilized and becomes an article of commerce. Rent is possible only from the moment when the development of urban industry, and the social organization resulting therefrom, force the landowner to aim solely at cash profits, at the monetary relation of his agricultural products in fact to look upon his landed property only as a machine for coining money. Rent has so completely divorced the landed proprietor from the soil, from nature, that he has no need even to know his estates, as is to be seen in England. As for the farmer, the industrial capitalist and the agricultural worker, they are no more bound to the land they exploit than are the employer and the worker in the factories to the cotton and wool they manufacture; they feel an attachment only for the price of their production, the monetary product. Hence the jeremiads of the reactionary parties, who offer up all their prayers for the return of feudalism, of the good old patriarchal life, of the simple manners and the fine virtues of our forefathers. The subjection of the soil to the laws which dominate all other industries is and always will be the subject of interested condolences. Thus it may be said that rent has become the motive power which has introduced idyll into the movement of history. Ricardo, after postulating bourgeois production as necessary for determining rent, applies the conception of rent, nevertheless, to the landed property of all ages and all countries. This is an error common to all the economists, who represent the bourgeois relations of production as eternal categories. From the providential aim of rent which is, for M. Proudhon, the transformation of the colonus into a responsible worker, he passes to the equalized reward of rent. Rent, as we have just seen, is constituted by the equal price of the products of lands of unequal fertility, so that a hectolitre of corn which has cost 10 francs is sold for 20 francs if the cost of production rises to 20 francs upon soil of inferior quality. So long as necessity forces the purchase of all the agricultural products into the market, the market price is determined by the cost of the most expensive product. Thus it is this equalization of price, resulting from competition and not from the different fertilities of the lands, that secures to the owner of the better soil a rent of 10 francs for every hectolitre that his tenant sells. Let us suppose for a moment that the price of corn is determined by the labour time needed to produce it, and at once the hectolitre of corn obtained from the better soil will sell at 10 francs, while the hectolitre of corn obtained on the inferior soil will cost 20 francs. This being admitted, the average market price will be 15 francs, whereas, according to the law of competition, it is 20 francs. If the average price were 15 francs, there would be no occasion for any distribution, whether equalized or otherwise, for there would be no rent. Rent exists only when one can sell for 20 francs the hectolitre of corn which has cost the producer 10 francs. M. Proudhon supposes equality of the market price, with unequal costs of production, in order to arrive at an equalized sharing out of the product of inequality. We understand such economists as Mill, Cherbuliez, Hilditch, and others demanding that rent should be handed over to the state to serve in place of taxes. That is a frank expression of the hatred the industrial capitalist bears towards the landed proprietor, who seems to him a useless thing, an excrescence upon the general body of bourgeois production. But first to make the price of the hectolitre of corn 20 francs in order then to make a general distribution of the 10 francs overcharge levied on the consumer, is indeed enough to make the social genius pursue its zigzag course mournfully and knock its head against some corner. For any land valuation based upon rent to be of practical value, the conditions of present society must not be departed from. Now, we have shown that the farm rent paid by the farmer to the landlord expresses the rent with any exactitude only in the countries most advanced in industry and commerce. And even this rent often includes interest paid to the landlord on capital incorporated in the land. The location of the land, the vicinity of towns, and many other circumstances influence the farm rent and modify the ground rent. These peremptory reasons would be enough to prove the inaccuracy of a land valuation based on rent. Thus history, far from supplying, in rent, a ready-made land valuation, does nothing but change and turn topsy-turvy the land valuations already made. Finally, fertility is not so natural a quality as might be thought; it is closely bound up with the social relations of the time. A piece of land may be very fertile for corn growing, and yet the market price may decide the cultivator to turn it into an artificial pastureland and thus render it infertile. M. Proudhon has improvised his land valuation, which has not even the value of an ordinary land valuation, only to give substance to the providentially equalitarian aim of rent. This time, M. Proudhon sees in rent all the characteristics of interest, save that it is derived from capital of a specific nature. This capital is land, an eternal capital, which is capable of no increase in matter, but only an indefinite improvement in its use. In the progressive advance of civilization, interest has a continual tendency to fall, whilst rent continually tends to rise. Interest falls because of the abundance of capital; rent rises owning to the improvements brought about in industry, which results in an ever better utilization of land. Such, in its essence, is the opinion of M. Proudhon. Let us first examine how far it is true to say that rent is interest on capital. For the landed proprietor himself, rent represents the interest on the capital that the land has cost him, or that he would draw from it if he sold it. But in buying or selling land he only buys or sells rent. The price he pays to make himself a receiver of rent is regulated by the rate of interest in general and has nothing to do with actual nature of rent. The interest on capital invested in land is in general lower than the interest on capital invested in manufacture or commerce. Thus, for those who make no distinction between the interest that the land represents to the owner and the rent itself, the interest on land capital diminishes still more than does the interest on other capital. But it is not a question of the purchase or sale price of rent, of the marketable value of rent, of capitalized rent, it is a question of rent itself. Farm rent can imply again, apart from rent proper, the interest on the capital incorporated in the land. In this instance the landlord receives this part of the farm rent, not as a landlord but as a capitalist; but this is not the rent proper that we are to deal with. Land, so long as it is not exploited as a means of production, is not capital. Land as capital can be increased just as much as all the other instruments of production. Nothing is added to its matter, to use M. Proudhon s language, but the lands which serve as instruments of production are multiplied. The very fact of applying further outlays of capital to land already transformed into means of production increases land as capital without adding anything to land as matter that is, to the extent of the land. M. Proudhon s land as matter is the Earth in its limitation. As for the eternity he attributes to land, we grant readily it has this virtue as matter. Land as capital is no more eternal than any other capital. Gold and silver, which yield interest, are just as lasting and eternal as land. If the price of gold and silver falls, while that of land keeps rising, this is certainly not because of its more or less eternal nature. Land as capital is fixed capital; but fixed capital gets used up just as much as circulating capital. Improvements to the land need production and upkeep; they last only for a time; and this they have in common with all other improvements used to transform matter into means of production. If land as capital were eternal, some lands would present a very different appearance from what they do today, and we should see the Roman Campagna, Sicily, Palestine, in all the splendour of their former prosperity. There are even instances when land as capital might disappear, even though the improvements remain incorporated in the land. In the first place, this occurs every time rent proper is wiped out by the competition of new and more fertile soils; secondly, the improvements which might have been valuable at one time cease to be of value the moment they become universal owing to the development of agronomy. The representative of land as capital is not the landlord, but the farmer. The proceeds yielded by land as capital are interest and industrial profit, not rent. There are lands which yield such interest and profit but still yield no rent. Briefly, land in so far as it yields interest, is land capital, and as land capital it yields no rent, it is not landed property. Rent results from the social relations in which the exploitation of the land takes place. It cannot be a result of the more or less solid, more or less durable nature of the soil. Rent is a product of society and not of the soil. According to M. Proudhon, improvement in the use of the land a consequence of the perfecting of industry causes the continual rise in rent. On the contrary, this improvement causes its periodic fall. Wherein consists, in general, any improvement, whether in agriculture or in manufacture? In producing more with the same labour; in producing as much, or even more, with less labour. Thanks to these improvements, the farmer is spared from using a greater amount of labour for a relatively smaller product. He has no need, therefore, to resort to inferior soils, and instalments of capital applied successively to the same soil remain equally productive. Thus, these improvements, far from continually raising rent as M. Proudhon says, become on the contrary so many temporary obstacles preventing its rise. The English landowners of the 17th century were so well aware of this truth, that they opposed the progress of agriculture for fear of seeing their incomes diminish. (See Petty, an English economist of the time of Charles II.)

The Poverty of Philosophy – Chapter 2.4

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02d.htm

We deny all these assertions, except that two and two make four. In the first place, there is no general rise in prices. If the price of everything doubles at the same time as wages, there is no change in price, the only change is in terms. Then again, a general rise in wages can never produce a more or less general rise in the price of goods. Actually, if every industry employed the same number of workers in relation to fixed capital or to the instruments used, a general rise in wages would produce a general fall in profits and the current price of goods would undergo no alteration. But as the relation of manual labour to fixed capital is not the same in different industries, all the industries which employ a relatively greater mass of capital and fewer workers, will be forced sooner or later to lower the price of their goods. In the opposite case, in which the price of their goods is not lowered, their profit will rise above the common rate of profits. Machines are not wage-earners. Therefore, the general rise in wages will affect less those industries, which, compared with the others, employ more machines than workers. But as competition always tends to level the rate of profits, those profits which rise above the average rate cannot but be transitory. Thus, apart from a few fluctuations, a general rise in wages will lead, not as M. Proudhon says, to a general increase in prices, but to a partial fall that is a fall in the current price of the goods that are made chiefly with the help of machines. The rise and fall of profits and wages expresses merely the proportion in which capitalists and workers share in the product of a day's work, without influencing in most instances the price of the product. But that strikes followed by an increase in wages culminate in a general rise in prices, in a dearth even those are notions which can blossom only in the brain of a poet who has not been understood. In England, strikes have regularly given rise to the invention and application of new machines. Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labour. The self-acting mule, the greatest invention of modern industry, put out of action the spinners who were in revolt. If combinations and strikes had no other effect than that of making the efforts of mechanical genius react against them, they would still exercise an immense influence on the development of industry. Of all the towns in England, Bolton is the one in which the radicalism is the most developed. The Bolton workers are known to be the most revolutionary of all. At the time of the great agitation in England for the abolition of the Corn Laws, the English manufacturers thought that they could cope with the landowners only by thrusting the workers to the fore. But as the interests of the workers were no less opposed to those of the manufacturers than the interests of the manufacturers were to those of the landowners, it was natural that the manufacturers should fare badly in the workers' meetings. What did the manufacturers do? To save appearances they organized meetings composed, to a large extent, of foremen, of the small number of workers who were devoted to them, and of the real friends of trade. When later on the genuine workers tried, as in Bolton and Manchester, to take part in these sham demonstrations, in order to protest against them, they were forbidden admittance on the ground that it was a ticket meeting a meeting to which only persons with entrance cards were admitted. Yet the posters placarded on the walls had announced public meetings. Every time one of these meetings was held, the manufacturers' newspapers gave a pompous and detailed account of the speeches made. It goes without saying that it was the foremen who made these speeches. The London papers reproduced them word for word. M. Proudhon has the misfortune to take foremen for ordinary workers, and enjoins them not to cross the Channel. If in 1844 and 1845 strikes drew less attention than before, it was because 1844 and 1845 were the first two years of prosperity that British industry had had since 1837. Nevertheless none of the trades unions had been dissolved. Now let us listen to the foremen of Bolton. According to them manufacturers have no command over wages because they have no command over the price of products, and they have no command over the price of products because they have no command over the world market. For this reason, they wish it to be understood that combinations should not be formed to extort an increase in wages from the masters. M. Proudhon, on the contrary, forbids combinations for fear they should be followed by a rise in wages which would bring with it a general dearth. We have no need to say that on one point there is an entente cordiale between the foremen and M. Proudhon: that a rise in wages is equivalent to a rise in the price of products. But is the fear of a dearth the true cause of M. Proudhon's rancour? No. Quite simple, he is annoyed with the Bolton foremen because they determine value by supply and demand and hardly take any account of constituted value, of value which has passed into the state of constitution, of the constitution of value, including permanent exchangeability and all the other proportionalities of relations and relations of proportionality, with Providence at their side. M. Proudhon wants to pass off an article of the Penal Code as a necessary and general result of bourgeois relations of production. In England, combination is authorized by an Act of Parliament, and it is the economic system which has forced Parliament to grant this legal authorization. In 1825, when, under the Minister Huskisson, Parliament had to modify the law in order to bring it more and more into line with the conditions resulting from free competition, it had of necessity to abolish all laws forbidding combinations of workers. The more modern industry and competition develop, the more elements there are which call forth and strengthen combination, and as soon as combination becomes an economic fact, daily gaining in solidity, it is bound before long to become a legal fact. Thus the article of the Penal Code proves at the most that modern industry and competition were not yet well developed under the Constituent Assembly and under the Empire. Economists and socialists [*1] are in agreement on one point: the condemnation of combination. Only they have different motives for their act of condemnation. The economists say to workers: The socialists say to the workers: And we, as socialists, tell you that, apart from the money question, you will continue nonetheless to be workers, and the masters will still continue to be the masters, just as before. So no combination! No politics! For is not entering into combination engaging in politics? The economists want the workers to remain in society as it is constituted and as it has been signed and sealed by them in their manuals. The socialists want the workers to leave the old society alone, the better to be able to enter the new society which they have prepared for them with so much foresight. In spite of both of them, in spite of manuals and utopias, combination has not yet ceased for an instant to go forward and grow with the development and growth of modern industry. It has now reached such a stage, that the degree to which combination has developed in any country clearly marks the rank it occupies in the hierarchy of the world market. England, whose industry has attained the highest degree of development, has the biggest and best organized combinations. In England, they have not stopped at partial combinations which have no other objective than a passing strike, and which disappear with it. Permanent combinations have been formed, trades unions, which serve as ramparts for the workers in their struggles with the employers. And at the present time all these local trades unions find a rallying point in the National Association of United Trades, the central committee of which is in London, and which already numbers 80,000 members. The organization of these strikes, combinations, and trades unions went on simultaneously with the political struggles of the workers, who now constitute a large political party, under the name of Chartists. The first attempt of workers to associate among themselves always takes place in the form of combinations. Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance combination. Thus combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that English economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favor of associations, which, in the eyes of these economists, are established solely in favor of wages. In this struggle a veritable civil war all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character. Economic conditions had 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 interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle. In the bourgeoisie we have two phases to distinguish: that in which it constituted itself as a class under the regime of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and that in which, already constituted as a class, it overthrew feudalism and monarchy to make society into a bourgeois society. The first of these phases was the longer and necessitated the greater efforts. This too began by partial combinations against the feudal lords. Much research has been carried out to trace the different historical phases that the bourgeoisie has passed through, from the commune up to its constitution as a class. But when it is a question of making a precise study of strikes, combinations and other forms in which the proletarians carry out before our eyes their organization as a class, some are seized with real fear and others display a transcendental disdain. 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 relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. The organization of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society. 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. [*2] 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 denouement? 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:

The Poverty of Philosophy – Chapter 2.5

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02e.htm

M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error. The reader will understand that in this thankless task we have often had to abandon our criticism of M. Proudhon in order to criticize German philosophy, and at the same time to give some observations on political economy. M. Proudhon's work is not just a treatise on political economy, an ordinary book; it is a bible. "Mysteries", "Secrets Wrested from the Bosom of God", "Revelations" it lacks nothing. But as prophets are discussed nowadays more conscientiously than profane writers, the reader must resign himself to going with us through the arid and gloomy eruditions of "Genesis", in order to ascend later, with M. Proudhon, into the ethereal and fertile realm of super-socialism. (See Proudhon, Philosophy of Poverty, Prologue, p.III, line 20.)

The Poverty of Philosophy – Foreword

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/foreword.htm

For the second edition I have only to remark that the name wrongly written Hopkins in the French text (on page 45) has been replaced by the correct name Hodgskin and that in the same place the date of the work of William Thompson has been corrected to 1824. It is to be hoped that this will appease the bibiliographical conscience of Professor Anton Menger.

The Poverty of Philosophy – Introduction (1892)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/int-1892.htm

The present work was produced in the winter of 1846-47, at a time when Marx had cleared up for himself the basic features of his new historical and economic outlook. Proudhon s Syst me des contradictions conomiques, ou Philosophie de la mis re, which had just appeared, gave him the opportunity to develop these basic features, setting them against the views of a man who, from then on, was to occupy the most important place among living French socialists. Since the time in Paris when the two of them had often spent whole nights discussing economic questions, their paths had increasingly diverged: Proudhon s book proved that there was already an unbridgeable gulf between them. To ignore it was at that time impossible, and so Marx put on record the irreparable rupture in this reply of his. Marx s general opinion of Proudhon is to be found in the article which appeared in the Berlin Social-Demokrat Nos 16, 17 and 18 for 1865. It was the only article Marx wrote for that paper; Herr von Schweitzer s attempts to guide it along feudal and government lines, which became evident soon afterwards, compelled us to publicly terminate our collaboration after only a few weeks. For Germany, the present work has at this precise moment a significance which Marx himself never imagined. How could he have known that, in trouncing Proudhon, he was hitting Rodbertus, the idol of the careerists of today, who was unknown to him even by name at that time? This is not the place to deal with relations between Marx and Rodbertus; an opportunity for that is sure to present itself to me very soon. Suffice it to note here that when Rodbertus accuses Marx of having plundered him and of having freely used in his Capital without quoting him his work Zur Erkenntnis, he allows himself to indulge in an act of slander which is only explicable by the irksomeness of unrecognised genius and by his remarkable ignorance of things taking place outside Prussia, and especially of socialist and economic literature. Neither these charges, nor the above-mentioned work by Rodbertus ever came to Marx s sight; all he knew of Rodbertus was the three Sociale Briefe and even these certainly not before 1858 or 1859. With greater reason Rodbertus asserts in these letters that he had already discovered Proudhon s constituted value before Proudhon; but here again it is true he erroneously flatters himself with being the first discoverer. In any case, he is thus one of the targets of criticism in the present work, and this compels me to deal briefly with his fundamental piece: Zur Erkenntnis unsrer staatswirthschaftlichen Zust nde, 1842, insofar as this brings forth anticipations of Proudhon as well as the communism of Weitling likewise (again unconsciously) contained in it. Insofar as modern socialism, no matter of what tendency, starts out from bourgeois political economy, it almost without exception takes up the Ricardian theory of value. The two propositions which Ricardo proclaimed in 1817 right at the beginning of his Principles, These two propositions had ever since 1821 been utilised in England for socialist conclusions , and in part with such pointedness and resolution that this literature, which had then almost been forgotten and was to a large extent only rediscovered by Marx, remained unsurpassed until the appearance of Capital. About this another time. If, therefore, in 1842 Rodbertus for his part drew socialist conclusions from the above propositions, that was certainly a very considerable step forward for a German at that time, but it could rank as a new discovery only for Germany at best. That such an application of the Ricardian theory was far from new was proved by Marx against Proudhon, who suffered from a similar conceit. And the quotations given here from Bray on their own put an end to a good part of the priority claimed by Rodbertus. At that time Marx had never yet entered the reading room of the British Museum. Apart from the libraries of Paris and Brussels, apart from my books and extracts, he had only examined such books as were obtainable in Manchester during a six-week journey to England we made together in the summer of 1845. The literature in question was, therefore, by no means so inaccesible in the forties as it may be now. If, all the same, it always remained unknown to Rodbertus, that is to be ascribed solely to his Prussian local bigotry. He is the actual founder of specifically Prussian socialism and is now at last recognised as such. However, even in his beloved Prussia, Rodbertus was not to remain undisturbed. In 1859, Marx s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part I, was published in Berlin. Therein, among the economists objections to Ricardo, the following was put forward as the second objection (p. 40): On this there was the following note: In the same note there was a reference to Marx s Mis re de la philosophie, which was then obtainable in all the bookshops. Rodbertus, therefore, had sufficient opportunity of convincing himself whether his discoveries of 1842 were really new. Instead he proclaims them again and again and regards them as so incomparable that it never occurs to him that Marx might have drawn his conclusions from Ricardo independently, just as well as Rodbertus himself. Absolutely impossible! Marx had plundered" him the man whom the same Marx had offered every opportunity to convince himself how long before both of them these conclusions, at least in the crude form which they still have in the case of Rodbertus, had previously been enunciated in England! The simplest socialist application of the Ricardian theory is indeed that given above. It has led in many cases to insights into the origin and nature of surplus value which go far beyond Ricardo, as in the case of Rodbertus among others. Quite apart from the fact that on this matter he nowhere presents anything which has not already been said at least as well, before him, his presentation suffers like those of his predecessors from the fact that he adopts, uncritically and without examining their content, economic categories labour, capital, value, etc. in the crude form, clinging to their external appearance, in which they were handed down to him by the economists. He thereby not only cuts himself off from all further development in contrast to Marx who was the first to make something of these propositions so often repeated for the last sixty-four years but, as will be shown, he opens for himself the road leading straight to utopia. The above application of the Ricardian theory that the entire social product belongs to the workers as their product, because they are the sole real producers, leads directly to communism. But, as Marx indeed indicates in the above-quoted passage, it is incorrect in formal economic terms, for it is simply an application of morality to economics. According to the laws of bourgeois economics, the greatest part of the product does not belong to the workers who have produced it. If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has nothing immediately to do with economics. We are merely saying that this economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality. Marx, therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree; he says only that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact. But what in economic terms may be formally incorrect, may all the same be correct from the point of view of world history. If mass moral consciousness declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it did at one time in the case of slavery and statute labour, that is proof that the fact itself has outlived its day, that other economic facts have made their appearance due to which the former has become unbearable and untenable. Therefore, a very true economic content may be concealed behind the formal economic incorrectness. This is not the place to deal more closely with the significance and history of the theory of surplus value. At the same time other conclusions can be drawn, and have been drawn, from the Ricardian theory of value. The value of commodities is determined by the labour required for their production. But now it turns out that in this imperfect world commodities are sold sometimes above, sometimes below their value, and indeed not only as a result of ups and downs in competition. The rate of profit tends just as much to balance out at the same level for all capitalists as the price of commodities does to become reduced to the labour value by agency of supply and demand. But the rate of profit is calculated on the total capital invested in an industrial business. Since now the annual products in two different branches of industry may incorporate equal quantities of labour, and, consequently, may represent equal values and also wages may be at an equal level in both, while the capital advanced in one branch may be, and often is, twice or three times as great as in the other, consequently the Ricardian law of value, as Ricardo himself discovered, comes into contradiction here with the law of the equal rate of profit. If the products of both branches of industry are sold at their values, the rates of profit cannot be equal; if, however, the rates of profit are equal, then the products of the two branches of industry cannot always be sold at their values. Thus, we have here a contradiction, the antinomy of two economic laws, the practical resolution of which takes place according to Ricardo (Chapter I, Section 4 and 5 ) as a rule in favour of the rate of profit at the cost of value. But the Ricardian definition of value, in spite of its ominous characteristics, has a feature which makes it dear to the heart of the honest bourgeois. It appeals with irresistible force to his sense of justice. Justice and equality of rights are the cornerstones on which the bourgeois of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would like to erect his social edifice over the ruins of feudal injustice, inequality and privilege. And the determination of value of commodities by labour and the free exchange of the products of labour, taking place according to this measure of value between commodity owners with equal rights, these are, as Marx has already proved, the real foundations on which the whole political, juridical and philosophical ideology of the modern bourgeoisie has been built. Once it is recognised that labour is the measure of value of a commodity, the better feelings of the honest bourgeois cannot but be deeply wounded by the wickedness of a world which, while recognising the basic law of justice in name, still in fact appears at every moment to set it aside without compunction. And the petty bourgeois especially, whose honest labour even if it is only that of his workmen and apprentices is daily more and more depreciated in value by the competition of large-scale production and machinery, this small-scale producer especially must long for a society in which the exchange of products according to their labour value is at last a complete and invariable truth. In other words, he must long for a society in which a single law of commodity production prevails exclusively and in full, but in which the conditions are abolished in which it can prevail at all, viz., the other laws of commodity production and, later, of capitalist production. How deeply this utopia has struck roots in the way of thinking of the modern petty bourgeois real or ideal is proved by the fact that it was systematically developed by John Gray back in 1831, that it was tried in practice and theoretically propagated in England in the thirties, that it was proclaimed as the latest truth by Rodbertus in Germany in 1842 and by Proudhon in France in 1846, that it was again proclaimed by Rodbertus as late as 1871 as the solution to the social question and, as, so to say, his social testament, and that in 1884 it again finds adherents among the horde of careerists who in the name of Rodbertus set out to exploit Prussian state socialism. The critique of this utopia has been so exhaustively furnished by Marx both against Proudhon and against Gray (see the appendix to this work) that I can confine myself here to a few remarks on the form of substantiating and depicting it peculiar to Rodbertus. As already noted, Rodbertus adopts the traditional definitions of economic concepts entirely in the form in which they have come down to him from the economists. He does not make the slightest attempt to investigate them. Value is for him This, to put it mildly, extremely slovenly definition gives us at the best an idea of what value approximately looks like, but says absolutely nothing of what it is. Since this, however, is all that Rodbertus is able to tell us about value, it is understandable that he looks for a measure of value located outside value. After thirty pages in which he mixes up use value and exchange value in higgledy-piggledy fashion with that power of abstract thought so infinitely admired by Herr Adolf Wagner, he arrives at the conclusion that there is no real measure of value and that one has to make do with a substitute measure. Labour could serve as such but only if products of an equal quantity of labour were always exchanged against products of an equal quantity of labour whether this is already the case of itself, or whether precautionary measures are adopted to ensure that it is. Consequently value and labour remain without any sort of material connection in spite of the fact that the whole first chapter is taken up to expound to us that commodities cost labour and nothing but labour, and why this is so. Labour, again, is taken uncritically in the form in which it occurs among the economists. And not even that. For, although there is a reference in a couple of words to differences in intensity of labour, labour is still put forward quite generally as something which costs", hence as something which measures value, quite irrespective of whether it is expended under normal average social conditions or not. Whether the producers take ten days, or only one, to make products which could be made in one day; whether they employ the best or the worst tools; whether they expend their labour time in the production of socially necessary articles and in the socially required quantity, or whether they make quite undesired articles or desired articles in quantities above or below demand about all this there is not a word: labour is labour, the product of equal labour must be exchanged against the product of equal labour. Rodbertus, who is otherwise always ready, whether rightly or not, to adopt the national standpoint and to survey the relations of individual producers from the high watchtower of general social considerations, is anxious to avoid doing so here. And this, indeed, solely because from the very first line of his book he makes directly for the utopia of labour money, and because any investigation of labour seen from its property of creating value would be bound to put insuperable obstacles in his way. His instinct was here considerably stronger than his power of abstract thought which, by the by, is revealed in Rodbertus only by the most concrete absence of ideas. The transition to utopia is now made in the turn of a hand. The "measures", which ensure exchange of commodities according to labour value as the invariable rule, cause no difficulty. The other utopians of this tendency, from Gray to Proudhon, rack their brains to invent social institutions which would achieve this aim. They attempt at least to solve the economic question in an economic way through the action of the owners themselves who exchange the commodities. For Rodbertus it is much easier. As a good Prussian he appeals to the state: a decree of the state authority orders the reform. In this way then, value is happily constituted", but by no means the priority in this constitution as claimed by Rodbertus. On the contrary, Gray as well as Bray among many others before Rodbertus, at length and frequently ad nauseam, repeated this idea, viz. the pious desire for measures by means of which products would always and under all circumstances be exchanged only at their labour value. After the state has thus constituted value at least for a part of the products, for Rodbertus is also modest it issues its labour paper money, and gives advances therefrom to the industrial capitalists, with which the latter pay the workers, whereupon the workers buy the products with the labour paper money they have received, and so cause the paper money to flow back to its starting point. How very beautifully this is effected, one must hear from Rodbertus himself: If Rodbertus has hitherto always had the misfortune to arrive too late with his new discoveries, this time at least he has the merit of one sort of originality: none of his rivals has dared to express the stupidity of the labour money utopia in this childishly naive, transparent, I might say truly Pomeranian, form. Since for every paper certificate a corresponding object of value has been delivered, and no object of value is supplied except in return for a corresponding paper certificate, the sum total of paper certificates must always be covered by the sum total of objects of value. The calculation works out without the smallest remainder, it is correct down to a second of labour time, and no governmental chief revenue office accountant, however many years of faithful service he may have behind him, could prove the slightest error in calculation. What more could one want? In present-day capitalist society each industrial capitalist produces off his own bat what, how and as much as he likes. The social demand, however, remains an unknown magnitude to him, both in regard to quality, the kind of objects required, and in regard to quantity. That which today cannot be supplied quickly enough, may tomorrow be offered far in excess of the demand. Nevertheless, demand is finally satisfied in one way or another, good or bad, and, taken as a whole, production is ultimately geared towards the objects required. How is this evening-out of the contradiction effected? By competition. And how does competition bring about this solution? Simply by depreciating below their labour value those commodities which by their kind or amount are useless for immediate social requirements, and by making the producers feel, through this roundabout means, that they have produced either absolutely useless articles or ostensibly useful articles in unusable, superfluous quantity. Two things follow from this: First, continual deviations of the prices of commodities from their values are the necessary condition in and through which the value of the commodities as such can come into existence. Only through the fluctuations of competition, and consequently of commodity prices, does the law of value of commodity production assert itself and the determination of the value of the commodity by the socially necessary labour time become a reality. That thereby the form of manifestation of value, the price, as a rule looks somewhat different from the value which it manifests, is a fate which value shares with most social relations. A king usually looks quite different from the monarchy which he represents. To desire, in a society of producers who exchange their commodities, to establish the determination of value by labour time, by forbidding competition to establish this determination of value through pressure on prices in the only way it can be established, is therefore merely to prove that, at least in this sphere, one has adopted the usual utopian disdain of economic laws. Secondly, competition, by bringing into operation the law of value of commodity production in a society of producers who exchange their commodities, precisely thereby brings about the only organisation and arrangement of social production which is possible in the circumstances. Only through the undervaluation or overvaluation of products is it forcibly brought home to the individual commodity producers what society requires or does not require and in what amounts. But it is precisely this sole regulator that the utopia advocated by Rodbertus among others wishes to abolish. And if we then ask what guarantee we have that necessary quantity and not more of each product will be produced, that we shall not go hungry in regard to corn and meat while we are choked in beet sugar and drowned in potato spirit, that we shall not lack trousers to cover our nakedness while trouser buttons flood us by the million Rodbertus triumphantly shows us his splendid calculation, according to which the correct certificate has been handed out for every superfluous pound of sugar, for every unsold barrel of spirit, for every unusable trouser button, a calculation which works out exactly, and according to which all claims will be satisfied and the liquidation correctly brought about. And anyone who does not believe this can apply to governmental chief revenue office accountant X in Pomerania who has checked the calculation and found it correct, and who, as one who has never yet been caught lacking with the accounts, is thoroughly trustworthy. And now consider the naivet with which Rodbertus would abolish industrial and commercial crises by means of his utopia. As soon as the production of commodities has assumed world market dimensions, the evening-out between the individual producers who produce for private account and the market for which they produce, which in respect of quantity and quality of demand is more or less unknown to them, is established by means of a storm on the world market, by a commercial crisis. [*1] If now competition is to be forbidden to make the individual producers aware, by a rise or fall in prices, how the world market stands, then they are completely blindfolded. To institute the production of commodities in such a fashion that the producers can no longer learn anything about the state of the market for which they are producing that indeed is a cure for the crisis disease which could make Dr. Eisenbart envious of Rodbertus. It is now comprehensible why Rodbertus determines the value of commodities simply by labour and at most allows for different degrees of intensity of labour. If he had investigated by what means and how labour creates value and therefore also determines and measures it, he would have arrived at socially necessary labour, necessary for the individual product, both in relation to other products of the same kind and also in relation to society s total demand. He would thereby have been confronted with the question as to how the adjustment of the production of separate commodity producers to the total social demand takes place, and his whole utopia would thereby have been made impossible. This time he preferred in fact to make an abstraction", namely of precisely that which mattered. Now at last we come to the point where Rodbertus really offers us something new; something which distinguishes him from all his numerous fellow supporters of the labour money exchange economy. They all demand this exchange organisation for the purpose of abolishing the exploitation of wage labour by capital. Every producer is to receive the full labour value of his product. On this they all agree, from Gray to Proudhon. Not at all, says Rodbertus. Wage labour and its exploitation remain. In the first place, in no conceivable condition of society can the worker receive the full value of his product for consumption. A series of economically unproductive but necessary functions have to be met from the fund produced, and consequently also the persons connected with them maintained. This is only correct so long as the present-day division of labour applies. In a society in which general productive labour is obligatory, which is also conceivable after all, this ceases to apply. But the need for a social reserve and accumulation fund would remain and consequently even in that case, the workers, i.e., all, would remain in possession and enjoyment of their total product, but each separate worker would not enjoy the full returns of his labour". Nor has the maintenance of economically unproductive functions at the expense of the labour product been overlooked by the other labour money utopians. But they leave the workers to tax themselves for this purpose in the usual democratic way, while Rodbertus, whose whole social reform of 1842 is geared to the Prussian state of that time, refers the whole matter to the decision of the bureaucracy, which determines from above the share of the worker in his own product and graciously permits him to have it. In the second place, however, rent and profit are also to continue undiminished. For the landowners and industrial capitalists also exercise certain socially useful or even necessary functions, even if economically unproductive ones, and they receive in the shape of rent and profit a sort of pay on that account a conception which was, it will be recalled, not new even in 1842. Actually they get at present far too much for the little that they do, and badly at that, but Rodbertus has need, at least for the next five hundred years, of a privileged class, and so the present rate of surplus value, to express myself correctly, is to remain in existence but is not to be allowed to be increased. This present rate of surplus value Rodbertus takes to be 200 per cent, that is to say, for twelve hours of labour daily the worker is to receive a certificate not for twelve hours but only for four, and the value produced in the remaining eight hours is to be divided between landowner and capitalist. Rodbertus labour certificates, therefore, are a direct lie. Again, one must be a Pomeranian manor owner in order to imagine that a working class would put up with working twelve hours in order to receive a certificate for four hours of labour. If the hocus-pocus of capitalist production is translated into this na ve language, in which it appears as naked robbery, it is made impossible. Every certificate given to a worker would be a direct instigation to rebellion and would come under 110 of the German Imperial Criminal Code. One need never have seen any other proletariat than the day-labourer proletariat, still actually in semi-serfdom, of a Pomeranian manor where the rod and the whip reign supreme, and where all the beautiful women in the village belong to his lordship s harem, in order to imagine one can treat the workers in such a shamefaced manner. But, after all, our conservatives are our greatest revolutionaries. If, however, our workers are sufficiently docile to be taken in that they have in reality only worked four hours during a whole twelve hours of hard work, they are, as a reward, to be guaranteed that for all eternity their share in their own product will never fall below a third. That is indeed pie in the sky of the most infantile kind and not worth wasting a word over. Insofar, therefore, as there is anything novel in the labour money exchange utopia of Rodbertus, this novelty is simply childish and far below the achievements of his numerous comrades both before and after him. For the time when Rodbertus Zur Erkenntnis, etc., appeared, it was certainly an important book. His development of Ricardo s theory of value in that one direction was a very promising beginning. Even if it was new only for him and for Germany, still as a whole, it stands on a par with the achievements of the better ones among his English predecessors. But it was only a beginning, from which a real gain for theory could be achieved only by further thorough and critical work. But he cut himself off from further development by also tackling the development of Ricardo s theory from the very beginning in the second direction, in the direction of utopia. Thereby he surrendered the first condition of all criticism freedom from bias. He worked on towards a goal fixed in advance, he became a Tendenz konom. Once imprisoned by his utopia, he cut himself off from all possibility of scientific advance. From 1842 up to his death, he went round in circles, always repeating the same ideas which he had already expressed or suggested in his first work, feeling himself unappreciated, finding himself plundered, where there was nothing to plunder, and finally refusing, not without intention, to recognise that in essence he had only rediscovered what had already been discovered long before. In a few places the translation departs from the printed French original. This is due to handwritten alterations by Marx, which will also be inserted in the new French edition that is now being prepared. It is hardly necessary to point out that the terminology used in this work does not entirely coincide with that in Capital. Thus this work still speaks of labour as a commodity, of the purchase and sale of labour, instead of labour power. Also added as a supplement to this edition are: For more details about the pamphlet see Engels Preface to Vol. II of Marx s Capital.

The Poverty of Philosophy – Preface (1885)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/pre-1885.htm

From various quarters we have been reproached for neglecting to portray the economic conditions which form the material basis of the present struggles between classes and nations. With set purpose we have hitherto touched upon these conditions only when they forced themselves upon the surface of the political conflicts. It was necessary, beyond everything else, to follow the development of the class struggle in the history of our own day, and to prove empirically, by the actual and daily newly created historical material, that with the subjugation of the working class, accomplished in the days of February and March, 1848, the opponents of that class the bourgeois republicans in France, and the bourgeois and peasant classes who were fighting feudal absolutism throughout the whole continent of Europe were simultaneously conquered; that the victory of the "moderate republic" in France sounded at the same time the fall of the nations which had responded to the February revolution with heroic wars of independence; and finally that, by the victory over the revolutionary workingmen, Europe fell back into its old double slavery, into the English-Russian slavery. The June conflict in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the tragi-comedy in Berlin in November 1848, the desperate efforts of Poland, Italy, and Hungary, the starvation of Ireland into submission these were the chief events in which the European class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class was summed up, and from which we proved that every revolutionary uprising, however remote from the class struggle its object might appear, must of necessity fail until the revolutionary working class shall have conquered; that every social reform must remain a Utopia until the proletarian revolution and the feudalistic counter-revolution have been pitted against each other in a world-wide war. In our presentation, as in reality, Belgium and Switzerland were tragicomic caricaturish genre pictures in the great historic tableau; the one the model State of the bourgeois monarchy, the other the model State of the bourgeois republic; both of them, States that flatter themselves to be just as free from the class struggle as from the European revolution. But now, after our readers have seen the class struggle of the year 1848 develop into colossal political proportions, it is time to examine more closely the economic conditions themselves upon which is founded the existence of the capitalist class and its class rule, as well as the slavery of the workers. We shall present the subject in three great divisions: We shall seek to portray this as simply and popularly as possible, and shall not presuppose a knowledge of even the most elementary notions of political economy. We wish to be understood by the workers. And, moreover, there prevails in Germany the most remarkable ignorance and confusion of ideas in regard to the simplest economic relations, from the patented defenders of existing conditions, down to the socialist wonder-workers and the unrecognized political geniuses, in which divided Germany is even richer than in duodecimo princelings. We therefore proceed to the consideration of the first problem.

Wage Labour and Capital. Prelimary

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch01.htm

Consequently, it appears that the capitalist buys their labour with money, and that for money they sell him their labour. But this is merely an illusion. What they actually sell to the capitalist for money is their labour-power. This labour-power the capitalist buys for a day, a week, a month, etc. And after he has bought it, he uses it up by letting the worker labour during the stipulated time. With the same amount of money with which the capitalist has bought their labour-power (for example, with two shillings) he could have bought a certain amount of sugar or of any other commodity. The two shillings with which he bought 20 pounds of sugar is the price of the 20 pounds of sugar. The two shillings with which he bought 12 hours' use of labour-power, is the price of 12 hours' labour. Labour-power, then, is a commodity, no more, no less so than is the sugar. The first is measured by the clock, the other by the scales. Their commodity, labour-power, the workers exchange for the commodity of the capitalist, for money, and, moreover, this exchange takes place at a certain ratio. So much money for so long a use of labour-power. For 12 hours' weaving, two shillings. And these two shillings, do they not represent all the other commodities which I can buy for two shillings? Therefore, actually, the worker has exchanged his commodity, labour-power, for commodities of all kinds, and, moreover, at a certain ratio. By giving him two shillings, the capitalist has given him so much meat, so much clothing, so much wood, light, etc., in exchange for his day's work. The two shillings therefore express the relation in which labour-power is exchanged for other commodities, the exchange-value of labour-power. The exchange value of a commodity estimated in money is called its price. Wages therefore are only a special name for the price of labour-power, and are usually called the price of labour; it is the special name for the price of this peculiar commodity, which has no other repository than human flesh and blood. Let us take any worker; for example, a weaver. The capitalist supplies him with the loom and yarn. The weaver applies himself to work, and the yarn is turned into cloth. The capitalist takes possession of the cloth and sells it for 20 shillings, for example. Now are the wages of the weaver a share of the cloth, of the 20 shillings, of the product of the work? By no means. Long before the cloth is sold, perhaps long before it is fully woven, the weaver has received his wages. The capitalist, then, does not pay his wages out of the money which he will obtain from the cloth, but out of money already on hand. Just as little as loom and yarn are the product of the weaver to whom they are supplied by the employer, just so little are the commodities which he receives in exchange for his commodity labour-power his product. It is possible that the employer found no purchasers at all for the cloth. It is possible that he did not get even the amount of the wages by its sale. It is possible that he sells it very profitably in proportion to the weaver's wages. But all that does not concern the weaver. With a part of his existing wealth, of his capital, the capitalist buys the labour-power of the weaver in exactly the same manner as, with another part of his wealth, he has bought the raw material the yarn and the instrument of labour the loom. After he has made these purchases, and among them belongs the labour-power necessary to the production of the cloth he produces only with raw materials and instruments of labour belonging to him. For our good weaver, too, is one of the instruments of labour, and being in this respect on a par with the loom, he has no more share in the product (the cloth), or in the price of the product, than the loom itself has. Wages, therefore, are not a share of the worker in the commodities produced by himself. Wages are that part of already existing commodities with which the capitalist buys a certain amount of productive labour-power. Consequently, labour-power is a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to the capitalist. Why does he sell it? It is in order to live. But the putting of labour-power into action i.e., the work is the active expression of the labourer's own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labour itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another. The product of his activity, therefore, is not the aim of his activity. What he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he draws up the mining shaft, not the palace that he builds. What he produces for himself is wages; and the silk, the gold, and the palace are resolved for him into a certain quantity of necessaries of life, perhaps into a cotton jacket, into copper coins, and into a basement dwelling. And the labourer who for 12 hours long, weaves, spins, bores, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries hods, and so on is this 12 hours' weaving, spinning, boring, turning, building, shovelling, stone-breaking, regarded by him as a manifestation of life, as life? Quite the contrary. Life for him begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed. The 12 hours' work, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which enable him to sit down at a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed. If the silk-worm's object in spinning were to prolong its existence as caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of a wage-worker. Labour-power was not always a commodity (merchandise). Labour was not always wage-labour, i.e., free labour. The slave did not sell his labour-power to the slave-owner, any more than the ox sells his labour to the farmer. The slave, together with his labour-power, was sold to his owner once for all. He is a commodity that can pass from the hand of one owner to that of another. He himself is a commodity, but his labour-power is not his commodity. The serf sells only a portion of his labour-power. It is not he who receives wages from the owner of the land; it is rather the owner of the land who receives a tribute from him. The serf belongs to the soil, and to the lord of the soil he brings its fruit. The free labourer, on the other hand, sells his very self, and that by fractions. He auctions off eight, 10, 12, 15 hours of his life, one day like the next, to the highest bidder, to the owner of raw materials, tools, and the means of life i.e., to the capitalist. The labourer belongs neither to an owner nor to the soil, but eight, 10, 12, 15 hours of his daily life belong to whomsoever buys them. The worker leaves the capitalist, to whom he has sold himself, as often as he chooses, and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit, as soon as he no longer gets any use, or not the required use, out of him. But the worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labour-power, cannot leave the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he gives up his own existence. He does not belong to this or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class; and it is for him to find his man i.e., to find a buyer in this capitalist class. Before entering more closely upon the relation of capital to wage-labour, we shall present briefly the most general conditions which come into consideration in the determination of wages. Wages, as we have seen, are the price of a certain commodity, labour-power. Wages, therefore, are determined by the same laws that determine the price of every other commodity. The question then is, How is the price of a commodity determined?

Wage Labour and Capital. Chapter 2

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch02.htm

By the competition between buyers and sellers, by the relation of the demand to the supply, of the call to the offer. The competition by which the price of a commodity is determined is threefold. The same commodity is offered for sale by various sellers. Whoever sells commodities of the same quality most cheaply, is sure to drive the other sellers from the field and to secure the greatest market for himself. The sellers therefore fight among themselves for the sales, for the market. Each one of them wishes to sell, and to sell as much as possible, and if possible to sell alone, to the exclusion of all other sellers. Each one sells cheaper than the other. Thus there takes place a competition among the sellers which forces down the price of the commodities offered by them. But there is also a competition among the buyers; this upon its side causes the price of the proffered commodities to rise. Finally, there is competition between the buyers and the sellers: these wish to purchase as cheaply as possible, those to sell as dearly as possible. The result of this competition between buyers and sellers will depend upon the relations between the two above-mentioned camps of competitors i.e., upon whether the competition in the army of sellers is stronger. Industry leads two great armies into the field against each other, and each of these again is engaged in a battle among its own troops in its own ranks. The army among whose troops there is less fighting, carries off the victory over the opposing host. Let us suppose that there are 100 bales of cotton in the market and at the same time purchasers for 1,000 bales of cotton. In this case, the demand is 10 times greater than the supply. Competition among the buyers, then, will be very strong; each of them tries to get hold of one bale, if possible, of the whole 100 bales. This example is no arbitrary supposition. In the history of commerce we have experienced periods of scarcity of cotton, when some capitalists united together and sought to buy up not 100 bales, but the whole cotton supply of the world. In the given case, then, one buyer seeks to drive the others from the field by offering a relatively higher price for the bales of cotton. The cotton sellers, who perceive the troops of the enemy in the most violent contention among themselves, and who therefore are fully assured of the sale of their whole 100 bales, will beware of pulling one another's hair in order to force down the price of cotton at the very moment in which their opponents race with one another to screw it up high. So, all of a sudden, peace reigns in the army of sellers. They stand opposed to the buyers like one man, fold their arms in philosophic contentment and their claims would find no limit did not the offers of even the most importunate of buyers have a very definite limit. If, then, the supply of a commodity is less than the demand for it, competition among the sellers is very slight, or there may be none at all among them. In the same proportion in which this competition decreases, the competition among the buyers increases. Result: a more or less considerable rise in the prices of commodities. It is well known that the opposite case, with the opposite result, happens more frequently. Great excess of supply over demand; desperate competition among the sellers, and a lack of buyers; forced sales of commodities at ridiculously low prices. But what is a rise, and what a fall of prices? What is a high and what a low price? A grain of sand is high when examined through a microscope, and a tower is low when compared with a mountain. And if the price is determined by the relation of supply and demand, by what is the relation of supply and demand determined? Let us turn to the first worthy citizen we meet. He will not hesitate one moment, but, like Alexander the Great, will cut this metaphysical knot with his multiplication table. He will say to us: "If the production of the commodities which I sell has cost me 100 pounds, and out of the sale of these goods I make 110 pounds within the year, you understand that's an honest, sound, reasonable profit. But if in the exchange I receive 120 or 130 pounds, that's a higher profit; and if I should get as much as 200 pounds, that would be an extraordinary, and enormous profit." What is it, then, that serves this citizen as the standard of his profit? The cost of the production of his commodities. If in exchange for these goods he receives a quantity of other goods whose production has cost less, he has lost. If he receives in exchange for his goods a quantity of other goods whose production has cost more, he has gained. And he reckons the falling or rising of the profit according to the degree at which the exchange value of his goods stands, whether above or below his zero the cost of production. We have seen how the changing relation of supply and demand causes now a rise, now a fall of prices; now high, now low prices. If the price of a commodity rises considerably owing to a failing supply or a disproportionately growing demand, then the price of some other commodity must have fallen in proportion; for of course the price of a commodity only expresses in money the proportion in which other commodities will be given in exchange for it. If, for example, the price of a yard of silk rises from two to three shillings, the price of silver has fallen in relation to the silk, and in the same way the prices of all other commodities whose prices have remained stationary have fallen in relation to the price of silk. A large quantity of them must be given in exchange in order to obtain the same amount of silk. Now, what will be the consequence of a rise in the price of a particular commodity? A mass of capital will be thrown into the prosperous branch of industry, and this immigration of capital into the provinces of the favored industry will continue until it yields no more than the customary profits, or, rather until the price of its products, owning to overproduction, sinks below the cost of production. Conversely: if the price of a commodity falls below its cost of production, then capital will be withdrawn from the production of this commodity. Except in the case of a branch of industry which has become obsolete and is therefore doomed to disappear, the production of such a commodity (that is, its supply), will, owning to this flight of capital, continue to decrease until it corresponds to the demand, and the price of the commodity rises again to the level of its cost of production; or, rather, until the supply has fallen below the demand and its price has risen above its cost of production, for the current price of a commodity is always either above or below its cost of production. We see how capital continually emigrates out of the province of one industry and immigrates into that of another. The high price produces an excessive immigration, and the low price an excessive emigration. We could show, from another point of view, how not only the supply, but also the demand, is determined by the cost of production. But this would lead us too far away from our subject. We have just seen how the fluctuation of supply and demand always bring the price of a commodity back to its cost of production. The actual price of a commodity, indeed, stands always above or below the cost of production; but the rise and fall reciprocally balance each other, so that, within a certain period of time, if the ebbs and flows of the industry are reckoned up together, the commodities will be exchanged for one another in accordance with their cost of production. Their price is thus determined by their cost of production. The determination of price by the cost of production is not to be understood in the sense of the bourgeois economists. The economists say that the average price of commodities equals the cost of production: that is the law. The anarchic movement, in which the rise is compensated for by a fall and the fall by a rise, they regard as an accident. We might just as well consider the fluctuations as the law, and the determination of the price by cost of production as an accident as is, in fact, done by certain other economists. But it is precisely these fluctuations which, viewed more closely, carry the most frightful devastation in their train, and, like an earthquake, cause bourgeois society to shake to its very foundations it is precisely these fluctuations that force the price to conform to the cost of production. In the totality of this disorderly movement is to be found its order. In the total course of this industrial anarchy, in this circular movement, competition balances, as it were, the one extravagance by the other. We thus see that the price of a commodity is indeed determined by its cost of production, but in such a manner that the periods in which the price of these commodities rises above the costs of production are balanced by the periods in which it sinks below the cost of production, and vice versa. Of course this does not hold good for a single given product of an industry, but only for that branch of industry. So also it does not hold good for an individual manufacturer, but only for the whole class of manufacturers. The determination of price by cost of production is tantamount to the determination of price by the labor-time requisite to the production of a commodity, for the cost of production consists, first of raw materials and wear and tear of tools, etc., i.e., of industrial products whose production has cost a certain number of work-days, which therefore represent a certain amount of labor-time, and, secondly, of direct labor, which is also measured by its duration.

Wage Labour and Capital. Chapter 3

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch03.htm

Now, the same general laws which regulate the price of commodities in general, naturally regulate wages, or the price of labour-power. Wages will now rise, now fall, according to the relation of supply and demand, according as competition shapes itself between the buyers of labour-power, the capitalists, and the sellers of labour-power, the workers. The fluctuations of wages correspond to the fluctuation in the price of commodities in general. But within the limits of these fluctuations the price of labour-power will be determined by the cost of production, by the labour-time necessary for production of this commodity: labour-power. What, then, is the cost of production of labour-power? It is the cost required for the maintenance of the labourer as a labourer, and for his education and training as a labourer. Therefore, the shorter the time required for training up to a particular sort of work, the smaller is the cost of production of the worker, the lower is the price of his labour-power, his wages. In those branches of industry in which hardly any period of apprenticeship is necessary and the mere bodily existence of the worker is sufficient, the cost of his production is limited almost exclusively to the commodities necessary for keeping him in working condition. The price of his work will therefore be determined by the price of the necessary means of subsistence. Here, however, there enters another consideration. The manufacturer who calculates his cost of production and, in accordance with it, the price of the product, takes into account the wear and tear of the instruments of labour. If a machine costs him, for example, 1,000 shillings, and this machine is used up in 10 years, he adds 100 shillings annually to the price of the commodities, in order to be able after 10 years to replace the worn-out machine with a new one. In the same manner, the cost of production of simple labour-power must include the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones. The wear and tear of the worker, therefore, is calculated in the same manner as the wear and tear of the machine. Thus, the cost of production of simple labour-power amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus determined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the race. Individual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves; but the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum. Now that we have come to an understanding in regard to the most general laws which govern wages, as well as the price of every other commodity, we can examine our subject more particularly.

Wage Labour and Capital. Chapter 4

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch04.htm

Capital consists of raw materials, instruments of labour, and means of subsistence of all kinds, which are employed in producing new raw materials, new instruments, and new means of subsistence. All these components of capital are created by labour, products of labour, accumulated labour. Accumulated labour that serves as a means to new production is capital. So say the economists. What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is worthy of the other. A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar. In the process of production, human beings work not only upon nature, but also upon one another. They produce only by working together in a specified manner and reciprocally exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations to one another, and only within these social connections and relations does their influence upon nature operate i.e., does production take place. These social relations between the producers, and the conditions under which they exchange their activities and share in the total act of production, will naturally vary according to the character of the means of production. With the discover of a new instrument of warfare, the firearm, the whole internal organization of the army was necessarily altered, the relations within which individuals compose an army and can work as an army were transformed, and the relation of different armies to another was likewise changed. We thus see that the social relations within which individuals produce, the social relations of production, are altered, transformed, with the change and development of the material means of production, of the forces of production. The relations of production in their totality constitute what is called the social relations, society, and, moreover, a society at a definite stage of historical development, a society with peculiar, distinctive characteristics. Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois (or capitalist) society, are such totalities of relations of production, each of which denotes a particular stage of development in the history of mankind. Capital also is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois relation of production, a relation of production of bourgeois society. The means of subsistence, the instruments of labour, the raw materials, of which capital consists have they not been produced and accumulated under given social conditions, within definite special relations? Are they not employed for new production, under given special conditions, within definite social relations? And does not just the definite social character stamp the products which serve for new production as capital? Capital consists not only of means of subsistence, instruments of labour, and raw materials, not only as material products; it consists just as much of exchange values. All products of which it consists are commodities. Capital, consequently, is 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 the place of wool, rice in the place of wheat, steamships in the place of railroads, 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 railroads, in which it was previously embodied. The bodily form of capital may transform itself continually, while capital does not suffer the least alteration. But though every capital is a sum of commodities i.e., of exchange values it does not follow that every sum of commodities, of exchange values, is capital. Every sum of exchange values is an exchange value. Each particular exchange value is a sum of exchange values. For example: a house worth 1,000 pounds is an exchange value of 1,000 pounds: a piece of paper worth one penny is a sum of exchange values of 100 1/100ths of a penny. Products which are exchangeable for others are commodities. The definite proportion in which they are exchangeable forms their exchange value, or, expressed in money, their price. The quantity of these products can have no effect on their character as commodities, as representing an exchange value, as having a certain price. Whether a tree be large or small, it remains a tree. Whether we exchange iron in pennyweights or in hundredweights, for other products, does this alter its character: its being a commodity, or exchange value? According to the quantity, it is a commodity of greater or of lesser value, of higher or of lower price. How then does a sum of commodities, of exchange values, become capital? Thereby, that as an independent social power i.e., as the power of a part of society it preserves itself and multiplies by exchange with direct, living labour-power. The existence of a class which possesses nothing but the ability to work is a necessary presupposition of capital. It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized labour over immediate living labour that stamps the accumulated labour with the character of capital. Capital does not consist in the fact that accumulated labour serves living labour as a means for new production. It consists in the fact that living labour serves accumulated labour as the means of preserving and multiplying its exchange value.

Wage Labour and Capital. Chapter 5

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch05.htm

What is it that takes place in the exchange between the capitalist and the wage-labourer? The labourer receives means of subsistence in exchange for his labour-power; the capitalist receives, in exchange for his means of subsistence, labour, the productive activity of the labourer, the creative force by which the worker not only replaces what he consumes, but also gives to the accumulated labour a greater value than it previously possessed. The labourer gets from the capitalist a portion of the existing means of subsistence. For what purpose do these means of subsistence serve him? For immediate consumption. But as soon as I consume means of subsistence, they are irrevocably lost to me, unless I employ the time during which these means sustain my life in producing new means of subsistence, in creating by my labour new values in place of the values lost in consumption. But it is just this noble reproductive power that the labourer surrenders to the capitalist in exchange for means of subsistence received. Consequently, he has lost it for himself. Let us take an example. For one shilling a labourer works all day long in the fields of a farmer, to whom he thus secures a return of two shillings. The farmer not only receives the replaced value which he has given to the day labourer, he has doubled it. Therefore, he has consumed the one shilling that he gave to the day labourer in a fruitful, productive manner. For the one shilling he has bought the labour-power of the day-labourer, which creates products of the soil of twice the value, and out of one shilling makes two. The day-labourer, on the contrary, receives in the place of his productive force, whose results he has just surrendered to the farmer, one shilling, which he exchanges for means of subsistence, which he consumes more or less quickly. The one shilling has therefore been consumed in a double manner reproductively for the capitalist, for it has been exchanged for labour-power, which brought forth two shillings; unproductively for the worker, for it has been exchanged for means of subsistence which are lost for ever, and whose value he can obtain again only by repeating the same exchange with the farmer. Capital therefore presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. They condition each other; each brings the other into existence. Does a worker in a cotton factory produce only cotton? No. He produces capital. He produces values which serve anew to command his work and to create by means of it new values. Capital can multiply itself only by exchanging itself for labour-power, by calling wage-labour into life. The labour-power of the wage-labourer can exchange itself for capital only by increasing capital, by strengthening that very power whose slave it is. Increase of capital, therefore, is increase of the proletariat, i.e., of the working class. And so, the bourgeoisie and its economists maintain that the interest of the capitalist and of the labourer is the same. And in fact, so they are! The worker perishes if capital does not keep him busy. Capital perishes if it does not exploit labour-power, which, in order to exploit, it must buy. The more quickly the capital destined for production the productive capital increases, the more prosperous industry is, the more the bourgeoisie enriches itself, the better business gets, so many more workers does the capitalist need, so much the dearer does the worker sell himself. The fastest possible growth of productive capital is, therefore, the indispensable condition for a tolerable life to the labourer. But what is growth of productive capital? Growth of the power of accumulated labour over living labour; growth of the rule of the bourgeoisie over the working class. When wage-labour produces the alien wealth dominating it, the power hostile to it, capital, there flow back to it its means of employment i.e., its means of subsistence, under the condition that it again become a part of capital, that is become again the lever whereby capital is to be forced into an accelerated expansive movement. To say that the interests of capital and the interests of the workers are identical, signifies only this: that capital and wage-labour are two sides of one and the same relation. The one conditions the other in the same way that the usurer and the borrower condition each other. As long as the wage-labourer remains a wage-labourer, his lot is dependent upon capital. That is what the boasted community of interests between worker and capitalists amounts to. If capital grows, the mass of wage-labour grows, the number of wage-workers increases; in a word, the sway of capital extends over a greater mass of individuals. Let us suppose the most favorable case: if productive capital grows, the demand for labour grows. It therefore increases the price of labour-power, wages. A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls. An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature. But wages are not at all determined merely by the sum of commodities for which they may be exchanged. Other factors enter into the problem. What the workers directly receive for their labour-power is a certain sum of money. Are wages determined merely by this money price? In the 16th century, the gold and silver circulation in Europe increased in consequence of the discovery of richer and more easily worked mines in America. The value of gold and silver, therefore, fell in relation to other commodities. The workers received the same amount of coined silver for their labour-power as before. The money price of their work remained the same, and yet their wages had fallen, for in exchange for the same amount of silver they obtained a smaller amount of other commodities. This was one of the circumstances which furthered the growth of capital, the rise of the bourgeoisie, in the 18th century. Let us take another case. In the winter of 1847, in consequence of bad harvest, the most indispensable means of subsistence grains, meat, butter, cheese, etc. rose greatly in price. Let us suppose that the workers still received the same sum of money for their labour-power as before. Did not their wages fall? To be sure. For the same money they received in exchange less bread, meat, etc. Their wages fell, not because the value of silver was less, but because the value of the means of subsistence had increased. Finally, let us suppose that the money price of labour-power remained the same, while all agricultural and manufactured commodities had fallen in price because of the employment of new machines, of favorable seasons, etc. For the same money the workers could now buy more commodities of all kinds. Their wages have therefore risen, just because their money value has not changed. The money price of labour-power, the nominal wages, do not therefore coincide with the actual or real wages i.e., with the amount of commodities which are actually given in exchange for the wages. If then we speak of a rise or fall of wages, we have to keep in mind not only the money price of labour-power, the nominal wages, but also the real wages. But neither the nominal wages i.e., the amount of money for which the labourer sells himself to the capitalist nor the real wages i.e., the amount of commodities which he can buy for this money exhausts the relations which are comprehended in the term wages. Wages are determined above all by their relations to the gain, the profit, of the capitalist. In other words, wages are a proportionate, relative quantity. Real wages express the price of labour-power in relation to the price of commodities; relative wages, on the other hand, express the share of immediate labour in the value newly created by it, in relation to the share of it which falls to accumulated labour, to capital.

Wage Labour and Capital. Chapter 6

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch06.htm

We have said: "Wages are not a share of the worker in the commodities produced by him. Wages are that part of already existing commodities with which the capitalist buys a certain amount of productive labor-power." But the capitalist must replace these wages out of the price for which he sells the product made by the worker; he must so replace it that, as a rule, there remains to him a surplus above the cost of production expended by him, that is, he must get a profit. The selling price of the commodities produced by the worker is divided, from the point of view of the capitalist, into three parts: Real wages may remain the same, they may even rise, nevertheless the relative wages may fall. Let us suppose, for instance, that all means of subsistence have fallen 2/3rds in price, while the day's wages have fallen but 1/3rd for example, from three to two shillings. Although the worker can now get a greater amount of commodities with these two shillings than he formerly did with three shillings, yet his wages have decreased in proportion to the gain of the capitalist. The profit of the capitalist the manufacturer's for instance has increased one shilling, which means that for a smaller amount of exchange values, which he pays to the worker, the latter must produce a greater amount of exchange values than before. The share of capitals in proportion to the share of labour has risen. The distribution of social wealth between capital and labour has become still more unequal. The capitalist commands a greater amount of labour with the same capital. The power of the capitalist class over the working class has grown, the social position of the worker has become worse, has been forced down still another degree below that of the capitalist. What, then, is the general law that determines the rise and fall of wages and profit in their reciprocal relation? They stand in inverse proportion to each other. The share of (profit) increases in the same proportion in which the share of labour (wages) falls, and vice versa. Profit rises in the same degree in which wages fall; it falls in the same degree in which wages rise. It might perhaps be argued that the capitalist class can gain by an advantageous exchange of his products with other capitalists, by a rise in the demand for his commodities, whether in consequence of the opening up of new markets, or in consequence of temporarily increased demands in the old market, and so on; that the profit of the capitalist, therefore, may be multiplied by taking advantage of other capitalists, independently of the rise and fall of wages, of the exchange value of labour-power; or that the profit of the capitalist may also rise through improvements in the instruments of labour, new applications of the forces of nature, and so on. But in the first place it must be admitted that the result remains the same, although brought about in an opposite manner. Profit, indeed, has not risen because wages have fallen, but wages have fallen because profit has risen. With the same amount of another man's labour the capitalist has bought a larger amount of exchange values without having paid more for the labour on that account i.e., the work is paid for less in proportion to the net gain which it yields to the capitalist. In the second place, it must be borne in mind that, despite the fluctuations in the prices of commodities, the average price of every commodity, the proportion in which it exchanges for other commodities, is determined by its cost of production. The acts of overreaching and taking advantage of one another within the capitalist ranks necessarily equalize themselves. The improvements of machinery, the new applications of the forces of nature in the service of production, make it possible to produce in a given period of time, with the same amount of labour and capital, a larger amount of products, but in no wise a larger amount of exchange values. If by the use of the spinning-machine I can furnish twice as much yarn in an hour as before its invention for instance, 100 pounds instead of 50 pounds in the long run I receive back, in exchange for this 100 pounds no more commodities than I did before for 50; because the cost of production has fallen by 1/2, or because I can furnish double the product at the same cost. Finally, in whatsoever proportion the capitalist class, whether of one country or of the entire world-market, distribute the net revenue of production among themselves, the total amount of this net revenue always consists exclusively of the amount by which accumulated labour has been increased from the proceeds of direct labour. This whole amount, therefore, grows in the same proportion in which labour augments capital i.e., in the same proportion in which profit rises as compared with wages.

Wage Labour and Capital. Chapter 7

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch07.htm

We thus see that, even if we keep ourselves within the relation of capital and wage-labour, the interests of capitals and the interests of wage-labour are diametrically opposed to each other. A rapid growth of capital is synonymous with a rapid growth of profits. Profits can grow rapidly only when the price of labour the relative wages decrease just as rapidly. Relative wages may fall, although real wages rise simultaneously with nominal wages, with the money value of labour, provided only that the real wage does not rise in the same proportion as the profit. If, for instance, in good business years wages rise 5 per cent, while profits rise 30 per cent, the proportional, the relative wage has not increased, but decreased. If, therefore, the income of the worker increased with the rapid growth of capital, there is at the same time a widening of the social chasm that divides the worker from the capitalist, and increase in the power of capital over labour, a greater dependence of labour upon capital. To say that "the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital", means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater will be the number of workers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased. We have thus seen that even the most favorable situation for the working class, namely, the most rapid growth of capital, however much it may improve the material life of the worker, does not abolish the antagonism between his interests and the interests of the capitalist. Profit and wages remain as before, in inverse proportion. If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social chasm that separates him from the capitalist has widened. Finally, to say that "the most favorable condition for wage-labour is the fastest possible growth of productive capital", is the same as to say: the quicker the working class multiplies and augments the power inimical to it the wealth of another which lords over that class the more favorable will be the conditions under which it will be permitted to toil anew at the multiplication of bourgeois wealth, at the enlargement of the power of capital, content thus to forge for itself the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train. Growth of productive capital and rise of wages, are they really so indissolubly united as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not believe their mere words. We dare not believe them even when they claim that the fatter capital is the more will its slave be pampered. The bourgeoisie is too much enlightened, it keeps its accounts much too carefully, to share the prejudices of the feudal lord, who makes an ostentatious display of the magnificence of his retinue. The conditions of existence of the bourgeoisie compel it to attend carefully to its bookkeeping. We must therefore examine more closely into the following question: If as a whole, the productive capital of bourgeois society grows, there takes place a more many-sided accumulation of labour. The individual capitals increase in number and in magnitude. The multiplications of individual capitals increases the competition among capitalists. The increasing magnitude of increasing capitals provides the means of leading more powerful armies of workers with more gigantic instruments of war upon the industrial battlefield. The one capitalist can drive the other from the field and carry off his capital only by selling more cheaply. In order to sell more cheaply without ruining himself, he must produce more cheaply i.e., increase the productive forces of labour as much as possible. But the productive forces of labour is increased above all by a greater division of labour and by a more general introduction and constant improvement of machinery. The larger the army of workers among whom the labour is subdivided, the more gigantic the scale upon which machinery is introduced, the more in proportion does the cost of production decrease, the more fruitful is the labour. And so there arises among the capitalists a universal rivalry for the increase of the division of labour and of machinery and for their exploitation upon the greatest possible scale. If, now, by a greater division of labour, by the application and improvement of new machines, by a more advantageous exploitation of the forces of nature on a larger scale, a capitalist has found the means of producing with the same amount of labour (whether it be direct or accumulated labour) a larger amount of products of commodities than his competitors if, for instance, he can produce a whole yard of linen in the same labour-time in which his competitors weave half-a-yard how will this capitalist act? He could keep on selling half-a-yard of linen at old market price; but this would not have the effect of driving his opponents from the field and enlarging his own market. But his need of a market has increased in the same measure in which his productive power has extended. The more powerful and costly means of production that he has called into existence enable him, it is true, to sell his wares more cheaply, but they compel him at the same time to sell more wares, to get control of a very much greater market for his commodities; consequently, this capitalist will sell his half-yard of linen more cheaply than his competitors. But the capitalist will not sell the whole yard so cheaply as his competitors sell the half-yard, although the production of the whole yard costs him no more than does that of the half-yard to the others. Otherwise, he would make no extra profit, and would get back in exchange only the cost of production. He might obtain a greater income from having set in motion a larger capital, but not from having made a greater profit on his capital than the others. Moreover, he attains the object he is aiming at if he prices his goods only a small percentage lower than his competitors. He drives them off the field, he wrests from them at least part of their market, by underselling them. And finally, let us remember that the current price always stands either above or below the cost of production, according as the sale of a commodity takes place in the favorable or unfavorable period of the industry. According as the market price of the yard of linen stands above or below its former cost of production, will the percentage vary at which the capitalist who has made use of the new and more faithful means of production sell above his real cost of production. But the privilege of our capitalist is not of long duration. Other competing capitalists introduce the same machines, the same division of labour, and introduce them upon the same or even upon a greater scale. And finally this introduction becomes so universal that the price of the linen is lowered not only below its old, but even below its new cost of production. The capitalists therefore find themselves, in their mutual relations, in the same situation in which they were before the introduction of the new means of production; and if they are by these means enabled to offer double the product at the old price, they are now forced to furnish double the product for less than the old price. Having arrived at the new point, the new cost of production, the battle for supremacy in the market has to be fought out anew. Given more division of labour and more machinery, and there results a greater scale upon which division of labour and machinery are exploited. And competition again brings the same reaction against this result.

Wage Labour and Capital. Chapter 8

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch08.htm

We thus see how the method of production and the means of production are constantly enlarged, revolutionized, how division of labour necessarily draws after it greater division of labour, the employment of machinery greater employment of machinery, work upon a large scale work upon a still greater scale. This is the law that continually throws capitalist production out of its old ruts and compels capital to strain ever more the productive forces of labour for the very reason that it has already strained them the law that grants it no respite, and constantly shouts in its ear: March! march! This is no other law than that which, within the periodical fluctuations of commerce, necessarily adjusts the price of a commodity to its cost of production. No matter how powerful the means of production which a capitalist may bring into the field, competition will make their adoption general; and from the moment that they have been generally adopted, the sole result of the greater productiveness of his capital will be that he must furnish at the same price, 10, 20, 100 times as much as before. But since he must find a market for, perhaps, 1,000 times as much, in order to outweigh the lower selling price by the greater quantity of the sale; since now a more extensive sale is necessary not only to gain a greater profit, but also in order to replace the cost of production (the instrument of production itself grows always more costly, as we have seen), and since this more extensive sale has become a question of life and death not only for him, but also for his rivals, the old struggle must begin again, and it is all the more violent the more powerful the means of production already invented are. The division of labour and the application of machinery will therefore take a fresh start, and upon an even greater scale. Whatever be the power of the means of production which are employed, competition seeks to rob capital of the golden fruits of this power by reducing the price of commodities to the cost of production; in the same measure in which production is cheapened - i.e., in the same measure in which more can be produced with the same amount of labour it compels by a law which is irresistible a still greater cheapening of production, the sale of ever greater masses of product for smaller prices. Thus the capitalist will have gained nothing more by his efforts than the obligation to furnish a greater product in the same labour-time; in a word, more difficult conditions for the profitable employment of his capital. While competition, therefore, constantly pursues him with its law of the cost of production and turns against himself every weapon that he forges against his rivals, the capitalist continually seeks to get the best of competition by restlessly introducing further subdivision of labour and new machines, which, though more expensive, enable him to produce more cheaply, instead of waiting until the new machines shall have been rendered obsolete by competition. If we now conceive this feverish agitation as it operates in the market of the whole world, we shall be in a position to comprehend how the growth, accumulation, and concentration of capital bring in their train an ever more detailed subdivision of labour, an ever greater improvement of old machines, and a constant application of new machine a process which goes on uninterruptedly, with feverish haste, and upon an ever more gigantic scale. But what effect do these conditions, which are inseparable from the growth of productive capital, have upon the determination of wages? The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease. The labourer seeks to maintain the total of his wages for a given time by performing more labour, either by working a great number of hours, or by accomplishing more in the same number of hours. Thus, urged on by want, he himself multiplies the disastrous effects of division of labour. The result is: the more he works, the less wages he receives. And for this simple reason: the more he works, the more he competes against his fellow workmen, the more he compels them to compete against him, and to offer themselves on the same wretched conditions as he does; so that, in the last analysis, he competes against himself as a member of the working class. Machinery produces the same effects, but upon a much larger scale. It supplants skilled labourers by unskilled, men by women, adults by children; where newly introduced, it throws workers upon the streets in great masses; and as it becomes more highly developed and more productive it discards them in additional though smaller numbers. We have hastily sketched in broad outlines the industrial war of capitalists among themselves. This war has the peculiarity that the battles in it are won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of workers. The generals (the capitalists) vie with one another as to who can discharge the greatest number of industrial soldiers. The economists tell us, to be sure, that those labourers who have been rendered superfluous by machinery find new venues of employment. They dare not assert directly that the same labourers that have been discharged find situations in new branches of labour. Facts cry out too loudly against this lie. Strictly speaking, they only maintain that new means of employment will be found for other sections of the working class; for example, for that portion of the young generation of labourers who were about to enter upon that branch of industry which had just been abolished. Of course, this is a great satisfaction to the disabled labourers. There will be no lack of fresh exploitable blood and muscle for the Messrs. Capitalists the dead may bury their dead. This consolation seems to be intended more for the comfort of the capitalists themselves than their labourers. If the whole class of the wage-labourer were to be annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for capital, which, without wage-labour, ceases to be capital! But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly? An exception to the law has been adduced, namely, the workers who are employed in the manufacture of machinery itself. As soon as there is in industry a greater demand for and a greater consumption of machinery, it is said that the number of machines must necessarily increase; consequently, also, the manufacture of machines; consequently, also, the employment of workers in machine manufacture; and the workers employed in this branch of industry are skilled, even educated, workers. Since the year 1840 this assertion, which even before that date was only half-true, has lost all semblance of truth; for the most diverse machines are now applied to the manufacture of the machines themselves on quite as extensive a scale as in the manufacture of cotton yarn, and the labourers employed in machine factories can but play the role of very stupid machines alongside of the highly ingenious machines. But in place of the man who has been dismissed by the machine, the factory may employ, perhaps, three children and one woman! And must not the wages of the man have previously sufficed for the three children and one woman? Must not the minimum wages have sufficed for the preservation and propagation of the race? What, then, do these beloved bourgeois phrases prove? Nothing more than that now four times as many workers' lives are used up as there were previously, in order to obtain the livelihood of one working family. To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together. In addition, the working class is also recruited from the higher strata of society; a mass of small business men and of people living upon the interest of their capitals is precipitated into the ranks of the working class, and they will have nothing else to do than to stretch out their arms alongside of the arms of the workers. Thus the forest of outstretched arms, begging for work, grows ever thicker, while the arms themselves grow every leaner. It is evident that the small manufacturer cannot survive in a struggle in which the first condition of success is production upon an ever greater scale. It is evident that the small manufacturers and thereby increasing the number of candidates for the proletariat all this requires no further elucidation. Finally, in the same measure in which the capitalists are compelled, by the movement described above, to exploit the already existing gigantic means of production on an ever-increasing scale, and for this purpose to set in motion all the mainsprings of credit, in the same measure do they increase the industrial earthquakes, in the midst of which the commercial world can preserve itself only by sacrificing a portion of its wealth, its products, and even its forces of production, to the gods of the lower world in short, the crises increase. They become more frequent and more violent, if for no other reason, than for this alone, that in the same measure in which the mass of products grows, and therefore the needs for extensive markets, in the same measure does the world market shrink ever more, and ever fewer markets remain to be exploited, since every previous crisis has subjected to the commerce of the world a hitherto unconquered or but superficially exploited market. But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises. We thus see that if capital grows rapidly, competition among the workers grows with even greater rapidity i.e., the means of employment and subsistence for the working class decrease in proportion even more rapidly; but, this notwithstanding, the rapid growth of capital is the most favorable condition for wage-labour.

Wage Labour and Capital. Chapter 9

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch09.htm

This pamphlet first appeared in the form of a series of leading articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, beginning on April 4th, 1849. The text is made up of from lectures delivered by Marx before the German Workingmen s Club of Brussels in 1847. The series was never completed. The promise to be continued, at the end of the editorial in Number 269 of the newspaper, remained unfulfilled in consequence of the precipitous events of that time: the invasion of Hungary by the Russians [Tsarist troops invaded Hungary in 1849 to keep the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty in power], and the uprisings in Dresden, Iserlohn, Elberfeld, the Palatinate, and in Baden [Spontaneous uprisings in Germany in May-July 1849, supporting the Imperial Constitution which were crushed in mid-July], which led to the suppression of the paper on May 19th, 1849. And among the papers left by Marx no manuscript of any continuation of these articles has been found. Wage-labour and Capital has appeared as an independent publication in several editions, the last of which was issued by the Swiss Co-operative Printing Association, in Hottingen-Zurich, in 1884. Hitherto, the several editions have contained the exact wording of the original articles. But since at least 10,000 copies of the present edition are to be circulated as a propaganda tract, the question necessarily forced itself upon me, would Marx himself, under these circumstance, have approved of an unaltered literal reproduction of the original? Marx, in the 40s, had not yet completed his criticism of political economy. This was not done until toward the end of the fifties. Consequently, such of his writings as were published before the first installment of his Critique of Political Economy was finished, deviate in some points from those written after 1859, and contain expressions and whole sentences which, viewed from the standpoint of his later writings, appear inexact, and even incorrect. Now, it goes without saying that in ordinary editions, intended for the public in general, this earlier standpoint, as a part of the intellectual development of the author, has its place; that the author as well as the public, has an indisputable right to an unaltered reprint of these older writings. In such a case, I would not have dreamed of changing a single word in it. But it is otherwise when the edition is destined almost exclusively for the purpose of propaganda. In such a case, Marx himself would unquestionably have brought the old work, dating from 1849, into harmony with his new point of view, and I feel sure that I am acting in his spirit when I insert in this edition the few changes and additions which are necessary in order to attain this object in all essential point. Therefore, I say to the reader at once: this pamphlet is not as Marx wrote it in 1849, but approximately as Marx would have written it in 1891. Moreover, so many copies of the original text are in circulation, that these will suffice until I can publish it again unaltered in a complete edition of Marx s works, to appear at some future time. My alterations centre about one point. According to the original reading, the worker sells his labour for wages, which he receives from the capitalist; according to the present text, he sells his labour-power. And for this change, I must render an explanation: to the workers, in order that they may understand that we are not quibbling or word-juggling, but are dealing here with one of the most important points in the whole range of political economy; to the bourgeois, in order that they may convince themselves how greatly the uneducated workers, who can be easily made to grasp the most difficult economic analyses, excel our supercilious cultured" folk, for whom such ticklish problems remain insoluble their whole life long. Classical political economy borrowed from the industrial practice the current notion of the manufacturer, that he buys and pays for the labour of his employees. This conception had been quite serviceable for the business purposes of the manufacturer, his bookkeeping and price calculation. But naively carried over into political economy, it there produced truly wonderful errors and confusions. Political economy finds it an established fact that the prices of all commodities, among them the price of the commodity which it calls labour, continually change; that they rise and fall in consequence of the most diverse circumstances, which often have no connection whatsoever with the production of the commodities themselves, so that prices appear to be determined, as a rule, by pure chance. As soon, therefore, as political economy stepped forth as a science, it was one of its first tasks to search for the law that hid itself behind this chance, which apparently determined the prices of commodities, and which in reality controlled this very chance. Among the prices of commodities, fluctuating and oscillating, now upward, now downward, the fixed central point was searched for around which these fluctuations and oscillations were taking place. In short, starting from the price of commodities, political economy sought for the value of commodities as the regulating law, by means of which all price fluctuations could be explained, and to which they could all be reduced in the last resort. And so, classical political economy found that the value of a commodity was determined by the labour incorporated in it and requisite to its production. With this explanation, it was satisfied. And we, too, may, for the present, stop at this point. But, to avoid misconceptions, I will remind the reader that today this explanation has become wholly inadequate. Marx was the first to investigate thoroughly into the value-forming quality of labour and to discover that not all labour which is apparently, or even really, necessary to the production of a commodity, imparts under all circumstances to this commodity a magnitude of value corresponding to the quantity of labour used up. If, therefore, we say today in short, with economists like Ricardo, that the value of a commodity is determined by the labour necessary to its production, we always imply the reservations and restrictions made by Marx. Thus much for our present purpose; further information can be found in Marx s Critique of Political Economy, which appeared in 1859, and in the first volume of Capital. But, as soon as the economists applied this determination of value by labour to the commodity labour", they fell from one contradiction into another. How is the value of labour determined? By the necessary labour embodied in it. But how much labour is embodied in the labour of a labourer of a day a week, a month, a year. If labour is the measure of all values, we can express the value of labour only in labour. But we know absolutely nothing about the value of an hour s labour, if all that we know about it is that it is equal to one hour s labour. So, thereby, we have not advanced one hair s breadth nearer our goal; we are constantly turning about in a circle. Classical economics, therefore, essayed another turn. It said: the value of a commodity is equal to its cost of production. But, what is the cost of production of labour"? In order to answer this question, the economists are forced to strain logic just a little. Instead of investigating the cost of production of labour itself, which, unfortunately, cannot be ascertained, they now investigate the cost of production of the labourer. And this latter can be ascertained. It changes according to time and circumstances, but for a given condition of society, in a given locality, and in a given branch of production, it, too, is given, at least within quite narrow limits. We live today under the regime of capitalist production, under which a large and steadily growing class of the population can live only on the condition that it works for the owners of the means of production tools, machines, raw materials, and means of subsistence in return for wages. On the basis of this mode of production, the labourer s cost of production consists of the sum of the means of subsistence (or their price in money) which on the average are requisite to enable him to work, to maintain in him this capacity for work, and to replace him at his departure, by reason of age, sickness, or death, with another labourer that is to say, to propagate the working class in required numbers. Let us assume that the money price of these means of subsistence averages 3 shillings a day. Our labourer gets, therefore, a daily wage of 3 shillings from his employer. For this, the capitalist lets him work, say, 12 hours a day. Our capitalist, moreover, calculates somewhat in the following fashion: Let us assume that our labourer (a machinist) has to make a part of a machine which he finishes in one day. The raw material (iron and brass in the necessary prepared form) costs 20 shillings. The consumption of coal by the steam-engine, the wear-and-tear of this engine itself, of the turning-lathe, and of the other tools with which our labourer works, represent, for one day and one labourer, a value of 1 shilling. The wages for one day are, according to our assumption, 3 shillings. This makes a total of 24 shillings for our piece of a machine. But, the capitalist calculates that, on an average, he will receive for it a price of 27 shillings from his customers, or 3 shillings over and above his outlay. Whence do they 3 shillings pocketed by the capitalist come? According to the assertion of classical political economy, commodities are in the long run sold at their values, that is, they are sold at prices which correspond to the necessary quantities of labour contained in them. The average price of our part of a machine 27 shillings would therefore equal its value, i.e., equal the amount of labour embodied in it. But, of these 27 shillings, 21 shillings were values were values already existing before the machinist began to work; 20 shillings were contained in the raw material, 1 shilling in the fuel consumed during the work and in the machines and tools used in the process and reduced in their efficiency to the value of this amount. There remains 6 shillings, which have been added to the value of the raw material. But, according to the supposition of our economists, themselves, these 6 shillings can arise only from the labour added to the raw material by the labourer. His 12 hours labour has created, according to this, a new value of 6 shillings. Therefore, the value of his 12 hours labour would be equivalent to 6 shillings. So we have at last discovered what the value of labour is. Hold on there! cries our machinist. Six shillings? But I have received only 3 shillings! My capitalist swears high and day that the value of my 12 hours labour is no more than 3 shillings, and if I were to demand 6, he d laugh at me. What kind of a story is that?" If before this we got with our value of labour into a vicious circle, we now surely have driven straight into an insoluble contradiction. We searched for the value of labour, and we found more than we can use. For the labourer, the value of the 12 hours labour is 3 shillings; for the capitalist, it is 6 shillings, of which he pays the workingman 3 shillings as wages, and pockets the remaining 3 shilling himself. According to this, labour has not one but two values, and, moreover, two very different values! As soon as we reduce the values, now expressed in money, to labour-time, the contradiction becomes even more absurd. By the 12 hours labour, a new value of 6 shillings is created. Therefore, in 6 hours, the new value created equals 3 shillings the amount which the labourer receives for 12 hours labour. For 12 hours labour, the workingman receives, as an equivalent, the product of 6 hours labour. We are, thus, forced to one of two conclusions: either labour has two values, one of which is twice as large as the other, or 12 equals 6! In both cases, we get pure absurdities. Turn and twist as we may, we will not get out of this contradiction as long as we speak of the buying and selling of labour and of the value of labour. And just so it happened to the political economists. The last offshoot of classical political economy the Ricardian school was largely wrecked on the insolubility of this contradiction. Classical political economy had run itself into a blind alley. The man who discovered the way out of this blind alley was Karl Marx. What the economists had considered as the cost of production of labour was really the cost of production, not of labour, but of the living labourer himself. And what this labourer sold to the capitalist was not his labour. At the most, he could sell his future labour i.e., assume the obligation of executing a certain piece of work in a certain time. But, in this way, he does not sell labour (which would first have to be performed), but not for a stipulated payment he places his labour-power at the disposal of the capitalist for a certain time (in case of time-wages), or for the performance of a certain task (in case of piece-wages). He hires out or sells his labour-power. But this labour-power has grown up with his person and is inseparable from it. Its cost of production, therefore, coincides with his own cost of production; what the economist called the cost of production of labour is really the cost of production of the labourer, and therewith of his labour-power. And, thus, we can also go back from the cost of production of labour-power to the value of labour-power, and determine the quantity of social labour that is required for the production of a labour-power of a given quantity, as Marx has done in the chapter on The Buying and Selling of labour Power. [Capital, Vol.I] Now what takes place after the worker has sold his labour-power, i.e., after he has placed his labour-power at the disposal of the capitalist for stipulated-wages whether time-wages or piece-wages? The capitalist takes the labourer into his workshop or factory, where all the articles required for the work can be found raw materials, auxiliary materials (coal, dyestuffs, etc.), tools, and machines. Here, the worker begins to work. His daily wages are, as above, 3 shillings, and it makes no difference whether he earns them as day-wages or piece-wages. We again assume that in 12 hours the worker adds by his labour a new value of 6 shillings to the value of the raw materials consumed, which new value the capitalist realizes by the sale of the finished piece of work. Out of this new value, he pays the worker his 3 shillings, and the remaining 3 shillings he keeps for himself. If, now, the labourer creates in 12 hours a value of 6 shillings, in 6 hours he creates a value of 3 shillings. Consequently, after working 6 hours for the capitalist, the labourer has returned to him the equivalent of the 3 shillings received as wages. After 6 hours work, both are quits, neither one owing a penny to the other. Hold on there! now cries out the capitalist. I have hired the labourer for a whole day, for 12 hours. But 6 hours are only half-a-day. So work along lively there until the other 6 hours are at an end only then will we be even. And, in fact, the labourer has to submit to the conditions of the contract upon which he entered of his own free will", and according to which he bound himself to work 12 whole hours for a product of labour which cost only 6 hours labour. Similarly with piece-wages. Let us suppose that in 12 hours our worker makes 12 commodities. Each of these costs a shilling in raw materials and wear-and-tear, and is sold for 2.5 shillings. On our former assumption, the capitalist gives the labourer .25 of a shilling for each piece, which makes a total of 3 shillings for 12 pieces. To earn this, the worker requires 12 hours. The capitalist receives 30 shillings for the 12 pieces; deducting 24 shillings for raw materials and wear-and-tear, there remains 6 shillings, of which he pays 3 shillings in wages and pockets the remaining 3. Just as before! Here, also, the worker labours 6 hours for himself i.e., to replace his wages (half-an-hour in each of the 12 hours), and 6 hours for the capitalist. The rock upon which the best economists were stranded, as long as they started out from the value of labour, vanishes as soon as we make our starting-point the value of labour-power. Labour-power is, in our present-day capitalist society, a commodity like every other commodity, but yet a very peculiar commodity. It has, namely, the peculiarity of being a value-creating force, the source of value, and, moreover, when properly treated, the source of more value than it possesses itself. In the present state of production, human labour-power not only produces in a day a greater value than it itself possesses and costs; but with each new scientific discovery, with each new technical invention, there also rises the surplus of its daily production over its daily cost, while as a consequence there diminishes that part of the working-day in which the labourer produces the equivalent of his day s wages, and, on the other hand, lengthens that part of the working-day in which he must present labour gratis to the capitalist. And this is the economic constitution of our entire modern society: the working class alone produces all values. For value is only another expression for labour, that expression, namely, by which is designated, in our capitalist society of today, the amount of socially necessary labour embodied in a particular commodity. But, these values produced by the workers do not belong to the workers. They belong to the owners of the raw materials, machines, tools, and money, which enable them to buy the labour-power of the working class. Hence, the working class gets back only a part of the entire mass of products produced by it. And, as we have just seen, the other portion, which the capitalist class retains, and which it has to share, at most, only with the landlord class, is increasing with every new discovery and invention, while the share which falls to the working class (per capita) rises but little and very slowly, or not at all, and under certain conditions it may even fall. But, these discoveries and inventions which supplant one another with ever-increasing speed, this productiveness of human labour which increases from day to day to unheard-of proportions, at last gives rise to a conflict, in which present capitalistic economy must go to ruin. On the one hand, immeasurable wealth and a superfluidity of products with which the buyers cannot cope. On the other hand, the great mass of society proletarianized, transformed into wage-labourers, and thereby disabled from appropriating to themselves that superfluidity of products. The splitting up of society into a small class, immoderately rich, and a large class of wage-labourers devoid of all property, brings it about that this society smothers in its own superfluidity, while the great majority of its members are scarcely, or not at all, protected from extreme want. This condition becomes every day more absurd and more unnecessary. It must be gotten rid of; it can be gotten rid of. A new social order is possible, in which the class differences of today will have disappeared, and in which perhaps after a short transition period, which, though somewhat deficient in other respects, will in any case be very useful morally there will be the means of life, of the enjoyment of life, and of the development and activity of all bodily and mental faculties, through the systematic use and further development of the enormous productive powers of society, which exists with us even now, with equal obligation upon all to work. And that the workers are growing ever more determined to achieve this new social order will be proven on both sides of the ocean on this dawning May Day, and on Sunday, May 3rd. [Engels is referring to the May Day celebrations of 1891] 1. By classical political economy, I understand that economy which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society, in contradistinction to vulgar economy, which deals with appearances only, ruminates without ceasing on the materials long since provided by scientific economy, and there seeks plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena for bourgeois daily use, but for the rest confines itself to systematizing in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, trite ideas held by the self-complacent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of all possible worlds.

Wage Labour and Capital - Introduction

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/intro.htm

Speech delivered in French commemorating 2nd anniversary of Krakow Uprising Brussels, February 22, 1848 There are striking analogies in history. The Jacobin of 1793 has become the communist of our day. When Russia, Austria, and Prussia partitioned Poland among themselves in 1793, the three powers relied on the Constitution of 1791 which they had unanimously condemned for its alleged Jacobin principles. And what did that Polish Constitution of 1791 proclaim? Nothing but a constitutional monarchy: legislative power in the hands of the representatives of the country; freedom of the press; freedom of conscience; open court proceedings; abolition of serfdom, etc. And all that was then called Jacobinism! Thus, gentlemen, you see that history was moved forward. What was then Jacobinism has today become liberalism, and in its most moderate form at that. The three powers marched with history. In 1846, when they incorporated Krakow into Austria and robbed the Poles of their last vestige of independence, they designated as communism what had previously been called Jacobinism. But, what did did the communism of the Krakow revolution consist of? Was it communist because it wanted to restore the Polish nationality? One could as well say that the war which the European Coalition waged against Napoleon was communistic and that the Congress of Vienna was made up of crowned communists. Or was the Krakow revolution communistic because it wanted to install a democratic government? Nobody would accuse the millions of citizens of Bern and New York of communistic impulses. Communism denies the necessity of the existence of classes; it wants to abolish all classes, all class distinctions. The Krakow revolution wanted to extirpate only the political distinctions among classes, it wanted to give equal rights to all classes. So, in what respect, finally, was this Krakow revolution communistic? Perchance because it wanted to break the chains of feudalism, to liberate property from feudal obligations and to transform it into modern property? If one asked French property owners, Do you know what the Polish democrats want? The Polish democrats want to introduce in their country the form of property that exists among you, the French property owner would answer, That is very good. But if one says to the French property owner, as Guizot did, The Poles want to abolish the form of property you established by your Revolution of 1789 and which still exists among you, then they exclaim, What! They are all revolutionists, communists! The scoundrels should be destroyed The abolition of corporations and guilds, and the introduction of free competition this is now called communism in Sweden. The [Paris daily] Journal des Debats [Politiques et Litteraires] goes even further: the abolition of revenues guaranteed to 200,000 voters by corrupt law as a source of income, which the Journal considers rightfully acquired property, this it calls communism. Undoubtedly the Krakow revolution wanted to abolish a certain kind of property. But what kind of property? The kind that in the rest of Europe can no more be abolished than the Swiss Sonderbund [federation] because neither one exists any more. Nobody will deny that in Poland the political question is tied up with the social one. For a long time they have been inseparable from each other. Just ask the reactionaries about it! Did they fight during the Restoration purely against political liberalism and the Voltaireanism that was necessarily dragged along with it? A very famous reactionary author has openly admitted that the loftiest metaphysics of a de Maistre and a de Bonald reduces itself in the last analysis to a money question and is not every money question directly a social question? The men of the Restoration did not conceal the fact that in order to return to the policies of the good old days one must restore the good old property, the feudal property and the moral property. Everybody knows that fealty to the monarch is unthinkable without tithes and socages. Let us go back further. In 1789, the political question of human rights absorbed in itself the social rights of free competition. And what is it all about in England? Did the political parties there, in all questions, from the Reform Bill [June 7, 1830] to the abolition of the Corn Laws [June, 1846], fight for anything other than changes of property, questions of property, social questions? Here in Belgium itself, is the struggle between liberalism and Catholicism anything else than a struggle between industrial capital and big landownership? And the political questions that have been debated for 17 years, are they not at bottom social questions? Thus no matter what position one takes be it liberal or radical or conservative nobody can reproach the Krakow revolution with having entangled a social question with a political one! The men at the head of the revolutionary movement in Krakow were most deeply convinced that only a democratic Poland could be independent, and that a Polish democracy was impossible without an abolition of feudal rights, without an agrarian movement that would transform the feudally obligated peasants into modern owners. Put Russian autocrats over Polish aristocrats; thereby you have merely naturalized the despotism. In exactly the same way, in their war against foreign rule, the Germans have exchanged one Napoleon for 36 Metternichs. If the Polish feudal lord no longer has a Russian feudal lord over him, the Polish peasant has not a less feudal lord over him indeed, a free, in place of an enslaved, lord. The political change has changed nothing in the peasant's social position. The Krakow revolution has set all of Europe a glorious example, because it identified the question of nationalism with democracy and with the liberation of the oppressed class. Even though this revolution has been strangled with the bloody hands of paid murderers, it now nevertheless rises gloriously and triumphantly in Switzerland and in Italy. It finds its principles confirmed in Ireland, where O'Connell's party [the Irish Confederation, founded January 1847] with its narrowly restricted nationalistic aims has sunk into the grave, and the new national party is pledged above all to reform and democracy. Again it is Poland that has seized the initiative, and no longer a feudal Poland but a democratic Poland; and from this point on its liberation has become a matter of honor for all the democrats of Europe.

Communism, Revolution, and a Free Poland by Karl Marx

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/02/22a.htm

Proletarians of all countries, unite!

Demands of the Communist Party in Germany

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm

Originally the date of publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was to be the first of July, and arrangements with correspondents, etc., were made with that date in view. But since the brazen attitude reassumed by the reactionaries foreshadows the enactment of German September Laws in the near future, we have decided to make use of every available day and to publish the paper as from June the first. Our readers will therefore have to bear with us if during the first days we cannot offer so wide a variety of news and reports as our widespread connections should enable us to do. In a few days we shall be able to satisfy all requirements in this respect too.

Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung June 1848

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The German people won its sovereign status by fighting in the streets of almost all towns in the country, large and small, and especially on the barricades of Vienna and Berlin. It exercised this sovereignty in the elections to the National Assembly. The bold and public proclamation of the sovereignty of the German people should have been the first act of the National Assembly. Its second act should have been the drafting of a German constitution based on the sovereignty of the people and the elimination from the conditions actually existing in Germany of everything that conflicts with this principle. During the whole of its session the Assembly ought to have taken all necessary measures to frustrate any reactionary sallies, to maintain the revolutionary basis on which it depends and to safeguard the sovereignty of the people, won by the revolution, against all attacks. Though the German National Assembly has met about a dozen times already, it has done none of these things. But it has ensured the salvation of Germany by the following great deeds. The National Assembly realised that it must have rules, for it knew that when two or three Germans get together they must have a set of rules, otherwise chair legs will be used to decide matters. And now some school-master had foreseen this contingency and drawn up special regulations for this high Assembly. A motion was submitted to adopt this scheme provisionally; though most deputies had not read it, the Assembly adopted it without more ado, for what would become of Germany s representatives without regulations? Fiat reglementum partout et toujours! Herr Raveaux of Cologne tables a quite simple motion dealing with conflicts between the assemblies at Frankfurt and at Berlin. But the Assembly debates the final regulations, and although Raveaux s motion is urgent, the regulations are still more urgent. Pereat mundus, fiat reglementum! However, the elected philistines in their wisdom cannot refrain from making a few remarks concerning Raveaux s motion, and while they are debating whether the regulations or the motion should take precedence, they have already produced up to two dozen amendments to this motion. They ventilate the thing, talk, get stuck, raise a din, waste time and postpone voting from the 19th to the 22nd of May. The matter is brought up again on the 22nd, there is a deluge of new amendments and new digressions, and after long-winded speeches and endless confusion they decide that the question, which was already placed on the agenda, is to be referred back to the sections. Thus the time has happily slipped by and the deputies leave to take their meal. On May 23 they first wrangle about the minutes, then have innumerable motions read out again, and just when they are about to return to the agenda, that is, to the beloved regulations, Zitz of Mainz mentions the brutalities of the Prussian army and the despotic abuses of the Prussian commandant at Mainz. This was an indubitable and successful sally on the part of the reaction, an event with which the Assembly was especially competent to deal. It ought to have called to account the presumptuous soldier who dared threaten to shell Mainz almost within sight of the National Assembly, it ought to have protected the unarmed citizens of Mainz in their own houses from the atrocities of a coarse soldiery which had been forced upon them and incited against them. But Herr Bassermann, the waterman of Baden [A pun on the words Bassermann and Wassermann (waterman). Ed.], declares that these are trifles. Mainz must be left to its fate, the whole is more important, the Assembly meets here to consider a set of regulations in the interests of Germany as a whole indeed, what is the shelling of Mainz compared with this! Pereat Moguntia, fiat reglementum! But the Assembly is soft-hearted, it elects a commission that is to go to Mainz to investigate matters and it is again just time to adjourn and dine. And then, on May 24, we lose the parliamentary thread altogether. The regulations would seem to have been completed or to have got lost, at any rate we hear nothing more about them. Instead we are inundated by a veritable flood of well-intentioned motions in which numerous representatives of the sovereign people obstinately demonstrate the limited understanding of a loyal subject. Then follow applications, petitions, protests, etc., and in the end the national slops find an outlet in innumerable speeches skipping from one subject to another. The fact, however, that four committees have been set up cannot be passed over in silence. Finally Herr Schl ffel asked for the floor. Three German citizens, Esselen, Pelz and L wenstein, had been ordered to leave Frankfurt that very day, before 4 p.m. The wise and all-knowing police asserted that these gentlemen had incurred the wrath of the townspeople by their speeches in the Workers Association and must therefore clear out. And the police dare to do this after German right of citizenship was proclaimed by the Preparliament and even after it was endorsed in the draft constitution of the 17 trusted men (hommes de confiance de la di te).The matter is urgent. Herr Schl ffel asks to be allowed to speak on this point. He is refused permission. He asks for the floor to speak on the urgency of the subject, which he is entitled to do according to the regulations, but on this occasion it was a case of fiat politia, pereat reglementum! Naturally, for it was time to go home and eat. On the 25th, the flood of tabled motions caused the pensive heads of the deputies to droop like ripe ears of corn in a downpour. Two deputies then attempted once more to raise the question of the expulsion, but they too did not get a chance to speak, even about the urgency of the matter. Some of the documents received, especially one sent by Poles, were much more interesting than all the motions of the deputies. Finally the commission that was sent to Mainz was given the floor. It announced that it could not report until the following day; moreover it had, of course, arrived too late: 8,000 Prussian bayonets had restored order by disarming 1,200 men of the Civil Guard. Meantime, there was nothing for it but to pass on to the agenda. This was done promptly, the item on the agenda being Raveaux s motion. Since in Frankfurt this had not yet been settled, whereas in Berlin it had already lost all significance because of Auerswald s decree, the National Assembly decided to defer the question till the next day and to go and dine. On the 26th innumerable new motions were introduced and after that the Mainz commission delivered its final and very indecisive report. Herr Hergenhahn, ex-people s representative and pro tempore minister, presented the report. He moved an extremely moderate resolution, but after a lengthy debate the Assembly concluded that even this docile proposition was too strong and resolved to leave the citizens of Mainz to the tender mercies of the Prussians commanded by a Herr H ser, and in the hope that the government will do its duty the Assembly passed on to the agenda, that is, the gentlemen left to have a meal. Finally, on May 27, after lengthy preliminaries over the minutes, Raveaux s motion was discussed. There was some desultory talk until half past two and then the deputies went to dine, but this time they assembled again for an evening session and at last brought the matter to a close. Because of the extreme tardiness of the National Assembly, Herr Auerswald had already disposed of Raveaux s motion, therefore Herr Raveaux decided to support an amendment proposed by Herr Werner, which settled the question of the people s sovereignty neither in the affirmative nor in the negative. Our information concerning the National Assembly ends here, but there is every reason to assume that after having taken this decision the meeting was adjourned and the deputies went to dine. That they were able to do this so early, they have to thank Robert Blum, who said:

Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung June 1848

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Herr H ser's project is only a part of reactionary Berlin's great plan, which strives to disarm all civil guards, especially on the Rhine, as soon as possible, to destroy gradually the whole arming of the people now developing, and to deliver us defenselessly into the hands of an army consisting mostly of foreign elements either easily assembled or already prepared. This is what has actually happened in Aachen, in Trier, in Mannheim, in Mainz, and it can happen elsewhere.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 1 June 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/06/01c.htm

The democratic party has suffered defeat; the principles which it proclaimed at the moment of victory are called in question; the ground it has actually won is being contested inch by inch; much has been lost already and soon the question will arise what is left? What is important for us is that the democratic party should understand its position. People may ask why we are concerned with a party, why we do not concentrate on the aims of the democratic movement, the welfare of the people, the happiness of all without distinction. For such is the law and usage of struggle, and only from the struggle of parties can the future welfare arise not from pseudo-judicious compromises or from a hypocritical alliance brought about despite conflicting views, interests and aims. We demand of the democratic party that it grasp the significance of its position. This demand springs from the experience of the past months. The democratic party has allowed the elation of its first victory to go to its head. Intoxicated with the joy of being able at last to proclaim its principles openly for all to hear, it imagined that one had merely to proclaim these principles for them to be immediately realised. It did not go beyond this proclamation after its first victory and the concessions which directly followed it. But while the party was lavish with its ideas and treated as a brother everyone who did not immediately dare to challenge it, the others those who retained or obtained power were active. And their activity is not to be made light of. Keeping their principles to themselves and divulging only those parts that were directed against old conditions already overthrown by the revolution, they carefully held the movement in check, ostensibly in the interests of the evolving legal system or the establishment of formal order. They made would-be concessions to the advocates of the old order to secure their support for their own plans; then they gradually built up the basic elements of their own political system and thus succeeded in occupying an intermediate position between the democratic party and the defenders of absolutism, on the one hand advancing and on the other retarding the movement, being at once progressive as regards the absolutists and reactionary as regards the democrats. In its first intoxication the people s party allowed itself to be taken in by the party of the prudent, moderate bourgeoisie, till finally it began to see things in their true light after having been contemptuously spurned, after all sorts of reprehensible intentions had been imputed to it, and its members denounced as demagogues. Then it perceived that it had actually achieved nothing but what the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie regarded as compatible with their own well-understood interests. Set in conflict with itself by an undemocratic electoral law and defeated in the elections, the party now has against it two elected bodies; the only doubtful thing about them is, which of them will more strongly oppose its demands. Consequently, the enthusiasm of the party has of course melted away and has been replaced by the sober recognition of the fact that a powerful reaction has gained control, and this, strangely enough, happened before any revolutionary action took place. Although all this is undoubtedly true, it would be dangerous if the bitter feeling engendered by the first and partly self-induced defeat would impel the democratic party now to revert to that wretched idealism, which is unfortunately characteristic of the German temperament, and according to which a principle that cannot be put into practice immediately is relegated to the distant future while for the present its innocuous elaboration is left to the thinkers. We must clearly warn against those hypocritical friends who, while declaring that they agree with the principles, doubt whether they are practicable, because, they allege, the world is not yet ready for them, and who have no intention of making it ready, but on the contrary prefer to share the common lot of the wicked in this wicked earthly life. If these are the crypto-republicans whom the privy councillor Gervinus fears so much, then we wholeheartedly agree with him: Such men are dangerous.

Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung June 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/06/02.htm

We encounter once more this greater latitude and flexibility in the demands of the Left compared with the demands of the Radical Party. The Left wants an executive central authority elected by the National Assembly for a definite period and responsible to it. It does not say whether this central authority has to be elected from the ranks of the National Assembly, as the manifesto of the Radicals expressly states. Finally the manifesto of the Left calls for the immediate definition, proclamation and maintenance of the basic rights of the German people against all encroachments by individual governments. The manifesto of the Radicals is not content with this. It declares that Both manifestos agree that the drafting of the German constitution should be left solely to the National Assembly and the governments debarred from taking part in it. Both agree that without prejudice to the people s rights to be proclaimed by the National Assembly it should be left to the individual states to choose the form of government, whether that of a constitutional monarchy or a republic. Both finally agree that Germany should be transformed into a confederation or a federative state. The manifesto of the Radicals at least expresses the revolutionary nature of the National Assembly. It demands appropriate revolutionary action. Does not the mere existence of a constituent National Assembly prove that there is no longer any constitution? But if there is no constitution, then there is no government either. And if there is no government the National Assembly must govern. Its first move should have been a decree of seven words: The Federal Diet is dissolved for ever. A constituent National Assembly must above all be an active, revolutionarily active assembly. The Assembly at Frankfurt is engaged in parliamentary school exercises and leaves it to the governments to act. Assuming that this learned gathering succeeds, after mature consideration, in framing the best of agendas and the best of constitutions, of what use is the best agenda and the best constitution if the governments meanwhile have placed bayonets on the agenda? Apart from the fact that it was the outcome of indirect elections, the German National Assembly suffers from a specifically German malady. It sits at Frankfurt am Main, and Frankfurt am Main is merely an ideal centre, which corresponded to the hitherto ideal, that is, merely imaginary, German unity. Frankfurt moreover is not a big city with a numerous revolutionary population that can back the National Assembly, partly defending it, partly spurring it on. It is the first time in human history that the constituent assembly of a big nation holds its sessions in a small town. This is the result of Germany s previous history. While the French and English national assemblies met on volcanic ground Paris and London the German National Assembly considered itself lucky to find neutral ground, where in the most comfortable peace of mind it could ponder over the best constitution and the best agenda. Yet the present state of affairs in Germany offered the assembly an opportunity to overcome the drawbacks of its unfortunate physical situation. It only had to oppose authoritatively all reactionary encroachments by obsolete governments in order to win such strength of public opinion as would make all bayonets and rifle butts ineffective against it. Instead Mainz, almost within sight of the Assembly, is abandoned to the arbitrary actions of the army, and German citizens from other parts of the country are exposed to the chicanery of the philistines in Frankfurt.[See issue of 1 June MIA] The Assembly bores the German people instead of inspiring it or being inspired by it. Although there is a public which for the time being still looks with good-natured humour upon the antics performed by the spectre of the resurrected Diet of the Holy Roman Empire, there is no people that can find its own life reflected in the life of the Assembly. Far from being the central organ of the revolutionary movement, the Assembly, up till now, was not even its echo. If the National Assembly forms a central authority from its own midst, little satisfaction can be expected from such a provisional government, in view of the Assembly s present composition and the fact that it let the favourable moment slip by. If it forms no central authority, it puts its seal to its own abdication and will be scattered to the winds at the first stir of a revolutionary current. It is to the credit of both the programme of the Left and that of the Radical group that they have grasped this necessity. Both exclaim with Heine: Because it is so difficult to decide who shall be emperor, and because there are as many good reasons for an elected emperor as there are for a hereditary emperor, even the conservative majority of the Assembly will be compelled to cut the Gordian knot by electing no emperor at all. It is quite incomprehensible how the so-called Radical-Democratic Party can advocate, as the ultimate political structure of Germany, a federation of constitutional monarchies, small principalities and tiny republics, i.e., a federal union of such heterogeneous elements, headed by a republican government for this is what the central body agreed to by the Left really amounts to. First of all the German central government elected by the National Assembly must undoubtedly be set up alongside the governments which still actually exist. But its struggle against the separate governments begins as soon as it comes into existence, and in the course of this struggle either the federal government and the unity of Germany are wrecked, or the separate governments with their constitutional princes or petty republics are destroyed. We do not make the utopian demand that at the outset a united indivisible German republic should be proclaimed, but we ask the so-called Radical-Democratic Party not to confuse the starting-point of the struggle and of the revolutionary movement with the goal. Both German unity and the German constitution can result only from a movement in which the internal conflicts and the war with the East will play an equally decisive role. The final act of constitution cannot be decreed, it coincides with the movement we have to go through. It is therefore not a question of putting into practice this or that view, this or that political idea, but of understanding the course of development. The National Assembly has to take only such steps as are practicable in the first instance. Nothing can be more confused than the notion advanced by the editor of the democratic manifesto for all his assurances that everybody is glad to get rid of his confusion that the federal state of North America should serve as a model for the German constitution. Leaving alone the fact that all its constituent parts have a similar structure, the United States of America covers an area equal to that of civilized Europe. Only a European federation would be analogous to it. But in order to federate with other states Germany must first of all become one state. The conflict between centralization and federalism in Germany is a conflict between modern culture and feudalism. Germany fell into a kind of bourgeoisified feudalism at the very moment the great monarchies arose in the West; she was moreover excluded from the world market just when this market was opened up to the countries of Western Europe. Germany became impoverished while the Western countries grew rich; she became countrified while they became urbanized. Even if Russia did not knock at the gates of Germany, the economic conditions alone would compel the latter to introduce rigorous centralization. Even from a purely bourgeois point of view, the solid unity of Germany is a primary condition for her deliverance from her present wretchedness and for the building up of her national wealth. And how could modern social problems be solved in a territory that is split into 39 small states? Incidentally, the editor of the democratic programme does not bother about such a minor question as material economic conditions. He relies on the concept of federation in his reasoning. Federation is an alliance of free and equal partners. Hence Germany must be a federal state. But cannot the Germans unite in one great state without offence to the concept of an alliance of free and equal partners?

Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung June 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/06/07.htm

The matter the Assembly had to decide was this. On March 18 the King promised a Constitution, introduced freedom of the press together with caution money, and made a series of proposals in which he declared that Germany s unity must be achieved by the merging of Germany in Prussia. These sum up the real content of the concessions made on March 18. The fact that the people of Berlin were satisfied with this and that they marched to the palace to thank the King is the clearest proof of the necessity of the March 18 revolution. Not only the state, its citizens too had to be revolutionised. Their submissiveness could only be shed in a sanguinary liberation struggle. A well-known misunderstanding led to the revolution. There was indeed a misunderstanding. The attack by the soldiers, the fight which continued for 16 hours and the fact that the people had to force the troops to withdraw are sufficient proof that the people completely misunderstood the concessions of March 18. The results of the revolution were, on the one hand, the arming of the people, the right of association and the sovereignty of the people, won de facto; on the other hand, the retention of the monarchy and the Camphausen-Hansemann Ministry, that is a Government representing the big bourgeoisie. Thus the revolution produced two sets of results, which were bound to diverge. The people was victorious; it had won liberties of a pronounced democratic nature, but direct control passed into the hands of the big bourgeoisie and not into those of the people. In short, the revolution was not carried through to the end. The people let the big bourgeoisie form a Government and the big bourgeoisie promptly revealed its intentions by inviting the old Prussian nobility and the bureaucracy to enter into an alliance with it. Arnim, Kanitz and Schwerin became members of the Government. The upper middle class, which was all along anti-revolutionary, concluded a defensive and offensive alliance with the reactionary forces, because it was afraid of the people, i.e. of the workers and the democratic bourgeoisie. The united reactionary parties began their fight against democracy by calling the revolution in question. The victory of the people was denied, the famous list of the seventeen dead soldiers was fabricated, and those who had fought on the barricades were slandered in every possible way. But this was not all. The United Diet convoked before the revolution was now actually convened by the Government, in order rather belatedly to fabricate a legal transition from absolutism to the constitution. Thus the Government openly repudiated the revolution. It moreover invented the theory of agreement, once more repudiating the revolution and with it the sovereignty of the people. The revolution was accordingly really called in question, and this could be done because it was only a partial revolution, only the beginning of a long revolutionary movement. We cannot here go into the question as to why and to what extent the present rule of the big bourgeoisie in Prussia is a necessary transitional stage towards democracy, and why, directly after its ascent to power, the big bourgeoisie joined the reactionary camp. For the present we merely report the fact. The Assembly of conciliation was now to declare whether it recognised the revolution or not. But to recognise the revolution under these circumstances meant recognising the democratic aspects of the revolution, which the big bourgeoisie wanted to appropriate to itself. Recognising the revolution at this moment meant recognising the half-and-half nature of the revolution, and consequently recognising the democratic movement, which was directed against some of the results of the revolution. It meant recognising that Germany was in the grip of a revolutionary movement, and that the Camphausen ministry, the theory of agreement, indirect elections, the rule of the big capitalists and the decisions of the Assembly itself could indeed be regarded as unavoidable transitional steps, but by no means as final results. The debate on the recognition of the revolution was carried on by both sides with great prolixity and great interest, but with remarkably little intelligence. One seldom reads anything so unedifying as these long-winded deliberations, constantly interrupted by noisy scenes or fine-spun arguments about standing orders. Instead of the great passion of party strife, we have a cold, placid temper which threatens at any moment to lapse into amiable colloquy; instead of the biting edge of argument we have interminable and confused talk rambling from one subject to another; instead of neat retorts we have tedious sermons on the essence and nature of morality. Nor has the Left particularly distinguished itself in these debates. Most of its speakers repeat one another; none of them dare tackle the matter head-on and speak their mind in frank revolutionary terms. They are always afraid to give offence, to hurt or to frighten people away. Germany would have been in a sorry plight if the people who fought on March 18 had not shown more energy and passion in battle than the gentlemen of the Left showed in the debate.

Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung June 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/06/14a.htm

Cologne, June 17. Another massacre similar to that of Poznan is being prepared in Bohemia. The possibility of a peaceful association of Bohemia and Germany has been drowned in the blood of the Czech people shed by the Austrian army. Prince Windischgratz had cannons mounted on the Wyshehrad and Hradschin and trained on Prague. Troops were massed and a sudden attack on the Slavic Congress and the Czechs was being prepared. The people discovered these preparations; they went in a body to the residence of the prince and demanded arms. The demand was rejected. Feeling began to run high and the crowds of people with and without arms were growing. Then a shot was fired from an inn opposite the commandant's palace and Princess Windischgratz dropped, mortally wounded. The order to attack followed immediately; the Grenadiers advanced, the people were driven back. But barricades were thrown up everywhere, checking the advance of the military. Cannons were brought into position and the barricades raked with grape-shot. Torrents of blood were shed. The fighting went on throughout the night of the 12th and continued on the 13th. Eventually the troops succeeded in occupying the wide streets and pressing the people back into the narrower quarters of the city where artillery could not be used. That is as far as our latest news goes. But in addition it is stated that many members of the Slavic Congress were sent out of the city under a strong escort. It would appear that the military won at least a partial victory. However the uprising may end, a war of attrition between the Germans and Czechs is now the only possible outcome. In their revolution the Germans have to suffer for the sins of their whole past. They suffered for them in Italy. In Poznan they have brought down upon themselves once more the curse of the whole of Poland, and to that is now added Bohemia. The French were able to win the recognition and sympathy even of the countries to which they came as enemies. The Germans win recognition nowhere and find sympathy nowhere. Even where they adopt the role of magnanimous apostles of liberty, they are spurned with bitter scorn. And so they deserve to be. A nation which throughout its history allowed itself to be used as a tool of oppression against all other nations must first of all prove that it has been really revolutionized. It must prove this not merely by a few indecisive revolutions, as a result of which the old irresolution, impotence and discord are allowed to continue in a modified form; revolutions which allow a Radetzky to remain in Milan, a Colomb and Steinacker in Poznan, a Windischgratz in Prague, a Hueser in Mainz, as if nothing had changed. A revolutionized Germany ought to have renounced her entire past, especially as far as the neighboring nations are concerned. Together with her own freedom, she should have proclaimed the freedom of the nations hitherto suppressed by her. And what has revolutionized Germany done? She has fully endorsed the old oppression of Italy, Poland, and now of Bohemia too, by German troops. Kaunitz and Metternich have been completely vindicated. And the Germans, after this, demand that the Czechs should trust them? Are the Czechs to be blamed for not wanting to join a nation that oppresses and maltreats other nations, while liberating itself? Are they to be blamed for not wanting to send their representatives to the despondent and faint-hearted National Assembly at Frankfurt, which is afraid of its own sovereignty? Are they to be blamed for dissociating themselves from the impotent Austrian government, which is in such a perplexed and helpless state that it seems to exist only in order to register the disintegration of Austria, which it is unable to prevent, or at least to give it an orderly course? A government which is even too weak to save Prague from the guns and soldiers of a Windischgratz? But it is the gallant Czechs themselves who are most of all to be pitied. Whether they win or are defeated, their doom is sealed. They have been driven into the arms of the Russians by 400 years of German oppression, which is being continued now in the street-fighting waged in Prague. In the great struggle between Western and Eastern Europe, which may begin very soon, perhaps in a few weeks, the Czechs are placed by an unhappy fate on the side of the Russians, the side of despotism opposed to the revolution. The revolution will triumph and the Czechs will be the first to be crushed by it. The Germans once again bear the responsibility for the ruin of the Czech people, for the Germans have betrayed them to the Russians.

NRZ: June 18, 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/06/18.htm

Cologne, June 24 -- IN THE constituent session of the twentieth of this month, that fateful session in which Camphausen's sun set and the ministerial crisis set in, Herr Patow submitted a memorandum on the main principles that were to regulate the elimination of feudalism on the land. When one reads this memorandum, one cannot understand how a peasant war has not broken out long ago in the Old Prussian provinces. What a confused mass of performances, tributes, and deliverings; what a jumble of medieval names, one crazy one after another! Loan suzerainty, decease, capitation, Elector's metes, blood tithe, patronage money, Walpurgis rent, bees' rent, wax lease, meadow right, tithes. Laudemiums, [in Roman law, 2 percent of the price paid the owner for his consent to sell -- ed.] additional rentals -- all this has remained until now in the "best-administered state in the world," and would have continued unto eternity if the French had not made their revolution in February! Yes, most of these exactions, and especially the most oppressive among them, would have continued unto eternity if Herr Patow had had his way. It was precisely Herr Patow who was assigned this department, to spare the bumpkin-Junkers in the Marches, in Pomerania, in Silesia as much as possible, and to cheat the peasants of the fruits of the Revolution as much as possible! The Berlin Revolution made all these feudal relations forever impossible. The peasants, naturally, immediately did away with them in practice. There was nothing left for the government to do but to put in legal form the actually existing abolition of all feudal burdens by the will of the people. But before the nobility decided on its Fourth of August, its castles were in flames. [On the night of August 4, 1789, the French National Assembly, under growing peasant pressure, formally abolished a whole series of feudal burdens on the peasantry, which the latter had already done away with in reality. -- Ed.] The government, here represented by an aristocrat, declared for the aristocracy. It put a memorandum before the Assembly demanding that it betray the peasant revolution, which had broken out all over Germany in March, to the aristocracy. The government is responsible for the consequences that the application of Patow's principles would have on the land. For Herr Patow wants the peasants to pay compensation for all the feudal exactions abolished, even the Laudemiums. The only exactions to be abolished without compensation are those that flow from serfdom, from the old tax system and the patrimonial jurisdiction, or those that are worthless to the feudal lord (how generous! ); that is, in general the exactions that are the least part of the whole feudal burden. On the other hand, all feudal commutations arrived at by agreement or judicial decision are final. That is: the peasants who settled their exactions under the reactionary and pro-aristocratic laws enacted since 1 8 1 6 and particularly since 1840, and have been swindled of their property by bribed officials in favor of feudal lords, receive no compensation. Rent banks are to be established, to throw sand into the eyes of the peasants. If Herr Patow had his way, the feudal exactions would be eliminated under his law as little as they were under the old law of 1807. The correct title for Herr Patow's essay is: Memorandum on the Maintenance of Feudal Exactions Forever by Means of Their Commutation. The government is provoking a peasant war. Perhaps Russia will not "shy away" from a "momentary loss of Silesia."

Neue Rheisnische Zeitung June 15 1848

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Prague. Every day brings further confirmation of our view of the Prague uprising (No. 18 of this paper), and shows that the insinuations of the German papers which alleged that the Czech party served reaction, the aristocracy, the Russians, etc., were downright lies.

NRZ: June 25, 1848

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Cologne, June 26. The news just received from Paris takes up so much space that we are obliged to omit all articles of critical comment. Therefore only a few words to our readers. Our latest news from Paris gives this: the resignation of Ledru-Rollin and Lamartine and their ministers; the transfer of Cavaignac's military dictatorship from Algiers to Paris; Marrast the dictator in plain clothes; Paris bathed in blood; the insurrection growing into the greatest revolution that has ever taken place, into a revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Three days which sufficed for the July revolution and the February revolution are insufficient for the colossal contours of this June revolution, but the victory of the people is more certain than ever. The French bourgeoisie has dared to do what the French kings never dared -- it has itself cast the die. This second act of the French revolution is only the beginning of the European tragedy.

NRZ: June 27 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/06/27.htm

None of the big republican figures, whether of the National or of the Reforme, sided with the people. In the absence of leaders and means other than those thrown up by the rebellion itself, the people stood up to the united forces of the bourgeoisie and army longer than any French dynast with the entire military apparatus at its disposal was ever able to stand up to any group of the bourgeoisie allied with the people. To have the people lose its last illusions and break completely with the past, it was necessary that the customary poetic trimmings of French uprisings -- the enthusiastic bourgeois youth, the students of the ecole polytechnique, the tricornes -- should join the side of the suppressers. The medical students had to deny the wounded plebeians the succor of their science. Science does not exist for the plebeian who has committed the heinous, unutterable crime of fighting this time for his own existence instead of for Louis Philippe or Monsieur Marrast. The Executive Committee, that last official vestige of the February revolution, vanished like a ghost in the face of these grave events. Lamartine's fireworks have turned into the incendiary shells of Cavaignac. Fraternite, the brotherhood of antagonistic classes, one of which exploits the other, this fraternity which in February was proclaimed and inscribed in large letters on the facades of Paris, on every prison and every barracks -- this fraternity found its true, unadulterated and prosaic expression in civil war, civil war in its most terrible aspect, the war of labor against capital. This brotherhood blazed in front of the windows of Paris on the evening of June 25, when the Paris of the bourgeoisie held illuminations while the Paris of the proletariat was burning, bleeding, groaning in the throes of death. This brotherhood lasted only as long as there was a consanguinity of interests between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Pedants sticking to the old revolutionary tradition of 1793; socialist doctrinaires who begged alms for the people from the bourgeoisie and who were allowed to deliver lengthy sermons and compromise themselves so long as the proletarian lion had to be lulled to sleep; republicans who wanted to keep the old bourgeois order in toto, but without the crowned head; members of the Dynastic Opposition on whom chance imposed the task of bringing about the downfall of a dynasty instead of a change of government; legitimists, who did not want to cast off their livery but merely to change its style -- these were the allies with whom the people had fought their February revolution. What the people instinctively hated in Louis Philip was not Louis Philip himself, but the crowned rule of a class, the capital on the throne. But magnanimous as always, the people thought they had destroyed their enemy when they had overthrown the enemy of their enemies, their common enemy. The February revolution was the nice revolution, the revolution of universal sympathies, because the contradictions which erupted in it against the monarchy were still undeveloped and peacefully dormant, because the social struggle which formed their background had only achieved an ephemeral existence, an existence in phrases, in words. The June revolution is the ugly revolution, the nasty revolution, because the phrases have given place to the real thing, because the republic has bared the head of the monster by knocking off the crown which shielded and concealed it. Order! was Guizot's war-cry. Order! shouted Sebastiani, the Guizotist, when Warsaw became Russian. Order! shouts Cavaignac, the brutal echo of the French National Assembly and of the republican bourgeoisie. Order! thundered his grape-shot as it tore into the body of the proletariat. None of the numerous revolutions of the French bourgeoisie since 1789 assailed the existing order, for they retained the class rule, the slavery of the workers, the bourgeois system, even though the political form of this rule and this slavery changed frequently. The June uprising did assail this system. Woe to the June uprising! Under the Provisional Government it was considered good form and, moreover, a necessity to preach to the magnanimous workers -- who, as a thousand official posters proclaimed, "placed three months of misery at the disposal of the Republic" -- it was both good politics and a sign of enthusiasm to preach to the workers that the February revolution had been carried out in their own interests and that the principal issue of the February revolution was the interests of the workers. With the opening of the National Assembly the speeches have become more prosaic. Now it was only a matter of leading labor back to its old conditions, as Minister Trelat said. Thus the workers fought in February in order to be engulfed in an industrial crisis. It is the business of the National Assembly to undo the work of February, at least as far as the workers are concerned, and to throw them back to their old conditions. But even this was not done, because it is not within the power of any assembly any more than of a king to will a universal industrial crisis -- advance up to this point and no further. In its crude eagerness to put an end to the tiresome February phraseology, the National Assembly did not even take the measures that were possible on the basis of the old conditions. Parisian workers aged 17 to 25 were either pressed into the army or thrown onto the street; those from other parts were ordered out of Paris to the Sologne without even receiving the money that went with such an order; adult Parisians could for the time being secure a pittance in workshops organized on military lines on condition that they did not attend any public meetings, in other words on condition that they ceased to be republicans. Neither the sentimental rhetoric which followed the February events nor the brutal legislation after May 15 achieved their purpose. A real, practical decision had to be taken. For whom did you make the February revolution, you rascals -- for yourselves or for us? The bourgeoisie put this question in such a way that it had to be answered in June with grape-shot and barricades. The entire National Assembly is nevertheless struck with paralysis, as one deputy [Ducoux. -- Ed.] put it on June 25. Its members are stunned when question and answer make the streets of Paris flow with blood; some are stunned because their illusions are lost in the smoke of gunpowder, others because they cannot understand how the people dare stand up on their own for their own vital interests. Russian money, British money, the Bonapartist eagle, the lily, amulets of all kinds -- this is where they sought an explanation of this strange event. Both parts of the Assembly feel however that a vast gulf separates them from the people. None of them dare stand up for the people. As soon as the stupor has passed frenzy breaks out. The majority quite rightly greets with catcalls those hapless utopians and hypocrites guilty of the anachronism of still using the term fraternite, brotherhood. The question at issue was precisely that of doing away with this term and with the illusions arising from its ambiguity. When the legitimist Larochejaquelein, the chivalrous dreamer, protested against the infamy of those who cried "Vae victis! Woe to the vanquished!" the majority of the deputies broke into a St. Vitus's dance as if stung by a tarantula. They shouted woe! to the workers in order to hide the fact that they themselves are the "vanquished". Either the Assembly must perish now, or the republic. And that is why it frantically yells -- long live the republic! Is the deep chasm which has opened at our feet to mislead us, democrats, or cause us to believe that the struggle for a form of polity is meaningless, illusory and futile? Only weak, cowardly minds can pose such a question. Collisions proceeding from the very conditions of bourgeois society must be overcome by fighting, they cannot be reasoned out of existence. The best form of polity is that in which the social contradictions are not blurred, not arbitrarily -- that is, merely artificially, and therefore only seemingly -- kept down. The best form of polity is that in which these contradictions reach a stage of open struggle in the course of which they are resolved. We may be asked, do we not find a tear, a sigh, a word for the victims of the people's wrath, for the National Guard, the mobile guard, the republican guard and the line? The state will care for their widows and orphans, decrees extolling them will be issued, their remains will be carried to the grave in solemn procession, the official press will declare them immortal, the European reaction in the East and the West will pay homage to them. But the plebeians are tormented by hunger, abused by the press, forsaken by the physicians, called thieves, incendiaries and galley-slaves by the respectabilities; their wives and children are plunged into still greater misery and the best of those who have survived are sent overseas. It is the right and the privilege of the democratic press to place laurels on their gloomy threatening brow.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 29 June 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/06/29a.htm

Gradually we gain a more comprehensive view of the June Revolution; fuller reports arrive, it becomes possible to distinguish facts from either hearsay or lies, and the nature of the uprising stands out with increasing clarity. The more one succeeds in grasping the interconnection of the events of the four days in June, the more is one astonished by the vast magnitude of the uprising, the heroic courage, the rapidly improvised organization and the unanimity of the insurgents. The workers' plan of action, which Kersausie, a friend of Raspail and a former officer, is said to have drawn up, was as follows: The insurgents, moving in four columns, advance concentrically towards the town hall. The first column, whose base were the suburbs of Montmartre, La Chapelle and La Villette, advance southwards from the gates of Poissonniere, Rochechouart, St. Denis and La Villette, occupy the Boulevards and approach the town hall through the streets Montorgueil, St. Denis and St. Martin. The second column, whose base were the faubourgs du Temple and St. Antoine, which are inhabited almost entirely by workers and protected by the St. Martin canal, advance towards the same centre through the streets du Temple and St. Antoine and along the quais of the northern bank of the Seine as well as through all other streets running in the same direction in this part of the city. The third column based on the Faubourg St. Marceau move towards the Ile de la Cite through the Rue St. Victor and the quais of the southern bank of the Seine. The fourth column, based on the Faubourg St. Jacques and the vicinity of the Medical School, move down the Rue Saint Jacques also to the Cite. There the two columns join, cross to the right bank of the Seine and envelop the town hall from the rear and flank. Thus the plan, quite correctly, was based on the districts in which only workers lived. These districts form a semicircular belt, which surrounds the entire eastern half of Paris, widening out towards the east. First of all the eastern part of Paris was to be cleared of enemies, and then it was intended to move along both banks of the Seine towards the west and its centres, the Tuileries and the National Assembly. These columns were to be supported by numerous flying squads which, operating independently alongside and between the columns, were to build barricades, occupy the smaller streets and be responsible for maintaining communication. The operational bases were strongly fortified and skillfully transformed into formidable fortresses, e.g., the Clos St. Lazare, the Faubourg and Quartier St. Antoine and the Faubourg St. Jacques, in case it should become necessary to retreat. If there was any flaw in this plan it was that in the beginning of the operations the western part of Paris was completely overlooked. There are several districts eminently suitable for armed action on both sides of the Rue St. Honore near the market halls and the Palais National, which have very narrow, winding streets tenanted mainly by workers. It was important to set up a fifth centre of the insurrection there, thus cutting off the town hall and at the same time holding up a considerable number of troops at this projecting strongpoint. The success of the uprising depended on the insurgents reaching the centre of Paris as quickly as possible and seizing the town hall. We cannot know what prevented Kersausic from organizing insurgent action in this part. But it is a fact that no uprising was ever successful which did not at the outset succeed in seizing the centre of Paris adjoining the Tuileries. Suffice to mention the uprising [The uprising took place in Paris on June 5-6, 1832. -- Ed.]" which took place during General Lamarque's funeral when the insurgents got as far as the Rue Montorgueil and were then driven back. The insurgents advanced in accordance with their plan. They immediately began to separate their territory, the Paris of the workers, from the Paris of the bourgeoisie, by two main fortifications -- the barricades at the Porte Saint Denis and those of the Cite. They were dislodged from the former, but were able to hold the latter. June 23, the first day, was merely a prelude. The plan of the insurgents already began to emerge clearly (and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung grasped it correctly at the outset, see No. 26, special supplement), especially after the first skirmishes between the advanced guards which took place in the morning. The Boulevard St. Martin, which crosses the line of operation of the first column, became the scene of fierce fighting, which, partly due to the nature of the terrain, ended with a victory for the forces of "order". The approaches to the Cite were blocked on the right by a flying squad, which entrenched itself in the Rue de la Planche-Mibray; on the left by the third and fourth columns, which occupied and fortified the three southern bridges of the Cite. Here too a very fierce battle raged. The forces of "order" succeeded in taking the St. Michel bridge and advancing to the Rue St. Jacques. They felt sure that by the evening the revolt would be suppressed. The plan of the forces of "order" stood out even more clearly than that of the insurgents. To begin with, their plan was merely to crush the insurrection with all available means. They announced their design to the insurgents with cannon-ball and grape-shot. But the government believed it was dealing with an uncouth gang of common rioters acting without any plan. After clearing the main streets by the evening, the government declared that the revolt was quelled, and the stationing of troops in the conquered districts was arranged in an exceedingly negligent manner. The insurgents made excellent use of this negligence by launching the great battle which followed the skirmishes of June 23. It is simply amazing how quickly the workers mastered the plan of campaign, how well-concerted their actions were and how skillfully they used the difficult terrain. This would be quite inexplicable if in the national workshops the workers had not already been to a certain extent organized on military lines and divided into companies, so that they only needed to apply their industrial Organization to their military enterprise in order to create a fully organized army. On the morning of the 24th they had not only completely regained the ground they had lost, but even added new strips to it. True, the line of Boulevards up to the Boulevard du Temple remained in the hands of the troops, thus cutting off the first column from the centre, but on the other hand the second column pushed forward from the Quartier St. Antoine until it almost surrounded the town hall. It established its headquarters in the church of St. Gervais, within 300 paces of the town hall. It captured the St. Merri monastery and the adjoining streets and advanced far beyond the town hall so that together with the columns in the Cite it almost completely encircled the town hall. Only one way of approach, the quais of the right bank, remained open. In the south the Faubourg St. Jacques was completely reoccupied, communication with the Cite' was restored, reinforcements were sent there, and preparations were made for crossing to the right bank. There was no time to be lost. The town hall, the revolutionary centre of Paris, was threatened and was bound to fall unless resolute measures were taken immediately.

Neue Rheinsche Zeitung 1st July 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/07/01.htm

Cologne, July 2. All hitherto existing rulers and their diplomats have employed their skill and efforts to set one nation against another and use one nation to suppress another, and in this manner to perpetuate absolute rule. Germany has distinguished herself in this respect. During the last 70 years alone, she had furnished the British, in exchange for English gold, with mercenaries to be used against the North Americans fighting for their independence; when the first French revolution broke out it was the Germans again who, like a rabid pack, allowed themselves to be set upon the French; in a vicious manifesto issued by the Duke Of Brunswick they threatened to raze the whole of Paris to the ground; they conspired with the migr aristocrats against the new order in France and were paid for this in the form of subsidies received from England. When the Dutch, for the first time in two hundred years, finally hit upon the sensible idea of putting an end to the mad rule of the House of Orange and establishing a republic, it was the Germans again who acted as the hangmen of freedom. The Swiss, too, could tell a tale about their German neighbors, and it will be some time before the Hungarians recover from the harm which Austria, i.e., the German imperial court, inflicted upon them. German mercenary troops were even sent to Greece to prop up the little throne of dear Otto, and German policemen were sent even to Portugal. Then there were the congresses after 1815, Austria's expeditions to Naples, Turin and the Romagna, the imprisonment of Ypsilanti, the German-imposed war of suppression which France waged against Spain, Dom Miguel and Don Carlos [3O] who were supported by Germany; the reaction in Britain had Hannoverian troops at its disposal; German influence led to the dismemberment of Belgium and the establishment of a Thermidorian rule there; in the very heart of Russia Germans are the mainstay of the one autocrat and of the smaller ones, all Europe is flooded with sprigs of the House of Coburg. Poland was plundered and dismembered and Krakow throttled with the help of German soldiers. German money and blood helped to enslave and impoverish Lombardy and Venice, and directly or indirectly to stifle any movement of liberation throughout Italy by means of bayonets, gallows, prisons and galleys. The list of sins is much longer, let us close it. The blame for the infamies committed with the aid of Germany in other countries falls not only on the governments but to a large extent also on the German people. But for the delusions of the Germans, their slavish spirit, their flair for acting as mercenaries and "benign" jailers and tools of the masters "by divine right", the German name abroad would not be so detested, cursed and despised, and the nations oppressed by Germany would have long since been able to develop freely. Now that the Germans are throwing off their own yoke, their whole foreign policy must change too. Otherwise the fetters with which we have chained other nations will shackle our own new, barely prescient, freedom. Germany will liberate herself to the extent to which she sets free neighboring nations. Things are indeed beginning to look up. The lies and misrepresentations which the old government organs have been so busy spreading about Poland and Italy, the attempts to artificially create enmity, the turgid phrases proclaiming that German honor or German power is at stake -- all these magic formulas are no longer effective. The official patriotism is effective only when these patriotic postures conceal material interests, i.e., only among a section of the big bourgeoisie whose business depends on this official patriotism. The reactionary party knows this and makes use of it. But the great mass of the German middle class and the working class understand or feel that the freedom of the neighboring nations is the guarantee of their own freedom. Is Austria's war against Italy's independence or Prussia's war against the restoration of Poland popular, or do these "Patriotic" crusades on the contrary destroy the last illusions? However, neither this understanding nor this feeling is sufficient. If Germany's blood and money is no longer to be squandered, to her own detriment, in suppressing other nations, then we must achieve a really popular government, and the old edifice must be razed to the ground. Only then can an international policy of democracy take the place of the sanguinary, cowardly policy of the old, revived system. How can a democratic foreign policy be carried through while democracy at home is stifled? Meanwhile, everything possible must be done to prepare the way for the democratic system on this side and the other side of the Alps. The Italians have issued a number of declarations which make their friendly attitude towards Germany perfectly clear. We would mention the Manifesto of the Provisional Government at Milan addressed to the German people and the numerous articles written in the same vein, which are published in the Italian press. We have now received further evidence of this attitude -- a private letter from the administrative committee of the newspaper L'Alba, published in Florence, to the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. It is dated June 20, and says among other things: The Alba is one of the few papers in Italy which advocate thoroughly democratic principles.

NRZ: July 3, 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/07/02.htm

The substance of the debate is well known the reservations the government advanced regarding the immediate validity of the decisions passed by the National Assembly and Jacoby s motion asserting the Assembly s right to pass legally binding decisions requiring no one s consent, and at the same time objecting to the resolution on the central authority. That a debate on this subject was possible at all may seem incomprehensible to other nations. But we live in a land of oaks and lime-trees where nothing should surprise us. The people send their representatives to Frankfurt with the mandate that the Assembly assume sovereign power over the whole of Germany and all her governments, and, by virtue of the sovereignty the people have vested in the Assembly, adopt a constitution for Germany. Instead of immediately proclaiming its sovereignty in respect to the separate states and the Federal Diet, the Assembly timidly avoids any question relating to this subject and maintains an irresolute and vacillating attitude. Finally it is confronted with a decisive issue the appointment of a provisional central authority. Seemingly independent, but in fact guided by the governments with the help of Gagern, the Assembly elects as Vice Regent of the Empire a man whom these governments had in advance designated for this post. The Federal Diet recognizes the election, pretending, as it were, that only its confirmation makes the election valid. Reservations are nevertheless made by Hannover and even by Prussia, and it is the Prussian reservation that has caused the debate of the 11th and 12th. This time, therefore, it is not so much the fault of the Chamber in Berlin that the debates are vague and hazy. The irresolute, weak-kneed, ineffectual Frankfurt National Assembly itself is to blame for the fact that its decisions can only be described as so much twaddle. Jacoby introduces his motion with a brief speech made with his usual precision. He makes things very difficult for the speakers of the Left, because he says everything that can be said about the motion if one is to avoid enlarging upon the origin of the central authority, whose history is rather discreditable to the National Assembly. In fact, the deputies of the Left who follow him advance hardly any new arguments, while those of the Right fare much worse they lapse either into sheer twaddle or juridical hair-splitting. Both sides endlessly repeat themselves. The honor of first presenting the case for the Right devolves on Deputy Schneider. He begins with the grand argument that the motion is self-contradictory. On the one hand, the motion recognizes the sovereignty of the National Assembly, on the other hand, it calls upon the Chamber of conciliation to censure the National Assembly, thus placing itself above it. Any individual could express his disapproval but not the Chamber. This subtle argument, of which the Right seems to be very proud seeing that it recurs in all the speeches of its deputies, advances an entirely new theory. According to this theory, the Chamber has fewer rights with regard to the National Assembly than an individual. This first grand argument is followed by a republican one. Germany consists for the most part of constitutional monarchies, and must therefore be headed by a constitutional, irresponsible authority and not by a republican, responsible one. This argument was rebutted on the second day by Herr Stein, who said that Germany, under her federal constitution, had always been a republic, indeed a very edifying republic. The reaction indulges in wishful thinking. When, by order of the so-called Preparliament an assembly having no valid mandate the trembling Federal Diet convened the German National Assembly, there was no question at the time of any agreement; the National Assembly was then considered to be a sovereign power. But things now have changed. The June events in Paris have revived the hopes of both the big bourgeoisie and the supporters of the overthrown system. Every country bumpkin of a squire hopes to see the old rule of the knout re-established, and a clamour for an agreed German constitution is already arising from the imperial court at Innsbruck to the ancestral castle of Henry LXXII. The Frankfurt Assembly has no one but itself to blame for this. Can anyone ask for better proof of the virtues represented in the Berlin Chamber than these noble and modest words of Deputy Schneider? Surely, if any doubt still existed about the fitness of the Germans to set up a republic, it must have completely vanished in face of these examples of true civic virtue, of the noble and most modest self-sacrifice of our Cincinnatus-Schneider. Let Cincinnatus pluck up courage and have faith in himself and the numerous noble citizens of Germany who likewise regard the republic as the most noble political form but consider themselves bad republicans they are ripe for the republic, they would endure the republic with the same equanimity with which they have endured the absolute monarchy. The republic of worthies would be the happiest republic that ever existed a republic without Brutus and Catiline, without Marat and upheavals like those of June, it would be a republic of well-fed virtue and solvent morality. How mistaken is Cincinnatus-Schneider when he exclaims: On the contrary, as Herr Vogt (from Giessen) said in the National Assembly, the Germans are republicans by nature, and to educate his children in the republican spirit Cincinnatus-Schneider could do no better than bring them up in the old German discipline, tradition of modesty and God-fearing piety, the way he himself grew up. Not anarchy and despotism, but those cozy beer-swilling proceedings, in which Cincinnatus-Schneider excels, would be brought to the highest perfection in the republic of worthies. Far removed from all the atrocities and crimes which defiled the first French republic, unstained by blood, and detesting the red flag, the republic of worthies would make possible something hitherto unattainable: it would enable every respectable burgher to lead a quiet, peaceful life marked by godliness and propriety. The republic of worthies might even revive the guilds together with all the amusing trials of non-guild artisans. This republic of worthies is by no means a fanciful dream; it is a reality existing in Bremen, Hamburg, L beck and Frankfurt, and even in some parts of Switzerland. But its existence is everywhere threatened by the contemporary storms, which bid fair to engulf it everywhere. Therefore rise up, Cincinnatus-Schneider, leave your plough and turnip field, your beer and conciliation, mount your steed and save the threatened republic, your republic, the republic of worthies! This beginning is likewise somewhat precarious. We get the impression that we are still listening to Deputy Schneider: This is the same old-Prussian illusion, the cherished dream of merging Germany in Prussia and of declaring Berlin the German Paris. Herr Waldeck, it is true, sees this cherished hope dwindling, but he hankers after it with painful feelings, and he blames both the ,previous and the present Government for the fact that Prussia is not at the head of Germany. Unfortunately the fine days have passed when the Customs Union paved the way for Prussian hegemony in Germany, days when provincial patriots could believe that the Brandenburg stock has determined the fate of Germany for 200 years and will continue to do so in the future, the fine days when the disintegrating Germany of the Federal Diet could regard even the Prussian bureaucratic strait jacket as a last means of maintaining some sort of cohesion. The world was naturally astonished when it saw this Constituent National Assembly. One need only read the French, English and Italian newspapers to understand this. Herr Waldeck then explains at some length that he is against the idea of a German emperor and gives up his place on the rostrum to Herr Reichensperger II. Herr Reichensperger II declares the supporters of Jacoby s motion to be republicans and desires them to state their aims as candidly as did the republicans in Frankfurt. Then he too asserts that Germany is not yet in possession of the If Reichensperger, the patriot, says this, Germany must be in a bad way! Herr Reichensperger continues, the Government has made no reservations (!) but merely expressed wishes. There was reason enough for this and I also hope that the National Assembly will not always ignore the opinions of governments when making decisions. it is outside our competence to lay down the sphere of competence of the Frankfurt National Assembly; the National Assembly itself has refused to advance theories concerning its own competence; it has acted in a practical manner when necessity has demanded action. In other words, at the time when the Frankfurt Assembly was omnipotent, it failed during the revolutionary agitation to settle the inevitable conflict with the German governments with one decisive stroke. It has preferred to postpone the decision and to fight small skirmishes with one or another Government over each individual resolution, skirmishes which weaken the Assembly the further it recedes from the time of the revolution and the more it compromises itself in the eyes of the people by its feeble actions. And in this respect, Herr Reichensperger is quite right: it is not worth our while to come to the aid of an Assembly which has forsaken itself! But it is touching when Herr Reichensperger says: It is indeed unstatesmanlike to dispose of these practical questions once and for all by means of a forceful decision; it is ..unstatesmanlike if, in the face of reactionary attempts to halt the movement, the revolutionary mandate were asserted, a mandate which every Assembly that has come into being as a result of barricade fighting possesses. Cromwell, Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon and the entire English and French revolutions were indeed exceedingly unstatesmanlike , but Bassermann, Biedermann, Eisenmann, Wiedenmann and Dahlmann behave in a very statesmanlike manner! Statesmen disappear altogether when a revolution takes place, and the revolution must be temporarily dormant for statesmen to re-emerge, and, moreover, statesmen of the calibre of Herr Reichensperger II, the deputy for the Kempen district. Herr Reichensperger may be right. If the Assembly engages in a discussion of competence, it may give rise to clashes, possibly leading to a civil war and intervention by the French and the Russians. If the Assembly does not discuss this, however, and, in fact, it has not done so, a civil war is even more certain. The conflicts which, at the beginning of the revolution, were still fairly simple, every day become more involved, and the longer the decision is delayed, the more difficult and the more bloody will be the solution. A country like Germany, which is forced to work its way up from indescribable fragmentation to unity, which, if it does not want to perish, needs the more stringent revolutionary centralisation, the more divided it has been up to now, a country which contains twenty Vend es, which is sandwiched between the two most powerful and most centralised states of the Continent and surrounded by numerous small neighbours, with whom it is on strained terms, if not at war such a country cannot, in the present period of universal revolution, avoid either civil war or war with other countries. These wars, which we will certainly have to face, will be the more perilous and devastating, the more irresolute is the conduct of the people and its leaders and the longer the decision is postponed. If Herr Reichensperger s statesmen remain at the helm, we might witness another Thirty Years War. But, fortunately, the force of events, the German people, the Emperor of Russia and the French people also have a say in the matter. Herr Berg has several reasons for opposing Jacoby s motion. The first is this: Mr. Cobden, with his motion to abolish the Corn Laws, also belonged to the minority in the House of Commons from 1840 to 1845. He belonged to a party which had been defeated within a legislative body . What did he do? He sought support from outside . He did not simply state his disapproval of parliamentary decisions, he went much further; he set up and organised the Anti-Corn Law League and the Anti-Corn Law press, in short, the whole enormous agitation against the Corn Laws. According to Herr Berg, this was an attempt that was bound to lead to civil war . The minority in the erstwhile United Diet likewise sought support from outside . Herr Camphausen, Herr Hansemann and Herr Milde had no scruples whatever over this. The facts that stand as proof of this are well known. It is obvious that the consequences of their conduct, according to Herr Berg, were bound to lead to civil war . They led not to civil war, however, but to the Ministry. We could cite a hundred more such examples. The minority in a legislative body, if it does not want to bring about civil war, must not, therefore, seek support from outside. But what then does from outside mean? It means the constituents, i.e. the people who create the legislative body. If one is no longer supposed to obtain support by influencing these constituents, where is one to gain support? Are the speeches of Hansemann, Reichensperger, von Berg and so on, delivered merely for the benefit of the Assembly or also for the public, to whom they are presented in stenographic reports? Are not these speeches likewise means by which this party within a legislative body seeks, or hopes, to obtain support from outside"? In short, Herr Berg s principle would lead to the abolition of all political propaganda. For propaganda is simply the practical application of the immunity of advocates of freedom of the press and of freedom of association, i.e. of freedoms which legally exist in Prussia. Whether these freedoms lead to civil war or not is not our concern. It is sufficient that they exist, and we shall see where it leads , if they continue to be infringed. First, as regards Jacoby s motion, there is no question of a minority objecting and leaving . Secondly, the efforts of the minority to find recognition outside the legislative authority did, it is true, not begin today or yesterday , for they date from the moment when legislative authorities and minorities came into being. Thirdly, it is not the fact that the minority expressed its objections and left the Pre-parliament which led to civil war, but Herr Mittermaier s moral conviction that Hecker, Fickler and their associates were traitors to their country, and the measures which the Government of Baden consequently took and which were dictated by the most abject fear. The civil war argument, which is, of course, apt to throw the German burgher into a dreadful state of alarm, is followed by the argument about the absence of a mandate. This weighty argument has been greatly admired by the legal experts and legal dilettanti in the Assembly. We have no mandate! Nevertheless, two minutes later, the same Herr Berg asserts that the Frankfurt Assembly was convoked in order to create the future Constitution of Germany, in concert with the German governments , and it is to be hoped that the Prussian Government will not, in this case, ratify it without consulting the Agreement Assembly or the Chamber which is to be elected under the new Constitution. The Ministry has nevertheless immediately informed the Assembly of its recognition of the Imperial Regent, [Archduke John of Austria] as well as of its reservations, thereby inviting the Assembly to pronounce its decision. It is therefore precisely the point of view expressed by Herr Berg, his own speech and Herr Auerswald s information which lead to the conclusion that the Assembly certainly has a mandate to deal with the Frankfurt resolutions. We have no mandate! Hence, if the Frankfurt Assembly reintroduces censorship, if it sends Bavarian and Austrian troops to Prussia to support the Crown in a conflict between the Chamber and the Crown, then Herr Berg has no mandate"! What mandate has Herr Berg? Literally only this: to agree with the Crown upon the Constitution . By no means has he, therefore, a mandate to put down parliamentary questions, and to agree to laws on immunity, on the civic militia, on redemption and to all other laws not mentioned in the Constitution. This is what reactionaries daily assert. Berg himself says: Nevertheless, under the force of necessity, Herr Berg and the entire Assembly constantly abandon their mandate. The Assembly must do so due to the revolutionary, or rather, at present, reactionary, provisional state of affairs. Because of this provisional state, everything serving to safeguard the achievements of the March revolution falls within the competence of the Assembly and if it can achieve this by exerting moral influence on the Frankfurt Assembly, then the Agreement Chamber is not only entitled, but even obliged, to do so. Then follows the Rhenish-Prussian argument, which is of special importance for us Rhinelanders, because it shows how we are represented in Berlin. We shall not discuss at all the idle speculations about what we might prefer if Prussia is turned into a Berlin republic , nor the new theory about the conditions of existence of the Prussian state etc. As Rhinelanders, we simply protest against the statement that we have come under the jurisdiction of the Prussian Crown . On the contrary the Prussian Crown has come to us. The next speaker against the motion is Herr Simons from Elberfeld. He repeats everything that Herr Berg has said. He is followed by a speaker from the Left and then by Herr Zachari . Zachari repeats everything that Herr Simons has said. Deputy Duncker repeats everything that Herr Zachari has said, but he also adds a few other things, or he expresses what has been said before in such an extreme way, that we find it advisable to deal briefly with his speech. According to Herr Duncker, the authority of the Central Government and the National Assembly and this willing obedience exist; the obedience consists in the people submitting blindly to this authority, whereas the individual governments make reservations and, when it suits them, refuse ! to obey. Recognition of the sovereignty of the Frankfurt Assembly by the representatives of 16 million Germans is thus merely a theoretical statement"!? Hence, the mere opinions, the views held by the Prussian Government and Parliament are supposed to be capable of making the resolutions of the National Assembly impossible. Here we have again all the old Prussian arrogance, the Berlin national patriotism in all its old glory, with the pigtail and crooked stick of old Fritz [King Frederick II of Prussia]. It is true, we are only a minority, only two-fifths (and not even that) but we will certainly show the majority that we are masters in Germany, that we are Prussians! We do not advise the gentlemen of the Right to provoke a conflict of this kind between two-fifths and three-fifths . The numerical balance may prove to be quite different, and many a province may remember that it has been German from time immemorial, but that it has been Prussian for only thirty years. Herr Duncker has a remedy, however. Those in Frankfurt must, along with us, pass only those resolutions that express the reasonable collective will, the true opinion of the public, so that they can be approved by the moral consciousness of the nation , i.e. resolutions after Deputy Duncker s own heart. After this profound definition of sovereignty, which is in keeping with his moral consciousness, Herr Duncker heaves a sigh: In any case, this belongs to the future , and thus concludes his speech. Lack of space and time prevents us from discussing the speeches of the Left made on the same day. Nevertheless, even from the speeches of the Right presented here, our readers will have realised that Herr Parrisius was not entirely mistaken when he moved the adjournment because the temperature in the hall has risen so high that it is impossible to maintain absolute clarity of thought'! We must bring our report of the debate to a hasty close, but cannot refrain from presenting a few examples from the profusion of penetrating thoughts and bright ideas expressed by the Right. Deputy Abegg opened the second day of the debate with a threat to the Assembly: to get to the bottom of this motion, one would have to repeat all the Frankfurt debates in their entirety and the High Assembly is obviously not entitled to do this! Their constituents with their practical tact and practical sense would never approve of this! Incidentally, what is to become of German unity, if (now follows a particularly penetrating thought ) people do not simply confine themselves to making reservations , but express their firm approval or disapproval of the Frankfurt resolutions . In this case nothing remains but purely formal submissiveness"! Of course, purely formal submissiveness can be evaded by reservations and, if need be, even directly denied that cannot harm German unity; but to approve or disapprove of these resolutions and to judge them with regard to their style, logic or usefulness that s the limit! Herr Abegg concludes with the observation that it was for the Frankfurt Assembly, and not the Berlin Assembly, to comment upon the reservations presented to the Assembly in Berlin, not that in Frankfurt. One ought not to anticipate the Frankfurt deputies as this would surely be an insult to them! The gentlemen in Berlin are not competent to express an opinion on statements made by their own Ministers. Let us skip the idols of the small people, such as Baltzer, K mpf and Gr ff, and make haste to hear the hero of the day, the incomparable Baumstark. Deputy Baumstark declares that he would never pronounce himself incompetent, unless he is forced to admit no knowledge of the matter in hand and surely eight weeks of debate cannot leave one with no knowledge of the matter? Consequently, Deputy Baumstark is competent. Namely, in the following manner: Herr Baumstark thinks, therefore, that sometimes there can be very special reasons to contradict even historical facts . Indeed, the gentlemen of the Right usually have no scruples in this respect. Herr Baumstark, moreover, declares himself once again incompetent, by pushing the competence on to the shoulders of all political philosophers, from Plato down to Dahlmann . Herr Baumstark, of course, does not belong to this category of political philosophers. Then Herr Baumstark makes the following penetrating pronouncement which, even on the closest examination, will not be against all common sense . Thus, Herr Baumstark once more declares himself incompetent, and this time, in his place, it is popular opinion that is competent to judge the republic. Popular opinion, therefore, has more knowledge about the matter than Deputy Baumstark. At last, however, the speaker proves that there are also matters about which he has some knowledge , and first and foremost among these is popular sovereignty. Then follows a series of extremely penetrating thoughts and bright ideas about Brandenburg-Prussian history and popular sovereignty causing the neighbouring journalist to forget all worldly sufferings in a fit of constitutional ecstasy and doctrinaire bliss. One has to admire the deep moral feeling of the Brandenburg philistines of the seventeenth century who, profoundly moved by their profits, acclaimed the Elector when he attacked their enemies, the feudal lords, and sold privileges to the philistines but one has to admire even more the Common sense and bright ideas of Herr Baumstark, who regards this acclamation as an expression of popular sovereignty"! The popular sovereignty of flogging, serfdom and soccage services is, for Herr Baumstark, genuine popular sovereignty. An artless admission! From genuine popular sovereignty, Herr Baumstark now goes on to consider false popular sovereignties. This is then proved by a long constitutional rigmarole in which, to cut a long story short, he asserts that, from 1811 to 1847, the people of Prussia called continuously for a Constitution, and never for a Republic (!). This is naturally followed by the remark that the people has turned away in indignation from the recent republican insurrection in Southern Germany. From this it follows quite naturally that the second kind of popular sovereignty (although it is no longer the genuine one) is the constitutional sovereignty proper . Then Herr Baumstark raises a word against this broadest basis. This basis leads to the decline of countries, to barbarism! We have no Cato, who could give the republic a moral foundation. Herr Baumstark then begins to blow Montesquieu s old horn of republican virtue a horn which has long been out of tune and full of dents and to blow it so loudly that the neighbouring journalist, in transports of admiration, chimes in likewise and, to the astonishment of all Europe, demonstrates brilliantly that it is precisely republican virtue ... which leads to constitutionalism"! Meanwhile, Herr Baumstark changes his tune and also comes to constitutionalism but through the absence of republican virtue. The reader can imagine the splendid effect of this duet when, after a series of the most heart-rendingly discordant notes, the two voices finally unite to produce the conciliatory chord of constitutionalism. After a lengthy argument, Herr Baumstark comes to the conclusion that the Ministers have actually made no real reservation at all, but merely a slight reservation concerning the future and, in the end, he finds himself on the broadest basis, since he considers only a democratic and constitutional state to be Germany s salvation. He is so overwhelmed by the prospect of Germany s future that he gives vent to his feelings by crying: He was indeed quite right when he said this unfortunate broadest basis! Several speakers from both sides then take the floor but, after Deputy Baumstark, we dare not present them to our readers. We shall just mention Deputy Wachsmuth s declaration that his principal tenet is the point made by the noble Stein: The will of free men is the unshakeable support of every throne. Indeed, the profusion of penetrating thoughts and bright ideas and the healthy feeling for true freedom displayed by the speakers of the majority in this debate are far from matching the depth and penetration of the thoughts of the neighbouring journalist!

Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, July 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/07/18.htm

Events have fully borne out our views. The unimpeded capture of Schleswig by the Danes, the recapture of the country and the march to Jutland, the retreat to the Schlei, the repeated capture of the duchy up to Koenigsau-this utterly incomprehensible conduct of the war from first to last has shown the Schleswigers what sort of protection they can expect from the revolutionary, great, strong, united, etc., Germany, from the supposedly sovereign nation of forty-five million. However, in order that they lose all desire to become German, and that "the Danish yoke" appear infinitely more desirable to them than "German liberty", the Prussians, in the name of the German Confederation, negotiated the armistice of which we print toddy a word-for-word translation. Hitherto it has been the custom, when signing an armistice, for the two armies to maintain their positions, or as a last resort, a narrow neutral strip was interposed between them. Under this armistice, the first result of "the prowess of Prussian arms", the victorious Prussians withdraw over 20 miles, from Kolding to this side of Lauenburg, whereas the defeated Danes maintain their positions at Kolding and relinquish only Alsen. Furthermore, in the event of the armistice being called off, the Danes are to advance to the positions they held on June 24, in other words they are to occupy a six to seven miles wide stretch of North Schleswig without firing a shot-a stretch from which they were twice driven out -- whereas the Germans are allowed to advance only to Apenrade and its environs. Thus "the honor of the German arms is preserved" and North Schleswig, already exhausted because it was deluged with troops four times, is promised a possible fifth and sixth invasion. But that is not all. A part of Schleswig is to be occupied by Danish troops even during the armistice. Under Clause 8, Schleswig is to be occupied by regiments recruited in the duchy, i.e., partly by soldiers from Schleswig who took part in the movement, and partly by soldiers who at that time were stationed in Denmark and fought in the ranks of the Danish army against the Provisional Government. They are commanded by Danish officers and are in every respect Danish troops. That is how the Danish papers, too, size up the situation. The Fadrelandet of July 13 writes: On top of that we have the movement in Schleswig-Holstein. The Danes call it a riot, and the Prussians treat it as a riot. The Provisional Government, which has been recognized by Prussia and the German Confederation, is mercilessly sacrificed; all laws, decrees, etc., issued after Schleswig became independent are abrogated; on the other hand, the repealed Danish laws have again come into force. In short, the reply concerning Wildenbruch's famous Note, a reply which Herr Auerswald refused to give, can be found here in Clause 7 of the proposed armistice. Everything that was revolutionary in the movement is ruthlessly destroyed, and the government created by the revolution is to be replaced by a legitimate administration nominated by three legitimate monarchs. The troops of Holstein and Schleswig are again to be commanded by Danes and thrashed by Danes; the ships of Holstein and Schleswig are to remain "Danish property" as before, despite the latest order of the Provisional Government. The new government which they intend to set up puts the finishing touch to all this. The Fadrelandet declares: This semi-official paper thus promises the duchies that they will be swamped not only with Danish troops but also with Danish civil servants. A partly-Danish government will take up its residence in Rendsburg on the officially recognized territory of the German Confederation. These are the advantages which the armistice brings Schleswig. The advantages for Germany are just as great. The admission of Schleswig to the German Confederation is not mentioned at all. On the contrary, the decision of the Confederation is flatly repudiated by the composition of the new government. The German Confederation chooses the members for Holstein, and the King of Denmark chooses those for Schleswig. Schleswig is therefore under Danish, and not German, jurisdiction. Germany would have rendered a real service in this Danish war if she had compelled Denmark to abolish the Sound tax, a form of old feudal robbery. The German seaports, hard hit by the blockade and the seizure of their ships, would have willingly borne the burden even longer if it led to the abolition of the Sound tax. The governments also made it known everywhere that the abolition of this tax must at any rate be brought about. And what came of all this boasting? Britain and Russia want the tax kept, and of course Germany obediently acquiesces. It goes without saying that in exchange for the return of the ships, the supplies requisitioned in Jutland have to be refunded, on the principle that Germany is rich enough to pay for her glory. These are the advantages which the Hansemann ministry offers in this draft armistice to the German nation. These are the fruits of a war waged for three months against a small nation of a million and a half. That is the result of all the boasting by our national papers, our formidable Dane-haters! It is said that the armistice will not be concluded. General Wrangel, encouraged by Beseler, has definitely refused to sing it, despite repeated requests by Count Pourtales, who brought him Auerswald's order to sign it, and despite numerous reminders that it was his duty as a Prussian general to do so. Wrangel stated that he is above all subordinated to the German central authority, and the latter will not approve of the armistice unless the armies maintain their present positions and the Provisional Government remains in office until the peace is concluded. Thus the Prussian project will probably not be carried out, but it is nevertheless interesting as a demonstration of how Prussia, when she takes over the reins, is capable of defending Germany's honor and interests.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 51 July 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/07/21.htm

Nevertheless, put off thy shoes from off thy feet, German patriot, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. These barbarities are the last remnants of Christian-German glory, the last links of the historical chain which connects you with your illustrious ancestors all the way back to the forest of the Cherusci. The musty air, the feudal mire which we find here in their classic unadulterated form are the very own products of our fatherland, and every true German should exclaim with the poet: Reading the Bill, it seems to you at first glance that our Minister of Agriculture Herr Gierke, on the orders of Herr Hansemann, has brought off a terrifically "bold stroke", has done away with the Middle Ages by a stroke of the pen, and of course quite gratuitously. But when one looks at the Bill's motivation, one discovers that it sets out straight away to prove that no feudal obligations whatever ought to be abolished without compensation, that is to say, it starts with a bold assertion which directly contradicts the "bold stroke". The minister's practical timidity now maneuvers warily and prudently between these two bold postures. On the left "the general welfare" and "the demands of the spirit of our time"; on the right the "established rights of the lords of the manor"; in the middle the "praiseworthy idea of a freer development of rural relations" represented by Herr Gierke's shamefaced embarrassment -- what a picture! In short, Herr Gierke fully recognizes that feudal obligations in general ought to be abolished only against compensation. Thus the most onerous, the most widespread, the principal obligations are to continue or, seeing that the peasants have in fact already done away with them, they are to be reimposed. But, Herr Gierke observes, The revolution in the countryside consisted in the actual elimination of all feudal obligations. The government of action, which recognizes the revolution, recognizes it in the countryside by destroying it underhandedly. It is quite impossible to restore the old status quo completely; the peasants would promptly kill their feudal lords -- even Herr Gierke realizes that. An impressive list of insignificant feudal obligations existing only in a few places is therefore abolished, but the principal feudal obligation epitomized in the simple term corvee is revived. As a result of all the rights that are to be abolished, the aristocracy will sacrifice less than 50,000 thaler a year, but will thereby save several million. Indeed the minister hopes that they will thus placate the peasants and even gain their votes at future parliamentary elections. This would really be a very good deal, provided Herr Gierke does not miscalculate. In this way the objections of the peasants would be eliminated, and so would those of the aristocrats, in so far as they correctly understand their position. There remains the Chamber, the scruples of the inflexible legalists and radicals. The distinction between obligations that are to be abolished and those that are to be retained -- which is simply the distinction between practically worthless obligations and very valuable obligations -- must be based as regards the Chamber on some semblance of legal and economic justification. Herr Gierke must prove that the obligations to be abolished 1. have an insufficient inner justification, 2. are incompatible with the general welfare, 3. are incompatible with the demands of the spirit of our time, and 4. that their abolition is fundamentally no infringement of property rights, i.e., no expropriation without compensation. In order to prove the insufficient justification of these dues and services Herr Gierke delves into the darkest recesses of feudal law. He invokes the entire, "originally very slow development of the Germanic states over a period of a thousand years". But what good will it do? The deeper he digs, the more he rakes up the stagnant mire of feudal law, the more does that feudal law prove that the obligations in question have, not an insufficient justification, but from the feudal point of view, a very solid justification. The hapless minister merely causes general amusement when he tries his hardest to induce feudal law to make cryptic pronouncements in the style of modern civil law, or to let the feudal lord of the twelfth century think and judge like a bourgeois of the nineteenth century. Herr Gierke fortunately has inherited Herr von Patow's principle that everything emanating from feudal sovereignty and serfdom is to be abolished without payment, but everything else is to be abolished only against payment of compensation. But does Herr Gierke really think that special perspicacity is required in order to show that all and every obligation subject to repeal emanates from feudal sovereignty? It is hardly necessary to add that for the sake of consistency Herr Gierke constantly insinuates modern legal concepts into feudal legal regulations, and in an extremity he always invokes them. But if Herr Gierke evaluates some of these obligations in terms of the modern ideas of law, then it is incomprehensible why the same should not be done with all obligations. In that case, however, the corvee, faced with the freedom of the individual and of property, would certainly come off badly. Herr Gierke fares even worse when he advances the argument of public welfare and the demands of the spirit of our time in support of his differentiations. Surely it is self-evident that if these insignificant obligations impede the public welfare and are incompatible with the demands of the spirit of our time, then this applies in still greater measure to such obligations as labor service, the corvee, laudemium, etc. Or does Herr Gierke consider that the right to pluck the peasants' geese (S 1, No. 14) is out of date, but the right to pluck the peasants is not? Then follows the demonstration that the abolition of those particular obligations does not infringe any property rights. Of course, only spurious arguments can be adduced to prove such a glaring falsehood; it can indeed only be done by reckoning up these rights to show the squires how worthless they are for them, though this, obviously, can be proved only approximately. And so Herr Gierke sedulously reckons up all the 18 sections of Clause 1, and does not notice that, to the extent in which he succeeds in proving the given obligations to be worthless, he also succeeds in proving the proposed legislation to be worthless. Virtuous Herr Gierke! How it pains us to have to destroy his fond delusions and obliterate his Archimedean-feudalist diagrams. But there is another difficulty. Both in previous commutations of the obligations now to be abolished and in all other commutations, the peasants were flagrantly cheated in favor of the aristocracy by corrupt commissions. The peasants now demand the revision of all commutation agreements concluded under the previous government, and they are quite justified in doing so. But Herr Gierke will have nothing to do with this, since "formal right and law are opposed" to it; such an attitude is altogether opposed to any progress, since every new law nullifies some old formal right and law. Herr Gierke now proves with staggering thoroughness that such a procedure Herr Gierke thus sees in this an infringement of the rights of property, which would undermine all legal principles. Why is the abolition of the obligations under discussion without compensation not an infringement? These are not merely indubitable contractual relations, but claims that were invariably met and not contested since time immemorial, whereas the demand for revision concerns contracts that are by no means uncontested, since the bribery and swindling are notorious, and can be proved in many cases. It cannot be denied that, though the abolished obligations are quite insignificant, Herr Gierke, by abolishing them, secures "advantages to those under obligations by means that run counter to the eternal legal principles" and this is "directly opposed to formal right and law"; he "undermines the entire legal framework of landed property" and attacks the very foundation of the "most indubitable" rights. Really, Herr Gierke, was it worth while to go to all trouble and commit such a grievous sin in order to achieve such paltry results? Herr Gierke does indeed attack property -- that is quite indisputable -- but it is feudal property he attacks, not modern, bourgeois property. By destroying feudal property he strengthens bourgeois property which arises on the ruins of feudal property. The only reason he does not want the commutation agreements revised is because by means of these contracts feudal ownership relations were converted into bourgeois ones, and consequently he cannot revise them without at the same time formally infringing bourgeois property. Bourgeois property is, of course, as sacred and inviolable as feudal property is vulnerable and -- depending on the requirements and courage of the ministers -- violable What in brief is the significance of this lengthy law? It is the most striking proof that the German revolution of 1848 is merely a parody of the French revolution of 1789. On August 4, 1789, three weeks after the storming of the Bastille, the French people, in a single day, got the better of the feudal obligations. On July 11, 1848, four months after the March barricades, the feudal obligations got the better of the German people Teste Gierke cum Hansemanno. The French bourgeoisie of 1789 never left its allies, the peasants, in the lurch. It knew that the abolition of feudalism in the countryside and the creation of a free, Iand-owning peasant class was the basis of its rule. The German bourgeoisie of 1848 unhesitatingly betrays the peasants, who are its natural allies, flesh of its own flesh and without whom it cannot stand up to the aristocracy. The perpetuation of feudal rights and their endorsement in the form of the (illusory) commutations -- such is result of the German revolution of 1848. There was much ado about nothing.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 60 July 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/07/30.htm

This great, this scholarly, this veracious proposition can be found in Herr Wolfers leading article in the always well-informed K lnische Zeitung. It is indeed strange. England has the most numerous, the most concentrated, the most classic proletariat, a proletariat which every five or six years is decimated by the crushing misery of a commercial crisis, by hunger and typhus; a proletariat which for half its life is redundant to industry and unemployed. One man in every ten in England is a pauper, and one pauper in every three is an inmate in one of the Poor Law Bastilles. The annual cost of poor-relief in England almost equals the entire expenditure of the Prussian state. Poverty and pauperism have been openly declared in England to be necessary elements of the present industrial system and the national wealth. Yet, despite this, where in England is there any trace of hatred against the bourgeoisie? There is no other country in the world where, with the huge growth of the proletariat, the contradiction between proletariat and bourgeoisie has reached such a high level as in England; no other country presents such glaring contrasts between extreme poverty and immense wealth yet where is there any trace of hatred against the bourgeoisie? Obviously, the associations of workers, set up secretly before 1825 and openly after 1825, associations not for just a day against any single manufacturer, but permanent associations directed against entire groups of manufacturers, workers associations of entire industries, entire towns, finally associations uniting large numbers of workers throughout England, all these associations and their numerous fights against the manufacturers, the strikes, which led to acts of violence, revengeful destructions, arson, armed attacks and assassinations all these actions just prove the love of the proletariat for the bourgeoisie. The entire struggle of the workers against the manufacturers over the last 80 years, a struggle which, beginning with machine wrecking, has developed through associations, through isolated attacks on the person and property of the manufacturers and on the few workers who were loyal to them, through bigger and smaller rebellions, through the insurrections of 1839 and 1842 , has become the most advanced class struggle the world has seen. The class war of the Chartists, the organised party of the proletariat, against the organised political power of the bourgeoisie, has not yet led to those terrible bloody clashes which took place during the June uprising in Paris, but it is waged by a far larger number of people with much greater tenacity and on a much larger territory this social civil war is of course regarded by the K lnische Zeitung and its Wolfers as nothing but a long demonstration of the love of the English proletariat for its bourgeois employers. Not so long ago it was fashionable to present England as the classic land of social contradictions and struggles, and to declare that France, compared with England s so-called unnatural situation, was a happy land with her Citizen King, her bourgeois parliamentary warriors and her upright workers, who always fought so bravely for the bourgeoisie. It was not so long ago that the K lnische Zeitung kept harping on this well-worn tune and saw in the English class struggles a reason for warning Germany against protectionism and the unnatural hothouse industry to which it gives rise. But the June days have changed everything. The horrors of the June battles have scared the K lnische Zeitung, and the millions of Chartists in London, Manchester and Glasgow vanish into thin air in face of the forty thousand Paris insurgents. France has become the classic country as regards hatred of the bourgeoisie and, according to the present assertions of the K lnische Zeitung, this has been the case since 1830. How strange. For the last ten years English agitators, received with acclamation by the entire proletariat, have untiringly preached fervent hatred of the bourgeoisie at meetings. and in pamphlets and journals, whereas the French working-class and socialist literature has always advocated reconciliation with the bourgeoisie on the grounds that the class antagonisms in France were far less developed than in England. The men at whose very name the K lnische Zeitung makes the triple sign of the cross, men like Louis Blanc, Cabet, Caussidi re and Ledru-Rollin, have, for many years before and after the February revolution, preached peace with the bourgeoisie, and they generally did it in good faith. Let the K lnische Zeitung look through any of the writings of these people, or through the R forme , the Populaire , or even the working-class journals published during the last few years like the Union , the Ruche populaire and the Fraternit though it should be sufficient to mention two works which everybody knows, Louis Blanc s entire Histoire de dix ans, especially the last part, and his Histoire de la r volution fran aise in two volumes. But the K lnische Zeitung is not content with merely asserting as a fact that no hatred exists in England against the class which in France is called the bourgeoisie (in England too, our well-informed colleague, cf. the Northern Star for the last two years) it also explains why this must be so. Peel saved the English bourgeoisie from this hatred by repealing the monopolies and establishing Free Trade. By doing away with the monopoly of the aristocracy, Peel saved the bourgeoisie from the threatening hatred of the proletariat, according to the amazing logic of the K lnische Zeitung. The English people! But the English people have been fighting the Free Traders since 1839 at all their meetings and in the press, and compelled them, when the Anti-Corn Law League was at the height of its fame, to hold their meetings in secret and to admit only persons who had a ticket. The people with bitter irony compared the practice of the Free Traders with their fine words, and fully identified the bourgeois with the Free Trader. Sometimes the English people were even forced temporarily to seek the support of the aristocracy, the monopolises, against the bourgeoisie, e.g. in their fight for the ten-hour day. And we are asked to believe that the people who were so well able to drive the Free Traders off the rostrum at public meetings, that it was these English people who originally conceived the ideas of Free Trade! The K lnische Zeitung, in its artless simplicity, not only repeats mechanically the illusions of the big capitalists of Manchester and Leeds, but lends a gullible ear to their deliberate lies. The bourgeois in England enjoys no privileges, no monopolies. But in France things are different: The only monopoly which the worthy K lnische Zeitung knows is the customs monopoly, i.e. the monopoly which only appears to affect the workers, but actually falls on the bourgeoisie, on all industrialists, who do not profit from tariff-protection. The K lnische Zeitung knows only a local, legally created monopoly, the monopoly which was attacked by the Free Traders from Adam Smith to Cobden. But the monopoly of capital, which comes into being without the aid of legislation and often exists despite it, this monopoly is not recognised by the gentlemen of the K lnische Zeitung. Yet it is this monopoly which directly and ruthlessly weighs upon the workers and causes the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Precisely this monopoly is the specifically modern monopoly, which produces the modern class contradictions, and the solution of just these contradictions is the specific task of the nineteenth century. But this monopoly of capital becomes more powerful, more comprehensive, and more threatening in proportion as the other small and localised monopolies disappear. The freer competition becomes as a result of the abolition of all monopolies, the more rapidly is capital concentrated in the hands of the industrial barons, the more rapidly does the petty bourgeoisie become ruined and the faster does the industry of England, the country of capital s monopoly, subjugate the neighbouring countries. If the monopolies of the French, German and Italian bourgeoisie were abolished, Germany, France and Italy would be reduced to proletarians compared with the all-absorbing English bourgeoisie. The pressure which the individual English bourgeois exerts on the individual English proletarian would then be matched by the pressure exerted by the English bourgeoisie as a whole on Germany, France and Italy, and it is particularly the petty bourgeoisie of these countries which would suffer most. These are such commonplace ideas that today they can no longer be expounded without causing offence to anyone but the learned gentlemen of the K lnische Zeitung. These profound thinkers see in Free Trade the only means by which France can be saved from a devastating war between the workers and the bourgeois. To reduce the bourgeoisie of a country to the level of the proletariat is indeed a means of solving class contradictions which is worthy of the K lnische Zeitung.

Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, August 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/08/01.htm

The Frankfurt Assembly, moreover, declared that the seven partitions of Poland were benefactions wasted on the Poles. Had not the forcible intrusion of the Jewish-German race lifted Poland to a level of culture and a stage of science which that country could never have dreamed of! Deluded, ungrateful Poles! If your country had not been partitioned you would have had to ask this favour yourselves of the Frankfurt Assembly. Pastor Bonavita Blank of the Paradise monastery near Schaffhausen trained magpies and starlings to fly in and out. He had cut away the lower part of their bill so that they were unable to get their own food and could only receive it from his hands. The philistines who from a distance saw the birds alight on the Reverend s shoulders and seem to be friendly with him, admired his great culture and learning. His biographer says that the birds loved their benefactor. Yet the fettered, maimed, branded Poles refuse to love their Prussian benefactors. We could not give a better description of the benefactions which Prussia bestowed on the Poles than that provided by the report which the learned historiographer Herr Stenzel submitted on behalf of the Committee for International Law, a report which forms the basis of the debate. The report, entirely in the style of the conventional diplomatic documents, first recounts how the Grand Duchy of Poznan was set up in 1815 by incorporation and merging. Then follow the promises which at the same time Frederick William III made to the inhabitants of Poznan, i.e., the safeguarding of their nationality, language and religion, the appointment of a native governor, and participation in the famous Prussian constitution. The extent to which these promises were kept is well known. The freedom of communication between the three sections of Poland, to which the Congress of Vienna could the more easily agree the less feasible it was, was of course never put into effect. The make-up of the population is then examined. Herr Stenzel calculates that 790,000 Poles, 420,000 Germans and about 80,000 Jews lived in the Grand Duchy in 1843, making a total of 1,300,000. Herr Stenzel s statement is challenged by the Poles, notably by Archbishop Przyluski, according to whom there are considerably more than 800,000 Poles, and, if one deducts the Jews, officials and soldiers, hardly 250,000 Germans, living in Poznan. Let us, however, accept Herr Stenzel s figures. For our purposes it is quite sufficient. To avoid all further discussion, let us concede that there are 420,000 Germans living in Poznan. Who are these Germans, who by the inclusion of the Jews have been brought up to half a million? The Slavs are a predominantly agricultural people with little aptitude for urban trades in the form in which they were hitherto carried on in the Slav countries. The first crude stage of commerce, when it was still mere hawking, was left to Jewish pedlars. With the growth of culture and population the need for urban trades and urban concentration made itself felt, and Germans moved into the Slav countries. The Germans, who after all had their heyday in the petty-bourgeois life of the imperial cities of the Middle Ages, in the sluggish inland trade conducted in caravan style, in a restricted maritime trade, and in the handicraft workshops of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries organized on guild lines the Germans demonstrated their vocation as the philistines of world history by the very fact that they still to this day form the core of the petty bourgeoisie throughout Eastern and Northern Europe and even in America. Many, often most of the craftsmen, shopkeepers and small middlemen in Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw and Krakow, in Stockholm and Copenhagen, in Pest, Odessa and Jassy, in New York and Philadelphia are Germans or of German extraction. All these cities have districts where only German is spoken, and some of them, for example Pest, are almost entirely German. This German immigration, particularly into the Slav countries, went on almost uninterruptedly since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Moreover, from time to time since the Reformation, as a result of the persecution of various sects large groups of Germans were forced to migrate to Poland, where they received a friendly welcome. In other Slav countries, such as Bohemia, Moravia, the Slav population was decimated by German wars of conquest, whereas the German population increased as a result of invasion. The position is clearest in Poland. The German philistines living there for centuries never regarded themselves as politically belonging to Germany any more than did the Germans in North America; just as the French colony in Berlin and the 15,000 Frenchmen in Montevideo do not regard themselves as belonging to France. As far as that was possible during the days of decentralization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they became Poles, German-speaking Poles, who had long since renounced all ties with the mother country. But the Germans brought to Poland culture, education and science, commerce and trades. True, they brought retail trade and guild crafts; by their consumption and the limited intercourse which they established they stimulated production to some extent. Up to 1772 Poland as a whole was not particularly well known for her high standard of education and science, and the same applies to Austrian and Russian Poland since then; of the Prussian part we shall speak later. On the other hand, the Germans prevented the formation of Polish towns with a Polish bourgeoisie. By their distinct language, their separateness from the Polish population, their numerous different privileges and urban codes, they impeded centralization, that most potent of political means by which a country achieves rapid development. Almost every town had its own law; indeed towns with a mixed population had, and often still have, a different law for Germans, Poles and Jews. The German Poles remained at the lowest stage of industrial development; they did not accumulate large capitals; they were neither able to set up large-scale industry nor control any extensive commercial networks. The Englishman Cockerill had to come to Warsaw for industry to strike root in Poland. The entire activity of the German Poles was restricted to retail trade, the handicrafts and at most the corn trade and manufacture (weaving, etc.) on the smallest scale. In considering the merits of the German Poles it should not be forgotten that -they imported German philistinism and German petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness into Poland, and that they combined the worst qualities of both nations without acquiring their good ones. Herr Stenzel seeks to enlist the sympathy of the Germans for the German Poles: Does Herr Stenzel perhaps demand that the Poles should have protected the Germans (i.e., German Poles, who are moreover also natives ) better than themselves? Surely it is obvious that foreigners who immigrate into any country must expect to share the good and bad with the indigenous inhabitants. Now passing to the blessings for which the Poles are indebted to the Prussian government in particular. Frederick II seized the Netze district in 1772, and in the following year the Bromberg canal was built, which made inland navigation between the Oder and Vistula possible. Thus, the first partition of Poland was no robbery. Frederick II merely seized an area which for centuries was an object of dispute. But since when has there no longer existed an independent Pomerania which could have disputed this region? For how many centuries were in fact the rights of Poland to this region no longer challenged? And in general, what meaning has this rusted and rotten theory of disputes and claims, which, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, served the purpose of covering up the naked commercial interests and the policy of rounding off one s lands? What meaning can it have in 1848 when the bottom has been knocked out of all historical justice and injustice? Incidentally, Herr Stenzel ought to bear in mind that according to this junk-heap doctrine the Rhine borders between France and Germany have been an object of dispute for millennia, and that Poland could assert her claims to suzerainty over the province of Prussia and even over Pomerania. In short, the Netze district became part of Prussia and hence ceased to be an object of dispute. Frederick 11 had it colonized by Germans, and so the Netze brethren, who received such praise in connection with the Poznan affair, came into being. The state-promoted Germanization began in 1773. The unexpected sympathy and recognition which Polish Jews have lately received in Germany has found official expression in this passage. Maligned wherever the influence of the Leipzig fair extends as the very incarnation of haggling, avarice and sordidness, they have suddenly become German brethren; with tears of joy honest Michael presses them to his bosom, and Herr Stenzel lays claim to them on behalf of the German nation as Germans who want to remain Germans. Indeed, why should not Polish Jews be genuine Germans? Do not they, and their children from the earliest years, speak German at home"? And what German at that! Incidentally, we would point out to Herr Stenzel that he might just as well lay claim to the whole of Europe and half America, and even part of Asia. German, as everyone knows, is the universal language of the Jews. In New York and Constantinople, in St. Petersburg and Paris the Jews, and their children from the earliest years, speak German at home, and some of them even a more classical German than the Poznan Jews, the kindred allies of the Netze brethren. The report goes on to present the national relations in terms that are as vague as possible and as favourable as possible to the alleged half a million Germans consisting of German Poles, Netze brethren, and Jews. It says that German peasants own more land than the Polish peasants (we shall see how this has come to pass), and that since the first partition of Poland enmity between Poles and Germans, especially Prussians, reached its highest degree. Not only the Poles but also the other Prussians, and especially we from the Rhine, can tell a tale about the rigidly regulated and strictly enforced measures of the worthy Prussian bureaucracy, measures which disturbed not only the old customs and traditional institutions, but also the entire social life, industrial and agricultural production, commerce, mining, in short all social relations without exception. But Herr Stenzel refers here not to the bureaucracy of 1807 48, but to that of 1772 1806, to the officials of genuine, dyed in the wool, Prussianism, whose baseness, corruptibility, cupidity and brutality were clearly evident in the treacherous acts of 1806. These officials are supposed to have protected the Polish peasants against the nobles and received in return nothing but ingratitude; of course the officials ought to have understood that nothing, not even the good things granted or imposed, can compensate for the loss of national sovereignty. We too know the way in which quite recently the Prussian officials used to grant and impose everything. What Rhinelander, who had dealings with newly arrived officials from the old Prussian lands, did not have an opportunity to admire their inimitable, obtrusive priggishness, their impudent meddlesomeness, their overriding insolence and that combination of narrow-mindedness and infallibility. True, with us, in most cases, these old Prussian gentry soon lost some of their roughness for they had no Netze brethren, no secret inquisition, no Prussian law and no floggings deficiency which even brought many of them to an early grave. We do not have to be told what havoc they wrought in Poland, where they could indulge in floggings and secret inquisitions to their heart s content. In short, the arbitrary Prussian rule won such popularity that already after the battle of Jena, the hatred of the Poles found vent in a general uprising and the ejection of the Prussian officials. This, for the time being, put an end to the bureaucratic rule. But in 1815 it returned in a somewhat modified form. The best, reformed, educated, incorruptible officialdom tried their hand at dealing with these refractory Poles. Thus according to Herr Stenzel, the King of Prussia could not possibly agree to keep his own promises and the treaties of Vienna. By means of various arrangements"! By prohibiting Poles from buying land brought under the hammer, and similar measures, which Herr Stenzel covers with the cloak of charity. What would Rhinelanders say if with us, too, the Prussian government were to prohibit Rhinelanders from buying land put up for sale by order of the court. Sufficient pretexts could easily be found, namely: in order to amalgamate the population of the old and new provinces; in order that the natives of the old provinces could share in the blessings of parcellation and of the Rhenish laws; in order that Rhinelanders be induced to emigrate to the old provinces and implant their industries there as well, and so on. There are enough reasons to bestow Prussian colonists on us too. How would we look upon people who bought our land for next to nothing while competition was excluded, and who did it moreover with the support of the government; people who were thrust upon us for the express purpose of accustoming us to the intoxicating motto With God for King and Country"? After all we are Germans, we speak the same language as the people in the old provinces. Yet in Poznan those colonists were sent methodically, with unabated persistence, to the demesnes, the forests and the divided estates of the Polish nobility in order to oust the native Poles and their language from their own country and to set up a truly Prussian province, which was to surpass even Pomerania in black and white fanaticism. In order that the Prussian peasants in Poland should not be left without their natural masters, they were sent the flower of Prussian knighthood, men like Tresckow and L ttichau, who also bought landed estates for a song, and with the aid of government loans. In fact, after the Polish uprising of 1846 , a joint-stock company was formed in Berlin, which enjoyed the gracious protection of the highest personages in the land, and whose purpose was to buy up Polish estates for German knights. The poor starvelings from among the Brandenburg and Pomeranian aristocracy foresaw that trials instituted against the Poles would ruin numerous Polish squires, whose estates would shortly be sold off dirt-cheap. This was a real godsend for many a debt-ridden Don Ranudo from the Uckermark. A fine estate for next to nothing, Polish peasants who could be thrashed, and what is more, a good service rendered to King and Country what brilliant prospects! Thus arose the third German immigration into Poland. Prussian peasants and Prussian noblemen settled throughout Poznan with the declared intention, supported by the government, not of Germanizing, but of Pomeranizing Poznan. The German Poles had the excuse of having contributed in some measure to the promotion of commerce, the Netze brethren could boast that they had reclaimed a few bogs, but this last Prussian invasion has no excuse whatever. Even parcellation was not consistently carried through, the Prussian aristocrats following hard on the heels of the Prussian peasants. Indeed, deeply felt within the calm German heart, where the feelings are so deeply embedded that they never manifest themselves in action there was compassion, expressed by a few alms in 1831 and by dinners and balls in aid of the Poles, so long as it was a matter of dancing and drinking champagne for the benefit of the Poles, and of singing Poland is not yet lost. But when were the Germans prone to do something really decisive, to make a real sacrifice! Indeed, if it were possible to expiate anything with sentimental phrases and dull tub-thumping, then the Germans would emerge as. the purest people in the annals of history. Surely, only the unreasoning, confused, haphazard enthusiasm, which from time immemorial has been a principal adornment of the German national character, could have caused the Germans to be surprised by the Polish demands. The Germans wanted to expiate the injustice the Poles had suffered. What started this injustice? To say nothing of earlier treacheries, it certainly started with the first partition of Poland in 1772. How could this be expiated"? Of course, only by restoration of the status quo existing before 1772, or at least by the Germans returning to the Poles what they had robbed them of since 1772. But this was against the interests of the Germans? Well, if we speak of interests, then it can no longer be a question of sentimentalities like expiation etc.; here the language of cold, unfeeling practice should be used, and we should be spared rhetorical flourishes and expressions of magnanimity. Moreover, firstly, the Poles did not at all only think of the restoration of the Poland of 1772. In any case what the Poles did think is hardly our concern. For the time being they demanded only the reorganisation of the whole of Posznan and mentioned other eventualities only in case of a German-Polish war against Russia. Secondly, the interests and aims of the two nations diverged only insofar as the interests and aims of revolutionary Germany in the field of international relations remained exactly the same as those of the old, absolutist Germany. If Germany s interest and aim is an alliance with Russia, or at least peace with Russia at any price, then of course everything in Poland must remain as it was hitherto. We shall see later, however, to what extent the real interests of Germany are identical with those of Poland. Then follows a lengthy, confused and muddled passage, in which Herr Stenzel expatiates on the fact that the German Poles were right when they wanted to do justice to Poland, but at the same time to remain Prussians and Germans. Of course it is of no concern to Herr Stenzel that the when excludes the but and the but the when. Next comes an equally lengthy and confused historical account, in which Herr Stenzel goes into detail in an attempt to prove that, owing to the diverging interests and aims of the two nations and the ensuing mutual enmity which was steadily growing, a bloody clash was unavoidable. The Germans adhered to the national interests, the Poles merely to the territorial interests. In other words, the Germans demanded that the Grand Duchy should be divided according to nationalities, the Poles wanted the whole of their old territory. This is again not true. The Poles asked for reorganisation but at the same time stated that they were quite willing to relinquish the frontier districts with a mixed population where the majority are Germans and want to join Germany. The inhabitants, however, should not be declared German or Polish by the Prussian officials at will, but according to their own wishes. Herr Stenzel goes on to assert that Willisen s mission was of course bound to fail because of the (alleged, but nowhere existing) resistance of the Poles to the cession of the predominantly German districts. Herr Stenzel was able to examine the statements of Willisen about the Poles and those of the Poles about Willisen. These published statements prove the opposite. But this happens if one is a man who, as Herr Stenzel says, has studied history for many years and deems it his duty never to utter an untruth and never to conceal anything. With the same truthfulness which never conceals what is true, Herr Stenzel easily passes over the cannibalism perpetrated in Poznan, the base and perfidious violation of the Convention of Jaroslawiec , the massacres of Trzemeszno, Miloslaw and Wreschen, the destructive fury of a brutal soldiery worthy of the Thirty Years War, and does not say a word about it. Now Herr Stenzel comes to the four partitions of Poland recently effected by the Prussian Government. First the Netze district and four other districts were torn away (April 14); to this were added certain parts of other districts. This territory with a total population of 593,390 was incorporated in the German Confederation on April 22. Then the city and fortress of Poznan together with the remainder of the left bank of the Warta were also included, making an additional 273,500 persons and bringing the combined population of these lands to double the number of Germans living in the whole of Poznan even according to Prussian estimates. This was effected by an Order in Council on April 26 and already on May 2 they were admitted to the German Confederation. Now Herr Stenzel pleads with the Assembly that it is absolutely essential for Poznan to remain in German hands, that Poznan is an important, powerful fortress, with a population of over 20,000 Germans (most of them Polish Jews) who own two-thirds of all the landed property etc. That Poznan is situated in the midst of a purely Polish territory, that it was forcibly Germanised, and that Polish Jews are not Germans, does not make the slightest difference to men who never utter an untruth and never suppress a truth, to historians of Herr Stenzel s calibre. In short, Poznan, for military reasons, should not be relinquished. As though it were not possible to raze the fortress, which, according to Willisen, is one of the greatest strategic blunders, and to fortify Breslau instead. But ten million (incidentally this is again not true barely five million) have been invested, and it is of course more advantageous to retain this precious work of art and 20 to 30 square miles of Polish land into the bargain. With the city and fortress of Poznan in one s hands, it will be all the easier to seize still more. It was for all these reasons that Pfuel von H llenstein , the well-known philanthropist, carried through two new partitions of Poland, thus meeting all the desires of Herr Stenzel and incorporating three-fourths of the Grand Duchy into Germany. Herr Stenzel is the more grateful for this procedure, since the revival of Louis XIV s chambers of reunion with augmented powers must evidently have demonstrated to this historian that the Germans have learned to apply the lessons of history. According to Herr Stenzel, the Poles ought to find consolation in the fact that their share of the land is more fertile than the incorporated territory, that there is considerably less landed property in their part than in that of the Germans and that no unbiased person will deny that the lot of the Polish peasant under a German Government will be far more tolerable than that of the German peasant under a Polish Government"! History provides some curious examples of this. Finally, Herr Stenzel tells the Poles that even the small part left to them will enable them, by practising all the civic virtues, It is solid! But even more solid are the real reasons for the last four partitions of Poland by the Prussian Government. You worthy German do you believe that the partitions were undertaken in order to deliver your German brothers from Polish rule; to ensure that the fortress of Poznan serves as a bulwark protecting you from any attack; to safeguard the roads of K strin, Glogau and Bromberg, and the Netze canal? What a delusion! You have been shamefully deceived. The sole reason for the recent partitions of Poland was to replenish the Prussian Treasury. The earlier partitions of Poland up to 1815 were annexations of territory by force of arms; the partitions of 1848 are robbery. And now, worthy German, see how you have been deceived! After the third partition of Poland the estates of the big Polish feudal lords and those of the Catholic clergy were confiscated by Frederick William II in favour of the state. As the Declaration of Appropriation issued on July 28, 1796, says, the estates of the church in particular constituted a very considerable part of landed property as a whole. The new demesnes were either managed on the King s account or leased, and they were so extensive that 34 crown-land offices and 21 forestry divisions had to be set up for their administration. Each of these crown-land offices was responsible for a large number of villages; for example, altogether 636 villages came under the ten offices of the Bromberg district, and 127 were administered by the Mogilno crown-land office. In 1796, moreover, Frederick William II confiscated the estates and woodlands of the convent at Owinsk and sold them to the merchant von Tresckow (forefather of the brave Prussian troop leader in the last heroic war ). These estates comprised 24 villages with flour mills and 20,000 morgen [an old German land measure, varying in different localities between 0.25 and 1.23 hectares Trans.] of forest land, worth at least 1,000,000 talers. Furthermore, the crown-land offices of Krotoschin, Rozdrazewo, Orpiszewo and Adelnau, worth at least two million thaler, were in 1819 made over to the Prince of Thurn und Taxis to compensate him for the post-office privileges in several provinces which had become part of Prussia. Frederick William II took over all these estates on the pretext that he could administer them better. Nevertheless, these estates, the property of the Polish nation, were given away, ceded or sold, and the proceeds flowed into the Prussian treasury. The crown lands in Gnesen, Skorzencin and Trzemeszno were broken up and sold. Thus 27 crown-land offices and forestry divisions, to a value of twenty million thaler at the very least, still remain in the hands of the Prussian Government. We are prepared to prove, map in hand, that all these demesnes and forests with very few exceptions, if any at all are located in the incorporated part of Poznan. To prevent this rich treasure from reverting to the Polish nation it had to be absorbed into the German Confederation, and since it could not go to the German Confederation, the German Confederation had to come to it, and three-fourths of Poznan were incorporated. That is the true reason for the four famous partitions of Poland within two months. Neither the protests of this or that nationality nor alleged strategic reasons were decisive the frontier was determined solely by the position of the demesnes, and the rapacity of the Prussian Government. While German citizens were shedding bitter tears over the invented sufferings of their poor brothers in Poznan, while they were waxing enthusiastic about the safety of the Eastern Marches of Germany, and while they allowed themselves to be infuriated against the Poles by false reports about Polish barbarities, the Prussian Government acted on the quiet, and feathered its nest. This German enthusiasm without rhyme or reason merely served to disguise the dirtiest deed in modern history. That, worthy German, is how you are treated by your responsible Ministers! Actually however you ought to have known this beforehand. Whenever Herr Hansemann has a hand in something, it is never a matter of German nationality, military necessity or suchlike empty phrases, but always a matter of cash payment and of net profit. Before dealing with the debate itself we must take another look at the Polish question. The problem of Poznan taken by itself is quite meaningless and insoluble. It is a fragment of the Polish problem and can only be solved in connection with and as a part of it. Only when Poland exists again will it be possible to determine the borders between Germany and Poland. But can and will Poland exist again? This was denied during the debate. A French historian has said: Il y a des peuples n cessaires there are necessary nations. The Polish nation is undoubtedly one of the necessary nations of the nineteenth century. But for no one is Poland s national existence more necessary than for us Germans. What is the main support of the reactionary forces in Europe since 1815, and to some extent even since the first French revolution? It is the Russian-Prussian-Austrian Holy Alliance. And what holds the Holy Alliance together? The partition of Poland, from which all the three allies have profited. The tearing asunder of Poland by the three powers is the tie which links them together; the robbery they jointly committed makes them support one another. From the moment the first robbery of Polish territory was committed Germany became dependent on Russia. Russia ordered Prussia and Austria to remain absolute monarchies, and Prussia and Austria had to obey. The efforts to gain control efforts which were in any case feeble and timid, especially on the part of the Prussian bourgeoisie failed entirely because of the impossibility of breaking away from Russia, and because of the support which Russia offered the feudalist-absolutist class in Prussia. Moreover, as soon as the allies attempted to introduce the first oppressive measures the Poles not only rose to fight for their independence, but simultaneously came out in revolutionary action against their own internal social conditions. The partition of Poland was effected through a pact between the big feudal aristocracy of Poland and the three partitioning powers. It was not an advance, as the ex-poet Herr Jordan maintains, it was the last means the big aristocracy had to protect itself against a revolution, it was thoroughly reactionary. Already the first partition led quite naturally to an alliance of the other classes, i.e. the nobles, the townspeople and to some extent the peasants, both against the oppressors of Poland and against the big Polish aristocracy. The Constitution of 1791 shows that already then the Poles clearly understood that their independence in foreign affairs was inseparable from the overthrow of the aristocracy and from the agrarian reform within the country. The big agrarian countries between the Baltic and the Black seas can free themselves from patriarchal feudal barbarism only by an agrarian revolution, which turns the peasants who are serfs or liable to compulsory labour into free landowners, a revolution which would be similar to the French Revolution of 1789 in the countryside. It is to the credit of the Polish nation that it was the first of all its agricultural neighbours to proclaim this. The first attempted reform was the Constitution of 1791; during the uprising of 1830 Lelewel declared an agrarian revolution to be the only means of saving the country, but the parliament recognised this too late; during the insurrections of 1846 and 1848 the agrarian revolution was openly proclaimed. From the day of their subjugation the Poles came out with revolutionary demands, thereby committing their oppressors still more strongly to a counter-revolutionary course. They compelled their oppressors to maintain the patriarchal feudal structure not only in Poland but in all their other countries as well. The struggle for the independence of Poland, particularly since the Cracow uprising of 1846, is at the same time a struggle of agrarian democracy the only form of democracy possible in Eastern Europe against patriarchal feudal absolutism. So long, therefore, as we help to subjugate Poland, so long as we keep part of Poland fettered to Germany, we shall remain fettered to Russia and to the Russian policy, and shall be unable to eradicate patriarchal feudal absolutism in Germany. The creation of a democratic Poland is a primary condition for the creation of a democratic Germany. But the restoration of Poland and the settlement of her frontiers with Germany is not only necessary, it is the most easily solvable of all the political problems which have arisen in Eastern Europe since the revolution. The struggle for independence of the diverse nationalities jumbled together south of the Carpathians is much more complicated and will lead to far more bloodshed, confusion and civil wars than the Polish struggle for independence and the establishment of the border line between Germany and Poland. Needless to say, it is not a question of restoring a bogus Poland, but of restoring the state upon a viable foundation. Poland must have at least the dimensions of 1772, she must comprise not only the territories but also the estuaries of her big rivers and a large seaboard at least on the Baltic. The Germans could have secured all this for Poland and at the same time protected their own interests and their honour, if after the revolution they had had the courage, for their own sake, arms in hand, to demand that Russia relinquish Poland. Owing to the commingling of Germans and Poles in the border regions and especially along the coast, it goes without saying and this would create no difficulties that both parties would have had to make some concessions to one another, some Germans becoming Polish and some Poles German. After the indecisive German revolution, however, the courage for so resolute an action was lacking. It is all very well to make florid speeches about the liberation of Poland and to welcome passing Poles at railway stations, offering them the most ardent sympathies of the German people (to whom had these sympathies not been offered?); but to start a war with Russia, to endanger the European balance of power and, to cap all, hand over some scraps of the annexed territory only one who does not know the Germans could expect that. And what would a war with Russia have meant? A war with Russia would have meant a complete, open and effective break with the whole of our disgraceful past, the real liberation and unification of Germany, and the establishment of democracy on the ruins of feudalism and on the wreckage of the short-lived bourgeois dream of power. War with Russia would have been the only possible way of vindicating our honour and our interests with regard to our Slav neighbours, notably the Poles. But we were philistines and have remained philistines. We made several dozen small and big revolutions, at which we ourselves took fright even before they were accomplished. We talked big, but carried nothing through. The revolution narrowed our mental horizon instead of broadening it. All problems were approached from the standpoint of the most timid, most narrow-minded, most illiberal philistinism, to the detriment, of course, of our real interests. From the standpoint of this petty philistinism, the great question of Poland s liberation was therefore reduced to the piddling slogan calling for reorganisation of a part of the Province of Poznan, while our enthusiasm for the Poles turned into shrapnel and lunar caustic. War with Russia, we repeat, was the only possible means of upholding Germany s honour and Germany s interests. We shrank from it and the inevitable happened the reactionary soldiery, beaten in Berlin, raised their head again in Poznan; under the pretext of saving Germany s honour and national integrity they raised the banner of counter-revolution and crushed our allies, the revolutionary Poles and for a moment the hoodwinked Germans exultantly cheered their victorious enemies. The new partition of Poland was accomplished, and only the sanction of the German National Assembly was still missing. The Frankfurt Assembly still had a chance to mend matters: it should have excluded the whole of Poznan from the German Confederation and left the border question open until it could be discussed with a restored Poland d' gal gal. But that would be asking too much of our professors, lawyers and pastors who sit in the Frankfurt National Assembly. The temptation was too great. These peaceful burghers, who had never fired a rifle, were, by simply rising or remaining seated, to conquer for Germany a country of 500 square miles and to incorporate 800,000 Netze brethren, German Poles, Jews and Poles, even though this was to be done at the expense of the honour and of the real, lasting interests of Germany what a temptation! They succumbed to it, they endorsed the partition of Poland. What the motives were, we shall see tomorrow. Herr Stenzel, the reporter, opened the debate with an appallingly confused and verbose speech. He poses as a historian and a conscientious man, he speaks of fortresses and field-works, of heaven and hell, of sympathies and German hearts. He goes back to the eleventh century to prove that the Polish nobility has always oppressed the peasants. He uses a few meagre facts from Polish history as an excuse for an unending stream of the most insipid commonplaces about nobility, peasants, towns, benefactions of the absolute monarchy etc. He defends the partition of Poland in a clumsy and self-conscious manner; he explains the provisions of the Constitution of May 3, 179 1, in such a completely I muddled way that those members not already familiar with it now know even less about it. He is just about to turn to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw when he is interrupted by the exclamation: This is too much! and by the President. Thrown into complete confusion, the great historian continues with the following touching words: Herr Stenzel speaks as if in Poland there were no difference at all between nobility and aristocracy. Lelewel s Histoire de Pologne, which he himself quotes, Mieroslawski s D bat entire la r volution et la contrer volution en Pologne and a great many other recent publications could disabuse the man who has studied history for many years . Most of the princes and counts mentioned by Herr Stenzel are precisely those against whom Polish democracy is fighting. Therefore, Herr Stenzel thinks, the nobility with its illusions should be dropped and a Poland for the peasants set up (by incorporating one Polish district after another into Germany). Elated with victory, the historian leaves the rostrum accompanied by exultant shouts of Bravo! , Excellent! from the national twaddlers of the Centre groups. To describe the new partition of Poland as a blessing for the Polish peasants, this astonishingly absurd turn of events was of course bound to bring tears of emotion to the eyes of the genial and philanthropic mass in the Centre of the Assembly! Next comes Herr Coeden from Krotoszyn, a German Pole of the first water. He is followed by Herr Senff from Inowroclaw, a fine example of a Netze brother , devoid of guile. He put his name down as a speaker against the motion tabled by the committee but spoke for the motion and, as a result of this trick, a speaker against the motion lost his turn. The way the Netze brethren behave here is the most ludicrous comedy one can imagine and shows once again what a genuine Prussian is capable of. We all know that the profit-hungry Jewish-Prussian small fry from Posen, who fought against the Poles, acted in close unity with the bureaucracy, the royal Prussian officers and the Brandenburg and Pomeranian squirearchy, in short with all who were reactionary and old-Prussian. The betrayal of Poland was the first insurrection of the counter-revolution, and no one was more counter-revolutionary than the Netze brethren . Now let us here in Frankfurt take a look at these rabidly Prussophile schoolmasters and officials with their God for King and Fatherland , [from the decree on the establishment of an army reserve issued by Frederick William III on March 17, 1813] who call their counter-revolutionary betrayal of Polish democracy a revolution, a real and genuine revolution in the name of the sovereign Netze brotherhood , who trample historical rights under foot and over the allegedly dead Poland exclaim: Right is on the side of the living! [from Schiller s An die Freunde] But that s how the Prussian behaves: on the Spree by the grace of God , on the Warta the sovereign people; on the Spree mob riots, on the Warta the revolution; on the Spree historical right which does not have no date , [ungrammatical phrase from speech of the Right-wing Deputy Lichnowski] on the Warta the right of the living facts which date from yesterday but for all that his faithful Prussian heart is devoid of guile, is honest and upright! Let us hear Herr Goeden. Long live the sovereign will of the Prussian-Jewish Netze brotherhood , a will which rests in the modern concept of the world , relies on the shrapnel revolution and is rooted in the fast beating pulse of the present, with its martial law! Long live the German nationalism of the bureaucrats salaries in Posen, of the plunder of church and state property and of loans la Flottwell! The oratorical knight of superior rights is followed by the impertinent Netze brother . Even Stenzel s motion is still too polite towards the Poles for Herr Senff of Inowroclaw; he therefore proposes a somewhat ruder wording. With the same impudence with which he used this pretext to put his name down as a speaker against the motion, he now declares that to debar the Posen deputies from voting was a disgraceful injustice. Herr Senff then talks about Poland s history since the first partition, elaborating it with a series of deliberate falsifications and gross lies so that, in comparison, Herr Stenzel is a pitiable dabbler. Everything that is tolerable in Posen owes its inception to the Prussian Government and the Netze brethren . Herr Senff is quite right. No trace remained of serfdom or of the cash contributions that Polish districts had to pay to Prussian educational institutions, e.g. the University of Halle, or of the extortions and brutalities perpetrated by Prussian officials who did not speak Polish. But Poland was not yet lost [words are from the Polish national anthem] for, thanks to Russia, Prussia began to thrive once more and Posen was again incorporated into Prussia. Those who want to know more about this should read Flottwell s memorandum of 1841. Up to 1830, the Government did nothing at all. Flottwell found only four miles of highway in the whole Grand Duchy! Shall we enumerate Flottwell s benefactions? Herr Flottwell, a cunning bureaucrat, sought to bribe the Poles by building roads, opening up rivers, draining marshes etc.; but he bribed them not with the money of the Prussian Government, but with their own money. All those improvements were, in the main, carried through with the aid of private and district resources and, though the Government occasionally contributed some money, this was only a small fraction of the amount it extracted from the province as taxes and revenues from the Polish state and church domains. The Poles, moreover, are indebted to Herr Flottwell not only for the continuing suspension (since 1826) of district council elections, but especially for the gradual expropriation of Polish landowners as a result of the Government buying up the auctioned estates of noblemen and reselling them only to loyal Germans (Order in Council of 1833). The last benefaction of Flottwell s administration was the improvement of the educational system. But this too was a measure designed to further Prussianisation. Prussian teachers were to Prussianise the young noblemen and future Catholic priests in the secondary schools, and the peasants in the primary schools. In an unguarded outburst, Herr Wallach, the Regierungspr sident of the Bromberg administrative district, has divulged the purpose of these educational establishments. He writes to Herr Beurmann, the Oberpr sident that the Polish language is one of the chief obstacles to the dissemination of education and well-being among the rural population. This is indeed quite true if the teacher does not speak Polish. Incidentally, it was again the Poles themselves who paid for these schools. For, first of all, the majority, including the most important institutes, which did not, however, directly serve the goal of Prussianisation, were founded and endowed by private contributions or by the Provincial Estates and, secondly, even the schools designed to Prussianise the population were maintained out of the revenues of monasteries secularised on March 31, 1833, and only 21,000 talers a year, for ten years, were granted by the treasury. Herr Flottwell admits, moreover, that all reforms were initiated by the Poles. The fact that the greatest benefactions of the Prussian Government consisted in the collection of large revenues and taxes and in enlisting young men into the Prussian military service, is passed over in silence by Herr Flottwell, just as it is by Herr Senff. In short, all the benefactions of the Prussian Government simply amount to the provision of posts for Prussian non-commissioned officers in Posen, be it as drill-master, schoolmaster, policeman or tax-collector. We cannot discuss in detail the other unfounded accusations which Herr Senff levels against the Poles, nor his false statistical data. It is sufficient to say that the purpose of Herr Senff s speeches is simply to make the Assembly detest the Poles. Herr Robert Blum follows. As usual, he delivers what is called a profound oration, i.e. an oration which contains more opinion than reason and more rhetoric than opinion, and which, incidentally, as a piece of rhetoric as we have to admit produces no greater effect than the modern concept of the world of Herr Goeden from Krotoszyn. Poland is the rampart against Nordic barbarism ... if the Poles have vices it is the fault of their oppressors ... old Gagern declares that the partition of Poland is the nightmare that weighs on our time ... the Poles warmly love their fatherland and, in this respect, we might take a leaf out of their book ... danger is imminent from Russia ... if the red republic were victorious in Paris and desired to liberate the Poles by force of arms, what then, gentlemen?... Let us not be prejudiced etc., etc. We are sorry for Herr Blum, but when all these fine observations are divested of their rhetorical flourishes, nothing remains but the most vapid political hot air, be it political hot air on a grand scale and in high style as we gladly admit. Even when Herr Blum asserts that, to be consistent, the National Assembly must act in Schleswig Bohemia, the Italian Tyrol, the Russian Baltic provinces and Alsace according to the same principle as in Posen, the argument is justified only with regard to the stupid lies about nationality and the convenient inconsistency of the majority. When, again, he asserts that, if Germany wants to behave decently, she can conduct negotiations on Posen only with an already existing Poland, we shall not deny this, but merely observe that this argument the only weighty one of his speech had been advanced hundreds of times before by the Poles themselves and in a much more convincing way, whereas Herr Blum, with great restraint and indulgent moderation , shoots it quite ineffectively, like a blunt rhetorical arrow, at the callous breast of the majority. Herr Blum is right when he says that shrapnel is no argument, but he is wrong and he knows it when he tries impartially to take a moderate superior standpoint. Herr Blum may not clearly understand the Polish question, but that is his own fault. He is in a sorry plight however, first, when he hopes to prevail upon the majority to demand even a report from the Central Authority, and secondly, when he imagines he will gain anything by virtue of a report furnished by the Ministers of this Central Authority, who, on August 6, submitted so disgracefully to the Prussian desire for sovereignty. To sit with the extreme Left one must first of all entirely discard indulgent moderation and refrain from attempts to secure anything, however small, from the majority. Whenever the Polish question is debated, almost the entire Left indulges, as usual, in declamation or even in extravagant rhapsody, without discussing the facts and the actual content of the question. Yet, with regard to this question in particular, there is ample material available and the facts are extremely convincing. But this requires that one really studies the problem, and one can of course save oneself the trouble, since, having passed through the purgatory of the election, one is no longer accountable to anybody. We shall return to the few exceptions to this rule in the course of the debate. Tomorrow we shall say a few words to Herr Wilhelm Jordan, who is no exception, but who this time, in the literal sense and for definite reasons, follows the multitude. The ranks of the combatants open reverentially and Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin advances with drawn sword. Who is Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin? In the heyday of German men of letters, Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin was one such in K nigsberg. Semi-legal meetings were held in the B ttchersh fchen. Herr Wilhelm Jordan went to one, read a poem of his Der Schiffer und sein Gott [The Skipper and His God] and was expelled. Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin went to Berlin. Certain student meetings were held there. Herr Wilhelm Jordan recited a poem Der Schiffer und sein Gott and was expelled. Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin went to Leipzig. There, too, some innocuous meetings were held. Herr Wilhelm Jordan recited a poem Der Schiffer und sein Gott and was expelled. Herr Wilhelm Jordan, moreover, published several of his writings: a poem Glocke und Kanone [Bell and Cannon]; a collection of Lithuanian folk-songs, including some of his own manufacture, in particular songs of Poland written by himself; translations of George Sand s works; a periodical, the incomprehensible comprehended world etc. all this in the service of the renowned Herr Otto Wigand, who has not yet got on so far as his French original, M. Pagnerre; furthermore, he published a translation of Lelewel s Histoire de Pologne, with an introduction full of enthusiasm for Poland etc. The revolution came. En un lugar de la Mancha, cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme ["At a certain village of La Mancha, which I shall not name the words with which Cervantes Don Quixote begins] in a locality in the German Mancha, in Brandenburg, where Don Quixotes still thrive, a locality the name of which I do not like to remember, Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin proposed himself as candidate for the German National Assembly. The peasants of the district were amiably constitutional men. Herr Wilhelm Jordan delivered several impressive speeches, full of the most constitutional amiability. The delighted peasants elected the great man as their deputy. As soon as he arrived in Frankfurt, the noble irresponsible man took his scat on the extreme Left and voted with the republicans. The peasants who, as electors, have produced this parliamentary Don Quixote, send him a vote of no confidence, reminding him of his promises and recalling him. But Herr Wilhelm Jordan considers that his word is as little binding as that of a king and at every opportunity continues to sound his bell and cannon in the Assembly. Each time Herr Wilhelm Jordan mounted the pulpit of St. Paul s Church, [meeting place of the German National Assembly in Frankfurt] he in fact recited only a poem Der Schiffer und sein Gott but this does not mean that he therefore deserves to be expelled. Let us listen to the great Wilhelm Jordan s latest ringing of the bell and the most recent roar of his cannon about Poland. The powerful Herr Wilhelm Jordan has, with one move, raised us high above the clouds to the lofty, snow-capped Chimborazo of the world-historical standpoint and unfolds an infinite prospect before us. But, to begin with, he remains for a moment in the commonplace sphere of special deliberation, and with much success at that. Here are a few examples: Herr Jordan speaks here of the Netze district as distinct from the rest of Posen. What source does he use here, this knight of the world-historical standpoint, the expert in Polish history, the translator of Lelewel? None other than the speech of Herr Senff of Inowroclaw! He sticks so closely to this source, that he quite forgets that, in 1794, the other, Polish part of Posen came under Prussian rule and, if one leaves out of account the short interlude of the Duchy of Warsaw, has since remained in Prussia . But the Netze brother Senff never mentioned this, and the world-historical standpoint consequently knows merely that the administrative district of Posen came under Prussian rule only in 1815. And the district of Miedzych d, Herr Jordan, was from time immemorial Polish , as regards the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants you can see this even from the name, can t you, Herr Jordan? The district of Miedzych d is nothing but the district of Birnbaum. Miedzych d is the Polish name of the town. What backing will these etymological chambers of reunion of the world-historical standpoint of the comprehended world obtain from the Christian-German Herr Leo! Not to mention the fact that Mailand, L ttich, Genf, Kopenhagen have been German from time immemorial, as you can see even from their names . Does not the world-historical standpoint also deduce the immemorial Germanity of Haimons-Eichicht, Welsch-Leyden, Jenau and Kaltenfelde even from their names"? True, he will have trouble finding these primevally German names on the map and when he learns that they denote Le Quesnoi, Lyons, Genoa and Campo Freddo, he will only have Herr Leo, who manufactured them, to thank for his embarrassment. What will the world-historical standpoint say, if presently the French claim Cologne, Coblence, Mayence and Francfort as primevally French territory? Woe then to the world-historical standpoint! But let us dwell no longer on these petites mis res de la vie humaine, [small mishaps of life] they also befall greater men. Let us follow Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin, as he soars to higher spheres. He says of the Poles that one But how does the world-historical standpoint explain that the peoples of the world do not like a certain nation, either when they are at a great distance from it or when they get closer to it, and that, with rare concurrence, they despise, exploit, deride and spurn this nation? This is the German nation. The world-historical standpoint will say, this is due to cosmopolitan materialism , thus extricating himself. Quite untroubled by such petty objections, however, the world-historical eagle on his mighty pinions soars higher and higher, until he reaches the pure ether of the idea that exists in itself and for itself, and gives vent to the following heroic world-historical Hegelian hymn: What an abundance of ideas! What profound wisdom! What stirring language! Thus speaks the world-historical standpoint, once he has corrected the shorthand reports of his speeches. The Poles have the choice; if they want to stage a true tragedy they have to submit humbly to being destroyed by the iron heel and the revolving wheels of history and say to Nicholas: Thy will be done! if, however, they want to rebel and, for a change, try to use the iron heel of history to crush their oppressors, then there is no true tragedy , and Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin can no longer take any interest in them. Thus speaks the world-historical standpoint whose aesthetic knowledge stems from Professor Rosenkranz. What was the inexorable, the iron necessity which has temporarily destroyed Poland? It was the decline of the noblemen s democracy based on serfdom, that is the development of a big aristocracy within the nobility. This was a step forward, as it was the only way out of the antiquated noblemen s democracy. What was the result? The iron heel of history, i.e. the three Eastern autocrats, crushed Poland. The aristocracy was compelled to enter into an alliance with foreign states, in order to cope with the noblemen s democracy. The Polish aristocracy until recently, and partially even up to the present, remained the faithful ally of Poland s oppressors. What is the reason for the inexorable, the iron necessity for Poland s liberation? It is the fact that the rule of the aristocracy in Poland, which has continued, since 1815, at least in Posen and Galicia, and to some extent even in Russian Poland, is today just as antiquated and hollow as was the democracy of the lower nobility in 1772. It is the fact that the establishment of a form of agrarian democracy has become vital to Poland, not only politically but also socially; the fact that agriculture, the source of existence of the Polish people, will be ruined, if the peasants who are serfs or liable to labour services, do not become free landowners, and the fact that an agrarian revolution cannot possibly be carried through without simultaneously winning a national existence and taking possession of the Baltic coast and the estuaries of the Polish rivers. And Herr Jordan of Berlin calls this attempting to stay the revolving wheels of history and trying to turn them back once more! It is true that the old Poland of the noblemen s democracy died and was buried long since, and only Herr Jordan can expect that anyone wants to nullify the true tragedy of this Poland, but the hero of this tragedy has produced a strapping son, and many a foppish Berlin literary man may indeed shudder at the thought of making his closer acquaintance. This son, who is still only preparing to act out his drama and to put his shoulder to the revolving wheels of history , but who is bound to achieve success, this son is the Poland. of the peasant democracy. Some stale literary flourishes, a little imitated contempt of the world which in Hegel was a sign of audacity, but becomes a cheap and nonsensical platitude in Herr Jordan in short a sample of the bell and cannon, sound and fury [Goethe, Faust] expressed in inadequate sentences and, in addition, incredible confusion and ignorance of quite ordinary historical circumstances this is what the world-historical standpoint amounts to. Long live the world-historical standpoint and its comprehended world! Herr Radowitz mounts the rostrum first. The speech of the leader of the Right is short, firm and calculated. No more declamation than necessary. Wrong premises, but concise rapid conclusions based on these premises. An appeal to the fear of the Right. Cold-blooded certainty of success which banks on the cowardice of the majority. Profound contempt for the entire Assembly, for the Right as well as the Left. These are the outlines of the short speech delivered by Herr Radowitz, and we understand very well the effect these few icy and unostentatious words were bound to produce in an assembly used to hearing the most pompous and shallow rhetorical exercises. Herr Wilhelm Jordan of Berlin would have been delighted, if with his entire comprehended and not comprehended world of images he had produced a tenth of the effect Herr Radowitz produced with his short and, basically, also quite superficial speech. Herr Radowitz is not a man of character , not a steadfast worthy, but he is a person with clear-cut, distinct traits; one needs only to read one of his speeches to know him thoroughly. We have. never coveted the honour of being an organ of any particular group of the parliamentary Left. On the contrary, because of the various different elements from which the democratic party has been formed in Germany, we have considered it essential to keep an especially close watch on the democrats. In view of the lack of energy, of decision, of talent and of knowledge we have encountered among the leaders, with a few exceptions, of all parties, we are pleased that Herr Radowitz is at least a worthy opponent. Herr Radowitz is followed by Herr Schuselka. In spite of all previous warnings, he nevertheless makes a touching appeal to the heart. An immensely long-winded discourse, interspersed with a few historical arguments and occasionally some Austrian common sense. On the whole, it has a wearisome effect. Herr Schuselka has gone to Vienna, having been elected a member of the Imperial Diet which meets in that city. This is the right place for him. If in Frankfurt he sat on the Left, there he will find himself in the Centre. If in Frankfurt he had some influence, his first speech in Vienna will prove a failure. This is the fate of all literary and philosophical great pot-house politicians, who use the revolution only to improve their own position if for a moment they are placed on really revolutionary ground, they disappear at once. The ci-devant Count von Wartensleben follows. Herr Wartensleben steps forth as a portly, honest man overflowing with benevolence, who tells anecdotes about his march as a member of the army reserve to the Polish frontier in 1830, he then turns into Sancho Panza and speaks in proverbs to the Poles, e.g. a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and, at the same time, he quite innocently manages to slip in the following perfidious remark: in other words, the Poles have, for eighty years, been continuously fighting and sacrificing their lives and property for a cause which they themselves regard as impossible and absurd. In conclusion Herr Wartensleben is in agreement with Herr Radowitz. Mr. Janiszewski from Posen, a member of the Posen National Committee, mounts the rostrum. Mr. Janiszewski s speech is the first piece of truly parliamentary eloquence to be delivered from the rostrum of St. Paul s Church. At last we hear a speaker who does not simply try to win the approval of the hall, but whose language is marked by true dynamic passion, and who, for this reason, produces an effect quite different from that produced by any of the preceding speakers. Blum s appeal to the conscience of the Assembly, Jordan s cheap bombast, Radowitz s cold logic, Schuselka s genial prolixity, all, without exception, sink into insignificance by the side of this Pole who fights for the existence of his nation and demands the restoration of his legitimate rights. Janiszewski speaks in an impassioned and forceful way, but without declamation. He merely reports facts with the justified indignation, without which a correct description of such facts is impossible and which is doubly justified after the shameless misrepresentations made earlier in the debate. His speech, which in fact constitutes the core of the debate, refutes all earlier attacks against the Poles, makes amends for the mistakes of the supporters of the Poles, leads the debate back to the only real and just basis, and deprives speakers of the Right who are to follow of the most high-sounding arguments in advance. This striking summary of Janiszewski s speech will endure, as will also the pride with which he replies to the begging speeches of the supporters of the Poles: Mr. Janiszewski is followed by Herr Kerst, a head-master from Posen. The Pole fighting for the existence and the social and political freedom of his people is followed by a Prussian schoolmaster who has immigrated to Posen and is fighting for his salary. The fine passionate indignation of the oppressed is followed by the trite impudence of the bureaucrat who lives on oppression. The partition of Poland which today is called a disgrace was at the time a quite ordinary event . These are a few of the pithy expressions on which Herr Kerst bases his arguments. They are followed by the most clumsy contradictions: In this connection he gives statistical data about the population ratio, data which correspond to the famous survey of the Netze brethren , according to which only those are regarded as Poles who do not speak any German, and all those are deemed Germans who speak a little broken German. Finally comes a most artificial calculation, by which he proves that the minority that voted for joining Germany, when the vote was taken in the Posen Provincial Diet a minority of 17 to 26 was really a majority... Thus, if the minority is 2/3 of the majority, then it is under the Provincial Law a majority! The old Prussians will greatly honour Herr Kerst for this discovery. But in fact the position is this in order to make an application, 2/3 must vote for it. Admission into the German Confederation was such an application. Application for admission was therefore only legal if 2 /3 of the Assembly, i.e . 2 /3 of the 43 who took part in the division, voted for it. But, instead, almost 2 1/2 voted against it. But what does it matter? For l7 is almost 2/3 of 43"! It is not surprising that the Poles are not so well educated as are the citizens of the Staat der Intelligenz, [Hegel] if this intelligent state sends them teachers who are such expert arithmeticians. Herr Clemens from Bonn makes the correct observation that the Prussian Government was not interested in the Germanisation of Posen but in its Prussianisation, and compares the attempts to Prussianise Posen with similar attempts in the Rhineland. Herr Ostendorf of Soest, the son of red soil, [Westphalia] reads from a compendium of political platitudes and twaddle, he indulges in possibilities, probabilities and conjectures, jumping from one subject to another, from Herr Jordan to the French, from the red republic to the redskins of North America, and puts the Poles on a par with them, and the Netze brethren on a par with the Yankees. An audacious comparison worthy of the red soil! Imagine Herr Kerst, Herr Senff and Herr Goeden as backwoodsmen in a log hut with shotgun and spade what a priceless comedy! Herr Franz Schmidt from L wenberg mounts the rostrum. He speaks calmly and unostentatiously. This is all the more commendable since Herr Schmidt belongs to a profession which is usually excessively fond of declamation, i.e. the German Catholic priesthood. Herr Schmidt s speech, after that of Janiszewski, is certainly the best of the whole debate, because it is the most convincing and best informed. Herr Schmidt demonstrates that the committee s display of learning (the content of which we have already examined) hides abysmal ignorance of actual conditions. Herr Schmidt, who has lived for many years in the Grand Duchy of Posen, shows that even with regard to this small district, which he knows in great detail, the committee has made the crudest blunders. He shows that the committee has failed to give the Assembly adequate information about any of the decisive questions and has even called upon the Assembly to make decisions at random without any factual data or any knowledge of the matter. He demands in the first place information about the actual state of affairs. He proves that the proposals of the committee are incompatible with their premises. He quotes Flottwell s memorandum and calls upon Flottwell, who is also present as a deputy, to make a statement should the document not be genuine. He finally makes public the fact that the Netze brethren came to Gagern and, by false news about an alleged uprising in Posen, tried to persuade him to bring the debate to a rapid close. True, Gagern denied this, but Herr Kerst has loudly boasted of it. The majority has taken revenge on Herr Schmidt for his bold speech by seeing to it that the speech was falsified in the stenographic reports. Herr Schmidt himself three times rectified the nonsense inserted in one passage, but it was nevertheless printed. Table-banging against Schl ffel, crude violence against Brentano and falsification against Schmidt the gentlemen of the Right are indeed subtle critics! Herr Lichnowski concludes the sitting, but we shall save this friend of ours for the next article; one should not act precipitately when dealing with a speaker of Herr Lichnowski s calibre! The handsome knight is definitely a necessary element in this debate. If there is anyone to whom Herr Goeden, Herr Senff and Herr Kerst have still not demonstrated the worth of the German Poles sufficiently clearly, the example of the knight Lichnowski will show him what a disgusting phenomenon despite the comely figure is the Prussianised Slav. Herr Lichnowski and the German Poles are kindred spirits; by his mere appearance on the rostrum, Herr Lichnowski makes the dossier more complete. The slachcic [Polish nobleman] from Upper Silesia who has been transformed into a Prussian squire from the backwoods provides a living example of what the loving Prussian Government intends to do with the nobility of Posen. Herr Lichnowski, despite all his protestations, is not a German, he is a reorganised Pole; he does not speak German, he speaks Prussian. Herr Lichnowski begins with the assertion that he fee the most chivalrous sympathy for the Poles, he pays compliments to Mr. Janiszewski, he upholds the Poles claim to the great poetry of martyrdom , and then he suddenly makes an about turn and asks: Why has this sympathy waned? Because the Poles fought in the first line at the barricades in all insurrections and revolutions! This is indeed a crime that will no longer be committed once the Poles are .reorganised . Incidentally, we can give Herr Lichnowski the reassuring information that even among the Polish emigrants and even among the Polish nobility in exile who, according to Herr Lichnowski, have sunk so low, there are people who have remained entirely uncontaminated by any contact with the barricades. Now follows an amusing scene. Were we not justified in saying that the noble knight speaks not German, but Prussian? The historical right which does not have no date encounters a formidable adversary in our noble paladin. The world must be in a bad way. The estates of the Prussian knights must be mortgaged beyond redemption, the pressure of their Jewish creditors must have become formidable, their promissory notes must be coming due for payment in rapid succession, public auction, imprisonment, dismissal from service owing to thoughtlessly incurred debts all these horrors of extreme pecuniary distress must threaten the Prussian knights with inevitable ruin, for things to have come to such a pass that a Lichnowski attacks the same historical right in whose defence he won his spurs at Don Carlos round table. True, only God knows whither the bailiffs would convey the lean knights if we were to broach the subject of the historical right governing debts! Yet, are these debts not their best quality and the only one that can serve the Prussian paladins as an excuse? The bel-homme then comes to his subject and observes that, when speaking to the German Poles, one should not paint a vague picture of a remote and obscure future Poland (!); he thinks the Poles would not be satisfied with Posen: But since Herr Lichnowski does not have the honour , since he is merely a reorganised Pole of Upper Silesia [Wasserpolack], he ponders on quite different and less patriotic matters every morning and every evening. On the contrary, how nice it would be if the Prussian Government laid out a new plantation to grow still more of the wood from which the Lichnowskis are made. The moustache-twirling knight continues to talk for some time in the same pleasantly nonchalant manner, which is in the main intended for the ladies in the gallery, but is still good enough for the Assembly as well, and then concludes: It is indeed bad that, when old Arndt wrote his poem, he did not think of the Polish Jews and their German. But fortunately, we have our Upper Silesian paladin. Who is not aware of the nobility s old obligations to the Jews, obligations that have become respectable in the course of centuries? What the old plebeian omitted, Lichnowski, the knight, remembers. that is the extent of Herr Lichnowski s fatherland! Citizen Ruge moreover [knows] his merits better than anyone else. He promises: He tables a motion; this is, however, not an ordinary motion, not a motion in general, but the only correct motion, the true motion, the absolute motion: (In this case therefore, Citizen Ruge sacrifices his free will to what is right .) Let us closer examine the passion, the knowledge and the only right thing of Citizen Ruge. The people in Southern France were, in the Middle Ages, no closer to the people in Northern France than the Poles are now to the Russians. In the Middle Ages, the Southern French, commonly called Proven als, achieved not only a remarkable development , they even led European development. They were the first modern nation to have a literary language. Their poetry was regarded by all Romance peoples, and even by the Germans and the English, as a model unequalled at the time. They vied with the Castilians, the Northern Frenchmen and the English Normans in the perfection of feudal chivalry and were equal to the Italians in industry and commerce. They did not only develop one aspect of medieval life in a resplendent way , they even produced a flash of the ancient Hellenic culture in the darkest Middle Ages. The people from Southern France have, therefore, rendered not only great, but immeasurable services to the European family of nations . Nevertheless, like the Poles, they were first partitioned between Northern France and England and later completely subjugated by the Northern French. From the wars against the Albigenses to Louis XI, the Northern French who were culturally just as inferior to their Southern neighbours as the Russians to the Poles waged continuous wars of conquest against the Southern French and, finally, conquered the whole country. The Southern French republic of nobles (this designation is quite correct for its heyday) was prevented by despotism (Louis XI) from bringing about its own internal abolition , which would have been certainly no less possible there, owing to the rise of the middle class in the towns, than it would have been in the Polish case by means of the Constitution of 1791. The Southern French fought against their oppressors for centuries but historical development was inexorable. After a struggle lasting three centuries, their beautiful language was reduced to a patois and they themselves were turned into Frenchmen. Northern French despotism ruled over Southern France for three hundred years and, only then, did the Northern French make amends for their oppressive rule by destroying the last vestiges of Southern French independence. The Constituent Assembly divided up the independent provinces, and it was the iron fist of the Convention that first turned the inhabitants of Southern France into Frenchmen and, in reparation for their nationality, gave them democracy. What Citizen Ruge says about the Poles is, however, quite literally a fitting description of the three hundred years of oppression: But the subjugation of Southern France by the Northern French has never been called shameful injustice . What is the reason, Citizen Ruge? Either the subjugation of Southern France is a shameful injustice, or the subjugation of Poland is not a shameful injustice. It is up to Citizen Ruge to decide. What is the difference between the Poles and the people of Southern France? Why was Southern France like inert ballast taken in tow by the Frenchmen from the North, even as far as the total obliteration of its nationality, whereas the Poles have every prospect of finding themselves very soon in the van of all Slav nationalities? As a result of social conditions which we cannot explain in detail here, Southern France became the reactionary section of France. Its opposition to Northern France very soon became opposition to the progressive classes in the whole of France. It became the principal support of feudalism and has remained the backbone of the French counter-revolution up to now. Poland, on the other hand, became a revolutionary part of Russia, Austria and Prussia, as a result of social conditions which we examined earlier (No. 81). Its opposition to its oppressors was, at the same time, opposition to the big aristocracy in Poland itself. Even the nobility, which was in part still feudal, supported the democratic-agrarian revolution with quite unprecedented selflessness. Poland had already become the focus of East-European democracy, when Germany was still floundering in the ideology of the most insipid constitutionalism and high-flown philosophy. This, and not the resplendent development of chivalry which belongs to the past, guarantees the restoration of Poland and makes it inevitable. But Herr Ruge has also a second reason for the necessity of an independent Poland within the European family of nations . Citizen Ruge has to prove that the Poles are, first, necessary, and second, not dead. He does this by saying: Because they are necessary, they are by no means dead. If one removes a few words Poles, element, freedom, propaganda, culture, apostolate from the above lengthy passage, in which one and the same idea is repeated seven times, one can see what remains of the whole bombastic statement. Citizen Ruge has to prove that the restoration of Poland is necessary. He proves this in the following way: The Poles are not dead, on the contrary they are very much alive, they are effective, they are the apostles of freedom in the whole of Europe. What is the reason for this? The violence, the shameful injustice perpetrated on them, has scattered them all over Europe, where they gave vent to their anger over the injustice they suffered, to their just revolutionary anger. This anger has been purified during their exile, and this purified anger has enabled them to become apostles of freedom and has placed them first at the barricades . What follows from this? Wipe out the shameful injustice, the violence done, restore Poland, and the anger ceases, in can no longer be purified, the Poles go home and cease to be apostles of freedom . If it was only the anger over the injustice they suffered that turned the Poles into revolutionaries, then the removal of the injustice will turn them into reactionaries. If the only thing that keeps the Poles alive is reaction to oppression, then remove oppression and they will be dead. Citizen Ruge therefore proves the exact opposite of what he wants to Prove. His arguments show that, in the interest of freedom and of the European family of nations, Poland must not be re-established. Incidentally, the fact that, when discussing Poland, Citizen Ruge mentions only the emigrants and sees only emigrants at the barricades, throws a strange light on his knowledge . We certainly do not want to hurt the feelings of the Polish emigrants, who have their energy and courage on the battlefield and during proved eighteen years of conspiratorial activity in the interests of Poland. But we cannot deny that those who are well acquainted with the Polish emigrants know that they are far from being as apostolically freedom-loving and as keen on barricade fighting as they are depicted by Citizen Ruge who, in good faith, repeats ex-Prince Lichnowski s assertions. The Polish emigrants have steadfastly persevered, have endured much and have worked hard for the restoration of Poland. But have the Poles within Poland done less, have they not braved greater dangers, have they not risked incarceration in Moabit and Spielberg, the knout and Siberian mines, Galician butcheries and Prussian shrapnel? But all this does not exist for Herr Ruge. He has not noticed either that the Poles who did not emigrate, have absorbed much more of the general European culture and have understood the needs of Poland, where they have lived all the time, much better than almost all the emigrants apart from Lelewel and Mieroslawski. All intelligent thinking which exists in Poland, or to use Ruge s expression, which has come to the Poles and upon the Poles , is attributed by Citizen Ruge to their stay abroad. In No. we have shown that the Poles did not have to go either to the French political dreamers who failed in February, thanks to their own phrases or to the profound German ideologists who have not yet been able to find an opportunity to fail in the quest for an understanding of their country s needs; and what Poland needs. It is the great merit of the Poles that they were that Poland itself was the best school to gain an understanding of the first to realise and to propagate the fact that, for all Slav nations, the only possible form of liberation is agrarian democracy and not, as Citizen Ruge imagines, that the Poles introduced into Poland and Russia general phrases, such as the great idea of political freedom, which matured in France, and even (!) the philosophy which emerged in Germany (and in which Herr Ruge was submerged). After this speech by Citizen Ruge, the Poles can exclaim: God protect us from our friends and we will protect ourselves from our enemies! But it has always been the greatest misfortune of the Poles that their non-Polish friends defend them with the worst possible arguments. It certainly speaks in favour of the Left in Frankfurt that, apart from a few exceptions, the deputies of the Left were perfectly delighted with Citizen Ruge s speech on Poland, a speech which contained the following passage: Are we expected to be enthusiastic about a Left that allows itself to be carried away when someone says that it wants on the whole the same thing as the Right, as Herr Radowitz, Herr Lichnowski, Herr Vincke and all the other fat or lean knights? A Left whose head has been turned with rapture and which forgets everything as soon as it hears a few empty slogans, such as national freedom and rule of the people"? But let us leave the Left and return to Citizen Ruge. As regards its principles, it is the most humane revolution for these principles have arisen as a result of the glossing over of the most contradictory interests. It is the most humane revolution as regards its decrees and proclamations , for they represent a compendium of philanthropical fantasies and sentimental phrases about fraternity produced by all the feather-heads of Europe. It is the most humane revolution as regards its actuality , that is the massacres and barbarities in Posen, the murderous incendiarism of Radetzky, the ferocious cruelties committed in Paris by the victors of June, the butcheries in Cracow and Prague, the rule of brutal soldiery everywhere in short, all the outrages which constitute the actuality of this revolution today, September 1, 1848, and which have spilled more blood in four months than was spilled in 1793 and 1794 taken together. The humane Citizen Ruge! Here, in one bold passage, we have the whole rationale of evenly in foreign policy-alliance between Germany, France and Britain, all three of whom think the same way and, on the whole, want the same thing , a new R tli Federation concluded by the three modern Swiss-Cavaignac, Leiningen and John Russell! It is true that France and Germany, with Cod s help, have meanwhile again retrogressed so far that as regards general political principles their governments think more or less the same way as official circles in Britain, that stable counter-revolutionary rock surrounded by the sea. But the countries do not only think the same way, they also, on the whole, want the same thing . Germany wants Schleswig, and Britain does not want to cede it to her; Germany wants protective tariffs, and Britain wants free trade; Germany wants unity, and Britain wants to see her disunited; Germany wants to be independent, and Britain seeks to subjugate her industrially but what does that matter? On the whole they nevertheless want the same thing"! And as to France, France issues tariff laws directed against Germany and France s Minister Bastide sneers at schoolmaster Raumer, who represents Germany there hence it is obvious that France on the whole wants the same thing as Germany! Indeed, Britain and France prove in the most striking manner that they want the same thing as Germany, by threatening her with war, Britain on account of Schleswig and France on account of Lombardy! Citizen Ruge is ideologically naive enough to believe that nations which have certain political ideas in common, would, just for that reason, conclude an alliance. Altogether, Citizen Ruge s political palette has only two colours black and white, slavery and freedom. The world for him is divided into two great camps into civilised nations and barbarians, freemen and serfs. The boundary line of freedom, which six months ago was situated on the other side of the Rhine, now coincides with the Russian frontier, and this advance is called the revolution of 1848. It is in this confused manner that the present movement is reflected in Citizen Ruge s head. That is how he translates the battle-cry of those who fought at the barricades in February and March into Pomeranian. [from Heine who spoke about Ruge as a man who knew how to translate Hegel into Pomeranian"] If we translate it from the Pomeranian back into German, we find that the three civilised nations, the three free peoples, are those where bourgeois rule exists in various forms and at various stages of development, whereas the slaves and serfs are peoples ruled by patriarchal and feudal absolutism. For Arnold Ruge, the farouche [fierce] republican and democrat, freedom denotes the most ordinary insipid liberalism, the rule of the bourgeoisie, with perhaps some quasi-democratic forms so that is the poodle s core! [Goethe, Faust] Citizen Ruge argues that France, Britain and Germany must of course be allies, because the bourgeoisie rules in these countries. And if the objective interests of the three countries are diametrically opposed to one another, if free trade with Germany and France is an indispensable condition for the existence of the British bourgeoisie, if protective tariffs against Britain are an indispensable condition for the existence of the French and German bourgeoisie, if, in many respects, similar relations obtain between Germany and France, and if this Triple Alliance amounted, in practice, to the industrial subjugation of France and Germany? Narrow-minded egoism mean mercenary minds, mutters Ruge, the Pomeranian thinker: into his blond beard. Herr Jordan spoke of the tragic irony of universal history. Citizen Ruge is a striking example of this. He, like the rest of the more or less ideological Left, sees his most cherished pet fantasies, his greatest mental efforts, wrecked by the class whom he represents. His philanthropically cosmopolitan project is wrecked by mean mercenary minds and he himself must, unknowingly and unintentionally, represent precisely these mercenary minds in a more or less ideologically distorted fashion. The ideologist proposes, the shopkeeper disposes. Tragic irony of universal history! Citizen Ruge then says that France has declared that, though the treaties of 1815 have been torn up, she is nevertheless willing to recognise the territorial division as it exists at present . This is quite right for Citizen Ruge has found something in Lamartine s manifesto, which so far nobody tried to find there that is the basis of a new international right. He explains this in the following way: In short, historical right edits the rationale of events! Thus it is written, word for word, in the acts of the apostles of German unity, i.e. the stenographic reports of Frankfurt, page 1186, column one and people complain that the Neue Rheinische Zeitung criticises Herr Ruge by means of exclamation marks! But this dizzy gyrating dance of historical right and international right was, of course, bound to stun the worthy members of the Left, as they were bound to be filled with admiration when the philosopher from Pomerania called out to them with unshakeable certainty: Historical right is the right which is brought about by history and. sanctioned by time etc. History has indeed always brought about the exact opposite of what had been sanctioned by time , and the sanction of time has always consisted in overturning that which had been brought about by history Citizen Ruge then tables the only correct and admissible motion: What upright, honest views! Lord John Russell and Eug ne Cavaignac are to restore Poland. The English and French bourgeoisie are to threaten Russia with war so as to bring about the liberation of Poland, which at present is a matter of complete indifference to them! At this time of general confusion and disarray, when the effect of every piece of reassuring news causing shares to rise by 1/8 per cent is nullified by six disturbing blows, when industry is struggling against creeping bankruptcy, when commerce is stagnant, when the unemployed proletariat has to be supported by enormous sums of money to prevent it from taking a last desperate stand at this moment, can the bourgeoisie of the three civilised nations be expected to create an additional difficulty? And what a difficulty! A war with Russia, which has been the closest ally of Britain since February! War with Russia, a war which, as everybody knows, would spell the downfall of the German and French bourgeoisie! To what advantage? None at all. This is indeed more than Pomeranian ingenuousness! But Citizen Ruge is absolutely confident that a peaceful solution of the Polish question is possible. This is getting better and better! And why? Because the point now is: Now it becomes clear why Herr Ruge on the whole wants the same thing as the Right. The Right also wants the treaties of Vienna carried out. The treaties of Vienna are the epitome of the great victory of reactionary Europe over revolutionary France. They are the classic form in which European reaction ruled for fifteen years during the Restoration period. They restore legitimacy, monarchy by divine right, feudal aristocracy, clerical rule, and patriarchal jurisdiction and administration. But since victory was won with the help of the English, German, Italian, Spanish and especially the French bourgeoisie, concessions had also to be made to the bourgeoisie. While the sovereigns, aristocrats, priests and bureaucrats divided the rich spoils among themselves, the bourgeoisie was put off with promissory notes drawn on the future, which were not honoured and which nobody had any intention of honouring. Instead of examining the real practical content of the treaties of Vienna, Herr Ruge assumes that these empty promises are their true content, and that reactionary practice is merely an improper misinterpretation! One must indeed be an astonishingly good-natured person to believe, after 33 years, after the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, that these promissory notes will still be paid and to imagine that the sentimental phrases in which the illusory promises of Vienna are wrapped up have still any meaning in the year 1848. Citizen Ruge appears as the Don Quixote of the treaties of Vienna. Finally, Citizen Ruge reveals a great secret to the Assembly it is only the fact that the treaties of 1815 were broken in Cracow in 1846 which caused the revolutions of 1848. Let this be a warning to all despots! To sum up, Citizen Ruge has not changed in any way since we last met him in the field of literature. He still uses the same phrases which he had learned by heart and repeated ever since he worked as the door-keeper of German philosophy at the Hallischen and Deutschen Jahrb cher; there is still the same confusion, the same jumble of views, the same lack of ideas, the same gift of presenting the most banal and nonsensical ideas in a pompous manner, the same lack of knowledge , and, in particular, the same pretensions to the approbation of the German philistine, who has never heard the like in his life. Here we conclude our summary of the debate on Poland. To expect us to deal with Herr L w from Posen and the other great intellects that follow, is asking too much. The debate as a whole leaves a sad impression. So many long speeches and so little content, so little knowledge of the subject and so little talent! The worst debate in the previous or the present French Chamber or in the British H use of Commons contains more intelligence, more expert knowledge and more real content than this discussion, which lasted for three days and dealt with one of the most interesting subjects of modern politics. Everything could have been made of it, and the National Assembly simply turned it into political twaddle. There has indeed never and nowhere been an assembly like this! The results are well known. Three-quarters of Posen has been conquered but it has been conquered not by force, or German industry or the plough , but by political twaddle, false statistics and timorous decisions. You have swallowed the Poles, but, by God, you shall not digest them!

Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, August 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/08/09.htm

With the same celerity with which they were expelled from Lombardy in March, the Austrians have now returned in triumph and have already entered Milan. The Italian people spared no sacrifice. They were prepared at the cost of life and property to complete the work they had begun and win their national independence. But this courage, enthusiasm and readiness to make sacrifices were nowhere matched by those who stood at the helm. Overtly or covertly, they did everything to use the means at their disposal, not for the liberation of the country from the harsh Austrian tyranny, but to paralyse the popular forces and, in effect, to restore the old conditions as soon as possible. The Pope, who was worked on more and more every day and won over by the Austrian and Jesuitical politicians, put all the obstacles in the way of the Mamiani Ministry which he, in conjunction with the Blacks and the Black-Yellows , could find. The Ministry itself delivered highly patriotic speeches in both chambers, but did not have the energy to carry out its good intentions. The Government of Tuscany distinguished itself by fine words and even fewer deeds. But the arch-enemy of Italian liberty among the native princes was and remains Karl Albert. The Italians should have repeated and borne in mind every hour of the day the saying: Heaven protect us from our friends, we will protect ourselves from our enemies! They hardly needed to fear Ferdinand of Bourbon, he was unmasked long ago. Karl Albert, on the other hand, let himself be acclaimed everywhere as la spada d'Italia (the sword of Italy) and the hero whose rapier was Italy s best guarantee of freedom and independence. His emissaries went to all parts of Northern Italy portraying him as the only man who could and would save the country. To enable him to do this, however, it was necessary to set up a North Italian kingdom. Only this could give him the power required not only to oppose the Austrians but to drive them out of Italy. The ambition which had previously made him join forces with the Carbonari, whom he afterwards betrayed, this ambition became more inflamed than ever and made him dream of a plenitude of power and magnificence before which the splendour of all the other Italian princes would very soon pale. He thought that he could appropriate the entire popular movement of 1848 and use it in the interests of his own miserable self. Filled with hatred and distrust of all truly liberal men, he surrounded himself with people more or less loyal to absolutism and inclined to encourage his royal ambitions. He placed at the head of the army generals whose intellectual superiority and political views he did not have to fear, but who neither enjoyed the confidence of the soldiers nor possessed the talent required to wage a successful war. He pompously called himself the liberator of Italy while making it a condition that those who were to be liberated accept his yoke. Seldom was a man so favoured by circumstances as he was. His greed, his desire to possess as much as he could led in the end to his losing everything he had gained. So long as there was no firm decision that Lombardy would join Piedmont, so long as the possibility of a republican form of government still existed, he remained in his entrenchments and did not move against the Austrians, although they were relatively weak at the time. He let Radetzky, d'Aspre, Welden, and others seize the towns and fortresses of the Venetian provinces one by one and did not stir a finger. Only when Venice sought the refuge of his crown did he deign to give his help. The same applies to Parma and Modena. Radetzky meanwhile had mustered strength and made all preparations for an attack which, in view of the inability and blindness of Karl Albert and his generals, led to a decisive victory. The outcome is well known. Henceforth Italians can and will no longer entrust their liberation to a prince or king. On the contrary, in order to save themselves they must completely discard this useless spada d'Italia as quickly as possible. If they had done this earlier, and had superannuated the King with his system and all the hangers-on, and had formed a democratic union, it is likely that by now there would have been no more Austrians in Italy. Instead, the Italians not only bore all the hardships of a war waged with fury and barbarity by their enemies and suffered the heaviest sacrifices in vain, but were left defenceless to the tender mercies of the vindictive Metternich-Austrian reactionaries and their soldiery. Anyone reading Radetzky s manifestos to the people of Lombardy and Welden s manifestos to the Roman legations will understand that to the Italians Attila and his Hun hordes would have appeared merciful angels. The reaction and restoration have triumphed. The Duke of Modena, called il carnefice (the hangman), who loaned the Austrians 1,200,000 florins for war purposes, has returned as well. The people, in their magnanimity, have so often made a stick for their own back, that it is time they got wiser and learned something from their enemies. Although, during his previous reign, the Duke had imprisoned, hanged and shot thousands of people for their political convictions, the Modenese let him depart unmolested. Now he has returned to discharge his sanguinary princely office with redoubled zeal. The reaction and restoration have triumphed, but only for a time. The people are so deeply imbued with the revolutionary spirit that they cannot be held in check for long. Milan, Brescia and other towns showed in March what this spirit is capable of. The excessive suffering inflicted upon them will lead to a new rising. By taking into account the bitter experience of the past months, Italy will be able to avoid new delusions and to secure her independence under a single democratic banner.

Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, August 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/08/12a.htm

What must please us is the view -- which is at last advanced by at least one Berliner -- that Berlin does not play the role of Paris as far as either Germany or the Rhineland in particular is concerned. Berlin is beginning to realize that it cannot govern us, cannot acquire the authority befitting a capital city. Berlin has amply proved its incompetence during the indecisive March revolution, during the storming of the armory and during the recent disturbances. To the irresolution displayed by the people of Berlin is added a complete lack of talent in all parties. Since February the whole movement has not produced a single man capable of leading his party. The spirit in this "capital of the spirit" is indeed very willing but just as weak as the flesh. The Berliners even had to import their Hansemann, their Camphausen and their Milde from the Rhine or Silesia. Far from being a German Paris, Berlin is not even a Prussian Vienna. It is not a metropolis, it is a "seat of the court". It is, however, noteworthy, that even in Berlin people are coming to the conclusion, long widespread in the Rhineland, that German unity can come about only as a result of the disintegration of the German so-called great powers. We have never concealed our views on this point. We are not enraptured with either the past or present glory of Germany, with either the wars of - independence or the "glorious victories of German arms" in Lombardy and Schleswig. But if Germany is ever to achieve anything she must unite, she must become one state in deed as well as in word. And to bring this about it is necessary above all that there should be "neither an Austria nor a Prussia". Incidentally, "the spirit" which "for so long held together" us and the old Prussian provinces was a palpable, crude spirit; it was the spirit of 15,000 bayonets and a number of cannon. It was not for nothing that military units of Silesian Poles and Kasubians were stationed here on the Rhine, and that our young men had to serve in guards regiments in Berlin. This was done not in order to reconcile us with the other provinces, but to stir up hatred between the provinces and to exploit the national enmity between the Germans and Slavs, and the regional hatred of every petty German province against all the neighboring provinces, in the interests of patriarchal feudal despotism. Divide et impera! It is indeed time to put an end to the fictitious role assigned to the Berliners by "the provinces", i.e., by the junkerdom of the Uckermark and Further Pomerania, in their panic-stricken declarations, a role which the Berliners promptly accepted. Berlin is not and will never become the seat of the revolution, the capital of democracy. Only the imagination of the knights of Brandenburg, terrified at the prospect of bankruptcy, the debtor's prison and the lamppost, could ascribe to Berlin such a role, and only the coquettish vanity of the Berliners could believe that it represented the provinces. We acknowledge the March revolution, but only for what it really was. Its greatest shortcoming is that it has not revolutionized the Berliners. The Zeitungs-Halle believes that the disintegrating Prussian state can be cemented by means of liberal institutions. On the contrary. The more liberal the institutions are, the freer will it be for the heterogeneous elements to separate, and the clearer will become the necessity of dissociation and the incompetence of the politicians of all parties in Berlin. We repeat, the Rhineland by no means objects to remaining together with the old Prussian provinces within Germany, but trying to compel it to remain for ever within Prussia, whether it be an absolutist, a constitutional or a democratic Prussia, is tantamount to making Germany's unity impossible, tantamount even to losing for Germany -- we express the general attitude of the people -- a large and beautiful territory by attempting to keep it for Prussia.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 87 August 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/08/27a.htm

The Italians were just as much deluded by the March events as the Germans. The former believed that foreign rule at any rate was now done with; the latter thought that the old system was buried for good and all. However, the foreign rule in Italy is worse than ever, and in Germany the old system has recovered from the few blows it sustained in March and it acts with greater ferocity and vindictiveness than ever before. The Italians are now making the mistake of expecting salvation from the present government of France. Only the fall of this government could save them. The Italians are further mistaken when they regard the liberation of their country as feasible while democracy in France, Germany and other countries continues to lose ground. Reaction, to whose blows Italy has succumbed, is not merely an Italian phenomenon, it is a European phenomenon. Italy alone cannot possibly free herself from the grip of this reaction, least of all by appealing to the French bourgeoisie, which is a true pillar of reaction in Europe as a whole. Before reaction can be destroyed in Italy and Germany, it must be routed in France. A democratic social republic must first be proclaimed in France and the French proletariat must first subjugate its bourgeoisie, before a lasting democratic victory is conceivable in Italy, Germany, Poland, Hungary and other countries.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 91 September 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/09/01.htm

The Risquons-Tout incident is well known. Belgian workers in Paris joined forces to attempt a republican invasion of their country. Belgian democrats came from Brussels to support the venture. Ledru-Rollin assisted as much as he could. Lamartine, the "noble-minded" traitor, who was not sparing of fine words and ignoble deeds as far as both the foreign and French democrats were concerned -- Lamartine, who prides himself on having conspired with the anarchists, like a lightning conductor with the lightning -- Lamartine at first supported the Belgian Legion the better to be able later to betray it. The Legion set out. Delescluze, Prefect of the Department du Nord, sold the first column to Belgian railway officials; the train which carried them was treacherously hauled into Belgian territory right into the midst of the Belgian bayonets. The second column was led by three Belgian spies (we were told this by a member of the Paris Provisional Government, and the course of events confirms it), and these treacherous leaders brought it into a forest on Belgian territory, where an ambush of loaded guns was waiting for it. The column was shot down and most of its members were captured. This tiny episode of the 1848 revolution -- an episode which assumed a farcical aspect as a result of the many betrayals and the magnitude ascribed to it in Belgium -- served the Brussels prosecutor as a canvas on which to embroider the most colossal plot that was ever devised. Old General Mellinet, the liberator of Antwerp, Tedesco and Ballin, in short the most resolute and most active democrats of Brussels, Liege and Ghent were implicated. Mr. Bavay would even have Mr. Jottrand of Brussels dragged into it, had not the latter known things and possessed documents whose publication would greatly compromise the entire Belgian government, the wise Leopold included. Why were these democrats arrested, why were these monstrous proceedings started against men who knew as much about the whole thing as the jurymen who faced them? It was meant to scare the Belgian bourgeoisie and, under cover of this scare, to collect the excessive taxes and forced loans, which are the cement of the glorious Belgian political edifice, and the payments on which were rather behindhand. In short, the accused were arraigned before the Antwerp jury, the elite of the Flemish faro-playing fraternity, who lack both the elan of French political dedication and the cool assurance of grandiose English materialism, i.e., before those dried-cod merchants who spend their whole life vegetating in philistine utilitarianism, in the most short-sighted and timid profiteering. The great Bavay knew his men and appealed to their fear. Indeed, had anyone ever seen a republican in Antwerp? Now thirty-two of the monsters faced the terrified men of Antwerp, and the trembling jury in concert with the wise bench consigned seventeen of the accused to the tender mercies of Article 86 and others of the Code penal, i.e., the death sentence. Mock trials were also held during the Reign of Terror in 1793, and convictions based on other facts than those officially stated did occur, but even the fanatical Fouquier-Tinville did not conduct a trial so distinguished by clumsy barefaced lies and blind partisan hatred. Moreover, is Belgium in the grip of a civil war and are the armies of half Europe assembled at her frontiers conspiring with the rebels, as was the case in France in 1793? Is the country in danger? Has a crack appeared in the crown? On the contrary, no one intends to subjugate Belgium, and the wise Leopold still drives every day without an escort from Laeken to Brussels and from Brussels to Laeken. What has the 81-year-old Mellinet done to be sentenced to death by jury and judges? The old soldier of the French republic saved the last spark of Belgian honor in 1831. He liberated Antwerp and in return Antwerp condemns him to death! His only sin is that he defended his old friend Becker against the insinuations of the Belgian official press and did not change his friendly attitude towards Becker even when the latter was plotting in Paris. Mellinet was in no way connected with the plot. And because of this he is without further ado sentenced to death. As to Ballin, he was a friend of Mellinet's, often visited him, and was seen in the company of Tedesco in a coffeehouse. Reason enough to sentence him to death. And finally Tedesco. Had he not visited the German Workers' Association, did he not associate with people on whom the Belgian police had planted stage daggers? Had he not been seen with Ballin in a coffee-house? The case was established -- Tedesco had provoked the great battle of Risquons-Tout -- off to the scaffold with him! And so with the others. We are proud of being able to call many of these "conspirators", sentenced to death only because they are democrats, our friends. If the venal Belgian press slings mud at them, then we, at least, want to vindicate their honor before the face of German democracy; if their country disowns them, we want to acclaim them. When the president of the court pronounced the sentence of death, they passionately exclaimed: "Long live the republic!" Throughout the whole procedure and the reading of the sentence they behaved with truly revolutionary steadfastness. As against this we read in the wretched Belgian press: The savagery of the Belgian government, the Belgian jury and law courts lies precisely in the fact that they play with death sentences.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 93 September 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/09/03.htm

The war in Italy was always unpopular with the democratic party, and has for a long time been unpopular even with the democrats of Vienna. The storm of public indignation over the war of extermination in Poznan could be staved off only for a few weeks by means of falsifications and lies on the part of the Prussian government. The streetfighting in Prague, despite all the efforts of the national press, excited sympathy among the people towards the defeated, but not towards the victors. The war in Schleswig-Holstein, however, from the outset was popular also among the people. What is the reason? Whereas in Italy, Poznan and Prague the Germans were fighting the revolution, in Schleswig-Holstein they were supporting it. The Danish war is the first revolutionary war waged by Germany. We therefore advocated a resolute conduct of the Danish war, from the very beginning, but this does not in any way denote kinship with the sea-girt bourgeois beer-garden enthusiasm. A sad thing for Germany that her first revolutionary war is the most ridiculous war ever waged. But come to the point. The Danish nation is in commercial, industrial, political and literary matters completely dependent on Germany. It is well known that the real capital of Denmark is not Copenhagen but Hamburg; that for a whole year the Danish government copied all the United Provincial Diet experiments conducted by the Prussian government, which passed away on the barricades; that Denmark obtains all her literary as well as material fare via Germany, and that apart from Holberg, Danish literature is a poor imitation of that of Germany. Impotent though Germany has been from time immemorial, she has the satisfaction of knowing that the Scandinavian nations, and especially Denmark, have fallen under her sway, and that compared with them she is even revolutionary and progressive. Do you require proofs? Then read the polemics carried on by the Scandinavian nations against each other ever since the concept of Scandinavianism arose. Scandinavianism is enthusiasm for the brutal, sordid, piratical, Old Norse national traits, for that profound inner life which is unable to express its exuberant ideas and sentiments in words, but can express them only in deeds, namely, in rudeness towards women, perpetual drunkenness and the wild frenzy of the Berserker alternating with tearful sentimentality. Scandinavianism and the theory of kinship with sea-girt Schleswig-Holstein appeared simultaneously in the states of the King of Denmark. The two concepts are correlated; they evoked each other and were in conflict with each other, thereby asserting their existence. Scandinavianism was the pattern of the Danes' appeals for Swedish and Norwegian support. But as always happens with the Christian-Teutonic nation, a dispute immediately arose as to who was the genuine Christian-Teuton, the true Scandinavian. The Swede contended that the Dane had become "Germanized" and had degenerated, the Norwegian said the same of the Swede and the Dane, and the Icelander of all three. Obviously, the more primitive a nation is, the more closely its customs and way of life resemble those of the Old Norse people, the more "Scandinavian" it must be. The Christiania Morgenbladet for November 18, 1846, is lying in front of us. This charming sheet contains the following amusing passages in an article on Scandinavianism. After stating that the whole concept of Scandinavianism is nothing but an attempt by the Danes to create a movement in their own interest, the paper says: The Morgenbladet attributes the degeneration of the Danes to their association with Germany and the spread of German traits in Denmark. The Germans have indeed The Danes, we are told, now had to oppose their nationality to the Germans and for this purpose they invented Scandinavianism. The Danes were unable to resist, Thus the Morgenbladet. Of course, it cannot be denied that the Danes are a more or less civilized nation. Poor Danes! By the same right under which France took Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, and will sooner or later take Belgium -- by that same right Germany takes over Schleswig; it is the right of civilization as against barbarism, of progress as against static stability. Even if the agreements were in Denmark's favor -- which is very doubtful-this right carries more weight than all the agreements, for it is the right of historical evolution. So long as the Schleswig-Holstein movement remained a purely legal philistine agitation of a civic and peaceful nature it merely filled well-meaning petty bourgeois with enthusiasm. When, before the outbreak of the February revolution, the present King of Denmark at his accession promised a liberal constitution for all his states, envisaging the same number of deputies for the duchies as for Denmark, and the duchies were opposed to this, the petty-bourgeois parochial nature of the Schleswig-Holstein movement became distastefully conspicuous. The issue, at that time, was not so much union with Germany -- did a Germany exist at that time? -- as separation from Denmark and establishment of a small independent parochial state. But then came the revolution, which imparted to the movement a different character. The Schleswig- Holstein party was forced either to attempt a revolution or to perish. It quite correctly chose the revolution. The Danish promises, which were very favorable before the revolution, were quite inadequate after the revolution; union with Germany -- formerly an empty phrase -- now acquired meaning. Germany made a revolution and as usual Denmark copied it on a small provincial scale. The Schleswig-Holstein revolution and the Provisional Government to which it gave rise behaved at first still in a rather philistine way, but the war soon compelled them to adopt a democratic course. This government, whose members are all moderate liberal worthies, formerly kindred spirits of Welcker, Gagern and Camphausen, has given Schleswig-Holstein laws which are more democratic than those of any other German state. The Kiel Provincial Assembly is the only German assembly based on universal suffrage and direct elections. The draft constitution which the government submitted to it was the most democratic constitution ever drawn up in the German language. As a result of the revolutionary war, Schleswig-Holstein, which had always trailed behind Germany in political matters, suddenly acquired more progressive institutions than the rest of Germany. The war we are waging in Schleswig-Holstein is therefore a truly revolutionary war. And who, from the outset, supported Denmark? The three most counter-revolutionary powers in Europe -- Russia, England and the Prussian government. As long as it was possible the Prussian government merely pretended to be waging a war -- this is evidenced by Wildenbruch's Note, by the alacrity with which the Prussian government, on the representations of England and Russia, ordered the withdrawal from Jutland, and finally by the two armistice agreements. Prussia, England and Russia are the three powers which have greater reason than anyone else to fear the German revolution and its first result -- German unity: Prussia because she would thereby cease to exist, England because it would deprive her of the possibility of exploiting the German market, and Russia because, it would spell the advance of democracy not only to the Vistula but even as far as the Dvina and the Dnieper. Prussia, England and Russia have conspired against Schleswig-Holstein, against Germany and against the revolution. The war that may now arise from the decisions taken at Frankfurt would be a war waged by Germany against Prussia, England and Russia. This is just the kind of war that the flagging German movement needs -- a war against the three great counter-revolutionary powers, a war which would really cause Prussia to merge into Germany, which would make an alliance with Poland an indispensable necessity and would lead to the immediate liberation of Italy; a war which would be directed against Germany's old counterrevolutionary allies of 1792-1815, a war which would "imperil the fatherland" and for that very reason save it by making the victory of Germany dependent on the victory of democracy. The bourgeois and titled landowners at Frankfurt should not deceive themselves -- if they decide to reject the armistice they will be setting the seal to their own downfall, just as the Girondins did during the first revolution when they took part in the events of August 10 and voted for the death of the ex-King, thereby preparing their own downfall on May 31. If, on the other hand, they accept the armistice, they will still be sealing their own downfall: they will be placing themselves under the jurisdiction of Prussia and cease to have any say in things. It is up to them to choose. The news of Hansemann's downfall probably reached Frankfurt before the vote was taken. This may influence the vote significantly, especially since it is expected that a government of Waldeck and Rodbertus will follow who, as we know, recognize the sovereignty of the National Assembly. The future will show. But we repeat -- Germany's honor is in bad hands.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 99 September 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/09/10a.htm

We are facing a decisive struggle. The concurrent crises at Frankfurt and Berlin and the latest decisions of the two Assemblies compel the counter-revolution to give its last battle. If the people in Berlin dare to spurn the constitutional principle of majority rule, if they confront the 219 members of the majority with twice as many guns, if they dare to defy the majority not only in Berlin but also in Frankfurt by presenting to them a government which is quite unacceptable to either of the two Assemblies if they thus provoke a civil war between Prussia and Germany, then the democrats know what they have to do. Either a Waldeck government, recognition of the authority of the German National Assembly and recognition of popular sovereignty; Or a Radowitz-Vincke government, dissolution of the Berlin Assembly, abolition of the revolutionary gains, a sham constitutionalism or even the United Provincial Diet. Don t let us shut our eyes to the fact that the conflict which has broken out in Berlin is a conflict not between the agreers and the Ministers, but between the Assembly, which for the first time acts as a constituent assembly, and the Crown. The point is whether or not the latter will have the courage to dissolve the Assembly. But has the Crown the right to dissolve the Assembly? True, in constitutional states the Crown in case of disputes has the right to dissolve the legislative chambers convened on the basis of the constitution and to appeal to the people by means of new elections. Is the Berlin Assembly a constitutional, legislative chamber? It is not. It has been convened to come to an agreement with the Crown on the Prussian Constitution, it has been convened not on the basis of a Constitution, but on that of a revolution. It received its mandate by no means from the Crown or from the Ministers answerable to the Crown, but from those who elected it and from the Assembly itself. The Assembly was sovereign as the legitimate expression of the revolution, and the mandate which Herr Camphausen jointly with the United Provincial Diet prepared for it in the shape of the electoral law of April 8 was nothing but a pious wish, and it was up to the Assembly to decide about it. At first the Assembly more or less accepted the theory of agreement. It realised that in doing so it had been cheated by the ministers and the camarilla. At last it performed a sovereign act, stepping forth for a moment as a constituent assembly and no longer as an assembly of conciliators. Being the sovereign Assembly of Prussia, it had a perfect right to do this. A sovereign assembly, however, cannot be dissolved by anybody, and cannot be given orders by anybody. Even as a mere assembly of conciliation, even according to Herr Camphausen s own theory, it has equal status with the Crown. Both parties conclude a political treaty, both parties have an equal share of sovereignty that is the theory of April 8, the Camphausen-Hansemann theory, the official theory recognised by the Crown itself. If the Assembly and the Crown have equal rights, then the Crown has no right to dissolve the Assembly. Otherwise, to be consistent, the Assembly would also have the right to depose the King. The dissolution of the Assembly would therefore be a coup d' tat. And how people reply to a coup d' tat was demonstrated on July 29, 1830, and February 24, 1848. One may say the Crown could appeal again to the same voters. But who does not know that today the voters would elect an entirely different assembly, an assembly which would treat the Crown with much less ceremony? Everyone knows that after the dissolution of this Assembly it will only be possible to appeal to voters of an entirely different kind from those of April 8, that the only elections possible will be elections carried through under the tyranny of the sword. Let us have no illusions If the Assembly wins and succeeds in setting up a Left ministry, then the power of the Crown existing alongside the Assembly is broken, then the King is merely a paid servant of the people and we return again to the morning of March 19 provided the Waldeck Government does not betray us, as did many a ministry before it. If the Crown wins and succeeds in setting up a Government of the Prince of Prussia, then the Assembly will be dissolved, the right of association abolished, the press muzzled, an electoral law based on property qualifications introduced, and, as we have already mentioned, even the United Provincial Diet may be reinvoked and all this will be done under cover of a military dictatorship, guns and bayonets. Which of the two sides will win depends on the attitude of the people, especially that of the democratic party. It is up to the democrats to choose. We have again the situation of July 25. Will they dare to issue the decrees being devised in Potsdam? Will the people be provoked to make the leap from July 26 to February 24 in a single day? The will to do it is certainly there, but what about the courage! Our readers will find below the King s reply to the resignation of the Ministers. By this letter the Crown itself comes to the fore, sides with the ministers and opposes the Assembly. It goes even further it forms a cabinet outside the Assembly, it nominates Beckerath, who represents the extreme Right at Frankfurt and who, as everyone knows, will never be able to count on the support of the majority in Berlin. The King s message is countersigned by Herr Auerswald. Let Herr Auerswald, if he can, justify the fact that he thus uses the Crown to cover up his ignominious retreat, that at one and the same time he tries to hide behind the constitutional principle as far as the Chamber is concerned and tramples on the constitutional principle by compromising the Crown and invoking the republic. Constitutional principle! shout the ministers. Constitutional principle! shouts the Right. Constitutional principle! faintly echoes the K lnische Zeitung. Constitutional principle! Are these gentlemen really so foolish as to believe that it is possible to extricate the German people from the storms of 1848, and from the imminent threat of collapse of all traditional institutions, by means of the Montesquieu-Delolme worm-eaten theory of division of powers, by means of worn-out phrases and long exploded fictions! Constitutional principle! But the very gentlemen who want to save the constitutional principle at all costs should realise first of all that at a provisional stage it can only be saved by energetic action. Constitutional principle! But the vote of the Berlin Assembly, the clashes between Potsdam and Frankfurt, the disturbances, the reactionary attempts, the provocations of the brutal soldiery has all this not shown long ago that despite all the empty talk we are still on a revolutionary ground, and the pretence that we have already reached the basis of an established, a complete constitutional monarchy only leads to collisions, which have already brought the constitutional principle. to the brink of the abyss? Every provisional political set-up following a revolution calls for dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that. From the very beginning we blamed Camphausen for not having acted in a dictatorial manner, for not having immediately smashed up and removed the remains of the old institutions. While thus Herr Camphausen indulged in constitutional fancies, the defeated party strengthened its positions within the bureaucracy and in the army, and occasionally even risked an open fight. The Assembly was convened for the purpose of agreeing on the terms of the constitution. It existed as an equal party alongside the Crown. Two equal powers in a provisional arrangement! It was this division of powers with the aid of which Herr Camphausen sought to save freedom it was this very division of powers in a provisional arrangement that was bound to lead to conflicts. The Crown served as a cover for the counter-revolutionary aristocratic, military and bureaucratic camarilla. The bourgeoisie stood behind the majority of the Assembly. The cabinet tried to mediate. Too weak to stand up for the bourgeoisie and the peasants and overthrow the power of the nobility, the bureaucracy and the army chiefs at one blow, too unskilled to avoid always damaging the interests of the bourgeoisie by its financial measures, the cabinet merely succeeded in compromising itself in the eyes of all the parties and bringing about the very clash it sought to avoid. The one important factor in any unconstituted state of affairs is the salut public, the public welfare, and not this or that principle. There is only one way in which the government could avoid a conflict between the Assembly and the Crown and that is by recognising the public welfare as the sole principle, even at the risk of the government itself coming into conflict with the Crown. But it preferred not to compromise itself in Potsdam. It never hesitated to employ public welfare measures (mesures de salut public), dictatorial measures, against the democratic forces. What else was the application of the old laws to political crimes, even after Herr M rker had recognised that these articles of the Civil Code ought to be repealed? What else were the wholesale arrests in all parts of the kingdom? But the cabinet carefully refrained from intervening against the counter-revolution in the name of public welfare. It was this half-heartedness of the Government in face of the counter-revolution, which became more menacing with every day, that compelled the Assembly itself to prescribe measures of public welfare. If the Crown represented by the ministers was too weak, then the Assembly itself had to intervene. It did so by passing the resolution of August 9. It did so in a still rather mild form, by merely warning the ministers. The ministers simply took no notice of it. Indeed, how could they have agreed to it? The resolution of August 9 flouted the constitutional principle, it is an encroachment of the legislative power on the executive power, it undermines the division of powers and their mutual control, which are essential in the interests of freedom, it turns the Assembly of conciliation into a National Convention. There follows a running fire of threats, a vociferous appeal to the fears of the petty bourgeois and the prospect of a reign of terror with guillotines, progressive taxes, confiscations and the red flag. To compare the Berlin Assembly with the Convention. What irony! But these gentlemen were not altogether wrong. If the government goes on the way it has been doing, we shall have a Convention before long not merely for Prussia, but for Germany as a whole a Convention which will have to use all means to cope with the civil war in our twenty Vend es and with the inevitable war with Russia. At present, however, we merely have a parody of the Constituent Assembly. But how have the Ministers who invoke the constitutional principle upheld this principle? On August 9, they calmly allowed the Assembly to break up in the belief that the ministers would carry out the resolution. They had no intention of making known to the Assembly their refusal to do so, and still less of resigning their office. They ruminated on the matter for a whole month and finally, when threatened with parliamentary questions, they curtly informed the Assembly that it was self-evident that they would not put the resolution into effect. When the Assembly thereupon instructs the ministers, nevertheless, to put the resolution into effect, they take refuge behind the Crown, and cause a rupture between the Crown and the Assembly, thus pushing matters towards a republic. And these gentlemen still talk about the constitutional principle! To sum up: The inevitable conflict between two powers having equal rights in a provisional situation has broken out. The cabinet was unable to govern with sufficient energy; it has failed to take the necessary measures of public welfare. The Assembly has merely performed its duty in demanding that the cabinet do its duty. The cabinet declares this to be an encroachment upon the rights of the Crown and discredits the Crown at the very moment of its resignation. The Crown and the Assembly confront each other. The agreement has led to disagreement, to conflict. It is possible that arms will decide the issue. The side that has the greater courage and consistency will win. Cologne, September 15. The government crisis has once again entered a new phase, due, not to the arrival and vain efforts of the impossible Herr Beckerath, but to the army revolt in Potsdam and Nauen. The conflict between democracy and aristocracy has broken out even within the guard regiments. The soldiers consider that the resolution carried by the Assembly on the 7th liberates them from the tyranny of their officers; they send letters of greeting and thanks to the Assembly. This has wrenched the sword from the hands of the counter-revolutionaries. They will not dare now to dissolve the Assembly, and since this cannot be attempted, they will have to give in, carry out the resolution of the Assembly and form a Waldeck cabinet. It is quite possible that the soldiers in revolt at Potsdam will save us a revolution.

Marx and Engels in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, September 1848

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/09/12.htm